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

I remember at DSs little school the plasters were hideous terracotta colour and stuck like flipping superglue.

The plasters of my childhood were a puce colour and stuck like superglue (which I don't think had been invented then). These days they are a more realistic colour I suppose but peel off if you look at them funny.

Give me the ones of my childhood any day.

Findus cheesy pancakes...

Kings size Bender & Chips with a Rum Baba and a Coke float at the Wimpy Bar.

@HandsOffMyRights

One more to strike off DS' university lists.

Is it not his choice which Universities to consider?

@AlfonsoTheDinosaur

Think of the poor sods who have to wear blue plasters so that they don't come off and end up in food or other inappropriate places.

Eh? I wear blue sticking plasters because I like the colour blue and the beige ones show dirt quickly. And it's good health and safety practice to wear brightly coloured plasters so that they can easily be spotted.

I agree that it is a very good idea to wear blue plasters when you want to spot them more easily. However, a previous poster had stated that your sticking plaster should match your skin tone as closely as possible.

I have never heard of humans with blue skin tone though, so I was just pointing out to the poster that there are people who must be very traumatised based on their plaster colour.

I have never come across a sticking plaster with freckles. Don't think my offspring would have appreciated that very much though; certainly not when we could have exciting and cheerful ones instead.

Poster is wrong anyway. Even just a quick google on amazon.

www.amazon.co.uk/Elastoplast-Sensitive-Hypoallergenic-Plasters-Breathable/dp/B08QX78HCR/ref=pd_lpo_2?psc=1&pd_rd_i=B08QX78HCR&tag=mumsnetforu03-21

www.amazon.co.uk/Fortuna-Plaster-Assorted-Toned-Plasters/dp/B00ENF075Q?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

@NewMutiny , your friend's experience sounds absolutely horrendous. Awful in any event, but imagine if you had children with you to witness this?

This regression to people engaging in racist chants and attacks is unbelievable and the viciousness directed the footballers was beyond belief.

Second hand clothes are not scruffy.

They’re as good as new.

All my daughter’s uniform is second hand from Hohn Lewis and M&S with some Next because first hand Primark looks and wears worse and costs more.

John not Hohn

@YetAnotherSpartacus

I don't actually like the food that matches my heritage.

Thank you!

(Though I do. All of them.)

However, a previous poster had stated that your sticking plaster should match your skin tone as closely as possible.

The previous poster is full of nonsense. There is no reason that a sticking plaster has to match your skin tone as closely as possible.

I have never heard of humans with blue skin tone though, so I was just pointing out to the poster that there are people who must be very traumatised based on their plaster colour.

Good grief. If people are "very traumatised" based on the colour of a sticking plaster they are in serious need of getting a grip.

[quote Cailleach1]@NewMutiny , your friend's experience sounds absolutely horrendous. Awful in any event, but imagine if you had children with you to witness this?

This regression to people engaging in racist chants and attacks is unbelievable and the viciousness directed the footballers was beyond belief.[/quote]
Yes thank you it was. She is such a lovely person too and was very reluctant to even feel angry about it. She just sort of accepted it as something that happens. Which is just so so awful.

St Andrews joining in with this:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dbb71c72-2223-11ec-8cb7-e60ba8dbca61?shareToken=855922f47dc5cbdc2c7138ca16e5def6

From that article:

"At St Andrews, the induction asks students to agree with statements including: “Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful start point in overcoming unconscious bias.” Those who tick “disagree” are marked incorrect and too many wrong answers mean they have failed the module and must retake it."

I think that I would be spending most of my uni time doing retakes.
How is it acceptable for an organisation to compel students to think in this way? This goes against all the tenets of free speech and freedom of thought. It is comparable to a fundamentalist religion.

Charity shop finds are trendy, I guess, and you have to be rich enough not to feel poor for doing it. If you are actually poor, the thinking goes, you'll buy bagfuls of cheap new tat from Primark and not dream of looking in a charity shop. That's all that makes sense to me.

It all starts to look and sound rather Maoist, cultural revolution, honestly. If the Woke could banish academics supporting free speech and students keen to think for themsleves to a state farm somewhere, I suspect they would.

Or if you read Shardlake, it's like people trying to keep ahead of Henry VIII's shifting thinking on what was doctrine and what heresy, so as to avoid being burnt at the stake.

“Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful start point in overcoming unconscious bias.”

Two problems: I was taught that academic language needs to be hesitant and qualified in its judgements. 'May be' or 'is often' a useful start...'

(and it's 'starting point,' a point where something starts. A start point is a point you gain for starting.)

Secondly, use of the second person implies this is all about me, that is 'your' guilt, not 'one's' guilt or better still, just say 'acknowledging personal guilt,' or better still, personal responsibility rather than the very judgemental 'guilt' trip.

Now call me old-fashioned and pre-POMO, but the ability to pick stuff apart critically like that is what a university education ought to be all about.

...Or I suppose I could just tick tick tick, all right, gold star, and then write "under duress" at the foot of the paper.

I think there are different issues here, and after being prepared to find the whole thing laughable and offensive I thought some of it actually wasn't. I mean the plasters thing, for example - yes, it's not serious, yes, you can work a little bit harder to find ones that do match your skin better, but the combined weight of that sort of thing is an issue. It's like the default male setting on so many other items, or women's clothes not having pockets, or whatever - no, it's not comparable to VAWG but it is unfair and it's a mental tax on our time and headspace that we shouldn't have to pay. And highlighting that to people who have never thought about it before isn't fatuous, it's potentially useful if done in the right way (with nuance and discussion).

OTOH "acknowledging our guilt" for some unspecified, unchosen, involuntary privilege - even, yes, if we benefit from it - makes me fucking furious. If feminism has taught me anything it's that I will not apologise for things that I didn't do. Why can't people see how crazy this is? If you have a family dynamic where one parent blatantly prefers one child, would you ask the preferred child to acknowledge its guilt to the other? No, of course you wouldn't, you'd try to heal the rifts by acknowledging what had happened and working on how to redress the imbalance. On a personal level it's obvious - why is it different on a political level? Vague "guilt" for nothing they have actually done makes people feel powerless and resentful. (For the avoidance of doubt I am not talking here about acknowledging specific things you have done, or addressing past behaviour which could have been better - those are definitely good things. I just fucking hate this pattern of righteousness and abasement.)

The last and most important issue, of course, is how on earth do you find square sausage skins?!

Ok, with the plasters, food, and hair dye - I always wonder, what is the endpoint someone is imagining.

If a family from a small, obscure group moves to another place, where their culture or appearance is unusual, what's the expectation for not "othering" them?

My city has recently had a small influx from a cultural group that is new here. They are very dark skinned compared to the black people that live here, they have somewhat different food traditions, they have a history that almost doesn't touch on the history of this place until now, they have a language that no one else here speaks.

While I suspect they may be able to have some foods become more available, they are not going to find that suddenly schools are focused on the history of the country they came from much less the ethnic group, they are not going to hear their language much, they may have to search around for appropriate plasters or order online and may find the school doesn't have a large selection, and they are very unlikely to find a store manager of the same ethnicity.

I really struggle with the idea that these in themselves represent failings of a culture. And what's the remedy - not to allow people to come here? To import store managers?

And who does it help to tell people that plasters are "othering" or that realizing that your background is different from others where you live should be something that you find oppressive because of things like plasters? If people won't give you a job due to your ethnicity, that's oppressive. Not just realizing your family history is different, that's a fact and plasters won't change it.

...Made from square pigs. Easier to stack them on shelves.

And it's Black History Month, and as someone who made a specialist study of British Imperialism and Decolonisation, back in the day, I am starting to worry about the sort of crude victim-narratives that are starting to gain currency in this country.

What bollocks about second hand clothes. I worked in a charity shop for a while, they haven’t got a clue what they are on about. Our customers were incredibly varied.

Also I think acknowledging your privilege and acknowledging your guilt for the actions of your ancestors are very different things. The first is a good step towards being an empathetic person, the second one leads to irritating videos on tic tok where some posturing teen “apologises” on behalf of dead people for woke points.

I'm more than happy to acknowledge my white privilege.

But some of this is utter bollocks. I grew up with Oxfam clothes because we were poor and was made to feel like shit for it by the rich kids and teachers at school. I'm ambivalent about the privilege of having attended a school full of rich kids. I'm sure my posh voice really does help but I also suffered for feeling utterly out of place and different.

We really don't talk enough about how working class people were treated in the not that distant past. Asylums, prisons for debt, orphanages if no father on the scene. These traumas leave scars that can be intergenerational.

I acknowledge no privilege.

Being treated not quite so shittily as someone else is not what I call a privilege.

Proper decent treatment by society is no privilege. It is everyone's right, regardless of background.

Privilege as a term has become overused and misused.

What was around intersectionality (also a term abused and misused) was not about this current accusatory thing. All white people are privileged. Etc.

It has ruined the original concepts and intentions of both intersectionality and privilege. Which were about recognising that there are many different things that are helpful, or less helpful when going through life. And that the ones we don't have we often don't really consider. It wasn't about angry accusations at whole groups of people for essentially being horrible bastards. And now naturally even the terms are enough to get the backs up of pretty much everyone who hears them.

Meanwhile the useful terms to think about social inequality have been rendered essentially useless. And still someone with the background education cash etc of Boris Johnson types, strangely, are very very much likely to do well in life in loads of different ways than eg a child of recent immigrants being raised in massive poverty, going to a struggling school in an area with loads of gang violence. Iyswim.

I mean the original thing was not to say that the Borises would ALWAYS find things easy, be wealthy successful etc. Nor that it's impossible for the girl to grow up to be very successful in all sorts of ways.

So the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. Because certain groups like nothing better than to appropriate any and all terms and arguments from other groups. And twist them in order to help ONLY themselves.

@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.

So... they're not saying that wearing 2nd hand clothing is a sign of privilege.