Don’t Divide Us supporter Clare Page reviews Martin Durkin’s controversial documentary The Great American Race Game.
“Is There Still Room for Debate?”
With the rise of an ideology that claims to be anti-racist but brooks no dissent, Andrew Sullivan at the New York Intelligencer argues that increasing authoritarianism makes freedom to debate vitally important: “In so far as this movement has made us more aware and cognizant of the darkness of the past, it is a very good […]
Newsletter 2021-08-27: Statue stupidity / Brave Josephine / Black and white history / Bowdlerising the Bard / Cowardly unis on Netflix / Dancing on pinheads / Kerr crash
What We’ve Been Up To Are you a teacher with questions or concerns about the educational implications of new active anti-racist initiatives? Or how Critical Race Theory-based curricula and teaching sit with a professional obligation to impartiality? If so we’d love to hear from you! Do get in touch with us if you’d like to […]
Critical Race Theory & the ‘Hyper-White Jew’
Pamela Paresky’s thoughtful and thought-provoking essay in Sapir Journal considers how, in America, the concept of ‘whiteness’ in critical race theory is implicated in anti-semitism: American Jews have generally looked upon Jewish success in the United States as evidence of the country’s fundamental (if far from fully realized) commitment to the principles of tolerance, fair […]
The Neoracists
John McWhorter at Persuasion describes America’s third-wave anti-racists as ‘millennials with lattes’. A better description still is ‘The Elect’. This appellation indicates the smugness and danger this thinking represents as its adherents come to occupy high-status institutional positions and influence educational agendas: Talking of Antiracist Baby, I am especially dismayed at the idea of this […]
Teaching ‘white fragility’ is bad for kids of color
Unless we adopt ‘a more humanistic approach, grounded in respect for the common qualities that bind us all’, argues Rav Arora, ‘we will continue to be stratified along racial lines’: One of the worst things you can tell young people of color is that they are fundamentally different from their white counterparts and they are […]
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 […]
John McWhorter on why academics fear for their freedom
A national reckoning on race, John McWorther writes, has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials. This episode […]
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 […]
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 […]