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Thank you so much Peter for your scholarly, well researched and thoughtful article. I essentially agree with the premise of your article so I can’t add much other than draw some conclusions and parallels with historical times.

Until I heard your talk and that of Ted Sadler I really haven’t come across many people who are as concerned as I am about the threats we have today to our freedom of expression and to western civilisation. I listened to the Minefield podcast (and have listened to these many times before) and was stunned by the lengths that the host and the two guests went to bundle whiteness with power and the need for ‘whites’ to accept that they by definition, regardless of their behaviour today, must accept that they are guilty by virtue of their heritage and will be forever. Do they really propose that the whiteness group must be pushed from their apparent inherent power, regardless of their real status in society, by the new self-appointed elite before society progresses?

I agree with you that the idea that racism can be removed by actively labelling and discriminating against any group because of their heritage is fundamentally racist. Who decides who fits into this category of whiteness and once decided do the whiteness group have to be re-educated before any further discussion be had with them? Is it this ‘correct’ thinking group who decides. It seems that the lack of morality by capitalism and the guilty ‘whites’ of past generations must be accepted by all who have benefited in any way whatsoever and their thinking be corrected before any move to improvement can be made to meet some new nirvana defined by the correct thinking elites. Must this ‘whiteness’ be assuaged from our society by whatever means? What means will they be?

Let me draw a parallel. In communist societies and e.g. after the French revolution, certain people, by virtue of their birth, or by some new elitist definition of what constituted an enemy of the people, were re-educated and even slaughtered in their millions. China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Vietnam, need I go on? Simply terror executed by the new elite who with their new found power changed society by simply brutal means. Another example is Islam where the Qur’an clearly states that those who do not agree with the literal words of the perfect man and criticise it can be slayed. By violent expansion they changed the face of North Africa in a few decades. I’m not suggesting that these handful of academics will stoop to these levels however it is of great concern that anyone could bundle groups of people into targets of criticism and hate because of their heritage. That is racism and bigotry. These academics have obviously forgotten Nazism and what was done to the Jews who now according to one of the speakers were accepted into the whiteness group. So they must be bad too, which is anti-Semitic.

I wrote this response to you to encourage you and the more educated to continue your efforts in promoting freedom of thought and freedom of speech. I sincerely look forward to the next philosophy series. Maybe you could invite one of these new ‘elite’ to the forum to speak. I’d love to hear their arguments.