Toby Young Toby Young

Virtue signalling is really status signalling

iStock

A £19,000-a-year London day school was in the news this week because it has started instructing its pupils about ‘white privilege’ and ‘microaggressions’. Apparently, St Dunstan’s in south London, which boasts Chuka Umunna among its alumni, teaches its well-heeled students that the royal family bolsters expectations of ‘inherited white privilege’, asks them to ‘explore’ why Meghan Markle faced ‘additional challenges’ compared with Kate Middleton when she married a prince, and tells them why it’s important for the National Trust to examine the colonial past of its country houses and links to the slave trade.

I was surprised this story attracted so much press interest. Surely a majority of top independent schools have been teaching their charges about these issues for some time? And quite right too. I say that not because I’ve made a Damascene conversion to critical race theory, but because children need to master the lingua franca of social justice ideology if they’re going to shin up the greasy pole in their careers. It’s the equivalent of being taught French during the age of empire.

To be fully conversant in this gobbledygook, you need to have been to an expensive private school and a good university

What critics of these trendy initiatives fail to grasp is that concepts like ‘white privilege’ are not intended to be taken at face value nor have any real-world impact. Rather, they are almost wholly performative. To be clear, when the teenage son or daughter of an Anglo-Saxon power couple is told to denounce ‘whiteness’ and affirm that it is a toxic affliction responsible for all the injustices in this world, they are not being asked to forego their place at a Russell Group university in favour of a student of colour or prepare themselves for a life of atonement. On the contrary, they are being taught a kind of catechism that they’ll need to re-cite several times a day to preserve their privileged status.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in