Thread by @PriyamvadaGopal

Churchill College's Master, Athene Donald has disbanded the Working Group on Churchill, Race, and Empire. The third event in the series--on commemoration--did not get held due to pressure from the Churchill family & Policy Exchange, & the college taking fright after the backlash

..to the second event in February.

Members of the Working Group (I was) were told that they had dissolved themselves (untrue) & that in any case, they had been constituted for a limited time (also not something they had been told).

Cancel culture is real & disgraceful. Giving in to it is worse.

NO PASARAN. Stand up to them. You & I will have to be cause the establishment will cave. And remember--activists for gender equality are not necessarily allies in the battle for racial justice.

People will recognise how serious this is. Let me repeat: under pressure from groups like Policy Exchange & some members of the Churchill family, Churchill College has disbanded a group set up to engage *critically* with Churchill's complicated legacies. Let that sink in.

The first two events --hugely successful (which is why the Daily Mail went nuts)--are for now still available on college's website. Watch them before those get taken down too.

Apologies, I forgot to include the Daily Mail among the pressure groups. The multiple attacks on the series, & on individuals involved, including me, has resulted in the successful shutting down of necessary critical discussion on Churchill's legacies.

In the sorry academic year leading up to the firing of this group today, some of us have had to put up with appalling, truly appalling racial discourse on top of everything else, from within & without the college.

I will say now publicly what I have said in multiple emails to the Master & College officers.

@ChurchillCol has a serious institutional problem when it comes to race, & the hagiography & mythologies around its founding figure contribute directly to that problem. They had a

chance to address it & bravely engage with difficult questions but bottled it the minute the Mail, Policy Exchange and what they call 'The Family' bared their teeth. Is this a comfortable place for p.o.c & their allies to be? You work it out.

The remarkable thing in the email essentially firing the Working Group was the claim that we had anyway dissolved ourselves. This is because we were preparing to issue a statement about what we've had to endure in the last four months since the last event. So much dissembling!!!

As a casual aside--I think I have a fairly shrewd idea of what the next target for cancellation will be. ;)

What has been deeply disappointing is the role played in this shutting down by people who have roles as 'gender equality' and LGBT champions in the university.

So much for 'solidarity'. I guess we get white gender equality and LGBT rights.

The most hilarious thing is the claim that I disbanded the group in an email. I have no authority to do that. There is no evidence anywhere that the college believed the group had disbanded itself. It's also completely...forgive me, Kafkaesque

You will notice how, rather unsubtly, Donald's statement presents the working group as too radical, and the college Council as needing to intervene for that reason. Worth noting that College Council is entirely white, while Working Group has 5 BAME on it, including students.

3-4 years ago, a group of black students approached the college's Master & asked for a more direct critical engagement with Churchill's legacies. They were, they told me, brusquely dismissed. Then George Floyd's murder happened. As we know, several white liberals then decided

that racism might exist, a little bit. In the light of that, I was asked by Athene Donald what the college should do. I proposed the college lead a national conversation on Churchill's less-examined side. It was then agreed to do just that. Now that story is being rewritten.

But what has also happened is that the immediate shock of George Floyd's death & the need to shed public tears is over, so the series is no longer needed in its current form. This is how racism operates--totally cynical.

An astute colleague writes of Donald's absurd statement: "How much of this is just echoing how colonial leaders like Churchill himself dismissed anti-colonial critiques as "well our advanced democratic governance is simply to complex for a colonised subject to understand...".