Is it acceptable to restrict academic scholarship to members of particular racial groups? My own view is “no,” although there is a case for “yes.”
There is certainly no case for: “Only when the racial group happens to be one we like.” Yet this last position, however unjustifiable, has become the default attitude in the United States and across the Anglosphere.
One of the constant laments of this column has been the way identity politics has spread from the U.S. to the other English-speaking democracies. Perhaps considering some of the crazier examples from overseas will help put the American experience in context.
Last week, it emerged that two of Britain’s private schools had turned down a bequest from a philanthropist, Sir Bryan Thwaites, who had wanted to set aside a million pounds to provide places for white working-class boys.
Sir Bryan, who had himself attended both schools on a scholarship, pointed to a mass of evidence showing that white, working-class boys are the single worst-performing group in Britain. But the schools refused his gift, arguing that bursaries should be offered wholly on the basis of need, without regard to color.
No such objection was made a year earlier, when Cambridge University accepted a donation from the musician Stormzy to fund two scholarships for black students. Stormzy, I should perhaps explain, is a grime artist, grime being a British form of rap music associated with gritty urban life, redolent of gangsterism. Stormzy has taken the genre to a new audience. Indeed, as far as I can tell, his fan base is largely made up of middle-class white children. His politics, naturally, are far-Left: He led the 2019 Glastonbury Festival in a chant of “F— Boris!”
The argument for racially limited scholarships (we often refer to them as bursaries in the United Kingdom) is, in essence, a libertarian one. It is Stormzy’s money to do with as he will. He is offering extra funding, so there will be no losers, only winners. There are plenty of other awards that, in accordance with the donors’ instructions, are restricted, to military personnel, say, or to children of alumni, or whatever. So, why not to black children?
That argument has a certain force. But it is, I think, outweighed by a higher imperative. In an open society, we are treated as autonomous individuals, equal before the law, free to make our own decisions, and answerable for our own actions. The idea that we should be defined by birth or caste or race, though common for the last 10,000 years, has no place in a post-Enlightenment, liberal country. Schools and universities, especially, should have no truck with the notion of sorting students into racial categories. The duty of preserving Enlightenment civilization falls most heavily on them.
But what we see throughout the Anglosphere is a truly bizarre double standard, which, as Eric Kaufmann put it in his lengthy and serious study Whiteshift, “lauds subaltern ethnic identity while decrying majority ethnic identity.” Celebrating blackness is a form of happy, multiculti diversity, whereas celebrating whiteness is tantamount to being a Nazi. Offering scholarships to poor black children is uncontroversial; offering scholarships to poor white children is racist.
How far the modern, woke interpretation of racism has drifted from the original, color-blind version. To most people, the fundamental problem with racism is that it denies people’s individuality. I remember flinching as a boy when a friend of my parents was unspeakably rude to a shy, young French Canadian couple. When my mother later confronted him, he airily told her that he had known French Canadians during the war and had had more than enough of them. Even as a 10-year-old, I could see the basic flaw in his argument: Whatever had bothered him about French Canadians during the war, it was plainly not the fault of that young couple.
What is obvious to 10-year-olds, though, is not always obvious to liberal academics. They have no problem with the collectivism involved in racial categorization. Indeed, it attracts them. They argue, and seem truly to believe, that a wrong done to someone else, possibly long ago, is somehow felt by another who simply happens to share that wronged person’s physiognomy, an odd superstition that justifies all manner of random social engineering.
An anti-apartheid comedian in the 1980s used to end his routine by simply reading out the number of people who had applied for racial reclassification in South Africa, from “black” to “colored,” or “colored” to “Indian,” or whatever. The sheer absurdity of that list made the case against apartheid more strongly than anything else he said. Yet now, we are watching the most liberal of institutions tell people to self-define primarily by race. What a world.
