by Philip Hammond on behalf of DDU academics The concept of ‘intersectionality’ seems omnipresent today. Human Resources departments in public institutions and businesses miss no opportunity to trumpet its significance. HR Magazine emphasises ‘the importance of intersectionality in HR’, while Personnel Today warns that failure to take proper account of intersectionality could mean that ‘organisations […]
Universities Should Exercise Healthy Scepticism Towards The Universities UK Report
Two DDU supporters argue why many universities are wrong to uncritically embrace the Universities UK Report, ‘Tackling Racial Harassment in Higher Education’
Can You Be For Justice But Against Social Justice?
In this short essay, Isobel Marston, a student of philosophy, considers some problems with current understandings of social justice and appeals for a more universalistic approach: Following the death of George Floyd, social media exploded with cries of indignation and frustration and the streets of Britain filled with protesters in solidarity with America. Political divisions […]
Kirsty Miller on her now cancelled resignation letter to the British Psychology Society
Psychologist Kirsty Miller found the organisation’s behaviour deeply concerning, and after deliberating for a substantial amount of time, decided to resign. She also wrote a letter explaining her decision to leave — feeling it may be useful for ‘the powers that be’ in the BPS to understand why a member of several decades felt she […]
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 […]
We’re facing a tsunami of censorship
“The authoritarian tide is rising”, warns Toby Young in the Spectator. It’s now “open season on mavericks and dissenters”. How can we push back? If you publicly challenge any of the sacred nostrums of the social justice left and you work in a school, a college, a university, an arts company, a public broadcasting organisation, […]
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 […]
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 […]
White Fragility Training and Freedom of Belief
What happens, asks Helen Pluckrose, when an ideology holds that beliefs other than its own are harmful and oppressive of others, and fails to recognise that it too is a belief system in itself? It is essential that employers recognise that the concepts of Social Justice, whiteness, white privilege and white fragility all depend upon […]