I Feel Unsafe

[EDIT: Rethinking Education has issued an apology/addendum to their original statement, which I’ll cover at the bottom of my essay.]

The statement from Rethinking Ed 2023 was both weasely and to the point.

Unfortunately we have taken the difficult decision to ask Alka Sehgal Cuthbert not to attend the conference tomorrow

Why?

At short notice, we have been contacted by several people – a combination of speakers and delegates – who communicated very clearly that they would not feel safe to speak at or attend the conference alongside a representative of Don’t Divide Us. When someone tells you that they feel unsafe, you need to listen.

Oh, I see. This Cuthbert person must be quite scary for people to feel unsafe.

Huh.

Dr. Cuthbert is a former English Literature teacher who has made a name for herself as the founder and leader of Don’t Divide Us, an organization that believes in a “colour-blind meritocratic” approach to race issues in Britain. Here is their mission statement:

• We should treat everyone as an individual worthy of respect regardless of race, religion or the colour of their skin
• We call this colourblind anti-racism – it is based on freedom and tolerance – and we believe it is the best way to counter prejudice where it does exist
• Today’s so-called anti-racism sees group identity before it sees a person and risks reinforcing prejudice by dividing us into a world of victims and oppressors
• Britain is a successful multi-cultural society with a positive story to tell about race relations
• We won’t benefit from importing divisive political ideas from the US that don’t reflect our history and which undermine our shared values today

An anti-racist group that sees Britain as a successful multi-cultural society? Scary indeed!

Their advisory council is more than half non-white, and Cuthbert herself is of Indian heritage. Her political views are a bit quixotic: she was a supporter of Brexit and is a member of the right-wing populist party Reform UK, but she also supports immigrants of all races (not surprising given her own background). She wrote an essay for Areo opposing the anti-immigrant views of American expat writer Lionel Shriver. As a side note, it was a bit surprising for me to discover that liberal white lady Shriver, the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, is vocally against the wrong kind of immigrant.

The lineages of white Britons in their homeland commonly go back hundreds of years. Yet for the country’s original inhabitants to confront becoming a minority in the UK (perhaps in the 2060s) with any hint of mournfulness, much less consternation, is now racist and beyond the pale. I submit: that proscription is socially and even biologically unnatural.

Have to keep up those lineages, what what, cheerio?

In Areo, Cuthbert strongly disagreed with Shriver’s views.

As the daughter of immigrants, I congratulate British citizens for being as tolerant as my parents had hoped they would be.

Many brown-skinned immigrants, like my father, moved to Britain because they saw it as the home of liberal values

When Shriver distinguishes between immigrants who assimilate easily, and those who don’t, or says that, in the US, the mainly white Irish and Italians managed to assimilate easily to become “civilizational kindred people,” the implication is that they are more authentic than more recent non-white immigrants. This is wrong. It is not racist to discuss immigration, or to express concerns. But when she conflates biology, morals, culture and politics, and views demographic statistics (which are descriptions of a single feature of populations) as determining the course of society, she is being logically incoherent. Worse, she ends up reneging on the universalist values and Enlightenment cultural traditions she wishes to uphold.

Cuthbert is a fan of enlightenment culture, which she believes can be shared by anyone, no matter their skin color (or colour). She is an enemy of white supremacy. And yet she was dropped from a panel (where she would have been the only non-white member).

Why?

Cuthbert wrote for Spiked that “I’ve been cancelled for standing up to racial identity politics.”

I was due to speak in a debate tomorrow entitled ‘What is indoctrination within education and how can we avoid it?’. But because I actively campaign against racial indoctrination in schools, I was disinvited. (Ironically, I was also the only person of colour on the panel.)

It’s true that Cuthbert and her organization¹ oppose “woke” ideas—she’s written articles about “The danger of ‘decolonising’ education” and “Woke activism has no place in the classroom”—but so do many others, including myself (depending on how we define “woke”). She seems far more moderate (and liberal) than American anti-woke activists like Chris Rufo or James Lindsay.

Rethinking Education's defense of its actions was laughable.

As an organisation and as a conference organiser, Rethinking Education is not taking a stance for or against any particular viewpoint. We are prioritising the safety of our speakers and delegates.

Safety? The idea that 62-year-old Cuthbert could have been any threat is ridiculous. This is what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt called “safetyism” in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind. It’s fueled by the deeply unhealthy idea that words often cause harm and people must always be protected from harm.²

Kenan Malik (author of Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics) is correct, of course. This isn’t about safety; it’s about silencing views with which the unknown complainers disagreed. It’s an attempt to maintain a monoculture of thought within Britain’s educational establishment.

It’s ironic that the title of Cuthbert’s planned debate was “What is indoctrination within education and how can we avoid it?” given that the reaction of Rethinking Education was to cancel her session in order to maintain ideological indoctrination within education!

Rest easy, British educators. Yesterday, you could attend sessions on “Emoco: A cooperative, systems-level approach to embedding a culture of well-being in schools,” “‘I can’t learn when i don’t feel safe': The art and science of polyvagal theory,” and “The Global Citizens Programme: Metacognition, oracy and self-regulated learning in action,” without the risk of hearing any scary threatening words from Dr. Alka Sehgal Cuthbert.³

---

EDIT (added Sunday afternoon, Sept 24)

Under fire for their actions, on Sunday (today), Rethinking Education added an apology to their original statement canceling Dr. Cuthbert’s debate. (Moments after I hit “send” on the first version of my essay!)

After the first Rethinking Education conference in 2022, an otherwise positive review in SchoolsWeek noted that the "only thing that was missing was conflict”.

In organising the 2023 conference, we were keen to address this…

…We carried out due diligence and determined that we were happy with the speakers they proposed - including Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, a respected academic and author and the Director of Don't Divide Us…

…With very little time before the conference, we faced a difficult decision. Based on the information available to us at the time, we felt that we should respect the concerns of these speakers and delegates, and asked Dr Cuthbert to step down…

…We wish to make clear that we respect Dr Cuthbert and her deeply held beliefs and views, and we would be happy to invite her to be involved in any future events that we stage. The loss of her involvement at the event was a loss for Rethinking Education and the values of free speech and open debate that we hold so dear.

We apologise to Dr Cuthbert, her colleagues and supporters for any and all implications this decision has had. We hope that there is some understanding - if not agreement - about the difficult position we were put in at the eleventh hour of planning.

My reaction to this addendum/apology is mixed. On the one hand, the organizers sound sincere when they express their belief that free speech is a good thing. They praise Cuthbert’s qualifications and say they’d be happy to have her speak in the future. They apologize for any ill effects their decision had, which, while not quite the same as apologizing for the decision, is positive. These are all good things, especially so as their praise of Cuthbert will be ill-received in some quarters.

On the other hand, they don’t say how they’re going to balance supporting “open debate” with any future complaints. What if at the next conference, more people say that they feel unsafe in the presence of Dr. Cuthbert’s scary mien? Will their reaction be the same?

I hope that their initial response was one of well-meaning people panicking and that the embarrassment of canceling a speaker at their own conference will give them the backbone to say no to the crybullies the next time they show up. It’s too much to say that I am confident but I’m teetering on the edge of being cautiously hopeful.

1. “Organization” may be too strong a word. Although she has sizable advisory council, it appears from their website that Don’t Divide Us is a one-woman operation.

2. For the quibblers in the audience, in rare cases, words can cause harm, but unless we’re talking about the equivalent of a KKK leader loudly calling on his followers to burn churches and beat civil rights marchers, mere words should not be forbidden.

3. To be unfair, I picked a few of the odder titles. Some of the sessions sounded actually interesting. Or at least only mildly boring.