"The book that tore publishing apart"

On cancellation and persecution of authors, and the grip of cancellationist staff in publishing companies.

The article is long, and it is only after hundreds of lines that we find Clanchy defend using the terms "chocolate skin" and "almond eyes" to describe pupils who used those same terms to describe themselves. Everyone else quoted has no doubt that those are insulting, but they do not try to justify this, and it seems totally arbitrary to me.

Chocolate is something delicious and much loved — I can't imagine it as negative. In the 1980s some black MIT students set up a dorm floor to live together in and called it "Chocolate House". Did they think they were insulting themselves? I think it was an expression of pride.

My conclusion is that Clanchy did nothing actually wrong; she was the victim of hypersensitivity, magnified by an ideology that calls for magnifying any and all hypersensitivity (except when on behalf of white males).

Mike Pence is a Christian extremist who nonetheless resisted pressure to join in overthrowing the US government. I disagree with his politics deeply and broadly, and I would not want to publish a book of his writing. But it is dangerous if books by people with his views are generally blocked from publication by people with views more like mine who work in the publishing industry.