The Pervasiveness of Covert Racism Within Our Institutions

Racism is bad. And thankfully almost everyone agrees. Over a decades-long process in the West, efforts have been made to eliminate racially-charged policies inherited from the past, and to replace them with fairer ones, where race is neither a factor used to make decisions about someone, nor can it give anyone an undeserved advantage. The commitment to these goals is, of course, more than laudable.

In the recent months and years, however, there has been a steady rise in news, reports and leaks of institutional policies being made in racially charged ways for ideological purposes. Created through a linguistic sleight of hand, this trend has largely passed under the radar, allowing it to grow and spread within major societal institutions. Now, as its proponents are increasingly more open and unapologetic about it, this practice is finally attracting wider attention and criticism.

Rising primarily from universities and other humanities-academic environments, today's efforts to institutionalize racially charged ideologies and tendencies have a strong background in linguistics. Being descendants of the school of Critical Theory, they learn from giants in the field of language and power- or social analysis, such as Foucault, Derrida, Saussure, or even Wittgenstein. One of the main themes is that language literally constructs the social fabric, and therefore, if used correctly, it can also be used to change it in a desired way.

The precise tactics vary, but approaches commonly used include, for example, word redefinition, or word appropriation. Redefinition is done by first selecting a word and inventing a new meaning. Once this new meaning is widespread enough, it is possible to weaponize the fact that the word has two simultaneous definitions through the motte-and-bailey strategy. As long as you are on the offensive, you use the new, more potent definition, which uses your own arguments as presumptions, enabling a bit of a linguistic fake-it-till-you-make-it approach on a societal scale. When challenged, however, you retreat into the old definition which is uncontroversial, and imply that it is that one which is being objected to. This then makes the challenger appear bad and possibly evil to any third-party onlookers.

The other common tactic, word appropriation, is somewhat similar, but theoretically even more potent. A useful word with multiple meanings and connotations is selected, and then used across society in one specific context and meaning instead. This results in that word only being associated with the one specific context and meaning in the eyes of the general public. But anyone who wishes to express the other meaning the word used to have is left without a term for such context. Instead, they have to invent new terms to express what was previously tied to the appropriated word. As such new words face a considerable ‘barrier to entry’ into an existing language, their inventors then often comes across as being difficult, confused, or even weird.

Through strategies such as these, advocates for modern-day racism are ‘infiltrating’ previously healthy environments of many institutions. Following the path tried and tested by the National Socialists, they recognize that perhaps the most potent weapon is to accuse your enemy of what you are guilty of. If you are a self-proclaimed long-standing freedom fighter, most accusations of you actually being an oppressor will end up moot. Stylizing yourself into a position directly opposite to the one you actually advocate is the best way to protect yourself while spreading your point of view.

In that vein, what follows are examples of such creeping racism within some major societal institutions. As often the best weapon against covert, pernicious influences is to shine light on what is going on, perhaps it can help with our current situation as well.

At the Ministry of Defence, employees are led to read resources including controversial doctrines including socially divisive messages and racially charged overtones.

This content was produced by the Ministry of Defence’s Diversity & Inclusion office. The exact number of employees and their salaries are unknown, but according to a MoD job advertisement the head of the office receives a salary of £110,000 per year. In such context, Donald Trump’s recent moves to weed out such influences for spreading “offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping” is understandable both ideologically and financially.

When the UK Conservative equalities minister Kemi Badenoch also denounced similar influences within the nation’s schools and other institutions, Lotuseaters.com pointed out that for example within Transport for London, texts advocating racially-charged, divisive doctrines are promoted, shielded, again, by antithetical language with positive connotations in the eyes of the public.

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, Loughborough University has issued a notice to its staff granting ‘compassionate leave’ to some of its staff on a racial basis. While we are happy for the individual employees to be receiving additional paid leave and express our regret in them being implicated in this controversy through no fault of their own, we condemn the administration for establishing this policy through an openly racist decision-making process. Though this was legal for the university to do under the 2010 Equality Act, this only illustrates how institutionally embedded some of these influences have become.

The university-focused website The Tab has opened applications for its 2020 ‘Inclusivity Internship’ by excluding a large part of the candidates by race. Such racially based policy was justified by the efforts to make “the next generation of journalists … more diverse.” This decision attracted considerable controversy, with commenters and applicants alluding to infamous racist practices of the past.

As Lotuseaters.com has reported, one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers promoted resources with explicitly racist overtones and theories in internal documents responding to the events surrounding the death of George Floyd earlier this year.

Finally, in a separate article, Lotuseaters.com has already covered Co-op Food’s leaked ‘Inclusion’ Plan which features policies based on intolerance and exclusion instead. Its goals of reaching a pre-set racial composition within the company are to be achieved through direct racial discrimination and through exclusion of sections of its employees.

That all these datapoints come from a span of just approximately two weeks shows the extent to which these modern forms of institutional racism are prevalent, and how widespread such doctrines are. Covered by a layer of linguistic protection, their proponents are able to advocate for, and put into practice, policies which, if engaged in openly, would be rightfully universally condemned. Amid today’s wider discussion about societal racism, it is high time to call out these influences and start pointing out the influencers.