If you can keep your head at a university, you’re probably not a dead white male
Matt Drake, Express, July 19:
Students have removed (the poem If by) Rudyard Kipling from a University of Manchester building because they claim the author was “racist” … The poem … painted on the wall of the students’ union … was removed … to “reclaim (the) history” of those who were “oppressed by the likes of Kipling”. Sara Khan, the liberation and access officer at the student union, said: “We, as an exec team, believe that Kipling stands for the opposite of liberation, empowerment and human rights — the things that we, as an SU, stand for.” … General secretary of the students’ union, Fatima Abid, said student leaders decided within an hour that the poem must be removed after seeing it. She said: “God knows, black and brown voices have been written out of history enough and it is time we try to reverse that — at the very least in our union.” Students used a black marker pen to write out the poem Still I Rise by Maya Angelou on the … wall.
Black Shakespeare! Karen Swallow Prior, The Atlantic, January 30, 2013:
“Shakespeare must be a black girl.” … Maya Angelou (said) Sonnet 29 must have been a black girl because its solemn words expressed so fiercely what she — an outcast, the victim of racism, destitution, and childhood sexual abuse, crying out alone before a deaf heaven — felt … Angelou’s message was that there is more in poetry … that unites than divides us. Not only can a long dead, uber-white male writer like Shakespeare voice an experience so universal that it speaks truth to power for a poor black girl (but) the poetry of her beloved Edgar Allan Poe reads “like it was written by LL Cool J”.
Kant stand whites! Jonathan Petre, Mail on Sunday, January 11 last year:
The student union at the … School of Oriental and African Studies (says) “the majority of philosophers on our courses” should be from Africa and Asia … to “decolonise” the “white institution” … (In) “Decolonising SOAS: Confronting The White Institution”, the union’s statement of “educational priorities” warns “white philosophers” should be studied only “if required” and … taught solely from “a critical standpoint”: “For example, acknowledging the colonial context in which so-called ‘Enlightenment’ philosophers wrote within.” The democracy and education union officer … Ali Habi (who wrote the paper, is a fan of) Frantz Fanon (author of seminal works) of revolutionary anti-colonialism … (A) campaign to counter the “colonial violence … embedded” in British universities … (called) for the removal of the statue of “imperialist” Cecil Rhodes from Oxford (University).
From Rudyard Kipling’s If, 1910:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken, Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to broken, And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools
Not all bad! Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Helen Fielding, 2000:
Poem (If)is good. Very good, almost like self-help book
Cleaning up on phantom cleaners. Anthony Klan, The Australian, August 24, 2015:
Up to 15 per cent of all members of the Victorian AWU under Bill Shorten’s leadership were phantom members signed up under his negotiations with … Cleanevent, which saw workers paid half the award rate or less … the more members a union head has, the more sway he (has) within the party.
Cleaning out phantom cleaners? Workplace Express, July 19:
The AWU is seeking to change rules governing the way it counts members after belatedly lodging membership figures of 69,786 as of December 2017 — a drop of 17,420, or 20 per cent, from the figure reported a year earlier — following an external audit conducted at the urging of the (Registered Organisations Commission).