Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West
My new book is out on September 15th.
My new book, Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West, is due September 15th.
I am doing a range of media on it at the moment and various talks, so please look out for those.
I’ve had some nice endorsements and reviews already:
‘Doug Stokes's book forensically dissects the ideas and practices concerning race, equality, identity and grievance, which are having such an explosive impact on our intellectual and cultural life. Whatever one's sentiments and sympathies, this is a concise and lucid guide to what lies behind the “culture war”.’
Robert Tombs, University of Cambridge
‘A highly insightful and persuasive contribution to the ongoing global debate about race, equality and decolonisation, going far beyond the walls of academia into wider institutions and the international world order.’
Munira Mirza, former head of the No. 10 Policy Unit and CEO of Civic Future
‘Doug Stokes’s incisive analysis of the threat posed by critical theory to wider society, particularly the universities, should stand at the top of every reading list about racism, gender and attempts to “decolonise” the curriculum.’
David Abulafia, University of Cambridge
‘Perhaps books like this one will encourage more academics to summon up the courage to resist the bullying and to challenge the new conformity. Not everyone will agree with them. But everyone who truly cares about truth will welcome the opening up of a debate which the universities have largely foreclosed.’
Jonathan Sumption, The Spectator
"Those critical of CRT, DEI policies and the “decolonisation” movement have been gaslit for a long-time. Stokes has just struck a match; the result may well be explosive." The Critic.
A small taster from the introduction:
With the shocking killing of George Floyd in America in 2020 and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), global awareness has been raised about the ongoing injustice of racism. In the U.S. alone, 14,000 protestors were arrested on BLM marches. President Joe Biden captured the sentiment well. He argued Floyd’s death had more of an impact than that of the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King. “Dr. King’s assassination did not have the worldwide impact that George Floyd’s death did”.[1] The legacy of racism and structural inequality for non-white minorities is now said to be one of the world's principal ethical challenges. The USA’s very political DNA has been denounced by its senior leaders. Americans must “acknowledge that we are an imperfect union – and have been since the beginning”, argued Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US Ambassador to the United Nations. The “original sin of slavery [has] weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles".[2]
Biden’s administration has instituted an ambitious ‘whole-government equity agenda’ to address inequality. On his first day in office, Biden signed the ‘Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities’ act, a “generational commitment that will require sustained leadership and partnership with all communities”. It is designed to tackle “the enormous human costs of systemic racism, persistent poverty, and other disparities”.[3] Vice-President Kamala Harris explained that U.S. citizens will all now ‘end up in the same place’ and thus ensure equal outcomes for everybody. Without this change and transformation, the West’s ethical trajectory will remain compromised and social justice will not be realised.
In response, many parts of American society are undergoing radical change, even those generally considered to be the most conservative. For example, the U.S. Navy’s new fealty pledge states that service personnel must “invest the time, attention and empathy required to analyse and evaluate Navy wide issues related to racism, sexism, ableism and other structural and interpersonal biases”.[4]
Drawing on academic theories, especially ‘critical race theory’, corporate America is also pursuing a new agenda of Equality, Diversity, Inclusion (EDI) to address what is said to be lingering forms of ‘white privilege’ and ‘whiteness’. In this pursuit, liberal forms of anti-racism, captured most notably by Martin Luther King’s insistence on the importance of character over colour, are being abandoned.
The new anti-racism openly advocates for the importance of identity over the individual and, increasingly, the collective guilt of white people. Yale’s Claudia Rankine explained that those in the West are “inside a culture that’s dedicated to whiteness and its dominance over other people because white people have been socialised to believe that they are superior, better-looking, smarter.”[5]
The rot is said to be so deep that Stanford’s Social Innovation Review argued that even the standards of professionalism are “defined by white supremacy culture—or the systemic, institutionalized centering of whiteness”. An alleged lack of diversity at the top of corporate America is taken as indicative of these trends of structural racism and ‘whiteness’. [6] Most American multinationals have now adopted these ideas. For example, the world’s largest asset manager is Blackrock, with US$10 trillion in assets under management in 2022 and now insists on diversity targets for the companies in which it holds shares.[7]
The global dominance of American culture means that the cultural effects of this new illiberal American ‘anti-racism’ has had a global impact. BLM protests occurred in 60 countries and every continent, even including Antarctica. As Greenfield argued, just “look at the way the Black Lives Matter movement spread … What took hold in the streets of Minneapolis made it to Monrovia, and Madrid, and London, and Sydney, and Berlin, and Cape Town, Stockholm, and Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo, and on, and on, and on”. These protests are necessary, she argued, as in “in today’s world” every society is racist.[8] As such, corporate America and the U.S. government is increasingly wedded to the global export of a worldview predicated around the centrality of identity, the ubiquity of racism and the morally compromised nature of Western civilisation.
The justified disgust at Floyd’s killing also helped energise a movement in the U.K. to address what was said to be a similar history of racial injustice and the legacy effects of discrimination. It was captured symbolically by the toppling of the Bristol-based statue of the slave trader Edward Colston.[9] The protests also targeted other prominent figures from British history said to be tarnished with the evil of racism including Winston Churchill, Oliver Cromwell and Horatio Nelson. Even a statue of the Indian independence leader, Mahatma Gandhi, was targeted and sprayed with the word ‘racist’. Demonstrators also attacked the Cenotaph in London, a memorial to the over a million British war dead, including those fighting Hitler’s genocidal racism.[10]
From the Archbishop of Canterbury’s declaration on the need to remove depictions of a white Jesus to investigations as to why the British countryside is racist, British institutions, like American ones, are undergoing a process of transformation in a desire to be more equitable and to create what are said to be genuinely ‘anti-racist’ institutions. The call to ‘decolonise’ British history and its institutions has become one the most important ways to acknowledge the alleged legacy effects of transatlantic slavery. Even King Charles argued that the history of transatlantic slavery should be given the same national level of importance as the Holocaust.[11]
How accurate is this characterisation of racism in the U.S. and the U.K.? …
[1] The Independent. ‘Biden Divides Opinion as Comments Comparing Deaths of MLK and George Floyd Resurface’, 18 January 2022.
[2] United States Mission to the United Nations. ‘Remarks by Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield at the 30th Annual Summit of the National Action Network’, 14 April 2021.
[3] The White House. ‘Advancing Equity and Racial Justice Through the Federal Government’. Accessed 22 August 2022. https://www.whitehouse.gov/equity/.
[4]Task Force One Navy, https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jan/26/2002570959/-1/-1/1/TASK%20FORCE%20ONE%20NAVY%20FINAL%20REPORT.PDF
[5] Benson, Dzifa. ‘Claudia Rankine: “We Are inside a Culture That’s Dedicated to Whiteness”’, 6 May 2022. https://www.ft.com/content/1353904c-affa-4bdc-9b0b-14bf5a7eb475; See also Brownlee, Dana. ‘Avoiding Terms Like “White Privilege” Is A Horrible Anti-Racism Strategy. Here’s Why’. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danabrownlee/2022/08/25/avoiding-terms-like-white-privilege-is-a-horrible-anti-racism-strategyheres-why/.
[6] ‘The Bias of “Professionalism” Standards (SSIR)’.. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_bias_of_professionalism_standards; See also Judy Blair. ‘White Supremacy Culture in a Pandemic’, 16 April 2020. https://judy-blair.com/2020/04/16/white-supremacy-culture-in-a-pandemic/; Angeles, Ben Hoyle, Los. ‘Focusing on the Correct Answer in Maths “Is Racist”’, sec. world. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/focusing-on-the-correct-answer-in-maths-is-racist-96gcztfs2.
[7] Kerber, Ross, Jessica DiNapoli, and Jessica DiNapoli. ‘BlackRock Adds Diversity Target for U.S. Boardrooms’. Reuters, 18 December 2021; See also Fortune. ‘Is Your CEO an Anti-Racist?’. https://fortune.com/2022/09/09/next-street-managing-partner-says-c-suite-needs-anti-racist-training-for-equity-commitments/.
[8] United States Mission to the United Nations. ‘Remarks by Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield at the 30th Annual Summit of the National Action Network’, 14 April 2021.
[9] BBC News. ‘Black Lives Matter Protests Held across England’, 20 June 2020; McDonald, Henry. ‘C of E Should Rethink Portrayal of Jesus as White, Welby Says’. The Guardian, 26 June 2020, Karim, Fariha. ‘Rural Britain Is Racist, Says Countryfile Presenter Ellie Harrison’, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rural-britain-is-racist-says-countryfile-presenter-ellie-harrison-wpk0lc7gn; on museums see Museums Association. ‘Decolonising-Museums - Campaigns’. https://www.museumsassociation.org/campaigns/decolonising-museums/; on the National Trust see National Trust. ‘Addressing Our Histories of Colonialism and Historic Slavery’. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/addressing-the-histories-of-slavery-and-colonialism-at-the-national-trust
[10] The Times of India. ‘35 Cops Injured in Further London Violence as Gandhi Statue Defaced’, 9 June 2020.
[11] Areo. ‘Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s “Against Decolonisation”’, 17 June 2022; Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi. Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously. Hurst Publishers, 2022.