If such spaces had existed in my schooldays, they would have carved up my diverse yet tightly-knit class. Barbara and I would have been separated.
But Wellesley is far from unusual. During the 2020 summer of race riots, schools across the country clamoured to virtue signal their message of “social justice”. “Affinity groups” have sprung up everywhere.
At Pierce Middle School in Milton Public Schools, Massachusetts, the “Mosaic Club” meets for “students of color who identify as African American/Black, Latinx/Hispanic American, Native American, Middle Eastern American, Asian/Asian American, or Multiracial”. Across the country, at Pathfinder Elementary School in Seattle Public Schools, students meet in “Lunchtime Community Building Groups for BIPOC & Multiracial Scholars, K-8”.
And in Indianapolis Public Schools, “affinity groups” have held meetings with this potpourri of names: “Ability Diverse”, “Black/African American”, “LatinX”, “Asian/Pacific Islander”, “Native American/Indigenous”, “Jewish”, “Muslim”, “LGBTQIA+”, “Women’s Network”, “Multi-Racial”, “Multi-Lingual” and “Confronting White Privilege”.
The school district noted that the members of “Confronting White Privilege” picked their own name — presumably knowing how they could do in the oppression Olympics if they didn’t frame their identity with a mea culpa.
In private schools, too, children are segregated. Allen-Stevenson School in New York City hosts meetings of “BOCAS: Boys of Color at Allen-Stevenson” and “WISE: White Identifying Students for Equity”.
The second “affinity” group meeting at Wellesley revealed the dangers of this new segregation. It took place on 18 March 2021, two days after a gunman killed eight people in three Atlanta spas, most of them Asian women. That day, Curry hosted a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian American students (grade 6-12), faculty/staff, and others in the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) community who wish to process recent events”.
A Wellesley Middle School teacher asked Curry if white students could participate. Her question answered, the teacher wrote to her students:
“This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White. If you identify as White, and need help to process recent events, please know I’m here for you as well as your guidance counselors. If you need to know more about why this is not for White students, please ask me!”
On the morning of the “healing space”, a white fitness and health teacher, asked Curry, “I wanted to check first, is it appropriate for me to go this healing space? I wasn’t sure?” (Her email signature read, ironically: “Be your own color and dance with joy”.) Later that morning, Curry replied and told her, “This time, we want to hold the space for the Asian and Asian American students and faculty/staff”. She wrote: “I hope this makes sense”.
It didn’t make sense. In fact, it is nonsense. And many parents saw through it. One mother wrote to the school in protest, arguing that:
“The email immediately pits one group of kids against another, ascribing guilt by mere identity to an entire population of children and adults who are equally scared by the events in Atlanta. I am concerned that in creating spaces for specific groups of students we are perpetuating the feelings of separation, isolation, and difference that we are trying to overcome”.
She pointed out, in measured tones: “Unfortunately, the healing space provided by the school further divides us at a time when we most need to come together and support one another”.
In response, the school doubled down. One Wellesley teacher circulated an “FAQ” document, written by a colleague. It advised that affinity-group sessions were a “safe space for members of the same identity or community” — where they can “share their experiences without risk of feeling like they will offend someone from another group, and without another group’s voices”.
Suggested watchingWhy anti-racism should be resisted
By Flo Read
The morning after the “healing space”, a mother sent an email to the Wellesley Middle School principal, pointing out the hypocrisy at the heart of anti-racism. “We are all horrified by recent events”, she wrote. “I would hope this would be an opportunity to bring our student community together”.
She continued: “However, the reaction at WPS has been to discriminate against white students. I find this message a little confusing. Are we focusing on inclusion or exclusion? How does separating kids by race teach them anything?”
“We must do better for all of our students”.
The principal responded: “Affinity spaces are a known strategy in education that offer time for marginalized groups to process feelings and concern in productive ways. Our Office of DE&I [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] for WPS feels this space is important for those who want to attend”.
Then, in the early afternoon of 12 April 2021, the Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion sent an email to school district staff, grousing about “hateful messages” it had received. “Sometimes, this work puts us in the crosshairs of those who find this mission to be a threat”.
Across the country, “diversity” officers and “equity” consultants are spinning a tale that segregation is virtuous. The historically progressive Southern Poverty Law Center, established in 1971 to fight racism, now provides schools with an online “Toolkit” to create “affinity groups”, through lesson plans it calls “Learning for Justice”. It argues that “affinity groups help marginalized students to be seen and heard”. It even shows schools how to “troubleshoot questions”, like the obvious: “Aren’t affinity groups exclusionary?”
But in WPS, the backlash could not be quashed. On 19 October 2021, Parents Defending Education filed a lawsuit against the school district on behalf of Parents A, B, C, D and E and their children, alleging violation of the 1965 Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as the First Amendment for its “Bias or Discrimination” hotline, “weaponized by certain students to punish classmates who express unpopular views”.
This resulted in a partial victory. On 9 November 2021, Superintendent Lussier rescinded the original “Responding to Incidents of Bias of Discrimination”. But the school district wouldn’t back down on the “affinity groups”, segregated by race.
This week, however, in a significant victory for justice, lawyers for Parents Defending Education filed a settlement with the school district, which agreed to end its practice of race segregation. On Tuesday night, at a virtual meeting of the school board, Lussier read these four remarkable statements:
- Under existing School Committee policies regarding Nondiscrimination and Student Organizations, membership in and attendance at all student clubs, listening sessions and affinity spaces is open to all.
- The Constitution and federal laws prohibit schools from excluding students from affinity-based group sessions or any other school-sponsored activities on the basis of their race.
- No students will be excluded from affinity-based group sessions or any school-sponsored activities on the basis of race.
- When any affinity-based group session is held, all grade-eligible students are welcome to attend — regardless of their race — and notice of the event will be publicized so that all students are aware of the event.
Any announcement of an “affinity-based” group will also include this disclaimer: “This event is open to all students regardless of race, color, sex, gender identity, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation”.
It’s strange to think that in 2022, a declaration that disallows racial segregation is a victory not against “white supremacy” but against the bigotry of “anti-racism”. Like most people, I am appalled by actual racism — but I am also appalled by the efforts of doctrinaire progressives to impose their divisive worldview on children. As the case of WPS illustrates, a new Jim Crow is being promoted, often by stealth, by a small cadre of illiberal activists — woke school boards, “diversity” officers and compliant teachers. They often steamroll a community with their bad ideas, which they try to conceal with enthusiasm: “If you need to know more about why this is not for White students, please ask me!”
Their doctrine is abundantly clear. Whites — and only whites — are the oppressors and must acknowledge their “privilege”, and admit their shame. Blacks and “people of color”, meanwhile, are portrayed as perpetual victims, people unable hold their own against white people, hence the need for “affinity spaces”.
Could anything be more racist? This philosophy is blatantly cultish, peddling the idea of original sin, but without the forgiveness. No wonder clear-thinking parents of all races rebel against such transparent nonsense. Teaching children that there is a hierarchy of human value is as illiberal — and regressive — today as it was when King called it a “tragedy”.
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SubscribeI find it rather amusing and ironic that it is getting hard to tell whether something was said by David Duke or Robin DiAngelo.
Indeed it isn’t anti-racism, it’s ‘black supremacy’ or ”of colour supremacy’ (but that sounds more clunky).
Can’t we just call them COWs–Citizens of Wakanda? Who wouldn’t want to be a Citizen of Wakanda, it’s so advanced? Such a better term than People of Color.
Of course there is a caste system where only the darkest skin tones can be first class citizens, lighter skin second class, still lighter, third class, and so on….
Our imports from the subcontinent, the highest-earning immigrant group in America, are happy to teach us all about caste systems. They’re the experts.
Brilliant! I see the caste system is about to be outlawed. In California!
No one should be confused by this woman. She is “on side” only because there are worse people out there. She is a vile and disgusting person, eager to play the race card as it suits her.
She is the physical embodiment of the multiculturalism that has destroyed America. Don’t English readers notice how eager she is to get in a little dig at colonial England.
Don’t be fooled: this woman is not really on side.
Who is “this woman” – the author? In your next comment, you refer to an “AS” – but the writer’s name would be initialized as “AN” or “AQN”, so presumably that’s not she. You also presume to have a great deal of knowledge about her without offering a single reference. I can’t see why I should be expected to just trust you absent any evidence other than your own assertions.
My mistake–AN. DON’T trust me–have a look at Freddie’s interview with her and draw your own conclusions.
You mean the Indians who made the caste system illegal in 1947, got a so called “lower caste” to write the constitution, has a “lower caste” prime minister and president?
Amusingly, I have never seen anyone discriminate on the basis of caste just like I haven’t had a single case of a white being racist in almost two decades in the West. Multiple incidents of racism against Indians by blacks or muslim though.
The lack of discrimination and sheer hard work, is why those same Indians have done so well (most of the “upper caste ” migrants had worse income and education spend than an inner city black)
And while plenty of people chatter about the Indian caste system, you won’t find anyone point out the savage black racism against Indian migrants, whether in African countries or in the US / UK
How about whether something was said by Martin Luther King or Nikole Hannah-Jones?
(See the quotation I printed below.)
Thank you for this article.
The issue of indoctrination of children with “progressive” values is probably the biggest threat the Democrats face in the midterms, and now they’re aware of the threat.
Politico recently reported on progressive Democrat parents turning on their school board in San Francisco due to the board failing to focus on getting kids back into school and instead spending their time debating issues that amount to little more than virtue signaling.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/11/activists-upending-democratic-politics-00008108
These types of stories are starting to appear everywhere. The Dems are backpedaling support for the more extreme progressive issues that are now seen as electoral liabilities whereas they were viewed as assets in 2020. Let’s hope voters see through this transparent strategy because the progressive ideologues certainly haven’t gone away.
Parents fighting back against school boards is a great start but it will take political will at the national level to really break the back of extreme progressivism.
I never cease to be amazed at the way in which virtue signalling progressive liberals claim to have the intellectual high ground in what is nothing more than a set of deeply damaging, divisive, rascist and community shattering initiatives…. in the name of equity and diversity. Educators are fawning to be associated with the initiatives and progressive way of thinking, believeing they are acting in the best interest of the oppressed ‘identity groups’ and their ilk.
Its fascism and sows resentment, suspicion and ultimately hatred. It is vile at every level.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10235857/Woke-head-teacher-indoctrinated-pupils-32k-year-school-quits.html
This needs to be fought in every corner and at every level and ultimately, eradicated.
As with JP Martin Esq above, a brilliant reply, thank you.
The British won and defended an empire largely as a bi-product of their efforts to eradicate slavery.
Sure they did.
Between 1807 and 1860, the Royal Navy, West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1600 ships involved in the slave trade and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard these vessels. The cost to the Uk was high, over 1500 service men died on the West Africa Squadron, from a variety of causes: disease, killed in action and accidental deaths. The financial drain must also have been massive.
Full article here:
All for “equity and social cohesion” I’m sure.
Just like all the Union dead in the Civil War, who died so that their children could go to school with blacks.
Try googling the phrase “commerce, christianity, and civilisation”.
Thanks for an excellent elaboration on my comment.
Well, partly; there were other reasons, such as competition with other nations such as France, but the Treasury were always reluctant to pay for anything, including empire building.
Completely agree with you, Richard. Except I think that those so called educators are pandering to the “progressives” not out of a sincere belief, rather because they see this convenient and self-beneficial.
Yes, much like the Woke corporations are. That way, they can deflect any economic criticism by pointing to how progressive they are on social issues.
Alyona, I agree with you. I know of many teachers and administrators falling down this rabbit hole. Its is an industry that has become very lucrative to many. Its dogma is being swallowed whole!
So just what is racism? Is it ” racist” that in the fields of finance, business, the academe, media, medicine and many others, Jewish and Indian peoples outperform all others? Is it ” racist” that African countries come at the bottom of GNP/GDP and democracy league tables? Is it racist that the best footballers are black, the best rally drivers Scandinavian, and the best jockeys and racehorse trainers Irish?…… or is it just empirical and evidence backed fact?
Nicky
Is it ” racist” that in the fields of finance, business, the academe, media, medicine and many others, Jewish and Indian peoples outperform all others?
Jewish, yes; Indian, no.
Is it ” racist” that African countries come at the bottom of GNP/GDP and democracy league tables?
Yes.
Is it racist that the best footballers are black
No
the best rally drivers Scandinavian,
Yes
the best jockeys and racehorse trainers Irish?
No.
As far as I can tell there is, among the left, one of those little charts going on that looks a bit like a SWOT analysis, with four areas in it, that is used to detect racism.
On the X axis are two labels: white and black. On the Y axis are two different labels: success / failure (or, depending on context, oppressor / oppressed).
The area that is white on one axis and success on the other denotes racism. The area that is black on one axis and failure on the other also denotes racism. The other two areas are ignored.
So in your examples, African countries [that] come at the bottom of GNP/GDP and democracy league tables are black along one axis and failure along the other, so are squarely in the zone that denotes racism, whereas…the best footballers are black is not racism.
This analysis instructs leftoids what to think. It works pretty reliably for them most of the time, provided you start with the correct categorisations. That is, you have to goodthink that Jews count as white whereas the Irish count as black. Once you have that straight, you know with pretty unerring accuracy what the left’s view will be of any social observation you make.
Don’t forget Cecil Rhode’s *great quote: “To be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life”.
And so it remains.
(* An outstanding Imperialist of the late 19th century.)
Can someone please explain to me what it is to be “English?” I sort of understand what it means to be Welch, what it means to be Scottish, but what does it mean to be English, as opposed to British? Or Northern Irish?
Is England not allowed to celibrate it’s culture in the same way that the Welsh and Scot’s and Irish do? I presume from your other posts that you are an American and have been introduced to the smaller nations culture through the national day celibrations in the US immigrant communities. The English have a rich history but for the last three hundred years the English have been encouraged not to expess any nationalistic tendencies or to celirate Englishness as England is hugely dominant economically in the United Kingdom. The British nationality was adopted as a way to allow patriatism whilst disallowing Englishness. This worked really well and the UK Flourished until a particularily dim government set about introducing devolution for all the nations apart from England resulting in the ridiculouse situation we have now.
I do not think so. Rather it is like this little story I saw:
An Asian reporter is interviewing a WASP, for some kind of cultural article.
Reporter: “Are you not a bit bereft, as a group? I mean the Italans have opera, the hispanics have catholicism, the Irish have St Patrick’s day, the French have cooking, and the Blacks have Jazz – but what do you have?”
WASP: “We have the United States”.
The English, as a dominant group have no need to differentiate themselves from the whole of the British Nation/Empire, so it is always a bit ambiguous whether you cleave to Britain or England. The smaller nations do have that need, so for them (and only them) British clearly means the larger entity as opposed to the smaller. Like also the Russians in the Soviet Union, one of the costs of being a hugely dominant group in a multi-national empire is that the dominant group plays down their in-group feeling and give slightly disproportionate space to the minor nations. ‘British’ has then been co-opted to be an identity open also to Asians and Africans in a way that is not nearly as simple for English or Scottish.
Maybe you could say that ‘English’ in the UK is a bit like ‘cis’? I mean, you do not have a specific ‘cis’ identity, because you feel that yours is just the way things are, and it is the others who are outliers?
So true Bob & so sad for us English folk (and I am Jewish to boot!)
Really? I get downvoted for asking a question? Wow!
I shall let William Shakespeare speak for me:-
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
Richard II Act I Scene II
Well, this is not an answer really but – I am Welsh, I was born in Wales, educated in Wales and chose to work and bring up my family in Wales.
Many years ago I visited Winchester for the first time. As a student of history I wandered through the Cathedral, somewhat in awe at the names of the Saxon Kings buried in its confines. From the time of Alfred the Great until the Norman conquest it was a royal chapel. Much of England`s early history was acted out here. It is one of those places that exudes a supernatural feeling as if the past is tangibly reaching out.
I then walked over to St Giles Hill. It was here Waltheof, Earl of Northumbria was executed on 31 May 1076, he was the last of the Anglo-Saxon earls.
From his execution spot I looked back over to the Cathedral and there flying from its highest point was the Cross of Saint George.It may sound silly now but at that point I realised that. here, I was indeed in deepest England and as a Welshman, a British citizen I sort of understood then what England and to be English meant.
I had somewhat balked at the sight of that flag in the past, but standing there I understood this was England and that was its symbol and that it should fly proudly.
Oh, I know I will be lectured and censured about later and the most recent waves of immigration and how things have changed, but standing there looking at that flag brought home to me the strength that was and is England.
Hugh, thank you. That echoes experiences I’ve had myself, and the frustration I’ve long felt at England’s elites continuing to pursue the campaign of eradication of their subjects’ culture. Paul Kingsnorth is especially good on this subject, I think.
The inheritors of Guillaume Le Batard foisted the British project upon us all, but, Ireland Wales and Scotland all having good historical reasons to balk at it, it seems England was the only place they made that much headway, there being no remaining foil against which the English could exercise their nationhood.
Centuries later, we’re made to feel bigoted or racist for daring to be proud of being English – our own fault for being conned maybe.
For myself, growing up in Hull, I was never really in doubt of what and who I was, and I’m now thankful for a childhood in the hinterland like that – even if I didn’t always appreciate it so much at the time. There was always a sense of stroppy independence there, a confidence in your place in time and the land, points of difference hard to define but palpable, viscerally there. I’ve had similar impressions while visiting Wales years ago and it impressed me there too. People knew themselves and the place which they lived in ways that outsiders simply couldn’t, which to me is a fair working definition of nationhood.
That has wilted and faded a bit now as the chain stores advance up the high streets, but I think it’s hanging in there in pockets.
I often find myself thinking of Dylan Thomas’s “Prologue”, to build an ark in my minds eye, at least, to carry all that’s precious to me above the encroaching waters, to keep it safe and pass it on, as “the flood flowers now”.
In response to your closing paragraph: yes, we’ll probably both be lectured and censured, and no doubt we’ve got it all wrong, but thanks again for your thoughtful comment.
When people like you write this quote, they imply that only ‘English’ people think this way, but could one not substitute any other nation and put it as from the lips a citizen of that nation?
For example, from an American; “To be born American is to win first prize in the lottery of life”, and I wouldn’t think it at all remarkable.
Or from a Frenchman “To be born French is to win first prize in the lottery of life”. I can understand that, too.
Of course, an Afghani struggling ashore at Dungeness may very well be thinking “To become English is to win first prize in the lottery of life”.
Off course anyone can use it.
However in this case ‘we’ did it first, or at least Cecil Rhodes did.
It used to be called ‘effortless superiority’, but I don’t wish to inflame this convivial conversation.
The problem is whereas previous immigrants (West Indians, Jews, Indians & Parkistanis, Huguenots & others) did, indeed, aspire to be British & part of the country, wanting to give to the nation that had welcomed them, more recent immigrants wish to remake the country in the image of the places they had supposedly fled from & taking from, not giving to, the host nation whom they seem to despise.
In the old days ‘racial discrimination’ was the term and it was wrong – eg, “No blacks or Irish” when advertising rooms for rent. The term got shortened to ‘racism’ but the definition became wider so that, “The winner of the next Olympics 100m sprint will be black” becomes a ‘racist’ prediction. Such confusion is not helpful.
I’m hearing more and more stories like this. My only questions are why is this happening and what do those perpetrating this kind of segregation hope to gain?
They hope to gain jobs, power, and influence. Diversity initiatives are jobs programmes for overeducated and unemployable idiots. It’s a coalition of resentful fanatics and venal cynics.
Brilliant reply, thank you.
Brilliant! Let me add to that white guilt, which enables jobs/power/influence.
Merit is so 20th Century and racist. “Equity” is the new black!
Also like most artificially inflated industries, the demand for racism far exceeds the supply. How else are the kids of our professional managerial class going to get jobs? Have useful skills? Do something important? I once saw someone call them the “diversity industrial complex” and I have been using the term ever since.
Yes, very good.
That’s an important question. I’ve tried not to be seduced by convoluted conspiracy theories but it’s hard not to imagine a sinister force with evil objectives behind the insanity. My older daughter was in 11th grade when BLM started after Michael Brown was killed. She was enrolled at Martin Luther King high school in a southern capital city. BLM swept through the city schools like a pressure wave from a large explosion and it’s only gotten more insane. We pulled our younger daughter out of public schools because of the unionized propaganda machine and we put her in Catholic middle and high school. But even the Dominican Sisters couldn’t resist inviting a black woman activist on campus last year to brow beat the all-girl student body about the implied violence of their whiteness. My daughter, who is Asian, was aghast. She thought it was weird and uncomely. I was glad I didn’t have to point that out.
It is a conspiracy. For details please read the op-ed “Inside the Woke Indoctrination Machine” by Andrew Gutman and Paul Rossi in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.
Gutman is a parent who rebelled against Woke at his daughter’s exclusive NY private school and Rossi is a teacher who did likewise. You probably read about them last year.
But the real problem is the continued importation of non-whites into white countries, a problem neither WSJ author, like the author here, even considers. They all just keep on mouthing MLK platitudes like it’s the Sixties and they want to share a Coke with the world “in perfect harmony.”
Yes it’s the one thing they don’t want to admit.
They accept utopian egalitarianism and then wonder why things are going wrong.
They swallow liberal premises and then wonder why the world is getting crazy.
Worse, their solution is “more egalitarianism, more liberalism!”
There is nothing inherently wrong with what you call “importation of non-whites into white countries”, many Asian and African ethnic groups are very successful in Western Europe and North America.
The damage is done when immigrants and their descendants are actively encouraged not to fit in and not to participate fully in the host culture, either by straight-up racists (used to be the case, no longer really a major factor) or by the racialised progressive left as is the case now.
It’s the numbers, man, the numbers.
The US for instance has had an annual legal immigration rate of one million for the past 40 years and has, not surprisingly, undergone both a major demographic and cultural transformation.
I maintain the two are related, as they are in the UK.
Furthermore, it is assumed by all the nicest and best people that this level of immigration should go on, unabated, forever. Certainly no one in public life ever argues against its continuance. To the contrary everyone, like you, says it’s a good thing.
But after saying that they go on to criticize the society it is begetting.
Your head is getting wet, the wallpaper is peeling off the walls, the windows are fogged and the floorboards above you are creaking and dripping water from the upstairs bathroom tub.
TURN OFF THE FAUCET!
Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but no normal European has any interest in immigrating to the US. Virtually ALL of the immigration to the US is from–well Trump had a name for those places.
If you don’t think this is a problem, you haven’t got a clue….
At base it’s a negotiation gambit; insist on getting everything you want and stick hard and fast to your demands. When/if you settle you’ll get most of what you want. Problem is, especially in public schools, the people in charge don’t realize this and think they must meet all demands as demanded. It’s the “you’re with me 100% or your not with me at all” mentality. As the article points out, when these programs are challenged they almost always are revised or dropped. Maybe negotiation should be taught in middle school.
…right on it Mike. It’s less ideological than just a business opportunity. Those ‘newcomers’ acute enough to see how it can advance them personally get into it because it’s an easy road forward. Silly, miseducated white women, with no other high social value work prospects also buy in, but I suspect out of naivety just as much as economic self interest.
I read this essay last night after a visit to my old home town. I am from a small market town in Pembrokeshire in the West of Wales called Haverfordwest. It has a long and interesting history of conflict through the ages, waves of settlers, forced ethnic cleansing and installation of immigrant populations by English Kings to help subject and control the Welsh.. But it is not that I wish to write about
As I said , yesterday I returned to my hometown on a short break and went for a walk around with my wife. At the top of the town is an old, slowly decaying house but one that still looks substantial despite the neglect. It used to a residency of General Picton. When I was a pupil at the local Grammar School (late 1960s – early 1970s) we were taught what a “right- piece of work” Picton was- a severe disciplinarian, a slave owner, prosecuted for torture, but we also learned of the punishment he ordered against a white man who raped a slave and we learnt of his bravery at the Battle of Waterloo.
On 16 June 1815, Picton was badly injured at The Battle of Quatre Bras fighting the tyranny of Napoleon- but hid his wounds from his men.Two days later – at the Battle of Waterloo – leading the English Guards from the front on horseback and so totally exposed he was shot through the temple by a musket ball, repulsing the French advances which had threatened to break the centre of the British line and condemn the Allied forces to defeat.
Anyway, there used to be a small circular plaque set into the wall about 8 foot up, Just stating that this house was a past residency of General Picton. I knew that when I looked up yesterday that it would be gone. And surely enough it was not there anymore, there was a circular indention left filled with ragged hacked off cement, it was an ugly scar.
Controversy over this man has existed ever since his death, and not just now. And this controversy always served a purpose. There is such a Woke drive in these times not just to ditch all consideration of the times in which events are set, but to totally pigeonhole people as having been either heroes or villains; in Picton’s case there’s plenty of evidence for both cases.
Picton and his memorials have always acted as a talking points, I don’t think anyone by the mid 1850`s ever saw them as a point of celebration of white supremacy.
If you wipe out his memory, by taking down notices and changing pub names, you also take away the prompts to ask ‘why’ is it named after him, and as a consequence you might not learn about Luisa Calderon the girl he ordered tortured, the ensuing trial or of the other events behind this name.
If you forget the names, you forget history, and you lose the lessons and awareness that can bring, When I looked up at the vandalised wall where that plaque had sat I felt what a terrible shame it now was, that a stranger passing by, would never know who once lived here, and thus never enquire or learn more……….
A very melancholic observation.
A more practical one is that you live in a conquered land and you are a conquered people.
One of the first things a conqueror does is pull down the statues and symbols of the conquered. (Recall Saddam’s statue in Baghdad.)
Another is to restrict what can be said about the conquerors, even to what words can and cannot be said.
And another is to inculcate the children of the conquered with the ideology of their new masters. To make them despise their past and love their overlords.
Why is this second observation practical? Because in men it fosters a spirit of resistance, as opposed to sadness.
Oh, I am not conquered for,“As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under Wokeish rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself”. (The Declaration of Arbroath -amended).
Fired up I have put further pen to paper and written letters to both a local and a national(Wales) newspapers (resistance). Also, I will soon return to Haverfordwest armed with a home-made plaque and a tube of super glue!
Yes! Please!!
Great piece, thanks, Asra. Jordan Peterson labels this exclusionism Diversity, Inclusion and Equity DIE. It could also be acronymed as IED as it simply causes explosive social destruction at a time when we most need to heal our divisions and learn from one another.
Brilliant. DIE or IED, in conjunction with my contribution COWs–new acronyms for a new war!
And make no mistake, it is war!
No, it’s a flood and the first thing you have to do to clean it up is turn off the faucet.
Some might say it’s a hole, so stop digging. I say it’s a war, so Lock and Load!
If their plan is to restore a white identity for millions of people who have only ever viewed the world through a class lens then they are doing a superb job.
It is the duty of teachers to ensure, as they can, that all our students get a fair chance. In practice, in this context, it means we should not allow students to bully or humilate others. We have to confront racist behaviour in the classroom directly.
However, this is rather unexciting work; not as promotion friendly as an office for diversity.
Teachers tend to do this naturally; we want all of our pupils to learn. There will always be a handful of bigots, who need to be sacked and, there will be times when our failure to act, our missing something or being to preoccupied, will have a deleterious affect on a young person. We sometimes need reminding to do our duty.
The work of looking after young people in this way is all behind the scenes and nobody can build a career from it. The diversity agenda is a scam and allows mediocrities opportunities for power, influence and cash.
And, in Brighton, teachers are being trained in ‘racial literacy’ in a policy that Brighton council says is based on ‘Critical Race Theory’. Thankfully, a group of parents have got together to challenge it with this group https://dontdivideus.com/
Alternatively, start a Whites Only affinity group.
I do think we need some focus for help to that completely abandoned ethnic group – white working class boys.
Hope you can do without cries of Racism! and Sexism! littering the conversation. Wouldn’t bet on it though.
Total agree, here. White working-class boys do need some encouragement, I won’t say leg-up because I don’t generally agree with racial, sexual, or class quotas, but an “Affinity Group” – maybe.
That would immediately pronounced RACIST by most of the Labour MPs and all liberal, SNP, PC.and green MPs and other Idiots. Certain Labour MPs would organise a march in protest and that would be turned into a riot. Arson and Looting would then break out and the Met police, given their stance on IR motorway protests, would probably stop the Fire Brigade from even trying boundary cooling on buildings not already ablaze so as not to inflame (pun intended!) the situation.
In 1975, in the USA, the hit songs that floated over the airwaves back then were many serious groovy numbers, such as
“Philadelphia Freedom” by Elton John; “Shining Star” by Earth Wind & Fire; “One Of These Nights” by the Eagles; “You’re The First, The Last, My Everything” by Barry White; “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton; “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” by James Taylor; “When Will I See You Again?” by The Three Degrees —among many others at a time when the radio, television and the newspaper … were enough excitement.
A few more hit songs of 1975: “Only Yesterday” by The Carpenters; “Pick Up The Pieces” by Average White Band; “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. There was somethin’ for everyone.
Any old songs tinged by melancholy that were first heard at a time when people as good as had to scrap (family fights over which channel to watch) for any entertainment or good times that they could get, do not equate in the slightest with the resentment, ludicrous vanity and self-pitying doom-mongering that marks today’s music scene in the internet-smart phone age.
The old pop charts were a sign of good times to come. The music scene back then represented a happier equality of opportunity in which the music pioneers, both black and white, surely sensed they were ambassadors for a new and better future. Their faces smiled from the album covers (much like the kids in the colourful class photo at the top). They would not have had it any other way. Moreover, where else in the world was this new harmony in the air being struck up? USA number 1!
What do those old pioneers now say about the hijacking of creativity by the Marxist-minded commissars who are leveraging their way into the institutions of America?
The aim of all this nonsense of spite affecting the running of what should be normal activities, in, say, American schools, must be to knock the stuffing out of childhood. Childhood is over in a flash if children too have to tip-toe around saying sorry all the time.
The sound of music that the kids in the photo above probably heard back in ‘75 probably gave them a sense of wonder about the world. I doubt children of a similar age today react the same way in today’s environment.
A combination of the fattening of culture, in the internet age, (the mass of resentful, vain and self-pitying arts and entertainments worlds), combined with remarkable tyrannical technology at one’s fingertips, has given the resentful-of-man-and-womankind a massive opportunity to pull the rug from under society. To upend it.
You’d think the old happy pop charts were a figment of the older citizen’s imagination. Speak up now you old music pioneers! Maybe give a concert in a local school singing about love and harmony: if the commissars can stand it! (Don’t see guitars at protests these days, do you?).
Oh, everybody can claim to have a record collection these days. Culture has been so democratised. Fattened.
But beware of those spoilsports and harbingers of doom.
Don’t expect the likes of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to share your enthusiasm. They’ve revealed themselves to be commissars of woke group-think and censorship.
Oh yes.
Why, the Eighties were far better for making our kids insipid little “idealists,” ripe for plucking.
Who can forget Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder singing “Ebony and Ivory”?
And then there was “Feed the World (Do They Know It’s Christmas?)” by the whole motley collection of moralizing millionaire scolds called Band Aid.
That stuff inspired so many of the proto-Woke back then, and whose progeny you see today on your music awards shows and in conformist performing artists.
Love is all you need.
The difference was in the population and for the most part was socially cohesive. We are a long way away from that time.
Brilliant! Great observation!
Of course this is happening because they see the writing on the wall when anglos become a minority population. It was never going to be a kum ba ya moment, only strife and a struggle for resources and power. The leaders of the west have been utter fools.
I’ll allow our past leaders this excuse: many of them were culturally magnanimous because they were so firmly ensconced on top they felt they could afford to be. The world was the West’s oyster.
The current lot don’t have that excuse. They’re just sellouts or stupid.
Internationalism has made them rich.
A useful insight if depressing. I am all in favour of helping children who are struggling but defining any group of people by colour, race, religion or sex is perpetuating the problem that we should be putting behind us. Children should be taught to speak up against those who bully them, not hide from them in an “affinity” group. Their peers should be taught to help them do this.
Could anything be more racist? This philosophy is blatantly cultish, peddling the idea of original sin, but without the forgiveness.
Asra Nomani nails it. Her perspective enables a clearer view of the sordid practices of these educational ‘progressives’, who think that only the evil whities, who put a stop to uncounted centuries of slavery, must pay for the sins of all the anonymized tribes of every color who took slavery for granted.
A very simple argument:-
1. Racism should be resisted.
2. Anti-racism = racism
3. If a=b, then a shares all and only b’s properties.
Ergo
4. Anti-racism should be resisted.
I agree. Racism is just another form of bullying. Bullies will pick on you for ANYTHING they can. Skin colour is just one of many many things. And the only response to bullies is to stand up for yourself not cower in a corner or run to mummy. The idea that saying something mean to a black kid is somehow worse than saying something mean to a disabled/fat/ginger kid is ludicrous.
The other thing that annoys me is that race gets so often confused with culture. Somalian, Pakistani, Afghani cultures are largely incompatible with British culture. That’s got nothing to do with skin colour.
Good post.
Very true, except for China being the most economically successful country. If they have the highest GDP, it’s largely because of their huge population. But their per capita income is still well behind that of the West, and of Japan and the Little Dragons.
Wait until the debt bills come due. Then you’ll find out how much of that per capita wealth is illusory.
D. I. E. stands for Divide, Indict, Exclude. Simple as that.
Very interesting article and enlightening discussion, thank you. A cynics view … there is money and status and employment for life in the burgeoning industry of “ism” whatever particular “ism” a person feels drawn to be an activist for. If there wasn’t … well, I doubt we would be having this discussion.
The tragedy is black people are not resisting this new era of segregation. Very short sighted.
I would have thought that this could be dealt with effectively by simply describing all such efforts with a Jim Crow label.
That is after all what is going on. The fact that it is done to exclude white people as opposed to black people is pretty much irrelevant: the outcome is the same, and it’s repugnant to any civilised and fair-minded human being.
Parents might have a victory here and there. But it will always be temporary. The state school system in western countries is thoroughly infiltrated by Marxists and post modernists. School choice is the only solution. Parents with enough money should take their kids from state schools, parents should also organized like Jewish people did for ages by organizing their own schools.
If I were a racist and believed that the white man should reign supreme in his own country and the black be expelled or worse then I would welcome a doctrine like CRT that treated my fellow whites as a conquered people who had to give precedence to the invaders and avoid offending them because it’s consequence could only be to instill a simmering hatred for the favoured invader and his quisling supporters who dared to denigrate my culture and history. I would wait for the incident that would set off a backlash against the interlopers.and hope this would occur while the enemy was still but a small proportion of the population. CRT would be my secret weapon to rouse my countrymen against the foreign horde that an amiable complacency by my fellow citizens that had allowed the invasion to occur. I would laugh at the stupid liberals who worked so hard to stir up distrust and hatred of non-whites. Everyone knows how the teachers pet gets bullied – just not the stupid liberal. The last thing I wold want was for people not to care what colour a persons skin was and for “race” to be regarded as unimportant.
In this age of extremist indoctrination peddled as DIE, it is absolutely critical that non-white people speak up about racism against whites. For, it shocks those racist indoctrinators to see and hear non-white people that they identify with saying “No. Stop damaging our kids” – so well done to this author.
There are also a growing number of coloured people (by this I mean non-white) on YouTube who are against this kind of insidious, segregational racism. It is instructive and wonderful to hear their rationality and humanity – lightning rods for their communities, where people have become isolated due to institutional and social media intolerance and racism.
It strikes me that the race madness today, is not about race at all. It is “colourism” – one of the historic words supplanted by the modern word “racism”. For those hell-bent on making everything about race, it is really about their perception of colour.
“Race” is a social construct, not a scientific or economic one. There is no race of Africans or Europeans – each set of peoples contain hugely varying DNA.
Then there is the self-identification by people who claim it is on the basis of race, but the harsh reality it is either on the basis of colour or culture.
Commonly, a mixed-race person who is 50%, or even 75% white, will identify as coloured, as non-white. Why? By DNA they are no more coloured, than they are white. It is because they identify, often very strongly, with a non-white colour or a non-white culture.
Perhaps we should be dropping the racist “white” terminology and references althogether. So-called white people have origins, largely in the pre-conquest European continent from Russia in the East to Ireland and Portugal in the West.
So, as there are self-identified African Americans or Korean Americans, “white” people can be referred to, by the equally respectful, “European Americans”.
However that’s in the USA! In the UK we can continue to uphold our long-held tradition that you are English, Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish – irrespective of colour. And that we are British. We decided your colour would not be important, would not define you, would not give cause for people to discriminate against you – just as Martin Luther King reasoned.
Your last paragraph co-incides with the experience in my own family where my mixed race relations indentify as neither white nor black, but as English.
Great, well said.
Easy. Just say you don’t identify as white? Utter nonsense.
Diversity is the new racism.
Who said this?
“ We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.”
Two “down” votes? Did you think I said it?
The answer is MLK, not Hannah-Jones or Ibram X Kendi.
He said it on August 31, 1967, in a speech titled “The Three Evils of Society.”
Nothing has changed since the Sixties. We just forgot. We were encouraged to forget.
We were instructed over and over again that the only things King ever spoke about were “content,” “character” and “mountaintops.”
Nobody said MLK was infallible.
I can’t see anything wrong with what MLK said. Capitalism was built (mostly) upon exploitation, whether that be slaves (of any hue) or working-class people (again of any hue)
I upticked you for saying that. It’s true, but it’s certainly not a popular view here at UnHerd. Well said.
I suppose that there is a sense in which Christian, Jewish or Moslem religious services are affinity groups. But at least they usually do not tell others to stay away.
Jewish and Muslim religious services are closed to people not of their religion. Christian services do not matter.
How are Affinity Spaces any different from female safe spaces?
Female safe spaces are generally for particular women (those have been abused) from particular men (those who have abused those women.)
The ‘Female safe spaces’ I know of allow men to be around – just keeping the location secret from the abusers.
At first I was agitated by these cases of segregation but I’ve just looked into the very first example quoted about the Centennial Elementary school in Denver.
Having read further (link below) I see the school has a very small proportion of black pupils (3%) and it’s their attempt at allowing people of colour to meet up when that mechanism wouldn’t exist otherwise as they are always seeing each other in a general mass at the school gates and activities. And everyone is invited to attend too. If you accept that in the USA black people often have a different culture to that of white and Hispanics, and I do, then such a mechanism seems worthwhile for that tiny group, especially when it’s open to all to attend.
https://www.denverpost.com/2021/12/23/denver-elementary-school-families-of-color-playground-night-racism-segregation-fox-news/
But a right wing activist in the USA made hay with it as an example of segregation without context, and it’s received widespread condemnation as a result – yet in my view it’s a worthy activity that’s been clumsily communicated. Unherd readers usually appreciate that we shouldn’t condemn such mistakes from well intentioned efforts out of hand.
That changes my opinion of this cited case, and I don’t know if the other cases have deeper nuances.
What’s that road to Hell paved with again?
I believe it would be a mistake to ascribe good intentions to these activists.
So sit on our hands and do nothing except criticise? That sounds like the leftist approach to progress.
Why not encourage ALL of the white students to swamp the meeting in an act of collective friendship to their non-white co-eds.
I agree, The choices made by leadership at Centennial Elementary appear to have merit in context. The irony is that in a pre-grievance theory world, the story would not have been notable nor could it have been weaponized.
Our society is no longer dominated by anglos. The culture is different now so they aren’t a tiny island who sees only the ocean surrounding them.
It’s the numbers, the numbers.
There’s nothing wrong with a little salt, or a little spice in the soup.
But what happens when you dump the entire contents of the salt box in?
It’s inedible?
Benjamin Constant made this observation and Éric Zemmour has popularised it: Tout est moral dans les individus mais tout est physique dans les masses.
So because it’s only a small number of blacks it’s ok? The very idea that black people should be encouraged to develop their own culture (to the exclusion of whites) that is a major underlying source of increased racial strife. OUR common culture in the US has absorbed a large amount of early black culture, from music and fashion to language. Racists call it cultural appropriation but instead it is a good and necessary thing! We must acknowledge that tribalism is a part of our nature and fight efforts that separate humans into us and them.