Rakib Ehsan in Spiked, and signatory of DDU’s open letter, points to the anti-democratic, wholly ideological response of some of the CRED Report’s critics: Then there is UK Black Lives Matter. UK BLM strives for the eventual abolition of the police in the UK – even though fewer than one in five black Brits would […]
We Need to Defend the CRED Report And Its Authors
The hysterical and vicious reaction to the simple point that labels of ‘institutional, systemic and structural racism’ need to be supported by a wider range of empirical evidence and logical reasoning tells us that more of us need to be brave and speak out – we need to publicly defend both the report and its […]
DDU’s Response to The Committee on Racial and Ethnic Disparities’ Report
The CRED Report does not deny that racism exists, but it does maintain that not all disparities are incontrovertible proof of racism. Like any report, it has limitations and will not please everyone, but DDU welcomes it as a robust attempt to bring some objectivity into what has become an increasingly fraught and subjective discussion […]
Racism & Enlightenment
Ian Buruma at Persuasion argues that if there is a problem with Enlightenment thought, it is not because of its ‘whiteness’, but because of the way claims to universalism have been co-opted in indefensible political-military conquests. This should not make us blind to what was, and remains, valuable about the ideas and culture it has […]
Critical race theory: a ruling-class ideology
The mainstreaming and elite-backing of anti-racism initiatives is promoting a new form of racial thinking, argues Joanna Williams in spiked. A new elite is using not racism but anti-racism to invent and exploit differences between people. Rather than aiming to end racism, they want it to continue indefinitely. Just at the point when ‘scientific’ racism […]
The myth of Britain’s racist universities
The idea has taken hold that British universities are in urgent need of radical reform to overturn entrenched racial discrimination. I don’t buy it, says Philip Hammond. This view of the education system — largely promulgated by universities themselves — is now widely being acted on, via new staff training programmes and moves to decolonise […]
A New (Third) letter to a Vice Chancellor from a Don’t Divide Us supporter
Over on our Universities, you can follow a link to our third letter to a Vice Chancellor To be told that, simply because of an immutable characteristic, your skin colour, you are actively complicit in the deaths of black people, is psychologically very dangerous. I would question whether it is in fact against equality legislation […]
Why Nobody is Systemically Racist
James Lindsay argues why falling prey to bad theory can make it harder to ascertain moral responsibility where racism is concerned Given the events of the past few months, it has probably been explained to you at least once that all people who are “white” and “white-adjacent” are allegedly complicit in “systemic racism.” This may […]
The Fight to Redefine Racism
Kelefa Sanneh writes on Ibram X’s argument for redefining racism, as he believed that we should think of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple, widely-encompassing term of description In modern American political discourse, racism connotes hatred, and just about everyone claims to oppose it. But many on the contemporary left have pursued […]
The problem with identity politics
In this Q&A interview, Asad Haider, author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, reflects on the contemporary meanings of ‘identity politics’: Too many irreconcilable things have been conflated in the contemporary usage of the term “identity politics”. We are supposed to believe that, for example, the mass movements for racial […]