What We’ve Been Up To Are you a teacher with questions or concerns about the educational implications of new active anti-racist initiatives? Or how Critical Race Theory-based curricula and teaching sit with a professional obligation to impartiality? If so we’d love to hear from you! Do get in touch with us if you’d like to […]
Newsletter 2021-08-20: AWOL over Afghanistan / Protecting racial slurs / Cynical business / Kate Clanchy / US police division / Professing to Madam Butterfly / Drake canards
What We’ve Been Up To CALLING PARENTS: We’d love to hear from parents who have experience of their children’s schools promoting a one-sided view about racism/anti-racism. Has your child been taught that all white children have ‘white privilege’, without any question, for example? Or, if you are a parent from an ethnic minority background, has […]
Newsletter 2021-08-06: Undiverse thinking in the academy / Colour complexity / What a Geordie Boer! / All aboard the Caliphate express / Security makes (arts) cowards
What We’ve Been Up To Don’t Divide Us hosted a lively session on the Sewell Report at the Battle of Ideas Open For Debate festival on Saturday 31 August with Tony Sewell on on film (pictured), who was joined by Professor James Tooley, Kunle Olulode, Patrick Vernon and Zara Qureshi with DDU’s Dr Alka Sehgal […]
Newsletter 2021-07-23: DDU CERD report event / Di Angelo heart-broken / Baroness Falkner speaks up / Oxford dons’ tantrums / Dead White Men / Can we fix hate crime laws?
What We’ve Been Up To On Thursday evening, DDU hosted a successful event, ‘Is the UK systemically racist?’, in the context of the recent Runnymede Trust CERD report. Chaired by Professor Doug Stokes, the panellists included DDU founding signatories Dr Rakib Ehsan, Ike Ijeh and Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert, and Sewell (CRED) report co-opted member Kunle Olulode. […]
What History Is Being Taught in Primary Schools?
A primary school teacher has undertaken a study of the history curriculum as available on school websites in five local education authorities. The results are fascinating and insightful. A must read for anyone who thinks education should be valued for its own purpose and not its effectiveness to engender political activism: Overall the idea that […]
Colonial Guilt Prevents Understanding History
Kamel Daoud at The Financial Times reviews a report by historian Benjamin Stora on France’s colonial war with Algeria Critical of the trend in Western academia that sees history in terms of guilty and victimhood, Stora writes: . . . being a “victim” prevents us from seeing how the memory of colonisation is manipulated by political […]
Churchill and the Genocide Myth
In February, an academic event at Oxford University presented an ill-informed historical caricature of Winston Churchill’s role in the Bengal Famine. Whatever one’s views about the man, the subject of history deserves better treatment. Here, Zareer Masani for The Critic provides an alternative, more nuanced account supported by historical knowledge more than personal opinion: Much […]
A Matter of Historical Specificity (or its absence)
Below, J. Unsworth, a DDU supporter and former student of History and English Literature, explains why she found an event at Cambridge University on Winston Churchill left much to be desired. The level of debate among learned academics shows, once again, that ‘the divisiveness and tribalism that emerges now again in different periods and different […]
The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Our City, Our Heritage And Its People
Adrian Hart draws on historical archives to show that anti-slavery was alive and well among sections of Brighton’s citizenry, and those who only focus on the city’s associations with slavery present a very one-sided picture at best. Brighton was an abolition town. Archive copies of the Brighton Gazette and the Brighton Guardianoffer a glimpse of […]
John Lewis: ‘Good Trouble’
Kevin Yuill at Spiked Online remembers John Lewis and reminds us to remember his example in holding onto courage and hope: Lewis should be remembered for his incredible courage, his inspirational hopefulness and his love – not just of his people but all people, of the entire country. When Elwin Wilson, the Klan member who […]