The boohoo files
Hadley Freeman on the witchfinders:
In 2021, when lockdown was driving people insane, Clanchy’s 2019 book about working with children, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, was suddenly derided on social media as racist, because she used physical descriptions like “chocolate-coloured skin”. The charge was led by three women: Monisha Rajesh, Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman, all middle-aged, middle-class writers, like Clanchy. Pan Macmillan, Clanchy’s publisher through its Picador imprint, abjectly apologised to them and parted ways with its writer…
…When The Sunday Times interviewed Clanchy in 2022, Rajesh tweeted, “Jesus f***ing Christ. Picador have just emailed to let us know that @thesundaytimes will be running an interview with Kate Clanchy this weekend.” She then grossly insulted those responsible. Quite why Pan Macmillan felt the need to tell these bullies anything is one puzzle. Another is how on earth it became the norm for adults to behave like emotionally incontinent tyrants. When The Times ran an interview with Clanchy last week, Rajesh posted a video of herself weeping.
But the good news is this time it didn’t work for her.
Ursula Doyle, an editor who felt hounded out of her job in 2024 after publishing Kathleen Stock’s feminist book Material Girls, says: “There had been highly political issues in publishing before — cultural appropriation, Brexit, MeToo, Black Lives Matter. But never anything before like the trans issue, where even to question it meant you were an evil person.”
And also where the putative wrongdoing is not in the same category as sexism and racism and xenophobia and the like, but a new and peculiar category of refusing to lie about a very basic fact about human beings. To avoid being yelled at for sexism, for example, there is the option of not being sexist, which is not all that onerous. To avoid being shunned as a terf you have to tell a stupid childish lie, not just once but forever. The rules are both more demanding and more ridiculous.
Oh fer…
I am fond of the work of Walter Mosley. He is a prolific writer, and a great many of his characters are dark-skinned. Every time I get a new book of his, one of the things I look forward to reading is his description of the skin colors of the characters. He always finds some new, interesting, vivid ways to illustrate the many skin tones of people who might be lumped together as “Black” otherwise. I am pretty sure that “chocolate”, in addition to references to specific kinds of chocolate, has been used as an analogy.
Mosley himself is of mixed race, as are many of his characters. I suppose these “sensitivity readers” would allow him to use these descriptions because of his racial background. Which would be hypocritical; cinnamon-colored skin is cinnamon-colored skin, regardless of who is looking at it.
I’ve got a feeling that this particular instance of madness would have arisen without the added stress of lockdowns.
I grew up reading Hardy Boys stories. In the books, the brothers’ friend Tony was invariably described as “olive skinned” whenever he was first mentioned in any story. “Franklin W. Dixon’s” audience (in this case me) would not likely have been anticipating exactly which type of olive would be used for comparison. Olive was olive and that was that.
Yeah, it’s not as if Caucasian skin has ever been compared to snow, cream, butter, alabaster, fish-bellies, ivory, egg-shell, or anything else, FFS.
It wasn’t until I was older that I came to realize the formulaic nature of the Hardy Boy series, wherein the mystery the Hardy brothers were working on was always connected to the current case of their private investigator father, Fenton, during which one or other of the brothers (or one of their chums), would be kidnapped, briefly glimpsed characters would be skulking around, etc. These stories, along with Thornton W. Burgess’ “Old Mother West Wind” animal stories with Johnny Chuck, Sammy, Jay, Jerry Muskrat, and many others, were what I remember as my childhood introduction to independent, all-on-my-own reading.
I don’t doubt that, being of their times, these works are chock full of sexism, racism, classism, and many other explicit and implicit Crimes against Correctness. But we live, we learn, and times change, though not all changes are improvements. Today’s confident certainties might become tomorrow’s laughable or gasp-inducing miss-steps. Burning the past makes it harder to learn from, and encourages us to mistakenly believe we have successfully reached some state of perfect judgement and behaviour that makes us better than all of our sadly flawed, benighted predecessors, none of whom were smart enough to be as clever and sensitive as we are. Not all comparisons with the past are going to have our present come out on top; take questions of biodiversity and ecosystem health. We might not have know as much as we do now about the basic, deep, interconnectedness of life, and the grand cycles of material and energy from which we have emerged, and in which we are emmersed, but that newfound knowledge has not yet galvinized us to act on it in a meaningful way that will forestall impending disaster in a useful time frame. We have yet to even put the needed ounce of cure on our shopping list. In my own lifetime, human numbers have more than doubled, and the impact of that alone, on a small, finite planet, continues to send shockwaves through the entire Earth system, even without the addtional strains of anthropogenic warming. More of us means less of everything else. This much at least can’t be anything but a zero sum game. For the foreseeable future, this comparison with conditions of the past is only going to get worse.
Whitewashing the past is no different; if your simplified, sanitized narrative of a new Golden Age depends upon ignoring the destruction and suffering of others like some kind of historical (or present) externality, to be swept under a rug the size of a continent, you’re gonna need a very large broom. If you try to write people out of history (First Nations, Blacks, women, the poor, enslaved people, the working class, etc.) their continued survival and resilience will always be an impediment. Where are their stories? Where is there suffering and concious exclusion recorded? What of their victories against oppression and powerlessness. Who decides what makes the pages of the Official, Authorized History? Who’s telling the story, and whose stories are they telling? If it’s not in the canon, did it even happen? History is messy, disorganized, conspiratorial, collaborative, progressive, reactionary, activist, apathetic, shared, seized, built, destroyed, harmed, healed, and omnidirectional. It’s all there, it’s all happened. Any story told about it that looks too good to be true undoubtedly is.
Much of the past was indeed “Affirmative Action” for white males. When people see you stacking the deck against them, you can’t expect them to accept it quietly. DEI, however much it might be abused and weaponized, did not arise in a vacuum. People see. People remember. You can’t burn all of the books. You can’t hide everything. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time. (But if you’re really stupid, and overconfident, you say the quiet things out loud, and do the terrible, evil things in broad daylight). There’s only so much whitewash available, and too much to paint over. Ironically, the very recognition of the “need” to disregard the “bad bits” of history belies that braggadocio, and betrays the existance of a shame and embarassment that it would conciously deny. Perhaps this sliver of conciousness and self-knowledge might be a source of hope?
Who knows. We might not have to struggle with these issues for much longer, as we’ll be worried about more important, more immediate needs, like the source of our next meal. Much of our own unwitting self-incrimination, and oblivious stupidity, committed as it is on electronic media, will have the good grace to vanish quietly when the power goes out.