Continued vigilance is needed if the pernicious growth in 'thought crime' is not to utterly infect our higher education establishments according to Charles Moore.
Writing in this week's Telegraph, he cites the example of Downing College Cambridge which is busy drawing up its own 'Report and Support' guidelines on racial awareness after the University's original proposals were thrown out by the dons by a majority of four to one.
Nonetheless the implications of the revised proposals are equally worrying:
"Racism, it said, “is an ideology and a set of practices based on ideas of inherited white 'racial' superiority that normalises control, domination and exclusion over people of colour, while legitimating privilege and oppression”.
This included “beliefs, feelings, attitudes, utterances, assumptions and actions” which promote “a system that offers dominant groups opportunities to thrive while contributing towards the marginalisation of minority groups.”
The Downing document instructed students how to identify “micro-aggressions”. The phrase “Where are you really from?” – friendly versions of which must be commonplace, especially during freshers’ week – was deemed particularly wicked.
It also told students that denouncing alleged racists anonymously would build up “a fine-grained archive” of supposedly bad people (who, of course, have no redress against their accusers because they can never know who they are)."
The implication, that white = racist was immediately denounced by those who thought they'd seen off the threat. Not to be outdone, Downing College immediately issued a new set of guidelines which now implies rather than explicitly states that racism is the preserve of white people.
"Why does it matter how one college, with only 400 undergraduates, behaves? Partly because the revised document might mistakenly be seen as respectable by others. It might become the model into which the explicitly anti-white words can be reinserted later. Also because of the changing state of the law."
The full article can be read here with a link to the original beneath:
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