Doreen Lawrence, a Baroness since October 2013, gave a speech at the Oxford Union on the 20th of May. Baroness Lawrence has spent over two decades campaigning for justice and police transparency in the wake of her son’s racially aggravated murder in 1993. Her efforts led to the eventual conviction of two of her son’s murderers, which marked a huge step forward in British race-relations, and also caused an internal reform of the police service. She now sits as a Labour peer in the House of Lords whilst promoting racial equality and maintaining the Stephen Lawrence Trust, which she founded in memory of her son.

Baroness Lawrence has previously admitted that she does not consider herself a natural speaker, and her speech is not that of a career politician – it is not created for effect or glory, but out of sheer necessity to see and perpetuate real change within our society. After her speech, I’m able to ask her a few questions about racism in the UK.

A topic that the Baroness mentioned in her speech was education. She believes that British students of colour are denied access to education about their history in the current curriculum. When asked whether she thinks this should be changed alongside the current governments other educational reforms, she responds, “It should be.” She answers firmly, before clarifying that she doesn’t believe these requirements are being met in Michael Gove’s plans.

“[It is] one of the things I’ve been campaigning about. After the enquiry, one of the things I wanted was about the history. When I challenged the fact that they hadn’t put that within [the reforms] and spoke to the schools minister, it was that [there’s] not enough people. You need more people to complain and say, ‘This is what we want.’ But I believe the government should make sure, because if you’re the government of a country, there [are] so many people within the society, and each of us needs to have some element of our background represented – currently that’s not there. The schools are not doing anything about it, so we’re looking to have an educational standard where we begin to challenge some of these things. To make sure that in schools, from primary going up, these things are taught.”

“There’s a way of introducing history. Because within primary school, many times, kids don’t think about whether, ‘That person’s black or white.’ They think about who their friends are. But by the time that they get to secondary school, that changes and they begin to develop that, ‘It’s them and us’ type stuff – and that shouldn’t happen. So we need to start very young, so that by the time they get to secondary school, it doesn’t become a problem, because I think sometimes, that’s where it stems from. So once you get to secondary school, the whole thing changes – and you’re not seeing your black friends as a friend – you’re seeing them as black first, rather than a friend first. We need to change that.”

I tell her that neither I, nor any of my friends who have been through the state school curriculum and who I have spoken to, were taught about British colonialism or our role in slavery. When asked whether she was surprised by this, she answered firmly “No – because I think Britain wants to deny their role in slavery.”

She continues by telling me of a discovery within her own family.
“I found out that even within my family, two have Scottish [history]. So you have somebody from the Scots who was a plantation owner, who would have raped one of their slaves.” She stops to explain that, “If you look in Jamaica there is this mixture of the skin colour, and I presume Jamaica’s not the only African-Caribbean country where slaves were raped – and none of those things were acknowledged.

“My grandmother’s name was Donaldson, which is a take on a slave name, which is part Scottish. So I would like to find out exactly where it is that my family originate from, that part of the family, and then to go back to Africa to see where that part starts from. I think we all need to know that, because if you look at the Chinese and even the Indians they can trace their ancestry back so far – I could never do that.”

I put it to the Baroness that it’s a possibility that without proper education, some people will be in danger of believing that we are living in a society where racism is a thing of the past.

“I think a lot of people believe that,” the Baroness acknowledges, “but then, if you’re people of colour, you don’t believe that. Because you face it on a daily basis, you don’t believe that. There are people in society that believe that racism is a thing of the past though. ‘Why do we need to talk about it? Why do we need to address it? Because we accept everybody – I’ve got a black friend.’ And I suppose they can say, ‘I’ve got a black neighbour.’ – as far as they’re concerned, that’s saying ‘I’m not racist’.”

Baroness Lawrence is adamant that we need to talk about race more – she feels as though there is a lack of open and frank discussion. However, she is at least optimistic about the mix of ethnicities of people who identify and speak out against racism.“When I think about what happened around Stephen’s case and I think about the enquiry and the letters I received from people, they’ll write to me and they felt that they’d need to mention, ‘I’m a white woman of 80 and I’m disgusted about what happened to your son.’ People do want to talk about it – and it’s not just within the black race that they want to talk about it. There’s so many people out there that want to see an equal society, but it’s very difficult to have. And I think the more people talk about it, whether you’re black or white or whatever, you just need to be able to talk openly about it.”

She recalls the support she has found through her campaign, telling of an event earlier in the day when she arrived in Oxford. “I’ve come from Paddington station. People were touching me on the arm and saying to me, ‘I think you’ve been doing great work and it’s really nice to see you,’ – and so it’s not just people of colour who are doing that – everybody who would meet me was saying that. And so people are out there who feel that they want to do more.”

I wonder though, if in a predominantly white House of Lords, she still feels the same support? “One of the Baronesses wanted to talk about young Caribbean boys’ exclusion rate in school, and unemployment. So I was asked whether I wanted to say something, which I did, but… Oral questions last about 30, 35 minutes, sometimes probably 40 minutes, so it’s not very long to have a discussion about issues like that. And people come up and say to me, I think we should look to put a debate together, so we can discuss it openly – and that’s not just black people, black Lords that are saying that – there are white Baronesses and Lords saying that we need to have a discussion.

“Also having me there brings more to their attention; that this is a discussion that they need to have and it doesn’t matter what side of the house they sit on. Everybody says to me, ‘I’m really pleased that you’re here, you will make a difference.’

“For me it’s a big thing – I want to make a difference, I want to be able to have a voice that speaks out. Not just to say that I’m speaking about people of colour but for everybody’s sake. At the end of the day, we live in a society. All of us are here, so there’s no point in me saying, ‘I only want to talk about black issues.’ We have to talk about everyone.”

YES

Tom Carter

Trinity! What a college. Enviable green lawns, beautiful buildings (for the most part) and (again for the most part) great people. What’s not to like? Indeed, from as early on as open days, we are peddled the myth that it doesn’t matter what college we get into, because as soon as we get there, we will love it and think that it is the best college, like, ever. In the scary world of big, bad Oxford, there is a lot to be said for colleges. They provide students with a much smaller and more manageable setting, enabling us to meet a whole range of peers from all academic disciplines and walks of life.

They give all students a support structure, both academic and pastoral, unlike students at other universities who sometimes feel stranded, and they give students a part of the university with which they can positively identify and belong. In short, they give students a home.

Sounds great, right? Not so fast. Much of what colleges supposedly achieve can be achieved without colleges and they are, in reality, a drawback of Oxford. Firstly, halls play very similar functions to colleges in the first years of many other universities. People make friends with people just as much because they live near them as because they are in the same college as them. This is borne out by the ridiculous extent to which staircase loyalty dominates colleges for at least the first part of the first year. Thus, the illusion that only colleges can help students make friends is patently untrue. Moreover, colleges could be seen as severely limiting your potential friendship group, as it is much harder to make friends outside college in Oxford than it is to make them outside halls in other universities.

Take Trinity for example. Here there are 86 freshers. Take away the scientists, the sporting meatheads and the recluses and I barely have 20 people who I could possibly be friends with. Whist this is a massive generalisation – I am sharing a room with a scientist next year and some athletes are surprisingly interesting– it does illustrate the limitations to making friends within college, especially when juxtaposed with the thousands of interesting people in the university as a whole.

What about the other claims for collegiate superiority? Take the idea that colleges provide a good support structure: a college is not required for this. One could just as easily have faculty appointed academic and personal tutors whilst student peer support could be provided on a halls level. Indeed, the college system can be actively damaging to your academic stress levels. For competition between colleges, especially over their ranking on the god- awful Norrington Table, can lead to colleges piling undue pressure on students to produce the academic goods. Merton, at least traditionally, illustrates this tendency perfectly.

There are plenty of other arguments for colleges being detrimental, such as the confused direction they set by adopting agendas distinct and different from that of the university as a whole, but space does not permit me to elucidate upon them. Colleges should carry some sort of health warning: not only do they hinder your social life but potentially your academic life as well.

NO

April Peake

It isn’t hard to imagine life at a university without the collegiate system. Flats aren’t that different from corridors or staircases and individual campuses are sort of like the colleges themselves. I’ve seen my friends at other universities nip downstairs to beg for help on their assignments, bang on their neighbours’ doors to announce pre-drinks, and get told off for staggering back to their rooms too noisily after a night out.

Imagining Oxford as a non-collegiate university, however, is impossible – and not simply because wherever you are in town you’re guaranteed to be at most a stone’s throw away from a college.

The collegiate system is the backbone of Oxbridge’s academic system too, providing the framework for the tutorial system. Tutorials are renowned for providing opportunities for students to discuss, argue and develop their own ideas under expert supervision and receive individual feedback on their work. Your tutors know you, your interests, and your writing style and can monitor your development minutely.

Tutorials and classes are of intrinsic academic value – and humanities students in particular would lose out if the format of their course changed to lectures and seminars. Writing down someone else’s thoughts in a lecture is certainly not as beneficial as receiving personally tailored support.

But while significant, the academic structure isn’t the sole or even the most important benefit of the collegiate system. Studying at Oxford can undoubtedly be an extremely stressful experience. But the collegiate system will support you every step of the way.

Being part of a college helps offset the natural ‘small fish, big pond’ fears that most freshers harbour when they first arrive at university. The work becomes less scary when you consider that you’ll be working with tutors who have hand selected you, deciding they want to work with
you for the next however many years. Instantly you become one of the five ‘chosen ones’, or one of twelve, rather than one of 3,198.

Entering a college, you become part of a ready-made community. You know that if you’re unsure of something your college mother is just in the next building, that if you have a problem with work, you can get help from the other people on your course that live across the corridor. The college system is a wonderful network for students, particularly if the centrally offered support isn’t right for you.

If you need to talk you have your college friends, parents, welfare reps, peer advisors, chaplain, nurse, subject tutors, personal tutor and senior tutor on site, ready to help you. These people are all there for you to reach out to, and to look out for you in times when you feel you can’t reach out, offering a range of support from social to academic. The collegiate system is one of the great strengths of Oxford – it may be old fashioned insofar as it is traditional but that by no means makes it outdated.

The recent tragedy where college student Elliot Rodger, went on a shooting spree at the University of California, which left seven people dead including himself, has caused a media storm. We can’t know exactly why he did it, but this incident has drawn attention to cultural prob- lems far beyond this man’s misogynistic personal opinions.

According to his family, he was on the autistic spectrum, and he is being armchair-diagnosed with all kinds of mental disorders; for many commentators this illness has served to mitigate his women-hating blog posts and videos. However, as valid as noting his mental health may be, this case cannot be simply dismissed as an instance of where a ‘lunatic’ lost control.

Rodger may have been in a mental state where he was more receptive to extreme attitudes already present in society, and maybe mental illness fuelled his irrational thinking. There is an argument that he should have received better treatment and not been allowed a gun. Pointedly though, this is not the end of the debate, and we must consider the root cause of the opinions which drove the man to mass-murder.

Elliot Rodger was an individual with an inflated sense of entitlement, extreme views, and a strong violent streak. This first aspect has raised a lot of discussion, because a sense of entitlement to female attention, and the idea that there are, or should be, failsafe ways to get it, is common. He used to post on PUAHate, an online forum which rails against pick-up artists – those who discuss, or even make a living from, surefire ways of seducing women. On a forum, aimed at those ‘PUAs’, I was immediately shown an advert offer- ing me ten ‘FREE’ videos, including ‘How To Approach Any Woman With Zero Chance Of Rejection… This Works EVERY Time!’ and the unsettlingly titled ‘The Secret To Developing Emotional Addiction In Women (That Makes Them Loyal And Obedient)’. In light of this misogyny, PUAHate doesn’t seem such a bad idea – sadly though, members of this forum didn’t seem against the concept, just disillusioned by the failure of its techniques, viciously critical of each other, and overwhelmingly misogynistic. The issue for these self-titled ‘incels’ (involuntary celibates) is injustice; they believe that they should be entitled to sex, and that women are breaking some unsaid promise by not giving it to them.

This attitude can be traced back to our cultural tropes; we are all taught that a good heterosexual man is entitled to a woman. There are countless films, books, sitcoms, and more, where the hero saves the world, or just does good, and then by default gets the girl – she’s a prize awarded by the justice of the universe. Men are told, through media like this, that they are the active ones, and that if they are successful people, or fol- low certain measurable steps, they can have sex with a desirable woman. This illusion of control has the potential to cause frustrations and become very dangerous, especially when the illusion falls apart.

On a similar note, I have often heard men complain about the ‘hoops’ that they have to jump through in order to get female attention: Buy them a drink; make the first move; spend money on them. It’s ludicrous that there are culturally expected hoops to jump through, yes. What is just as ludicrous though, is the assumption that once you have jumped through these ridiculous hoops, you will then get female attention, and that if you don’t, the women are at fault. (“You did what you were meant to.”) It is the hoops that are wrong in this paradigm.

That being said the hoops have some appeal. We all want a set of
rules to follow to gain rewards. The problem is that a woman is not a reward. A woman is not a concept you can deserve. A woman is an individual. Every single human being is. We all have our own desires, our own personalities, and make our own decisions, none of which anyone else can or deserves to control, no matter how many hoops they jump through.

The very concept of ‘Pick-Up Artists’ suggests that women are a homogenous, predictable mass. This lie also underpins countless films, books, TV programmes, articles, pieces of advice. (Not all of which are aimed at men.) This lie is ridiculous, so why is it so prevalent? Perhaps because it’s easier to blame a single, bitchy mass for your rejection than to analyse the motives of an individual, or to accept that maybe you’re not such a nice character after all. Perhaps because it’s easier to feel angry and entitled than be afraid that there is no effective system and you’re not in control.

There are those who feel entitled to sex just by being a ‘nice guy’, because apparently kindness is not the default way to treat someone. Comments on his videos include “well girls, keep that in mind the next time you friend-zone somebody!” and “I don’t blame guns, I blame blondes for this one.” I’d like to think they’re joking.

Be it in Internet forums or everyday gossip, abusive tweets or pop songs, there are echoes of this sense of entitlement all around us. No, not all men have malicious, extreme views that lead to violence. It takes more than entitlement to actually shoot someone. But this sense of entitlement in itself is something we are all taught to believe, and it should be discussed and refuted more openly.

This idea that ‘nice guys’, or those who follow all of our culture’s horrendous ‘pre-scribed steps’, are entitled to sexual attention from those they desire needs to end, or people will continue to get hurt.