“The way to end racism is to stop talking about it.”

“You’re just over thinking things.”

“Why do you always have to bring race into this?”

In discussions about race at Oxford, the as­sumption is always present that black and minority ethnic (BME) students or People of Colour (PoC) are somehow seeking racism in every facet of their daily lives; that we feel vindicated when we can whirl around and point the finger at racism as the cause of our problems. This is false. There is no reason for us to want to experience something that can crush us at both an institutional and a per­sonal level.

We want the eradication of racism more than anyone. After all, 59% of the BME re­spondents didn’t expect racism to affect their Oxford experience, matriculating with a light heart and clear ideals. I was one of them.

As a light-skinned Woman of Colour who grew up in a predominately white area, where cultural divisions were not visible and col­our-blindness is the order of the day, I never thought of myself as someone ‘of colour’. I measured myself academically against my white peers and blithely believed I had never experienced any ‘real racism’, making it all the more a shock when my experiences at Ox­ford opened my eyes.

Colour-blindness is an appealing concept, but when the majority of BME students have felt uncomfortable here due to their race – and I congratulate those who have either nev­er experienced a problem or simply taken a rather struthious attitude to it all – it clearly hasn’t succeeded in its aims. It is time to erad­icate the problem instead of ignoring it.

The overwhelming lack of representation among academics and courses is the logical place to start. Britain’s appalling response to Lenny Henry’s campaigns for diversity dem­onstrates that racism is not just physical at­tacks or slurs, but also sneering rejections of legitimate pleas for visible role models.

It isn’t about ticking boxes or filling quotas: I have suffered from depression as a result of feeling invisible – unimportant – while studying a course stuffed with white authors. When all your tutors are white too, in whom do you confide? It isn’t a problem that can be solved by a cheerful nod to the International Fair; its roots lie deep in the nature of West­ern academia and the myth of a meritocracy that conveniently rewards more white men than anyone else.

The necessary first step is being listened to, and we ask this of you because it still doesn’t happen. This report is a significant break­through, but will achieve nothing if everyone continues to pretend there isn’t a problem; that these findings aren’t worth taking seri­ously.

Being laughed off when we question a rac­ist bop theme, listening to yet another well-meaning white person protest that they have ‘non-white friends’, consistently failing to see ourselves celebrated in portraits, on col­lege alumni lists, in academia: these are real problems.

They are not the product of hypersensitiv­ity, or the starting point for a ‘theoretical de­bate’: these are our lives, and we ask that you treat them as such.

YES
Niamh McIntyre

Comments made recently by Rashida Manjoo, which claimed there is an ‘in your face sexist culture’ and ‘a marketization of women and girls’, in the UK led, to widespread indignation and an attempt to overwrite the suff erring of women. The Daily Mail’s headline ‘Britain’s ‘boys’ club’ culture makes it the most sexist country in the world says UN expert… who is from South Africa, the rape capital of the world’ was indicative of the pervasive assumption that sexism is ‘worse’ in other countries and therefore should take precedence over localized feminist activism.

The rapporteur did not claim Britain was the ‘most sexist’ country in the world, but that sexism was more ‘in your face’ than other countries she had visited, offering an analysis of the ways in which misogyny is manifested rather than a like-for-like comparison with other countries. Manjoo’s critics often cited South Africa, where it has been estimated that 40% of women will be raped at some point in their lifetime, or Saudi Arabia, where there is no prohibition against statutory or spousal rape.

Such a qualitative approach trivializes the experience of sufferers of domestic and sexual violence in the UK; assertions that women have ‘never had it so good’ disregard the fact that 85,000 women are raped and 400,000 sexually assaulted in the UK every year. While sexual assault may be more prevalent in other countries, it is extremely disconcerting to see this used to overwrite the experience of women in the UK. Rashida pre-empted the backlash her criticism of the UK would cause, drawing attention to the complacency created by ‘legal and policy responses that are often limited to some harmful practices’ while ignoring broader structural oppression.

The report makes a sensitive case for the interaction of practises of open misogyny, normalized by media representation and groups such as Women Who Eat On Tubes. The confidence expressed in gender equality often relies upon universalizing the experience of middle-class, heterosexual, usually white women in the UK. Contrarily, the UN report is particularly concerned to articulate marginalized perspectives, like those of asylum seekers, BME women, prisoners, LGBTQ women and the unemployed.

An example of structural sexism is the effect of the government’s austerity measures on women. Rashida measures not only the direct impact austerity is having on women by depriving them of crisis centres and trauma services, but also that of general cuts to the welfare system which affect poverty and unemployment, which are contributory factors to violence against women and girls.

The rush to defend the UK, by comparing it with other countries’ records of violence against women, silences the real and pressing issues highlighted by the preliminary UN report. The media’s mocking of Manjoo only serves to validate her judgments about the continued prevalence of misogyny in Britain.

NO
Radhika Seth

Manjoo’s comments about Britain’s ‘boys’ club sexist culture’ described the treatment of women in the UK as worse than that in most emerging nations. Her decision to place the social implications of Page Three, in which women have consented to appear, above the daily violence women face in countries like Azerbaijan and India is alarming.

A Home Office report found up to 1.2 million women in the UK experienced domestic violence in the past year, showing a serious need to address this problem. But if we consider Manjoo’s example of India, a country in which most domestic violence cases remain unreported, there is a qualitative difference. The low numbers of accusations are not only due to the fear of women becoming destitute if abandoned by their spouses, but also because, as a 2012 UN report revealed, 39% of women in India think it is justifiable for a husband to beat his wife. Legislation against sexual harassment has only been recently introduced and is rarely implemented. Manjoo’s comments regarding the ‘visible’ nature of UK sexism suggests that women can at least be outspoken about the injustice they face.

While women are underrepresented in the British parliament, politicians cannot make misogynistic remarks without fear of public reprimand. However, members of India’s Socialist Party are vocal about the need for women to conform to male expectations of correct moral behaviour. Abu Azmi, a regional unit chief of the party, publicly declared that women who have sex before marriage should be hanged. Even the party’s leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav, excused a recent rape case in Mumbai by saying, ‘boys will be boys.’ Such views are not confined to the peripheries of Indian politics.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), predicted to form the largest part of the coalition after the upcoming elections, has an extensive history of violence against women. In the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat, minister Narendra Modi, did little to stop the sexual torture and mass murder of women. Asaram Bapu, a spiritual leader endorsed by the BJP, refused to blame the perpetrators of the 2012 Delhi gang rape case. “The victim is as guilty as her rapists,” he said. “She should have called the culprits ‘brother’ and begged before them to stop. Can one hand clap? I don’t think so.”

Beside such misogyny, the UK ought to be proud of its position as a liberal democracy in which many politicians advocate equality. Women are free to both express their discontent and campaign for change. Putting the ‘sexist lad culture’ of the UK alongside the genuine widespread oppression of women in so many countries only insults women in the developing world for whom rape, violent beatings and forced marriages are daily occurrences. Sexism in the UK is far less widespread and severe than in countries like India, and an acceptance of this fact should not be viewed as imperialist self-congratulation.

Einstein once quipped, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” As soon as I arrived at Oxford, it came to my attention that much of what academics and students write is utter gobbledygook.

Some academics seem to take pleasure in constructing sentences completely incomprehensible not just to the layman, but even to students of their own subject. All I can do is wonder why. What does it prove? Do they show that they are such geniuses that they find it impossible to communicate with lesser mortals? Or maybe the ideas they are trying to convey are so complex that they require impenetrable terminology?

I suspect that it is not an academic’s high calibre of intellect that forces them to write like this, and that it is more likely an elaborate bluff. By ensuring that you do not understand a thing they are talking about, they trick you into thinking that they know exactly what they are talking about. From my own tutorial experiences, I smell a rat. After all, it is only when I do not have a clue about what I am saying that I bullshit to the maximum. If I start using words like “discourse” or “subjectivity”, I know I am really in trouble. Conversely, it is only when I actually know my stuff that I feel comfortable using simple phrases.

Don’t just take my word for it. The late Dennis Dutton, a philosophy professor from the University of Canterbury, was so incensed by this ‘awkward, jargon-clogged academic prose’ that he set up a “Bad Writing Competition” to find the most egregious examples of it. What follows, the winner of the competition in 1999, is a perfect example of this pernicious evil. Let me present an extract from a work of Judith Butler; fasten your seat belts, folks, you are in for a ride. 

 “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

I admit I don’t have a clue what this means. Do you? Dennis Dutton doesn’t. He says, “To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.” At least one intellectual has got it right.

This needless jargon goes against the purpose of academia. In the context of a world where academics are continually engaged in a desperate search for something, anything, to justify the continued funding of the study of the humanities, academia cannot subsist in its own little bubble. Academics have to make a consistent effort to make their specialised research accessible to the wider intellectual environment and even to the general public. As much as they might contest otherwise, academics are not being employed to engage in some obscurant hobby of theirs. Thus, the language with which they frame their research should be equally accessible. Whilst it doesn’t have to be Wikipedia Simple English, there is a happy medium to be had and one that is not weighted to the bullshit end.

In a similar vein, tutors should not get so wound up when students use simple, even colloquial, English, so long as it is grammatically correct. After all, when I applied to Oxford, it was beaten into me that it was the quality of the idea that counted, not the complexity of the vocabulary used to convey it. If that was not a façade to tempt innocent sixth formers in, then it should still stand on arrival at university. There is little point in having an idea unless you can convey it clearly. Mark Twain once said, “I never write ‘metropolis’ for seven cents when I can write ‘city’ and get paid the same.” With simple, elegant style, he gets right to the point. Tutors and students, cut the crap. It achieves nothing but making the writer look like a pretentious twit.

I end with Einstein again, who explains the problem much better than I ever could. “Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”