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 […]
We need to talk about Black Lives Matter
We should be able to discuss Black Lives Matter critically, argues Andrew Doyle, and not simply assume that its objectives are straightforwardly encapsulated by its name. How many people know, for instance, that part of the Black Lives Matter manifesto is a commitment to ‘dismantle cisgender privilege’ and ‘disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement […]
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 […]