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 […]
The dehumanising condescension of ‘White Fragility’
Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, argues John McWhorter, is “the prayer book for what can only be described as a cult”: In 2020 — as opposed to 1920 — I neither need nor want anyone to muse on how whiteness privileges them over me. Nor do I need wider society to undergo teachings in how to be […]
“Can You Really Teach Kids Not To Be Racist?”
“Can you really teach kids not to be racist?” asks Tom Chivers at Unherd: It’s powerful television, and incredibly uncomfortable to watch. But there are two huge problems with it, and they’re the same problems in our imaginary school, above: disease is real, but the test and the treatment are not.
Stop apologising for cultural appropriation
The concept of “cultural appropriation” has gone from the esoteric academic realm of post-colonial and decolonial studies, to being a mainstream political issue. But it’s reactionary rather than progressive, argues Ralph Leonard: An irony of this argument is that most opponents of cultural appropriation proclaim, often radically, to be for diversity, immigration and multiculturalism, yet […]
On ‘White Fragility’
Robin DiAngelo’s bestseller has “a simple message”, argues Matt Taibbi: “there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category”. White Fragility is based upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by […]