Free Speech Union Lodges Complaint With Downing College About New Snitching Portal
The Free Speech Union has written to Downing College, Cambridge about its new ‘Report Racism Guidance‘, which reproduces many of the legally questionable aspects of the university-wide ‘Report + Support’ policy that was abandoned by the Vice-Chancellor last May after the FSU complained to him about it. The Telegraph‘s Camilla Turner has more about this latest manifestation of Critical Race Theory.
A Cambridge college is encouraging students to report dons for “micro-aggressions”, despite the university’s Vice-Chancellor saying this was a “mistake”.
Downing College has been accused of promoting “highly contestable” and “pernicious” ideas in its new guidance on how to report racism.
The college, which was founded in 1800, counts the actor John Cleese and the illustrator Quentin Blake among its alumni.
Dons fear the guidance will lead to a “culture of fear” within the college, which is “antithetical to free speech”.
The guidance defines racism as “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”.
It goes on to say that: “One of the ways in which racism is perpetuated as a system of oppression is through everyday manifestations and micro-aggressions.
“Micro-aggressions are everyday acts that serve to subjugate people of colour in more or less covert ways.”
The document cites the question: “Where are you really from?” as an example of a “micro-aggression”, saying there are many other instances where “apparently building inclusivity” only serves to “reinforce racialised differences”.
But dons have pointed out that this definition of racism is itself racist, because it implies that it is impossible for anyone who is white – including Jewish, Polish and Irish people, for example – to be a victim of racism.
“The main concern is the definition of racism and the inclusion of micro-aggressions,” one Cambridge academic told the Telegraph.
“These are highly contestable, pernicious ideas about racism and they will generate a horrendous culture of fear within the college.”
I am quoted further down in the piece:
Toby Young, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, has written to Alan Bookbinder, master of Downing College, to raise concerns about their policy.
He said that considering the similarities with the university-wide policy, which was published in May and then swiftly removed, “I can only assume there was some governance failure within Downing College that allowed this guidance to slip through”.
His letter said: “We were disappointed to find that Downing’s new guidance – in what it asserts and promotes – appears to be a thinly-veiled attempt to reintroduce the same potentially unlawful policy through the back door.”
Worth reading in full.
You can read the FSU’s letter to Alan Bookbinder, the Master of Downing, here, and join the campaigning organisation here.
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Free Speech = saying anything you wish unless it breaks the LAW! Simples.
We are/were supposed to be a common law nation, no harm no fowl.
Indeed. It is instructive to explore the extent to which people really understand this. In my experience, hardly any do. I’m not talking about the barmy ones, but just average folks selected at random with varying attitudes and political positions, people who in general don’t have extreme views, will usually say there have to be some limits on speech, because it’s not nice to say really horrible things, but are then stumped when you ask them who will decide what is and is not “horrible”.
*foul, a dyslexic moment.
Like our “unwritten constitution”, common law now means nothing more than a very selectively applied, wafer thin veneer of propriety over the diktats of the ruling junta. We have to let go of that comforting fiction, and face reality as it is, or else end up standing-under an Admiralty Dock howling that we are not ships, as Freementals on the Land are wont to do.
Hope there are no Irish students at this college called Mick.
All this sort of behaviour has been planned and introduced into our universities etc to destroy our societies.
Anybody wanting to find out its roots needs to look into the beginnings and teachings of the Frankfurt School and their useful idiots. This is where the likes of critical race theory grew from, after all it was the Frankfurt School who first introduced Critical Theory.
To them, happiness is bad, misery is good..
To be fair, we have a pretty atrocious history, but it’s exactly that, history. Just as no African American was given a choice on their skin colour, I had no choice to be born white with a British heritage.
The Irony is it’s the same old culprits, middle-class liberals that have the most to repent over, they’re the ones who inherited privilege, wealth & opportunity from past egregious acts, you don’t see them stopping the first ethnic minority in the street & handing them the keys to their urban 4 bed detached house or their bank account number & sort code to compensate!
I really don’t care about lumps of stone with melted bronze fixed to them, but my skin colour, sex or class has NEVER brought me any privilege, & don’t tell me about lived experience when I was a kid, I didn’t know if I would eat the next day, my childhood was miserable with no small thanks to school bullying because of our poverty!
“To be fair, we have a pretty atrocious history“
Judged by some pie in the sky theoretical standard perhaps.
By the actual standards of actual human societies through history the British record is actually one genuinely to be admired and to be proud of, on most counts.Did our ancestors do bad things? For sure, human history is a trail of tears, but mostly to people of societies that would have done far worse to us if they had had the opportunity, and our ancestors brought benefits to the world that few societies can claim to match, pound for pound.
Yes, and the parasite class and their political fixers have always lived off the backs of those who really made things happen, and are still doing it today. Without them the world would undoubtedly be a better place for us all..
They hold us back because they’re desperate to cling on to their wealth and power..
Maybe so, but that’s another universal of human nature and human societies, as far as I can see. When one set gets overthrown they are replaced by a new lot pretty quickly.
What class did William Wilberforce belong to?
Hmm No! Our history is littered with atrocities in the name of empire, you can be proud of them if you like, but i’m not going to live in denial, so don’t include me in that.
I would be far happier living a simpler life like first nation Americans or African bush people. So no, i’m not particularly fond or proud of my countries past or present, like skin pigment, you don’t get to choose where you’re born.
That said other less industrially developed nations were just as violent & carried out their own atrocities, there are no innocents in competition just winners & losers.
The reason I don’t apologize for the past is because I wasn’t there & it’s not my duty to apologize for anyone else’s conduct. You can do as you like!
“I would be far happier living a simpler life like first nation Americans or African bush people. “ “First nation Americans” like the Commanches, infamous amongst their neighbours for the brutal aggression of their raiding and the tortures inflicted on their prisoners? Pre-European conquest America was not a land of hippy peace and love. It was a place, like everywhere held by human societies, where those who could not defend their lands were attacked by others and replaced as the owners. Exceptions were temporary. Indian tribes that held lands there had certainly, with perhaps a few exceptions, at some point taken them from others by force or been themselves taken over by force. Same certainly goes for Africa. “That said other less industrially developed nations were just as violent & carried out their own atrocities, there are no innocents in competition just winners & losers.” The point is to judge past societies – including that of our ancestors – by the standards of the times and the contexts in which they existed. Not by some unattainable (for them) modern ideals. Societies lived in a brutal, lawless world, in which the powerful did as they could and the weak suffered what they… Read more »
Not to mention the African tyrants who sold their own people as slaves.
Go read about Dahomey, for starters.
You can trade atrocities all you like, people do nasty shit to each other always have always will!
They didn’t/don’t do it out of need just greed, it has nothing to do with a simpler lifestyle.
Technology enables that atrocious conduct as much as it improves quality of life.
We can agree on all that. The important take home from it is that past soceties, like the people of the past as individuals, are not to be judged by modern or by impossible theoretical standards, but by the standards of the time and place they existed. And as I noted, when judged in that way, Britain historically comes out extremely well. Not pure as the driven snow, obviously. Not without the crimes and atrocities that go with human power as darkness goes with nightfall. But all told, pretty admirable. Claiming Britain’s history (or that of the US, for that matter) is something to be ashamed of is as bad as claiming it’s a story of unblemished nobility and virtue. But an excess of the former is more often the problem we face atm, not of the latter. “They didn’t/don’t do it out of need just greed, it has nothing to do with a simpler lifestyle.“ Simpler does not mean nicer. When I was young it was the fashion amongst hippies and those on that side generally to fantasise about the noble savage – a nonsense going back a couple of centuries, and to believe that war and the atrocities… Read more »
Two excellent reads, imo, on this broad and important topic (though I’m not necessarily endorsing Gat’s wider thesis):
War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage
by Lawrence H. Keeley
War in Human Civilization
by Azar Gat
“I would be far happier living a simpler life like first nation Americans or African bush people.”
Have you tried Wales?
”A simpler life….” like the people you mention. ”Nasty, brutish and short” then?
Imbeciles.
Only white people are racist (the whole lot of us – we can’t help it you know).
Gets just a teensy-weensy bit fucking annoying, this tsunami of shite nowadays.
Oh, by the way, I didn’t go to university (or even take any exams before leaving school), but surely this:
“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”.
should read:
“…. that normalises control, domination and exclusion of people of colour, while legitimating privilege and oppression”.
And why not make do with the word legitimising, rather than getting all poncey with legitimating? Ffs!
But, it’s all just gobbledegook.
During the 1950s people thought the 2020s would be full of flying cars and holidays on Mars. Instead, we have apparatchiks reporting “micro-aggressions” to the British version of the KGB, polling showing citizens terrified of expressing their political views in public, and overt racial discrimination against white people in employment law.
This is what happens when government bureaucracy gets too big.
Anyone can make a list of the snitches in their area, and deal with them in an appropriate way.
So, I want to be clear on micro-aggressions. Are there 1,000 micro-agressions in one aggression, or are there 1,000,000 micro-aggressions in one aggression? How does one convert an Imperial micro-aggression to metric? 🤣
Metric or ‘imperial‘?
It’s because the milli-aggressions were found to be overwhelming for woke leftist, causing serious distress. A smaller division was needed.
Can I measure them with my micrometer?
All white students should do the best they can to flood the system with complaints of micro-aggressions performed against them by woke faculty staff. They might expose the racism inherent in the system, which dismisses white students.
Downing was founded after a sleazy legal wrangle that lasted for decades. apItms got a reputation to live up to.
Seems a way of collating government’s collaborators for future reference when time comes for a ‘reckoning’.
Can’t yet see how but still trust truth and justice to eventually win; their opposites initially seem to win but that’s only ever short-term.
Think there’s a vast difference between a one-off ‘drip’ and persistent continuous dripping over a long period of time.
Some seem to reckon drips delivered OK but a drip received not OK. It would help resolve issue if they decided which way it is
Has Downing college forgotten that the biggest conflict in recent history, WW2, had nothing to do with colour. People of all colours fought on both sides. That battle and the current battles are over ideas, not colours. Even apartheid was a battle of an idea, that any one skin colour was superior to another, regardless of direction. Even the slave trade globally had and still has different manifestations and isn’t about colour.
Prediction: the vast majority of sensible people of all creeds and colours will ignore this.
However, a couple of grifting thugs with an eye to a political career will do nothing but make pernicious, malicious complaints, including and especially against anyone crying foul on their abuse of this process.
There will also be some “politically black” people, i.e. Talcum X / Elizabeth Warren types who figure that it’s a smart move to join the winning side and self identify as an ethnicity holding the whip hand.
And that’s the core irony: White people are now identify as anything-but-white in order to gain power and privilege, despite and because of policies like this which decry White supremacy.
”The capacity for being insulted is in inverse ratio to intelligence.”