June 20, 2024 - 7:00am

Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum has decided not to showcase a West African mask, and online photos of it, because Igbo culture has a taboo against women seeing it. The decision is justified in the name of “cultural safety”.

The rot starts at the top. Museum curator Laura van Broekhoeven could have been invented by Andrew Doyle or planted by grievance studies hoaxers James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian. Though she obtained her PhD in 2002, she has only a smattering of largely uncited low-prestige publications to her name, none of which prevented her being made Professor of Museum Studies at Oxford in 2021. By comparison, Harvard’s deposed Claudine Gay, who has several well-cited publications in top journals, is a veritable superstar and paragon of rigour.

Perhaps van Broekhoeven has shot to the heights of academia because she has been showered with research grant funds as part of right-on curatorial projects such as “Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage” and “Taking Care: Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care”. She seems to have gravitated to the more censorious end of academic governance such as ethics and repatriation of objects committees, while her service to the DEI gods is especially impressive, taking in spells as Co-Chair of the Oxford and Colonialism Network, a member of the Race Equality and Diversity Taskforce, and a member of the Museum Association Decolonisation Guidance Working Group.

Her university webpage features three videos of keynote speeches, including one given at a conference titled “Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and the Problem of Decolonizing Museums” and another labelled “Museums and Heritage Decolonisation presentation at Queen’s University Belfast, 2022”. The museum’s trustees are cut from the same cloth.

Pitt Rivers has set the pace when it comes to virtue-signalling, and the museum is a textbook case of institutionalised Left-liberal extremism. It blends critical theory tropes such as “decolonisation” with the radical Left-liberal embrace of “emotional safety”. Together, the two have fused to create the belief system we know as “woke”, which I define in my new book Taboo as “the sacralisation of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual identity groups”. This school of thought establishes a moral-emotional hierarchy of victim narratives and tripwires around sacred groups which underpins today’s cultural Left-liberalism.

“Diversity and Equity” may be translated as discriminating against white people, men and Asians to hit race and gender quotas. “Inclusion” means censoring freedom of speech to prevent the most hypothetically sensitive member of a totemic group from feeling emotionally “unsafe” or “traumatised”. This incentivises activists to play the trauma card, even as “woke” whites’ cultural antennae are so finely honed that they will have internalised this move and headed it off through self-censorship and racial self-abasement. This is likely what happened in the case of the Pitt Rivers display, even before the obligatory consultation with “stakeholder groups”.

An interesting aspect of the hiding of the Igbo “no women’s eyes allowed” mask is that it throws feminism under the bus in the name of race sensitivity, rankling feminist art historians such as Ruth Millington. There is an analogy here with the trans debate, where women must defer to transwomen who wish to enter their spaces. In both cases, women possess some intersectional points, but fewer than other marginalised groups. As John McWhorter argues, this approach is not about tribal identity politics so much as about “who is hurting who” and therefore has to walk behind in the “progressive stack”.

Once Labour takes office as expected, we should expect a DEI boom in British institutions. The weak restraints provided by the Tories’ episodic attention to identitarian excesses will be relaxed. Keir Starmer’s government will helpfully chime in to warn against “stoking divisive culture wars” should anyone have the temerity to complain. His Race Equality Act will spark new institutional initiatives, revving up the use of mandatory diversity statements, hiring quotas and speech policing.

We can therefore expect things to get worse for expressive freedom, truth, equal treatment, trust in institutions, national identity and social cohesion. Britain’s dwindling sensible media and the few unwoke MPs left standing will have an outsized role to play in taking on the upheaval taking place in our institutions.


Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July).

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