Other Events

31 Oct 2017

Statues Must Fall – Erasing History or Righting Wrongs?

Teachwell Ethnicity, Humanity, Other Events, Race critical race theory, history, Racism, sjw's, statues 2

It was a pleasure and privilege to be invited by Claire Fox to take part in the debate on statues alongside Patrick Vernon OBE (@ppvernon), Dr Cheryl Hudson (@HudsCheryl) and Dr Nicholas Draper.

The link to the debate and initial readings is here: https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/session/statues-must-fall-erasing-history-or-righting-wrongs/

Here is my 5 minute introduction speech that I made (the focus of which was the UK more than the US, as were my responses during the debate):

One of the most interesting aspects of this issue is how little it is about the statues involved, the past or the current state of race relations in either the US or the UK.

Are wrongs being righted here? What’s done is done and it can’t be undone. You can remove all the statues, street names, symbols, etc and it won’t make a jot of difference to what has actually happened in the past. The dead can neither be punished nor compensated.

What we are witnessing is a casual re-racialisation of society by critical race theorists unable or unwilling to process changes in society which they are removed from in their academic echo chambers and the need of pampered, insecure middle class students who want to recreate the sanitised world they have become accustomed to at school and home in the world at large.

What is striking is the lack of debate not the quality of it.

I tried to find reasons why removing statues would lead to some tangible improvement in either race relations or in society and what I came across was just a script.

The script goes like this:

Racism is rife in our society.

There is a statue from the past linked to slavery/colonialism. This statue is venerated or celebrated/not known about (often both are claimed by the writer about the same statue – particularly in the case of Rhodes in the UK).

A sentence referring to suffering of people during slavery or colonialism.

Repeated assertions (as much to convince themselves as anyone else) that institutional racism and prejudice are real with little or no evidence (what evidence there is, is vague and not clearly related to race)

Statements about how society is also ridden with prejudice regarding gender, disability, LGBTQ, etc.

The statue being removed is essential to ridding society of prejudice and part of the journey to creating a utopian world where everyone is safe and feels included.

The SJW movement is just a set of about 15 statements which they repeat and expect everyone to agree with without question or thought. These are the articles of faith of a secular religion where victimhood is sanctified and whose main goal is to embed a caste system into society based on divisions.

They remind me of the Dothraki in Game of Thrones who make statements about the world, which they follow by a simple “It is known” as they have no reason or explanation for their beliefs:

We live in a white supremacist state – it is known.

Statues cause us harm – it is known.

Power plus prejudice is racism – it is known.

I can understand why they demand safe spaces and refuse debate because a cursory examination of their ideas and beliefs demonstrates a lack of evidence, inability or unwillingness to develop historical perspective and an authoritarian stance which does the very things they claim they oppose – marginalise and silence individuals and groups.

The whole movement is a case study in hypocrisy, replicating so much of what caused the problems they state they wish to change.

The dismissal of universal humanist concepts as racist means that we now have a situation where the model of race proposed by Linnaeus and others is unquestionally accepted by racists and anti-racists alike. The core tenets – racial categories, biological determinism, necessity for separation of the races is agreed upon. Where they disagree is simply how they divvy up human characteristics between the different groups and a minor re-naming of terms – coloured people becoming people of colour.

Both rely on a stunted, sanitised and conflated versions of history, in which slavery and colonisation is the only history that matters. Yet such a focus serves to shore up the idea of white European exceptionalism as much as it does the narrative that history is just non-whites being subjugated by evil white people.

Racism and prejudice exists, just not in the same way and with the same intensity of the past in as many places. It says something when the NUS spent a whole report burying the fact that 93% of BME students had not experienced any racism at university.

The exaggerated claims of harm end up trivialising what happened in the past.

Rather than draw attention to and examine history, all that is happening is a middle class charade where ethnic minorities mine their ancestors suffering to barter with manufactured white guilt, which their middle class white allies are only too happy to provide. All of this allows their activist professors to continue peddling outdated models of postmodernist critical race theory without so much as a challenge to the core ideas or assumptions from their students.

Post-debate thoughts:

There is always points one wishes they had made

I was asked is there a half-way house or compromise between my view and that of Patrick Vernon in particular. My answer was no on the question of taking statues down because this is not a cost-free option and we do need to ask questions about whether this is the best way to spend money.

Patrick is an OBE and this is because of the work he has done to have black contributions to the UK seen and acknowledged. While I disagree with some initiatives (my objections to Black History Month as it stands can be read here and here), I would rather money was spent on erecting statues (which he mentioned but I can’t find a link to add to here) than removing them because that is about adding to this nation and enhances our historical knowledge and understanding of the past.

28 Oct 2016

Battle of Ideas #1 – History Wars

Teachwell Education Policy, Other Events 0

This was my first year at the Institute of Ideas annual event, the Battle of Ideas. I took part in the History Wars panel alongside Nick Dennis, Kwasi Kwarteng MP, Frank Furedi and Sean Lang, with the rather brilliant Helen Birtwistle chairing.

I think Nick Dennis’s description of the session as an enlightened conversation is fair. While we had much in common, we still came at it from different angles I felt that the audience asked pertinent questions about a range of issues. I do think there is the will to improve the teaching of history and we need to make a concerted effort to ensure that historians and those with a genuine passion for history defend it as a subject and not merely a means of achieving other goals. I don’t think my memory can do the whole thing justice so will post the sound cloud of the debate when it goes live.

Below is the transcript of my five-minute introduction:

Humans are pattern seeking and so attempts to draw parallels between current and past events comes naturally. It is simply part of our DNA to make such comparisons.

What is interesting and concerning is that some invocations of history are not the basis of debate or discussion, but a means to prevent debate altogether.

Having worked as a primary teacher for ten years, I would say that educators and the education system bears some of the responsibility for the current misuses of history.

When knowledge is elitist, ignorance becomes a revolutionary act. The line between education and indoctrination has been blurred by teachers who believe they belong to a priestly class, ordained by their left-wing teacher training institutions, and imbued with a sense of purpose based on curing social ills rather than educating.

In such a climate, it becomes easier to justify cherry picking historical interpretations and evidence.

Carter G Woodson believed that the introduction of Negro History Week in the US was the start of a journey to ensure that both black and white contributions were recognised as part of American history. It was an attempt to expand historical knowledge and add to what already existed.

The same cannot be said for those who claim to be his heirs in either the US or the UK. My time teaching in London brought this home to me. Black History Month and offshoots such as Rhodes Must Fall and Why is My Curriculum is White? are not about history, but about power. Self-esteem not enlightenment. Self-deception not self-awareness.

The peddling of ignorance in the form of conflating histories of different nations – the US and the UK, in particular, is what leads to a situation where a person on a Black Lives Matter rally in Manchester was filmed bemoaning Martin Luther King’s dream not being realised. It’s shocking that he didn’t understand that MLK was calling for changes in another nation and that the organisation he was marching for opposes much of what King stood for. The split in the civil rights movement is something which most resources for Black History Month gloss over. I find it hard to believe that so few have called out or debated what is glaringly obvious – that the black power movement seeks to promote their own revised and repackaged version of Linnaeus’s racial classification.

One website, which the Historical Association links teachers to for materials, states clearly that schools should be aiming to teach black children, in particular, to construct accounts of history that they can be proud of. This has nothing to do with history. You cannot expect the past to solve your self-esteem problems in the here and now. Neither should adults be allowed to indulge themselves at the expense of the education of the young. Of course, white liberals lap up these demands as it seems to give them an outlet to engage in masochistic self-flagellation, claim the moral high ground and all without examining their actual beliefs or conscience.

While some may simply be paving the path to hell with their good intentions, others are actively promoting their ideological stances under the guise of “radical history”. I recently read one such account which implies that the happy-go-lucky Indians were getting along just fine under the Mughals and then the nasty British came along with their capitalist beliefs, where they did nothing but ill with evidence deliberately selected to prove this point of view.

At best this is a form of overcompensation, which leads to accounts of history that are just as stereotypical and patronising as the accounts they seek to replace. Both at home and at school what Indian and colonial history I was taught was far richer and an attempt to help me understand the complex interactions between the different groups. There is something wrong if the accounts being taught and which are being called for to be taught today are regressive in comparison to what I taught 30 years ago.

At worst, this kind of ideologically-driven teaching of history is an attempt to nurture and encourage conflict and grievance mongering. It is no surprise that we have an immature generation of social justice warriors insisting on avenging the past. This was surely the intention of some within the education system in the first place. It’s not just historians but moderates from all groups who need to protect the freedom to teach history as honestly as we can.

The fact that no one is neutral does not mean that there is no difference between a person who is self-aware and can cope with the strengths and weaknesses of their ideas as well as the evidence that counters their preferred ideological stance, and those who are outright liers and propagandists.

The past is the past; it does not care about you or your feelings, and we just have to learn to live with that. At a time when we could be piecing together history from a wider range of sources, expanding scholarship and understanding the complexities of the past, we need to actively resist attempts to misuse and limit the teaching of history.