Why Wasn’t I Canceled?

When I moved from the United States to South Africa in 2009, the phrase cancel culture did not exist. By the time I returned this year to publicize my new book, it was commonly portrayed as a pervasive reality. 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. “However you define cancel culture, Americans know it exists,” The New York Times wrote in an editorial. 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 [now] contemplate the prospect of having her reputation savagely destroyed.” Her column’s inquiry was how to deal with this reality. Listen to the “mob” intent on censoring speech, resist it, or ignore it?

Friends 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. (I am white.) My book, , follows several South Africans as they grapple with their white-supremacist country’s rapid transfiguration into a Black-led democracy. 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. Ninety percent of South Africans are Black, and I’d felt frustrated reading decades’ worth of writing, even by, that envisioned South Africa through anxious