Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Oxfam’s strange obsession with ‘whiteness’

(Photo: iStock)

Remember when it was considered wrong for workplaces to harangue their employees about their racial origins? Ah, those were the days. Sadly, they’re long gone. Now it’s all the rage for employers to sit their staff down and berate them about their skin colour and all the problems it apparently causes.

The latest workplace to go down this weird road is Oxfam. There’s disquiet in Oxfam’s ranks after its UK employees were asked to take a ‘whiteness’ survey. The 1,800 workers were told to state their ethnicity, define themselves as ‘non-racist, anti-racist or neither’, and open their eyes to how terrible whiteness is.

‘All echelons of power, to some degree, exist to serve whiteness’, the survey told Oxfam’s bewildered employees, 88 per cent of whom are white. Racism is a ‘power construct created by white nations for the benefit of white people’, it continued. ‘Whiteness’, the survey declared, is ‘the overarching preservation of power and domination for the benefit of white people’.

In short, whiteness is bad. Really bad. To be white is to be complicit, whether wittingly or unwittingly, in a rotten social system singularly designed to hold up whites and push down everyone else. Not surprisingly, white workers at Oxfam, who consider themselves pretty decent, non-racist folk, were ticked off by this hectoring, hyper-racial work survey. One said she felt ‘under attack for being white, English and voting Leave’.

To feel under attack in your place of work for being English or for voting to leave the EU is really out of order. It suggests a prejudicial attitude towards employees on the basis of their national heritage and their political convictions. But to feel under attack ‘for being white’ is far worse. It raises the possibility that in the UK in 2021, people feel they are being demeaned on the basis of their race, over the accident of their skin colour, the thing that should matter least when we’re weighing someone up.

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