You Just are Racist if You Are White

The title is from an article in the Telegraph by a retired professor of Social Work Education at Dundee University called Jane Fenton. Professor Fenton served as a social worker in the criminal justice system before going into academia to teach the subject. She has plenty to say about what she believes have been destructive changes, and being white has been turned into a synonym for racism:

I have seen situations where social work has saved lives, but in recent years the profession has become captured by fundamentally political concepts that can rob social workers of their agency and, in some cases, put the population at large at risk.

In the past, social work seminars at university were lively places where students would discuss ideas and different approaches to problems. These are the crucial discussions that shape how the social workers of the future will do their jobs.

But around 2015, things changed – Gen Z began arriving on campus, having spent much of their childhood and adolescence on smartphones chasing ‘likes’, and in classrooms where ideas (initially developed in the US) about systemic racism, decolonisation, patriarchy and oppression had taken hold.

Now, if you walk into a social work classroom, you’ll often find silence. This is because many students are afraid to depart from the orthodoxy that has permeated both actual social work and the teaching of it: critical social justice theory.

Under this theory, which is seen by many as the only morally acceptable way to approach social work today, society is explained by the power differentials between the oppressed and the oppressor. It is often taught as an all-encompassing truth rather than what it is: a strongly contested way of seeing the world.

At its very core is the power-and-privilege hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy: straight white men. Everyone else is arranged underneath, depending on their identity, with significant moral status conferred on those who belong to groups in the ‘victimised’ category. If you are a black person, you are oppressed; if you are a woman, you are oppressed. If you are a disabled black woman, you are very oppressed. These are nice, simple calculations to make.

The other key element to the hierarchy is that it is perpetuated – consciously and unconsciously – by the oppressors. Robin DiAngelo, in her book White Fragility, suggests that white people are inescapably complicit in racism, even if they don’t think they are.

The result has been the redefining of terms:

Racism is no longer about treating someone differently or unfairly because of the colour of their skin; it is embedded in the very structures in society. Racism is no longer about your actions, you just are racist if you are white. The absorption of this belief easily explains why (particularly white) students fear questioning or debating issues of race.

In the terrible case of Valdo Calocane, who killed Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates in Nottingham in 2023, mental health professionals considered the over-representation of black men in detention when deciding whether to detain him following a violent incident in 2020. They will almost certainly have been taught this during their training as an example of ‘systemic racism’ or ‘unconscious bias’. Professionals in the Calocane case came to the decision not to lock him up. It is not a stretch to see how these notions might be influencing work on the ground – professionals do not want to be implicit in perpetuating oppression or racism.

Uncontested ideas about power and privilege, oppressed and oppressor, victimhood, trauma and harm have been extended across all disciplines to explain how society works. All this is resulting in a significant number of sub-standard professionals – and it is, shockingly, only going to get worse.

Only the other day, also in the Telegraph, Michael Deacon wrote about the Left’s most dangerous delusion:

On Friday, a 23 year-old woman from New York told a newspaper that she and a friend had been assaulted by a stranger on the subway in early April. Luckily, police were close by, and arrested the stranger. Yet the two friends chose not to cooperate with prosecutors. Why?

Well, in the words of the young woman: “Maybe a part of me was just like, ‘I don’t want to put another black man in jail.’”

She says she now regrets this decision “100%”, and feels “really bad”. Mainly because, mere weeks later, the very same man allegedly killed a 76 year-old retired teacher by hurling him down a flight of stairs. On Thursday he was charged with murder.

Jane Fenton’s piece in the Telegraph is worth reading in full.