Woke Mentalism or Conservative Culture War?
Across modern British campuses, dignity and respect are being squeezed. Follow me down the rabbit hole but please hold my gaze.
Many on the ‘woke’ liberal-left characterise those having the temerity to question PMC hegemony as ‘culture warriors’. The attack on ‘wokery’ is “a dog whistle. The language has been successfully co-opted – but as long as the underlying injustices remain, new words will emerge to describe them”. Conservatives are allegedly intent on stoking "divisions and promoting national populism” to hold together their electoral coalition. I am one too, obviously
One of the most important conceptual innovations for the Grievance Industrial Complex (GIC) is the theory of “microaggressions”. So armed, they can continue to monetise their social justice mission whilst consolidating their institutional hegemony across British institutions.
Is “wokery” really all a Tory fantasy? Nothing more than a weaponised culture war, caught in a landslide but with no purchase on reality?
Let us unpack the way in which microaggressions are being hunted down on the modern-day campus. You can decide if the handful of academics questioning these are culture warriors intent on conjuring imaginary demons, or if this is about defending precious values such as tolerance, equality, and basic human dignity.
The scale of the ‘problem’?
Racism and discrimination have no place in a liberal society, let alone on university campuses. Where found to exist, they should be robustly tackled. Fortunately, and as one would intuitively expect within the university system, instances of racism are vanishingly small.
I examined the EHRC data in last week’s substack, but even there it was concluded that:
What does the above tell us? British universities employ 670,000 staff and teach 2.3 million students annually. In a three-and-a-half-year period, where 9,200,000 students passed through the U.K.'s higher education institutions, 0.006% of students reported incidents of racial harassment to their universities. Of staff, just 0.05% made complaints.
The report's authors attribute this "under-reporting" to a lack of confidence for students and staff in their university's ability to address the problem. However, students in the EHRC's reports were asked how well they thought their university was tackling the issue of racial harassment, the results of which were overwhelmingly positive:
In sum, when ethnic minority students were asked how worried they were about being personally subjected to racial harassment at their place of study, 87 per cent responded from neutrality through to not at all worried, with the latter the largest group at 43 per cent of the total. In a total of almost four years, universities across the whole of the U.K. had dealt with on average one complaint of racial harassment a year, with only three per cent of those students who did report racial harassment feeling unhappy with how their universities had handled their complaints.
Given this, how does the GIC square their narrative of ubiquitous racism on UK campuses with the evidence and data?
Modern Mentalists
Mentalism is a performing stage art in which its practitioner demonstrates highly developed mental or intuitive abilities, often including telepathy, clairvoyance, and even mind control.
The great Max Maven, the ‘thief of thoughts’, is considered one of the greatest of all time. Here’s Max (love the hair by the way).
We have many Max Mavens on the modern university campus, backed by ever more powerful Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) bureaucrats. These modern Mavens can read minds, perform feats of clairvoyance and will even attempt to control behaviour lest forms of microaggressive ‘evil’ manifest in our unconcious souls.
What are microaggressions? The ‘theory’ of microaggressions took off with an influential 2007 paper by Derald Wing Sue. He argued that “microaggressions are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of colour”.
The theory is notoriously elastic and unscientific. For example, researchers solicited reports of academic microaggressions from African American graduate students in one example. The authors identified both withholding criticisms from supervisees and providing them with tough criticism as evidence of microaggressions. (A quantum microaggression perhaps?).
Despite this limitation, the past decade has witnessed the extension of the microaggression concept to other groups who historically have been the targets of prejudice and discrimination, including women; gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals; Asian Americans; Latinos; Muslim Americans and the obese.
As the clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Emory College, Scott O Lilienfeld has argued, all of these “extensions presume that the microaggression concept has already been validated and is well-established … despite the fact that, by any standard of psychological science, this concept does not pass scientific scrutiny”. His work is interesting and well worth a read. (If you’re really interested in this stuff, see this massive depository of papers on implicit bias, microaggressions and so on. See also this excellent book).
In short, microaggressions are a classic case of emotive reasoning: 'I feel that something was racist, and my feelings are evidence of that racism. Therefore, the act was racist.'
This highly subjective 'eye of the beholder' theory of personal slight is deeply problematic and disregards the essential question of the intent of an alleged perpetrator.
For example, Sue argued that the question 'Where were you born?' directed at Asian Americans was a microaggression. It reflects the assumption that recipients are 'different, less than, and could not possibly be, "real" Americans'. However, leaping to this inference without attempting to check one’s perceptions is based on a form of what cognitive-behavioural therapists call mind-reading: a form of clairvoyance that codes everyday interactions (sometimes bumbling and inept) in a paranoid and ideologically loaded, self-confirmative way.
Moreover, as we’ll see below, these theories have degraded campus cultures through illiberal forms of psychological policing such as unconscious bias to root out alleged 'microaggressions' in the minds of staff and students.
Cry Bullies and the culture of fear
An obvious problem is a clear capacity for activist staff and/or students to weaponize these amorphous forms of mind-reading. Fear is a very powerful emotion and can be used to keep others in check. To be smeared with the accusation of racism or other forms of discrimination is the modern-day equivalent of witch burning and can be used to generate wider forms of socio-political change: a strategy of “cry bullying”.
Compounding these trends is the growth of EDI bureaucracies that have grown in power and size across the University sector. These bureaucracies exist to police the implementation of the UK's 2010 Equality Act, and the Public Sector equality duty (PSED).
Data shows that the UK has seen a 58 per cent increase in diversity and inclusion roles since 2015, most of which are at the most senior level. Today, "UK organisations employ twice as many D&I professionals per 10,000 employees than any country in the world and have the second largest number of D&I professionals globally, behind the US". The PSED is the legal backbone of most of the ‘woke’ mission creep across British institutions and the fact that it has been left totally unreformed by the Tories is telling.
For a critical take on the Equality Act, especially its effect on freedom of speech, see my colleague Wanjiru Njoya below:
Hold on a minute though, surely I am exaggerating the effects of these on University campuses as part of a dastardly Tory strategy to stoke the ‘culture war’?
Remember, in my earlier piece, I showed that the theory of microaggressions forms the key empirical basis for the charge of ubiquitous racism in UK universities and thus the drive for ever more powerful EDI bureaucracies and the micro-management of campus cultures.
In the EHRC’s report, it gives the following as examples of racist microaggressions: the reluctance to share a lift with somebody, not getting an email, not being invited to lunch or a coffee break and the fact that the UK voted to leave the European Union which has allegedly "introduced a cold wind into universities that has reduced civility and increased harassment".
Indeed, the concept is so wide that the EHRC argued that an academic's body language and demeanour can be taken as evidence of a racial microaggression. When talking to non-white students, academics will allegedly "use certain phrases that they wouldn't use with your other Caucasian peers. There is a change in the attitude when they address you. And you can feel it".
Similarly, an Advance HE training package on microaggressions lists a series of bizarre examples. For example, if a white academic dare to question the integrity or "impact of institutional racism" on UK campuses it is because of their white guilt and "fear of a new order (black planet)". Similarly, allegedly not being served at a "bar/restaurant while others were served all around me" is another example of a microaggression.
Professor Binna Kandola OBE is one of the UK's key specialists on micro-aggressions and what he calls 'micro incivilities'. He is a partner of Pearn Kandola; one of the UK’s leading ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ consultancies that advises a panoply of leading UK corporates. His self-published book, Racism at Work: The Danger of Indifference has been endorsed by leading UK politicians such as former Health Conservative Secretary Matt Hancock: “I loved Binna’s book. It’s on my bedside table right now. Such wisdom and a great read.”
In his keynote address at Advance HE's annual BME Leadership in Higher Education Summit in 2019, Professor Binna shared his wisdom. Modern racism is very different to the older and more overt forms of racism. "It is subtle, oblique and indirect in its manifestation”. Worryingly “its impact on the people on the receiving end can be just as devastating, and sometimes more so". More insidiously, hardly a week goes by "without another story about racism on university campuses ". He asks, "what if the people joining in the chorus of outrage were racist themselves, but in more difficult to detect ways?".
What can professor Binna mean when he argues that subtle forms of racism are in fact more devastating than the organised racist violence of the fascist National Front and BNP in times now thankfully past?
Luckily, Professor Binna provides a useful list of telltale list of signs to spot the outraged anti-racists who are in fact, closet racists. These include not praising or criticising somebody, giving somebody late feedback or not "giving someone eye contact" when talking to them.
There you have it, folks—on today's campus, not looking somebody in the eye when having a conversation, taking the stairs instead of a lift, discussing Brexit or even the way you stand are all possible forms of covert racism.
The writing’s already on the wall. Responding to this pandemic of racist non-eye contact and white-supremacist body language, the lead organisation for British University leaders, Universities UK, states that universities now need to increase "staff and students' understanding of racism, racial harassment and microaggressions and white privilege, through training developed from an anti-racist perspective". This needs to move beyond psychological audits such as "unconscious bias training" to setting "targets for completion and carefully evaluate all training activities to ensure they have the desired effect".
Academics beware. Basic human interactions are now being policed and coded in highly authoritarian and illiberal ways. Whilst you may rely on civility and common sense to prevail, we are all now slowly boiling frogs.
Stay frosty!