![]() No South African believed it was possible-not to mention desirable-to write about the country’s white people without writing about its Black citizens everybody’s self-understanding incorporates ideas proposed by people unlike themselves. I’d discussed representation for years with the people I interviewed. Two editors, though, told me in private conversations to evade criticism by cutting the manuscript so it focused exclusively on white people. Ninety percent of South Africans are Black, and I’d felt frustrated reading decades’ worth of writing, even by Nobel-winning progressives, that envisioned South Africa through anxious white families’ eyes. It begins with a young Black woman’s memory of preparing to go to school-she was one of the first Black students at an elementary school that for a century accepted only white kids-and ends on her mother’s reflections. (I am white.) My book, The Inheritors, follows several South Africans as they grapple with their white-supremacist country’s rapid transfiguration into a Black-led democracy. ![]() Listen to the “mob” intent on censoring speech, resist it, or ignore it?įriends and colleagues told me that one of my biggest jobs ahead of publishing my book would be to take careful steps to avoid cancellation for writing about race. In a recent Times guest essay, a writer sympathetic to concerns about diversity in literature noted-almost as an obvious aside-that anyone “with a public-facing persona must contemplate the prospect of having her reputation savagely destroyed.” Her column’s inquiry was how to deal with this reality. “However you define cancel culture, Americans know it exists,” The New York Times wrote in an editorial. Publications I read said that American public discourse had been reshaped in the 13 years I’d been out of the country, like a barrier island after a hurricane, and that institutions such as publishers, newspapers, and universities now directed extraordinary resources and energy toward appeasing cancel-culture warriors. By the time I returned this year to publicize my new book, it was commonly portrayed as a pervasive reality. When I moved from the United States to South Africa in 2009, the phrase cancel culture did not exist.
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