“This is for Syria, my Muslim brothers.” These were the words of Muhaydin Mire, the ‘terrorist’ who a few weeks ago wielded his Stanley knife at Leytonstone Tube Station, injuring but thankfully not killing three innocent Londoners.  This particular remark is what led police to categorise this violence as a ‘terrorist incident’, a description which, as far as I’m concerned, is not particularly helpful or accurate.

Now at first you might think I’m being slightly obtuse — of course it was terrorism, you’d say. There was a young man, of Somalian or Sudanese origin, speaking with an Arabic accent according to eyewitnesses, who set out to kill innocent people. What’s more, he was acting on behalf of what he himself described as his “Muslim Brothers” in Syria — better known as ISIS to you and me. His actions even seem to fit the dictionary definition of terrorism as ‘the unofficial or unauthorised use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims’.

So why am I being so stubborn? Why can’t I just accept that the Leytonstone attack was terrorism? You probably think I should just get off my lefty-liberal Corbynista terrorist-sympathising high horse and accept like everyone else that this is just a new form of terrorism that we must all recognise and fight. There is a reason why I won’t.

On Tuesday 10th November, a month before the Leytonstone incident, a Japanese national and octogenarian Yoshiyuki Shinohara chose to push an unsuspecting woman into an oncoming Tube Train at Piccadilly Circus. Luckily his victim survived the ordeal although Shinohara was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. But nobody labelled the incident as terrorism. There was no blanket media coverage where politicians, police chiefs and commentators asserted the need for ever greater vigilance and ever-more resources in the fight against terror, stoking already high levels of fear amongst the population. It was just another crime on the tube, like the other 2,255 violent crimes which occurred on the network last year. So what was it that made Leytonstone so different from Piccadilly Circus or for that matter any of these other violent crimes?

Very little, as far as I can see. Of course, Mire did shout “this is for Syria” and his aims probably were political. But who is to say Shinohara was not harbouring some political motive and what reason is there to assume Mire was any more mentally stable? What’s more, imagine if Shinohara had shouted “this is for Syria”. I very much doubt whether anybody would have labelled him a terrorist. People would have just said that he was a crazy old man whereas Mire on the other hand was a young Somali Muslim — far more likely to be a terrorist, surely?  It appears then that when we use the word terrorism to describe events we do so not just on the basis of the presence or absence of political motivation, but on our prejudices: racial and religious. It is for this reason I am uncomfortable applying the word terrorism to describe events at Leytonstone. Worse still, the way in which we define terrorism also affects how we respond to it.

No better example of this is Donald Trump’s call “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” in the wake of the California shootings.  This typifies the often dangerous reactions which can be elicited by declaring a form of violence to be terrorism, demonstrating the need for caution before doing so. To their credit, US security services did this, initially refusing to call the shootings terrorism. Only once the identities and backgrounds of the perpetrators – married couple Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik – had been discovered was the label applied, due to the knowledge that they had been radicalised in Saudi Arabian training camps. Now, I don’t deny for one minute that the California Shootings were terrorism. Neither do I dispute that it was correct to express this fact in the media. My concern is simply the ubiquity of ethnic and religious prejudice when defining and reacting to tragedies such as this.

Take Charleston, South Carolina, where on the 17th June this year white supremacist Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and murdered nine worshippers in cold blood. Very few people classified his actions as terrorism, despite the fact Roof was politically motivated in his violence, admitting his intention was to start a race war. He targeted people due to their identity, killing them because of his beliefs, like ISIS. The only reason I can see why people didn’t call him a terrorist was because of who he was, because he was white, because he was a Christian. None of these factors seem legitimate to me.

It seems then that we determine whether or not something is terrorism based on the race and religion of those who carry out the act. If this was of limited consequence then I might be more ambivalent but this simply isn’t the case. The fight against Islamic fundamentalists seems to permit us to step over an invisible line, to say things we would not normally think acceptable, to justify things we would not normally consider permissible: mass surveillance laws, drone strikes in civilian areas, Guantanamo Bay.

Now it could be argued that all this is perfectly fine, as long as it is only the terrorists on the receiving end. However, this is almost never the case, with those often simply sharing the same race or religion as them being caught in the crossfire. And thanks to our selective use of the word ‘terrorism’ it is mostly Muslims and those from the Middle East who become the victims of our response. After all, it’s not as though the Klu Klux Klan suddenly felt the full military force of Western Governments after Charleston with all whites and Christians suddenly becoming acceptable collateral damage. Nor did we see Theresa May calling for a ban on all Japanese nationals after events at Piccadilly Circus involving Mr Shinohara. 

So where do we draw the line? We start by using the word terrorism properly, ridding it of our racial and religious prejudices. We should stop using it to describe everyday crimes on the Tube and instead use it to describe events which fit the true meaning of the word, such as the murder of African-American churchgoers, motivated by the colour of the victims’ skin. Then maybe if we stopped using the word so excessively, and instead started to use it more selectively, our response to many tragedies could become a little less unjust.

Oxford, like the rest of this country, is a systemically racist space. This does not mean that it is a university of card carrying, white sheet wearing racists. I am not saying that the UK is some sort of bigot-majority state. I, for one, have great faith in the good intentions and lack of conscious racism among British people today, be they white or people of colour. All this means, as the University recognises openly and is committed to changing, is that BME background people at Oxford and in Britain suffer serious and often violent disadvantages in their engagement with our society, through a complex of subtle factors: structural, psychological, often unconscious.

Curriculums across the board show an alarming preference for the work of white thinkers when there is no other reason to select them. According to the most recent information available about minorities in higher-level academia, a comprehensive 2011 University and College Union survey, Oxford has one of the greatest hiring gaps for professors of different racial and ethnic backgrounds in the UK. While 13% of the British population is from a BME background, only 3.9% of Oxford’s professors are, compared to 6.4% at Cambridge, 9.1% at Kings College London and 8.1% at Oxford Brookes. The University’s figures from the three-year period finishing 2014 showed a 26% acceptance rate for white applicants against a 16% acceptance for BME applicants, though this last picture is of course clouded by variation in choice.

A few moments browsing government statistics show horrific discrepancies across the country in far too many fields – try poverty, healthcare provision, severity of judicial punishment (for identical crimes, that is), police treatment, access to social welfare, housing, mental health and suicide rates, even life expectancy. Racism is still, somehow, an issue, and the numbers are too dispiriting for Christmas time.

This is the context of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, a Great Britain and university where – despite the best, most laudable intentions in so many places – racism still prevails.

This does not mean that we must by necessity take the Rhodes statue down, however. The way we interact with the past is complex and treacherous: it would be unwise to leap to conclusions and lob him straight into the river, like a replay of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad – even though he was a similar murderer and despot. Oriel’s careful plan for a “structured six-month listening exercise” involving “students and staff of the College and the wider University, alumni, heritage bodies, Oxford City Council, residents of Oxford, and other members of the public” should be commended.

What is in no way praiseworthy, however, is any discussion of the issue that fails to engage with the voices of those who are actually affected by the issue: the individuals who undergo prejudice and systemic discrimination on a daily basis, who have these questions of racial prejudice, of the statue and celebratory plaque as very real parts of their lives. I wish it was, but the legacy of colonialism is not just some fascinating intellectual issue, three sides of A4 for Tuesday, but a direct and violent part of the lives of far too many students in Oxford. Any muting of these voices is toxic.

This is why much discussion of the issue has such pernicious effects. Writers in the national press have grossly represented the RMF movement as an “unhistorical” Futurist rush or wild Cultural Revolution-style book-burning erasure of history. It is, unfortunately for their website hit counts, substantially less sensational than either of these. It is little more than a reasoned call for conversation about Britain’s colonial past and present, and an objection to the unconsidered celebration of a hate-filled, deluded individual. Instead there are wild, paranoid accusations and a sort of witch hunt of imaginary bleeding-heart liberals, probably humanities students or vegetarians (horror!). The cause? A failure to even consider listening to the arguments and experiences of those involved in the movement.

A picture has been painted, moreover, of a powerful minority of student activists who are pressing all too successfully for censorship in universities across the country, and the Rhodes Must Fall campaign is seen as a symptom of this. There is a painful lack of faith to facts, here: RMF’s online petition currently has 2324 signees, a strange sort of “small minority”, as one group of academics described the campaign. The irony of accusing the movement of censorship is worse, however, and far more dangerous.

This movement was started as and remains a call for discourse. It represents the voices of people forced into a position of weakness in our society, who are still under-represented in British media and politics. It calls for curriculums that do not erase and censor a writer on account of the colour of their skin, and it gives sound to voices that history has stamped out until far too recently. Those who claim to stand for freedom of speech should examine Rhodes Must Fall carefully, and then examine the actions they have taken towards its voices. Who, are you certain, is silencing who?

Bisexuality occupies a strange position in society. It manages to be mainstream and visible (a whole quarter of the ‘LGBT’ acronym!) at the same time as being very difficult to label and pin down. Of all the letters in the extended LGBT+ alphabet soup, ‘B’ might be the most nebulous. Anyone looking at film, TV or celebrity news with the eyes of a desperate bisexual looking for representation, as I do more often than I’d like, can tell that there’s an awful lot more bisexual behaviour around than there are people using the actual word. So while attraction to multiple genders is getting more visible, but not discussed using the right vocabulary, it seems to be the specific word ‘bisexual’ that seems to be a dirty word.

After a lot of wondering why that might be, I think it comes down to the very simple matter of a lot of people just not knowing what the word means.

We should probably begin with the important but more difficult than you’d think matter of defining bisexuality. The idea that it means attraction to men and women is now generally thought of as out-dated in a climate of growing awareness of non-binary gender identities. Though it is often pointed out that ‘bi’ means ‘two’, the definition that makes the least people angry seems to be attraction to people of your gender and people of other genders, keeping the ‘two’ that is so important to amateur etymologists and recognising the experience of many bisexual people who are capable of attraction to more than the binary genders.

Given the enormous amount of debate it’s taken for people to struggle to that definition, it’s likely that there will never be one that makes everyone happy. The one we’ve got seems to be mostly true and not to inspire great crossness, but it does make bisexuality and pansexuality very difficult to distinguish. With such similar definitions, it mainly seems to come down to personal preference for what people want to identify as. Some people say there’s a difference between pansexual total disregard for gender as a part of attraction, and bisexual attraction to all genders while recognising the distinctions between them. This difference works for me, and is the reason I go with bi instead of pan, but there are members of both communities who reject these definitions and sometimes go as far as to put them the other way round. But since no one really understands this and space is limited, let’s move on.

Bisexual erasure is all over the place in storytelling. Look at Orange is the New Black. Despite Piper’s insistence in episode one that sexuality ought to be measured on a Kinsey scale rather than thought of as black and white, and then going on to show attraction to more than one gender, watching the show crawl agonisingly towards an awareness of its protagonist’s apparent sexuality is like pulling teeth. In three seasons, the show has never yet managed to use the word ‘bisexual’. A dirty word indeed. Equally, the gay community’s (particularly the gay male community’s) adoration of Brokeback Mountain is very quick to acknowledge the validity of Jack and Ennis’ same-gender relationship, but not either of their different-gender relationships. With both fictional and real people, the public is quick to leap dramatically from gay to straight and back again without considering the b-word in the middle.

As with Jack and Ennis, so with real life. People’s assumptions about multiple gender attracted fictional characters illustrate a lot about people’s misconceptions about bisexuality in the real world. One of the most widely spread myths is that all bisexuals eventually ‘pick a side’ when they end up with someone of whatever gender. How many shows have we all seen where the kooky girl has a relationship with a woman as part of a grand will-they-won’t-they romance with a man, only to have her same-sex relationship completely ignored by the writers, the characters and the audience after she gets together with her one true love? I know I’ve seen enough.

This all feeds into the cultural assumption that bisexuality doesn’t really exist, that multiple gender attracted people always end up settling into heterosexuality or homosexuality. I’ve seen a lot of this first hand, as a bisexual woman currently dating a man, with my only other long term relationship having been with a woman. Am I secretly straight? Gay? Dreadfully confused? I’ve been accused of having every sexuality under the sun in the year or so since I came out as bisexual. There are a lot of pervasive cultural ideas about bisexuals, particularly bisexual women (from what I’ve seen, there’s fewer specific stereotypes about bisexual men who, for better or worse, are totally brushed under the carpet rather than just being gossiped about). Bisexual women are just slutty, just doing it to impress boys, just trying to look interesting – and if I ever have another discussion with a random bloke in a pub about whether I’m more likely to cheat on my boyfriend (I’m not) or be up for threesomes (not for you to hear about even if I am, random pub man), then I could well end up hurting somebody.

The ultimate answer to whether ‘bisexual’ is a dirty word, then, comes down to people not understanding it, the word or the concept. Nobody wants to use a word they don’t really understand, particularly when it describes a concept that might not even exist. For bisexuals, that means an awful lot of defining things to people, repeating the same definition over and over again, hoping against hope that people will get the hang of it. It’s difficult and it’s bang-your-head-against-the-wall frustrating, but maybe cultural climates surrounding sexual identity are starting to change, and you can tell yourself that every question you answer is you helping society move on a little bit. Whether you believe that or not is up to you.

Rhodes Must Fall Oxford has released an exclusive statement to Cherwell regarding Oriel College’s major new declaration of its intentions for the controversial statue of Cecil Rhodes, and the treatment of BME (black and minority ethnic) students in the college.

“We’re happy to see that Oriel College has started moving in the right direction by announcing their intention to take down the Rhodes plaque on King Edwards Street. At the same time, their decision to maintain the statue but open a 6-month ‘listening period’ seems disingenuous, given that we have invited them to engage us in an open, transparent, and accountable way – and they refused.  (Brian Kwoba)

As indicated in the name of our movement, Rhodes Must Fall Oxford has demanded that the statue of Cecil Rhodes should be removed. Commitment to a listening exercise is not the same as commitment to taking the statue down. Our movement is concerned with symbolism as well as other aspects of decolonization, such as curriculum and representation. The action plans that Oriel College has committed to are a starting point in dealing with the process of decolonization, but they are not sufficient.

Oriel College has acknowledged the petition which has finally lead to a public declaration that Rhodes was a colonialist whose values are ‘unacceptable’, a label they resisted using in their previous statements. The college taking a firm stance against Rhodes means we can begin to deal with the legacy of colonialism which continues at Oxford in the form of institutional racism. Oriel College has said that addressing the experiences of BME students is important to the success of the university; hopefully they also see the way that these issues are directly linked to Britain’s colonial history and continuous role in global affairs. Additionally, Oriel College’s mention of fundraising as a core aspect of addressing Rhodes’ legacy means that they understand questions of finance to be central to decolonization. (Tadiwa Madenga)

In the short term, we want to contest and expose those features of Oriel’s statement which fall short of our demands, including their refusal to take down the statue of a colonialist who masterminded the dispossession, murder, and terrorization of countless southern Africans and imposed a regime of labour exploitation for the benefit of mining companies. These companies, such as Lonmin, still extract precious minerals and wealth from the Black African descendants of Rhodes’ victims to this day. In the long term, we aim to continue pushing for the other aims of our movement: decolonization of the Eurocentric and white supremacist academic curriculum at Oxford, as well as transforming the demographic representation at the university to reflect a larger proportion of BME staff and students. (Brian Kwoba)”

A response to this statement from Simran Uppal, Cherwell Comment Editor, can be found here.