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Top UK college to replace busts of founding fathers with ethnic minorities
- taylodl 9y agoActions like this will always cary the risk of generating the response of "political correctness gone mad" - which may even be true - if we're not careful to exalt one's accomplishments over one's race and ethnic background. If it's the case that people achieving high accomplishments but were of the "wrong" race weren't also receiving praise then that would be bad. If people are having the recognition of their accomplishments removed solely based off their race - in this case their being white but can be generalized to any race - then that would be bad. That's what it means to be colorblind. So, is this an action to correct for colorblindness or is this an action to remove the recognition of the accomplishments of middle-aged white men? The article doesn't say.
- eesmith 9y agoIt quotes Leman, who proposed this change, as saying: “[We are] making sure that the space in which students learn... doesn’t just have the busts of the bearded 1920s men, but also has pictures of people from different ethnic groups, different cultures. It's not that we're throwing anything into the bin.” Of the two options you proposed, this sounds much closer to "correct for colorblindness". As other examples of correcting for colorblindness: “Meanwhile, teaching materials, such as diagrams of the human anatomy, will be changed to feature a “range of ethnic groups”, rather than just the “standard white male”” and “increasingly we try and broaden it to include more recent research from Asia, Africa, and from other parts of the world.”