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 […]
Opening Pandora’s Box
Teacher and educational researcher Greg Ashman warns that “once you have opened up Pandora’s Box, you cannot put the bad things back”. The heightened awareness of race promoted by activists unintentionally “plays into the hands of the far right”: If you have changed or added to your curriculum as a result of the Black Lives […]
Racism is a problem, white people are not
Contemporary politics is often driven by “cultural or psychological anxieties”, argues Kenan Malik. We need to consider social and structural material factors too: More than half of those killed by US police are white; and while, proportionately, police killings of African Americans have fallen in recent years, that of white people has sharply risen. Some analyses […]
Race is not the disadvantage it once was in the UK
Reflecting on her own experience of growing up in an ethnic minority family in the UK, Shabnam Nasimi wonders whether the categories of identity politics are holding people back rather than helping them: I’ve always been suspicious of what I see as orthodoxies around certain cultural issues. I have found that “multiculturalism,” which was meant […]
The fight to redefine racism
Kelefa Sanneh unpacks the new thinking about race elaborated in Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. In modern American political discourse, racism connotes hatred, and just about everyone claims to oppose it. But many on the contemporary left have pursued a more active opposition, galvanized by the rise […]
Unravelling the concept of unconscious bias
The concept of unconscious bias is “the child of neoliberalism”, argues Jenny Bourne of the Institute of Race Relations. According to the new narrative, “racism is covert not overt; it is psychological not social; it is individual not structural; it is subconscious not conscious”. The emphasis on individual bias runs fundamentally against a materialist view […]