Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race (Audible Audio Edition): Reni Eddo-Lodge, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Audible Studios for Bloomsbury: Amazon.ca: Books - Review: "An unfortunate and predictable diatribe...
I just knew, even before the book dropped through my letterbox, that the writer would be black. So why has Ms. Eddo-Lodge stopped ‘talking to white people about race’? Essentially because she doesn’t like the way white people respond – even her friends. She can’t understand why ‘their eyes glaze over in boredom or widen in indignation’, why they just don’t ‘get it’. She tells us:
‘I can’t continue to emotionally exhaust myself trying to get my message across, while also toeing a very precarious line that tries not to implicate any one white person in their role in perpetuating structural racism, lest they character assassinate me.’
Poor thing. Heaven forbid that someone might take exception to being told that because they are white they are racist, or that they might ‘character assassinate’ her by having the gall to question her characterization of them. It comes as no surprise to discover what she thinks is the source of the ‘structural racism’ that supposedly plagues Britain today – in a word, slavery. She concedes that prior to studying black history in her second year at university her knowledge of history was lacking. It shows. Her take on things is basic and highly selective. There is no mention of slavery being commonplace in Africa long before any European involvement and only a hint of the key part African blacks played in the slave trade. There is only grudging acknowledgement of the important role that Britain played (and continues to play) in abolishing slavery. But what is most lacking is any sense of historical context. It is as though she thinks that the average white person’s ancestors lived in the lap of luxury on the ‘white wealth amassed from the profits of slavery’, when if she knew anything about history she would know that even in the latter part of the period in question, those ancestors – including those of her white friends – were more likely to have lived in abject poverty, one step away from the workhouse, their children routinely sent down mines or up chimneys. Against this background her comments about ‘profits from slavery seeping into the fabric of British society’ are profoundly disingenuous – merely a way of unjustifiably allotting blame hundreds of years after the fact on the basis of nothing other than skin colour. The simple fact is that Eddo-Lodge’s white friends should no more feel ‘embarrassed’ by slavery than she should be embarrassed by the involvement of her own antecedents in cannibalism, human sacrifice, or indeed slavery. The supposed ‘historical’ analysis jumps from slavery to a string of examples of racism in 20th century Britain, with no connection other than the ongoing assumption that white people are racist. In the ensuing chapters there are the usual tropes about institutional racism, white privilege, a digression into feminism - another of the author’s gripes – and social class. But there is nothing new or original – not one thing - just a succession of selective anecdotes and personal hang-ups. There is certainly no serious sociological or political analysis, and as polemic we’ve heard it all before. In trotting out the usual well-worn grievances Eddo-Lodge simply repeats the same logical mistakes. Her text is littered with examples of erroneous thinking. For example, according to her reasoning, because a) most privileged people are white it follows that b) most white people are privileged. This is equivalent to saying that because a) most kings are human beings, then b) most human beings are kings. Eddo-Lodge is fond of casting aspersions about white people not ‘getting’ her point yet this is evidently something she doesn’t ‘get’... No doubt the reason Eddo-Lodge’s white friends ‘eyes glaze over in boredom’ whenever she talks about race is precisely because they have heard it all before. But if Ms. Eddo-Lodge wants to know why her friends’ eyes might, as she says, ‘widen in indignation’ I can enlighten her. Like everyone else, Eddo-Lodge’s white friends will be aware of the extraordinary lengths the UK has gone to over the past half-century or more to encourage and accommodate black inclusion. The UK has changed its laws, introduced no end of initiatives and directed considerable public funds to that end. Her friends will also know that the UK has a long history of welcoming immigrants from around the world. In short, there are few if any countries that could be said to be less racist than the UK... Of course none of this is acknowledged in Eddo-Lodge’s conveniently skewed reading of things or in her purposefully selective approach to the facts. And there is something else that her friends will be all too aware of, something that, again, is conspicuously absent from Eddo-Lodge’s account. Her white friends will know that whenever the media carries reports of the perpetrators of crime there is a good chance that the faces looking back at them will be black. The fact is that the black community places a disproportionately high burden on the criminal justice system with far higher levels of knife crime, drug dealing and robbery than other sections of the UK population. Black families are more likely to be single parent families, and the black community draws disproportionately on social services, on health, education and the benefits system. Of course none of this is about skin colour – being black doesn’t cause someone to commit crime or abandon their own children - but it is about attitude, perspective and values. And here we come to the nub of the issue and the essential problem with this book. For however much many in the black community strive to be part of British society, and through their talents and hard work make a valuable and important contribution to society, there remains a sizable and unduly vocal minority who are intent on portraying themselves as victims, as continually hard done by. They find fault and take exception to anything and everything, automatically characterizing any and every situation or circumstance as a consequence of being black – an attitude so prevalent that it is now frequently caricatured by comedians with the expression: ‘It’s coz I is black innit’. It is precisely this undercurrent of self-pitying, sniping resentment that informs this book, a book that is unashamedly prejudiced and intolerant. I was safe in assuming that its author would be black – not, for example, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Chinese – because even the very title betrays this selfsame characteristic attitude of ungracious, caustic negativity. We do indeed have a problem with racism in the UK and this ill-informed and unfortunate book serves to illustrate the problem – but not in the way the author thinks."
Facebook - "JUST IN: Southwest Airlines, American Airlines, and Delta Air Lines will NOT REQUIRE employees to get vaccinated, breaking with United Airlines' mandate that workers get vaccinated by October 25th or face getting fired."
"Today I will be making a “one click” Twitter campaign which will allow you to DM Southwest, Delta, and American Airlines with a single click. This was successful in getting companies to revert policy during the NRA boycotts. Links for each company will be added to this thread."
"A good reminder of how much social media pressure is fake."
Meme - "Actual racists don't care if you call them racist. They know they're racist. They'd just call you a nigger and move on with their day. You people are actually terrorizing people that aren't racist. No racist anywhere is apologizing for being racist. No racist anywhere is going to give two fucks what you think. The people you attack for being "racist" apologize for fear of being perceived as racists because they aren't. Do you see how absolutely retarded you fucking people are?"
But of course, reducing racism isn't actually the primary purpose of SJW mobs. It's about power and shaming. Anyway it's so overused nowadays they call everyone a "white supremacist" instead
Meme - "Why you shouldn't say sussy-baka... Do not say "sussy Baka" if you are not Japanese please. It is offensive to Japanese people"
i.e It's offensive to some Japanese American who can't even speak Japanese
Gad Saad on Twitter - "From a mass email the editor of National Geographic sent out. America surely has the most insufferable elite."
"Race Card: White, privileged, with much to learn"
"Look at the "race card" in her signature. Here is my signature. - Infinitely Wise, Supremely Sexy, & Footballing God"
Meme - Protester: "Silence is violence"
Same protester: "Why be racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic when you could just be quiet?"
Ted Lieu on Twitter - "Dear @RepScottPerry: Native-born Americans like you are no more American, and no less American, than an immigrant like me. And with every passing year, there will be more people who look like me in the US. You can’t stop it. So take your racist replacement theory and shove it."
SPOING! The irony of "refuting" white replacement theory but proving it because you want to be racist
Meme - "THEY'RE DETAINING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS"
"THIS IS EXACTLY LIKE THE HOLOCAUST"
Arbeit Macht Frei: Nazi prison guard with broom: "... AND STAY OUT!"
Escaping detainee to another who's crying: "NEXT TIME, BROTHER."
The parents were right: Documents show discrimination against Asian American students - "In the fall of 2020, school board members in Fairfax County, Va., were busily debating how best to racially engineer the admissions process for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ). For months, members of the grassroots Coalition for TJ — most of them Asian American immigrant parents of current or hopeful TJ students — witnessed public meetings in which board members and school officials attacked their community in coded language... Omeish wrote that she thought he was “just dumb and too white to [get] it.” For parents who doubted Brabrand’s seemingly hostile approach to their concerns, there is some vindication in knowing that board members shared their doubts, though only in private communications. Other texts and emails reveal board members obsessed with language games (board member Karen Corbett Sanders insisted that the policy changes were “not eliminating merit but rather reframing our understanding of merit”) and “controlling the narrative” regarding the controversial process of watering down admission standards at TJ. Evidently board members were more concerned with massaging the public relations problem than with addressing the substantive questions and objections that parents raised about the discriminatory effect of the new admissions policy on Asian American students... The new admissions process was meant to target Asian American students, and school board members knew what they were doing. Yet they voted unanimously in favor of eliminating merit-based, race-blind admissions tests. That is not just wrong — it’s illegal. The Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause is a promise that our government, including public schools such as TJ, will treat all citizens as individuals and not members of a racial group."
Facebook knew its algorithms were biased against people of color - The Washington Post - "top executives including Vice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan feared the new system would tilt the scales by protecting some vulnerable groups over others... “You are saying that the health and safety of women of color on the platform is not as important as pleasing your rich White man friends.”... Facebook’s “race-blind” rules of conduct on the platform didn’t distinguish among the targets of hate speech. In addition, the company had decided not to allow the algorithms to automatically delete many slurs, according to the people, on the grounds that the algorithms couldn’t easily tell the difference when a slur such as the n-word and the c-word was used positively or colloquially within a community. The algorithms were also over-indexing on detecting less harmful content that occurred more frequently, such as “men are pigs,” rather than finding less common but more harmful content... For years, Black users said that those same automated systems also mistook posts about racism as hate speech — sending the user to “Facebook jail” by blocking their account — and made them disproportionate targets of hate speech that the company failed to control... Kaplan, the company’s most influential Republican, was widely known as a strong believer in the idea that Facebook should appear “politically neutral,” and his hard-line free speech ideology was in lockstep with company CEO Mark Zuckerberg."
This is a naked admission that anti-male hate speech is common - apparently more than that towards favoured groups, as well as a blatant endorsement of political bias in censorship. And the usual equation of words to violence, of course
What would liberals and black people have said if black people were censored for saying "nigga"?
The irony of complaining about insufficient censorship of "hate speech" while also complaining that you are being hit by censorship for your own hate speech is hilarious
Addendum: "One April 2020 document said roughly 90 percent of “hate speech” subject to content takedowns were statements of contempt, inferiority and disgust directed at White people and men"
The algorithms that detect hate speech online are biased against black people - "In one study, researchers found that leading AI models for processing hate speech were one-and-a-half times more likely to flag tweets as offensive or hateful when they were written by African Americans, and 2.2 times more likely to flag tweets written in African American English (which is commonly spoken by black people in the US). Another study found similar widespread evidence of racial bias against black speech in five widely used academic data sets for studying hate speech that totaled around 155,800 Twitter posts. This is in large part because what is considered offensive depends on social context. Terms that are slurs when used in some settings — like the “n-word” or “queer” — may not be in others. But algorithms — and content moderators who grade the test data that teaches these algorithms how to do their job — don’t usually know the context of the comments they’re reviewing... natural language processing AI — which is often proposed as a tool to objectively identify offensive language — can amplify the same biases that human beings have. They also prove how the test data that feeds these algorithms have baked-in bias from the start... Tweets written by self-identified African American users were, on average, found to be 1.5 times more likely to be flagged as offensive. Researchers then applied this test data into a larger algorithmic model run using natural language processing on 56 million tweets and saw that these biases were only further reinforced. Taking their research a step further, Sap and his colleagues decided to do something interesting. They primed workers labeling the same data to think about the user’s dialect and race when deciding whether the tweet was offensive or not. Their results showed that when moderators knew more about the person tweeting, they were significantly less likely to label that tweet as potentially offensive. At the aggregate level, racial bias against tweets associated with black speech decreased by 11 percent."
Maybe big tech needs to have a "nigga" exception for black users. Or maybe this should apply to all hate speech, so "racial bias" against blacks can be eliminated. So everyone can set their race to black and they can say "nigga" or spout other hate speech all they want.
Weird how treating the same thing said by different people the same way is "bias"
Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Language - "Looking at the tweets misclassified as hate speech we see that many contain multiple slurs, e.g. @SmogBaby: These h*es be lyin to all of us n*ggas and My n*gga mister meaner just hope back in the b*tch. While these tweets contain terms that can be considered racist and sexist it is apparent than many Twitter users use this type of language in their everyday communications. When they do contain racist language they tend to contain the term n*gga rather than n*gger, in line with the findings of Kwok and Wang (2013). We also found a few recurring phrases such as these h*es ain’t loyal that were actually lyrics from rap songs that users were quoting. Classification of such tweets as hate speech leads us to overestimate the prevalence of the phenomenon."
The authors are studiously avoiding the conclusion that rap lyrics are hateful, and that many people engage in hate speech in everday communication
With so many false positives and false negatives, AI moderation is just going to piss everyone off
Apple's casual sacrifice of Antonio García Martínez - "Apple had recently hired Antonio García Martínez, author of the 2016 book Chaos Monkeys, which gives an insider’s perspective on Silicon Valley tech culture. Garcia Martínez has now been sacked, following a petition signed by over 2,000 Apple employees... According to the petitioners, García Martínez has a “history of publishing overtly racist and sexist remarks” which “directly oppose Apple’s commitment to Inclusion & Diversity”. They provide a number of examples — taken out of context — from Chaos Monkeys, such as the statement, “Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit”. Based on their concern that García Martínez’s presence at Apple will “contribute to an unsafe working environment”, they demanded “an investigation into how his published views on women and people of color were missed”, as well as assurance that he “and any who share his harmful views will not be involved in hiring, interviewing, or performance decisions”. Apple decided to simply fire him instead. I can see why people wouldn’t appreciate García Martínez’s irreverent writing style, but the book — which received many positive reviews — was written in personal capacity five years ago. Organising a petition to denounce him now is just malicious. And claiming that he will “contribute to an unsafe working environment” is absurd — construction sites and oil rigs are unsafe working environments, not office-bound tech companies. Of course, García Martínez’s detractors believe he’s just another example of the sophomoric “tech bro” culture that pervades Silicon Valley. More interesting than the Apple employees’ collective denunciation of García Martínez is the company’s decision to fire him. (Even the petition didn’t call for his firing.) They must have known about his controversial statements, as they caused a bit of a stir when the book was published, and it was a New York Times bestseller. This suggests the company fired him to placate the mob, rather than because they had a principled objection to what he wrote. Of course, Apple – like most large companies nowadays – has painted itself into a corner when it comes to dealing with these kinds of accusations, given its own stated promises to be more “inclusive”. The incident is yet another indication of big tech’s willingness to censor anyone who offends the sensibilities of its young and increasingly woke workforce. Though García Martínez will probably weather the storm (he once complained about his pay at Facebook falling to “just $550,000 a year”), what it says about companies like Apple is more concerning. It’s no longer good enough to say the right things today; you now have to make sure you didn’t say the wrong things in the past. And if enough of your colleagues kick up a fuss, you’ll get hung out to dry."
Fired Apple employee: a reckoning is underway - "'The ability to contextualise that creative output or other non-work output varies in real ways. Look at the rap lyrics of Dr. Dre, who’s currently sitting on the Apple board. They’re, in my opinion, absolutely putrid. And yet, there he is. I don’t see a lot of standing on principle here. I see a lot of activism, and those are not necessarily the same thing.'...
'If you’re an artist or writer, and every word you write, you have to project forward 20 years of politics to imagine whether it’s acceptable or not, what sort of art would you end up with? There’s a lot of 20th century political movements that you can cite that art should always be in service to politics. And those political movements did not end up pretty, either artistically or politically in those movements.'
García Martínez has personal knowledge of such regimes, as his parents fled from Communist Cuba...
'Communism is an all encompassing philosophy in which everything is in service of the state and the party. That’s a very dangerous trend and very dangerous expectation for culture.'
Referring to his case, some reports claimed that Silicon Valley had a white male workforce. Is this true?
'It’s empirically false to claim that most of Silicon Valley is white. Anyone who’s actually worked in tech realises that it’s not true. I find it odd to interject the whole racial politics of it into tech, to be honest. Do I find it funny that a Latino minority, who managed to make it up the ranks is getting assailed by a bunch of white people who have strong ideas about whatever their politics are? Yeah, I do find it pretty ironic, actually'...
'Moderating content is all behind closed doors. They adjudicate content policy and say “this is good, and this is bad, etc”. That is what I consider dangerous: a Supreme Court of Facebook that decides when we read and see.'"
Apple’s ugly China deal mostly bought time - "Apple signed a secret agreement with the Chinese government in 2016 to invest over $275 billion to support official strategic initiatives"
Apple manager says she was put on leave for complaining about sexism and a hostile workplace - "A white, female Apple manager said she's been placed on administrative leave this week after complaining about hostile treatment, including that managers told her she was too hard on white men during diversity training and speaks with a Valley Girl tone. The tech giant also barred the employee, Ashley Gjøvik, from using its Slack channel while on leave and from meeting one-on-one with other female employees to discuss her issues with the company... she also pinned a tweet on her profile alluding to hazardous working conditions, which read, 'When I say 'unsafe #workconditions,' I mean physically unsafe; #dangerous chemicals; #OSHA. You'll hear much more about this in a bit.'... Gjøvik told The Verge that she asked for months that Apple address her concerns, adding that she provided them with 558 'pieces of evidence to review.' In response, she said that the company offered her Employee Assistant Program therapy and medical leave... 'This happened to me at #Apple too: they offered EAP and suggested medical leave after I spoke up about #sexism, #discrimination, and a hostile work environment. They also suggested requesting #ADA #disability accommodations after I raised concerns about unsafe #workconditions.'... Timnit Gebru worked at Google as an AI ethicist until she was ousted in December after criticizing what she called a lack of diversity within Google's AI unit."
Wokeness is just a fig leaf
Art council’s use of Welsh language ‘excludes ethnic minorities’, body’s own report says - "Two leading cultural bodies in Wales are structurally racist and their Welsh language requirements risk excluding minorities, a report commissioned by the organisations themselves has concluded. The Arts Council of Wales and Amgueddfa Cymru - the National Museum Wales - commissioned research looking into their inclusion efforts."
Minority rights means you can't promote your own minority language. If you're white, anyway
Duke professor blames white men for white female professors impersonating women of color - "There’s really nothing in this world the regressive left won’t blame on white men. Not even white women passing themselves off as black, Hispanic or American Indian (ahem). The latest Caucasian outed as something she’s allegedly not – the Mexican-political identity “Chicana” – is Kelly Kean Sharp of Furman University in South Carolina... Duke University cultural anthropologist Christine Folch, who also weighed in on the Jessica Krug outing at George Washington University, told the publication that the absence of white men pulling these stunts shows their privilege:
'“And at the root I think what we see is a competition for scarce resources on the part of those who are not the hegemonic ideal in academia, which remains white male.” In other words, she said, there’s a competition for inclusion among the historically excluded in academe. And “strategic use and appropriation of brownness” becomes a way to “accumulate more power, more legitimacy, grants, coolness points.”'...
Totally ignored in this analysis, of course, is why white men who start identifying as white women – such as the College of Charleston’s Rachel McKinnon (below), who also dominates women’s cycling – are celebrated rather than vilified for taking academic spots from actual women... Sharp’s chosen identity of Chicana is also potentially less misleading than that of Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP official and adjunct professor who passed herself off as black for her entire adult life... “Chicana” is a political identity for women who believe they have Mexican descent... A grandmother born in Los Angeles could very well have Mexican heritage, even if the family appearance is non-Hispanic white, as census forms say. Sharp herself could pass as a light-skinned Mexican, based on her now-deleted Twitter profile. And light-skinned Mexicans, you may know, provoke a lot of resentment from the woke hordes because of their perceived cultural privilege in Mexico... Two things are clear from this saga, however: Intersectionality continues to dominate the academy, regardless of how arbitrary the distinctions are. And white males will always be blamed for everyone else’s difficulties."
Kathy Griffin Wonders If GamerGate To Blame For Backlash To Donald Trump Beheading Photoshoot - "It appears that Kathy Griffin has just learned of GamerGate, as the comedian recently asked her followers whether the backlash against her infamous ‘Donald Trump beheading’ photoshoot could be blamed on the nearly-decade old internet controversy."
Being Classically Liberal - Posts | Facebook - "The U.S. Census counts illegal aliens as part of our population, and as such, they expand the number of House seats that areas with larger illegal populations end up having (among other consequences). Since illegal aliens tend to reside in a select few states that have more “sanctuary” type policies, it’s blue States that get their representation amplified at the expense of red States. One estimate from the Center for Immigration Studies last year found that just from this most current census alone, the inclusion of illegal aliens will cost Ohio, Alabama, and Minnesota each a seat, while giving an extra seat to California, New York, and Texas. And that’s just from the 2020 census – not the cumulative effects of counting illegals in population, which the CIS estimates has given an extra 26 net seats to Democrats... “even the United Nations recommends that its member countries ask a citizenship question on their census surveys, and countries ranging from Australia to Germany to Indonesia all ask this question. Only in the U.S. is this considered at all controversial — and it shouldn’t be.” A citizenship question was part of the Census historically, and prior surveys consistently asked citizenship questions until 1950. When the Census was switched to including both a short-form and long-form survey in 1970, the citizenship question was part of the long form survey (and was included up until the 2000 census). The long form was discontinued after the 2000 census and replaced with the American Community Survey, hence the abolition of the citizenship question."
Blue states just lost a BUNCH of congressional seats in the census. Angered by citizens fleeing their liberal utopias, leftists blamed Trump. - "States that gained residents and will gain congressional seats include the freedom-loving states of Texas, Florida, and Montana, the pot-loving states of Oregon and Colorado, and for some reason, North Carolina... As lefties reeled from this lost, they took a moment to consider what led them to this place. Did people leave their states because of neutered police departments, a surge in violent crime, insane taxes, lockdowns, cost of living, coverups, and the indoctrination of their children? NOPE! It was TRUMP!"
The woke takeover of the National Trust is gathering steam - "all of its volunteers, whether they engage with the public or not, will be made to undergo diversity and inclusion training when returning after lockdown. Some volunteers have already resigned in protest. I don’t blame them. The "everyday inclusion" training promotes a number of poisonous political ideas, though these are disguised by anodyne management-speak. One of the worst ideas is that of "unconscious" or "implicit" bias. This is the myth that you can use psychological tests, usually done over the internet, to determine whether someone is unconsciously racist (or sexist, or indeed any other -ist or -phobe of your manager’s choosing). Do you hold secret racist thoughts? Computer says yes. In truth, these tests are about as scientific as a horoscope. Last year, the Government abandoned implicit-bias testing in the Civil Service. It found that "there is currently no evidence that this training changes behaviour in the long term or improves workplace equality". The Harvard Business Review similarly found that even any beneficial "effects may not last after the programme ends". There are major downsides, too. In a world where being a racist is (understandably) one of the worst offences possible, many employees are terrified of scoring poorly on these tests. It also enjoins everyone to put race at the forefront of their minds at all times. What might once have been normal, casual interactions between colleagues can become a minefield. Everyone is expected to second guess if their behaviour is, implicitly, giving off racist signals. The end result is that ethnic-minority employees are treated differently – hardly a win for equality. But despite the lack of clear benefits and the demonstrable downsides, the reach of unconscious-bias training and testing is always expanding. A Guardian survey found that 81 per cent of UK companies subject their employees to it – despite many business leaders losing confidence in it. But few are prepared to air their concerns out loud. The former boss of KPMG was forced from his role after he called unconscious bias "complete and utter crap". "After every single unconscious-bias training that has ever been done, nothing’s ever improved", he observed. The protective ring of silence around all things diversity allows this kind of training and thinking to creep into more and more areas unchallenged. Another questionable idea found in the National Trust’s training is that of "equity"... a coalition of teaching unions called for "equity" to become standard practice even in nursery settings. It called on nursery staff to "encourage dialogue and conversation about difference", instead of taking a "colour-blind approach" to education. In other words, this is the opposite of racial equality as it has been understood in the decades since the civil rights movement. Yet this version of "anti-racism", pushed by an increasingly shrill race lobby, is being accepted by businesses, institutions and organisations up and down the land. Sadly not even the National Trust is immune to these trends. Though the growing backlash, from its members and volunteers, should be welcomed wholeheartedly."
National Trust chairman Tim Parker quits after rebellion over charity’s ‘woke’ agenda - "members of the charity, MPs and ministers have grown concerned about the Trust after a report published last September. The report spoke about the links between the Trust’s properties, including the home of Winston Churchill, and the UK’s colonial and slavery history. The rebel motion at this year’s annual general meeting, is understood to have been backed by more than 50 members... “The pandemic has presented the National Trust with severe challenges, and meeting these while securing the future well-being of the charity should have been the absolute priority. "Instead, the National Trust has been the subject of debates in Parliament and an investigation by the Charity Commission, which found that the charity published a report which generated strongly held and divided views without fully managing the risks to the reputation of the charity."The director-general has admitted that the timing of the publication of the 'Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery' was 'a mistake'." The motion also stated that morale among the charity’s members is “at an all-time low”. It read: "The National Trust leadership has frequently been out of step with its members and supporters over recent years. "Unnecessary controversies have threatened to undermine the charity’s simple duty to promote public enjoyment of buildings, places and chattels under its protection. "As a result, morale among volunteers and members is at an all-time low and the National Trust has suffered, both financially and reputationally."... Tory MP Sir John Hayes, of the Parliamentary Common Sense Group and a National Trust member, told the Mail: "The National Trust has sadly lost sight of its purpose. It is preoccupied with the prejudices of a woke minority." Last year’s report by the Trust attracted widespread criticism and caused the Charity Commission to open a “regulatory compliance case”. At the time, the Heritage Minister said the report was “unfortunate” and that the Trust should go back to its “core functions”."
National Trust loses thousands of volunteers as some tell bosses they feel ‘abandoned and ignored’ - "The National Trust has lost thousands of volunteers in the last year with some telling bosses they have been “abandoned”, ignored and treated with disrespect. During the annual general meeting, members attempted to force the charity to consult with volunteers before making changes that impacted their work as they did not feel valued for the thousands of hours they donated... Caroline McAslan, a volunteer and a member of campaign group Restore Trust, raised the issue of the treatment of volunteers, and quoted official National Trust figures which showed that the number giving up their time had dropped from 65,000 to 50,000."
Oddly, the wokeness is not mentioned at all
