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 […]
Culture Wars Are About Our Society
Once again history and historiography are in the limelight. One approach involves ‘a notion of trust between the generations’. We are not obliged to agree or approve/disapprove of past events; only to try and understand them. The other approach involves a re-writing of history in an attempt to impose a particular version of our present […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]