Letters on Liberty: The Dangers of the New Anti-Racism

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Sunday 20 October at Church House, Westminster.

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

Open debate has been suffocated by today’s censorious climate and there is little cultural support for freedom as a foundational value. What we need is rowdy, good-natured disagreement and people prepared to experiment with what freedom might mean today. Faced with this challenge, the Academy of Ideas decided to launch Letters on Liberty – a radical public pamphleteering campaign aimed at reimagining arguments for freedom in the twenty-first century.

In her Letter – The Dangers of the New Anti-Racism – Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert argues that we need to break free of the new ideology of anti-racism, which differs dramatically from the anti-racism of the past. Contemporary anti-racist thinkers, such as Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, have emerged from niches of academic critical theory into the mainstream. Their work focuses on the historical grievances of colonialism and the slave trade, she argues, with the assumption that white and black people are fundamentally unable to relate to one another. Alka argues that we should shun this ideology, and instead adopt a universalist point of view when discussing race.

Join Alka and respondents as they ask what went wrong with our society’s treatment of race relations? What separates the speeches of Martin Luther King from the modern writing of anti-racist academics? Why did the American BLM resurgence of 2020 have such a visible impact on British institutions? Do schools and workplaces have an obligation to tackle race relations? And are DEI incentives an effective equaliser, or do they contribute to racial division?

SPEAKERS
Ben Cobley
author, The Tribe: the liberal-left and the system of diversity and The Progress Trap (forthcoming); former Labour Party activist

Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert
director, Don't Divide Us; author, What Should Schools Teach? Disciplines, subjects and the pursuit of truth

Sunil Sharma
founder and CEO, Global Conservative Coalition

CHAIR
Josephine Hussey
school teacher, AoI Education Forum