Life is simple when you’re racist. Explaining why Indians work in retail, black people are footballers and Jewish people are financiers is as easy as saying “it’s in their blood”. Serious sociological, statistical and economic analysis is a foreign concept in such a life. In fact, public policy is no more difficult. Just lock up black people, kick the immigrants out, keep an eye on the Jews and close the Mosques to solve the nation’s problems.
Crude racism is perfect evidence of why “anti-racists” need to be more vigilant than ever about analytical standards. How do you respond to someone who sincerely believes that black people should pay white people reparations because they ended slavery? Dogmatic beliefs and self-referential sloppiness make such a task impossible and now, more than ever, we need to be sensible about standards.
Working in education has (and this will sound pompous) shown me the importance of academic rigour. It’s absolutely infuriating to listen to a student talk through an incredibly detailed, step-by-step analysis of their political position perfectly and then, at the most inopportune moment, ruin everything with some nonsensical slogan they saw online. A highly dramatised version of such a monologue goes like this:
“It’s so interesting how we’ve rejected the principle of benevolent paternalism in areas as disparate as home life, the colonies and the policing of sexuality since the Second World War. We’ve started seeing all arbitrary forms of power as negatives, such as the rule of man over woman, white over black, or heterosexuality over homosexuality… I think it’s the Jews’ fault.”
In secondary education, the risks of this are multiplied. Students are old enough to deploy complex language from academics, but not mature enough to explore the exact meaning, relevance and necessary critical objections. Hence, even a rigid academic concept risks being abused by teenagers. It is therefore imperative to dot our I’s and cross our T’s when we do and engage with academic work.
Since academic standards and DEI have hit the spotlight again, I think it’s necessary to quickly assess the implications this discussion has for all levels of education. Starting in the 1990’s, the number of concepts that have become current in anti-racism circles has multiplied, increasing the risks of misuse and misrepresentation. “Whiteness”, “Blackness”, “systemic racism”, “unconscious bias”, “lived experience” and “white privilege” form a non-exhaustive list of words and ideas that have entered classrooms across the globe. In my view, we need to seriously evaluate them and separate the wheat from the chaff.
Many of these concepts have long, rich lineages that have undoubtedly contributed to our intellectual progress when effectively expressed. Particularly, I think “whiteness” and “blackness” can be useful concepts. While a full explanation eludes me here, these concepts long predate the civil rights act. However, it is terribly important to understand them as part and parcel of the historical picture, not as a tantalising, absolute whole. When done correctly, really important questions can be answered, such as why Irish people have not always been considered “white”, why slavery at some times and places had no racial character, or why racial discrimination sometimes takes the form of slavery, other times segregation and occasionally extermination.
Other concepts need to be discarded or replaced entirely, at least, at the level of secondary education. Falling into this category for me are “white privilege” and, to an extent, “lived experience”. White privilege is too mystical a concept to enhance students’ understanding of the social world. It exists when and where it conveniently needs to and only to explain what there’s otherwise no material basis for claiming. As explained by EBSCO “[W]hite privilege refers to the inherent advantages that White individuals experience in society, often without recognizing these benefits.”[1] Additionally, it claims that white people’s failure to recognise their privilege is a core mechanism for the reproduction of racism.
I take issue with this characterisation of racism because it’s inevitably vague. White people possess an “inherent” advantage, but any attempt to actually sequence the origin of that advantage would render the concept irrelevant. Let me demonstrate this by way of example. Imagine two people who, ceteris paribus, were black and white. The white person maintains a socioeconomic advantage over the black person. Why is this? White privilege does not actually answer the question, but simply slaps a label on the discrepancy, preventing any further inquiry. In reality, we might find some basis for such an inequality. The white person, for example, may have had social connections and cultural capital based on his ancestry that the black person lacked. If this were the mechanism for his advantage, then it ceases to be “white privilege” generally conceived and becomes a concrete explanation with no need for the idea of white privilege.
“Lived experience” is also an awkward, though over-hated idea. Detractors’ favourite quip is that it’s redundant since the “lived” is implied by “experience” and vice versa, although this is quite silly since people can experience things through media that their life is necessarily removed from. Nevertheless, I find this concept problematic too. I believe it finds its roots in “racial solipsism”, the notion that the black experience is fundamentally unknowable to white people.[2] Reproduced in education, it leads us to avoid traditional analysis of black peoples’ autobiographical data. If, in a sociological survey for instance, black participants routinely identify discrimination as a problem they face while white participants do not, racial solipsism suggests that we cannot do any further interpretation and have to take them at their word, since white people can never see things the way black people do and must content themselves with merely listening.
Complementing the reassessment of some ideas, other concepts need to be re-introduced, even if they imperfectly align with modern interpretations. Academia abandoned the notion of “race relations” because it implied an absolute, transhistorical notion of race. However, the cyclical and recurring nature of racial controversies is a call to return to the idea. Jason Arday’s unfortunate case led to fundamental realignments of how minorities view their status and relation to the rest of Britain and vice versa. The Henry Novak case did the same a few months previous. While legitimate concerns have been raised about the idea of “race relations”, its absence has unquestionably been a net negative on public and secondary education, even if the decision to discard it in academic circles was justified.
The final matter we must deal with is why a robust “black studies” programme, pursued chiefly in higher learning institutes, would resolve and strengthen education rather than weaken it. To do this, I draw on the work of Eugene Genovese.[3] An historian of the Old South, Genovese is conservative, but was an ardent defender of the notion of “black studies” (and not for segregationist reasons!). In my opinion, this makes his insight especially useful since his eccentric point of view was evidently informed by his academic work and mental faculties rather than blind commitment to a political stance.
Black academics increasing in number, whether or not it’s produced by DEI, is not enough on its own. Carter Woodson, a black educational historian and civil rights activist expressed the problem almost a hundred years ago:
“They [educated black people] hope to make the Negro conform quickly to the standard of the whites and thus remove the pretext for the barriers between the races. They do not realize, however, that even if the Negroes do successfully imitate the whites, nothing new has thereby been accomplished. You simply have a larger number of persons doing what others have been doing. The unusual gifts of the race have not thereby been developed, and an unwilling world, therefore, continues to wonder what the Negro is good for.”
-The Miseducation of the Negro, (1933)[4]
It’s difficult to fully appreciate the relevance of Woodson’s remarks today, especially given the anachronistic language of “negro” and “unusual gifts of the race”, but I will try and express its significance. Simply increasing the number of black participants in academic circles may sound like an acceptable outcome, but it misses the bigger picture. Before the civil rights settlement, academia was an active participant in knowledge production that was antagonistic to the well-being of black people. Genovese notes that southern slaveholders had an exceptionally high level of education. Academia in the era of civil rights was therefore not only quantitatively lacking, but qualitatively too. Black people entering an otherwise unchanged academia leaves the matter of civil rights vulnerable.
One reason for this, as Woodson outlined, is that white racists can simply claim that black people are uncreatively piggybacking off white people and therefore undermine their academic achievements even in the absence of DEI. A robust civil rights settlement relies on the increase of black people in higher education combined with an ideological defence of equal rights and anti-racism. It was crucial for the new personnel of academia to pursue lines of inquiry that delegitimised racism and changed perspectives towards black history rather than simply change the guard. This is intuitive in Holocaust and Jewish studies, where “never again” and “it could happen here” are accepted as ideas necessary to the constitution of Jewish emancipation and equality.
Genovese, for his part, deals with several objections to Black studies. The first is one that Birmingham City University reiterated recently when they closed the first ever Black studies undergraduate programme in 2024.[5] Low enrolment has been a feature of Black studies not only in our day, but in Genovese’s in 1995 and indeed Woodson’s all those years ago. Genovese remarks that enrolment naturally fluctuates and, in any event, is a poor indicator of whether an academic discipline has substance. Remember, after all, that the enrolees are overwhelmingly A-Level students! Combine this with recent conservative attacks on the programme and it’s clear that low enrolment on its own does not prove the deficiency of the field.
Another objection is that sociology, economics and related disciplines already cover the matter appropriately. Few scholars would deny the valuable output of disciplines like American studies, Jewish studies, Chinese studies and area studies that are similarly organised across these disciplines. As Genovese points out, taking a non-national entity as your unit of analysis allows cross-discipline research. Studies of this sort are often useful avenues for testing and applying the insights of more traditional fields to unique case-studies and building a research agenda that gives a fresh pair of eyes to the work of other disciplines. Taking Genovese’s argument further than he did, Black studies could even be a buy-in for so many people who would have otherwise been terribly uninterested in these subjects.
We need not look at the social sciences to see this principle. Even in the “hard sciences”, similar interdisciplinary fields have emerged, such as Origin of Life research or the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. These fields build interdisciplinary networks to answer questions relevant to academia and human intuition. Just as Origin of Life research organises itself around the question of where life comes from, Black studies can organise itself around the disparities, past and present, of black and white people across the west.
Finally, there’s a tendency to accuse Black studies advocates of “disuniting the nation”, as Arthur Schlesinger noted, but other commentators such as Richard Dawkins, Thomas Sowell and Douglas Murray have rearticulated. According to this view, to pursue Black studies is to undermine the fact that we are all “American” or “British” and engage in racial demagoguery and political agenda-pushing. Such a perspective is ridiculous. Immediately, it supposes that “American” or “British” are somehow not political labels themselves. Beyond this, it ignores the fact that for much of history, black people were not seen as belonging to “the nation”. Even since the achievement of formal citizenship, they don’t for a moment wonder why so many black people have embarked on projects to extricate themselves from the nation (such as black separatist movements) or why so many black people take issue with nationalist symbols and slogans that white people view as innocuous, such as the St. James’ cross. Black studies need not be seen as engaging in “race-baiting”, but instead, as a rational recognition of the fact that black people have expressed their nationalist and non-nationalist identity in unique ways. In doing so, nationalism could be strengthened by exploring the relationship of national imagination to minority ethnic identity and disparities.
I’ll be the first to admit that “Black studies” as a programme of education would be exceptionally vulnerable to attacks from outside and inside. Racists would take it as evidence of black troublemaking while those within the discipline would no doubt use their insider status to direct its course towards corrupt, personally-motivated ends. Many of the errant conceptions and negative attitudes outlined above are evidence of these ills. I, like Genovese, do not believe in its value because it would be smooth sailing, but because shutting ourselves out from its benefits based on arbitrary reasons is dumb.
Jason Arday’s tragic demise and the circumstances leading up to it should not be taken as evidence that anything related to “black studies” is worthless. Valuable critiques of Arday’s work and others do exist no doubt, but we’ve mistaken there being problems with the research agenda for the much less defensible position that there can only be problems with the agenda. It is about time we correct this.
[1] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/political-science/white-privilege-invisible-advantages-and-apparent-disadvantages
[2] https://globeopinion.substack.com/p/history-academics-politics-leftism
[3] https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780826210012/Southern-Front-History-Politics-Cultural-0826210015/plp
[4] https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-mis-education-of-the-negro-carter-g-woodson/59fb03f5ee625b46?ean=9780143137467&affiliate=7256
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jun/04/birmingham-city-university-axe-black-studies-ma-kimberle-crenshaw
Thoughts About the Past 
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