Diversity course at University of Kent

[andyoldlabour]

The university of Kent is introducing a mandatory 4 hour diversity course for students where it will be concentrating on topics such as White Privilege, Microaggressions and Pronouns.
Apparently seconhand clothes could be seen as an example of "white privilege".
"The course, titled Expect Respect and seen by The Telegraph, includes a white privilege quiz where participants are asked to pick which of 13 options are societal benefits allegedly enjoyed by white people in the UK.
If the student ticks all 13, a gold star is awarded, and if not, a button appears directing them to retry.
Staff have also been emailed by faculty managers to consider adding trigger warnings to exam papers, and carry out “pronoun checks, make a note of them and use them correctly” when meeting new students, such as they/them or ze/zir."

www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/wearing-second-hand-clothes-an-example-of-white-privilege-students-told/ar-AAOSULh?ocid=mailsignout&li=AAnZ9Ug

[BaronMunchausen]

This is possibly someone's misdirection from their own economic privilege.

A similar course on class privilege would be unimaginably disruptive!

[GeorgiaMcGraw]

Secondhand clothes a sign of privilege? Good to know the identity polutics lovers are finally openly shitting on the working class. Poor? That's a privilege! Careful about waste? Privilege! The whole thing is awful. 4 hours of totalitarian shit. The Unis need gutting.

[BaronMunchausen]

"...carry out “pronoun checks, make a note of them and use them correctly” when meeting new students, such as they/them or ze/zir."

This would involve an unbearable cognitive load!

It would be hard enough to remember the names of hundreds of students, never mind pronouns for each one.

(Hard enough to remember the full range of pronouns themselves)

[WeAreGerbil]

How are second hand clothes white privilege? I had to wear second hand knickers when we were really poor, sure didn't feel like a privilege.

[HandsOffMyRights]

One more to strike off DS' university lists.

[scoopydoopy]

How is this happening? Where are all the rational people?!?

[GCAcademic]

Only the second day of term and I’ve already been told I’m using the wrong pronouns for someone obviously female. Apparently “they” are very marginalised (despite attending a super expensive boarding school).

[andyoldlabour]

I am going to show this to my DW tonight, she graduated with her Masters from there.
When did universities stop being academic centres of excellence and turn into centres of babbling wokeism?

[Helleofabore]

Secondhand clothes a sign of privilege?

WTF? The wearing of, or the divesting of clothes to someone else?

[Jaysmith71]

It's actually:

“I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.”

Which is an odd juxtaposition of two entirely different things.

Swearing is complex. There are many ways to swear. You can be a sniper, carefully choosing your target, a machine-gunner spraying in all directions, every other word, or you can look all innocent and without warning lob a hand-grenade into the conversation. Which of these tactics you employs depends a lot on your social class upbringing.

Richard Hoggart speaks about working-class swearing in The Uses of Literacy.

[YetAnotherSpartacus]

I wanna see the males given a male privilege quiz. I could even write it for them.

[Jaysmith71]

....And it's all the ususal "White Privilege" shit. The more than a little racist assumption that all white people are the same, all descend from slave-owners and beneficiaries of slavery and the triangular trade, and all have the same status in society in the eyes of people in power and authority.

No acknowledgement of class, wealth, education or any other social variable.

Fuck This Shit.

[Swantastic]

@Jaysmith71

....And it's all the ususal "White Privilege" shit. The more than a little racist assumption that all white people are the same, all descend from slave-owners and beneficiaries of slavery and the triangular trade, and all have the same status in society in the eyes of people in power and authority.

No acknowledgement of class, wealth, education or any other social variable.

Fuck This Shit.

Well said. I totally agree with you.

[Floisme]

To be fair, I do kind of get the second hand clothes as privilege thing. I buy a lot of clothes this way but I'm looking for snatty, high end pieces to pep up my wardrobe - it's effectively a hobby and I can see how that's a privileged position to be in.

[Jaysmith71]

There is a narrative that has black people's love of smart dress and 'bling' as a cultural reaction to having generations of ancestors kept in rags and unable to do anything about it. Dressing sharp is a statement of agency and autonomy. I get that.

What this 'white privilege' shit fails to grasp is that the working-class also have heritage, and we have our generational experience of being looked down on for the way we speak, dress and behave. We decline to wear the costume of our 'betters' as an act of defiance and contempt for them, their privilege and their shiny-shoes values constructed with the specific purpose of excluding us.

[MidsomerMurmurs]

@GCAcademic

Only the second day of term and I’ve already been told I’m using the wrong pronouns for someone obviously female. Apparently “they” are very marginalised (despite attending a super expensive boarding school).

Sorry to be pedantic, but I would stick to a third person singular verb agreement there. “They is very marginalised”. They can compel inaccurate pronouns but they can’t force you to mangle the syntax as well.

[Floisme]

Yes the people I know who would never buy second hand because it feels too close to the bone are white, working class.

[SoManyQuestionsHere]

Okay, so: I'm white! A white, professionally successful, functionally very upper-middle-class but from a very rural working class family woman, actually (and, yes, this all sort of matters):

Here's the thing about the diversity markers situation: SOME of this stuff is actually very valid. Such as, frivolous as it may seem, the "wearing 2nd hand and swearing" thing. You see, I don't sound rural working-class. That'll be because I won a scholarship to a naice school as a child and speak as though I could trace my family tree back to roughly around the 9th century. Which I most certainly can't. It's just that "oh, do fuck off, dear!" out of my mouth, spoken in clipped RP, comes across as a hard but surgical strike of a reprimand. This works neither for my British black working-class subordinate (taken as "uncultured") nor for my much more "cultured" (can actually trace his pedigree) but very German boss (taken as "2nd language speaker who hasn't quite grasped the nuances"). Same goes for dress codes, by the way: in the corporate world, you can turn up in basically anything, so long as you're the sort of person people will assume does it due to individuality or arrogance rather than not knowing any better. My "personal best" happens to be "yoga pants - for a contract negotiation". Underdressing is, genuinely, a way to posture and outwardly signal "power". If you are a person who already has significant power, that is! Nobody will invite you to a negotiation over millions without assuming you own plenty of suits - and you turning up looking casual is an effective way of saying "this is small-fry, I haven't even bothered to dress up for this" and hence: negotiating tactics.

Having said that, I generally tend to agree that it's all a bit silly - and I'm steadfastly refusing to do pronouns on the grounds that I happen to think it's all vapid virtue signalling. But, then again: privilege is real, I have it (except on sex) and that is precisely why I get away with it!

No harm in a little self-awareness here and there!

[PaleBlueMoonlight]

Analysing this stuff is interesting - at a class level. However, you can’t then apply it to individuals. Use it to plan, not to demonise.

[drwitch]

You should see the gender and sexual harrasment modules ....

[OperationDessertStorm]

Second hand clothes?! This just makes me think of jumble sales in damp church halls and charity shops full of racks of 3 seasons old Per Una. We were solidly white middle class and raised in hand me downs. Second hand clothes could equally be on someone with a vintage look or someone with environmental concerns or someone with money concerns or someone that just doesn’t care.

[Jaysmith71]

How could you possibly tell if someone's clothes were second-hand or just old?

Are we allowed to keep our favourite jumpers?

[Eyesofdisarray]

Load of old ⚾️🥎
Glinner is right. In the video posted on another thread, he referred to the stuff coming out of universities. A first class degree in wokeism

[toomanytrees]

Why is the University of Kent doing this? What problems are they attempting to solve? Is this some sort of marketing strategy? Aren't the students arriving at university already beaten into submission with this drivel during their school years? It might be more useful if the university put on HGV licence courses. This is cult like: students paying huge amounts to be berated and insulted.

[FannyCann]

I took DD1 to an open day at Kent (a few years ago, she graduated last year) one of the tutors I was talking to said "if she's got an offer from XX (highly rated uni) she should go there". Wasn't exactly selling it to us. She went to XX needless to say. (Not that they are much better on all this shit.)