The BBC has acknowledged that the idea of “white privilege” is a contested concept following a complaint about its youth-orientated news service’s “controversial” definition of the term.
A 2020 article by the BBC’s Newsround, aimed at educating children about white privilege, has been updated with a link to a new explainer that “examines arguments about the concept’s use” and concedes that it is a “contested area.”
The move follows a complaint from the campaign group Don’t Divide Us, which advocates for a “common sense” approach to race.
BBC Response ‘Bureaucratic’
Speaking to The Epoch Times, Baroness Claire Fox, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords and founder of free speech festival The Battle of Ideas, welcomed the move but said that the BBC’s response to Don’t Divide Us was ”entirely bureaucratic,” with the broadcaster having told the group that they had missed the deadline for complaints.Baroness Fox said: “They [the BBC] had no self knowledge at all that there was anything problematic about it. And in many ways, it shows how any sense of what impartiality is has been completely compromised. But it also is a great success story that a parents-led and educators-led group carried on pursuing it, and eventually, they backed up.
“I didn’t want what they said removed. So I think this is a good resolution. The problem was that they commissioned it in the first place, and didn’t think about the fact that maybe it was problematic to preach what is effectively a hierarchy based on skin colour, with a whole range of historical assumptions … that were historically inaccurate.”
Baroness Fox also said that the history the BBC was trying to teach was “history through the prism of white privilege, which is an entirely socially constructed construct.”
Emphasising the importance of distinguishing opinions from factual content, Baroness Fox critiqued the presentation of such perspectives in a news format meant for young audiences.
She underlined the need for transparency, asserting, “If it’s got somebody who’s got an opinion, fine, but you have to then indicate it’s an opinion, not presented as somehow a tablet of stone that says truth.” Despite the controversy, she noted a reluctance from the national broadcaster to change the original content.
The director of Don’t Divide Us, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, told The Telegraph on Tuesday: “Although we’re pleased the BBC has recognised ‘white privilege’ is a contested term, the original content remains on the Newsround site, where children will continue to read its historical distortions about black and white people in America.
“No educator or broadcaster should be pushing controversial, U.S.-imported ideology to schoolchildren as fact.”
Toby Young, director of the Free Speech Union, told The Epoch Times, “I think the speed with which the BBC has retreated tells us that it doesn’t feel very confident about pushing this woke gobbledegook.”
He added: “It’s just reflexive groupthink, with no real thought or philosophy underpinning it. The lesson here is we should always fight back whenever any institution spouts this nonsense.”
BBC Accused of Promoting CRT
Last week, Secretary of State for Business and Trade Kemi Badenoch accused the BBC of promoting critical race theory (CRT) after one of its headlines claimed that black women were “most likely to die” of the plague in medieval London.CRT is a left-wing academic framework that originated in the United States, examining how race intersects with social structures and institutions.
Critics noted that the article’s claim was based on a tenuous study from the Museum of London, which used the 675-year-old remains of 49 individuals who succumbed to the Black Death, with only nine identified as “probably” black in ethnicity.
Ms. Badenoch took to X, formerly known as Twitter, both to voice her concerns over the headline and to take issue with the study itself.
“This study is unreliable and the headline inaccurate and alarmist,” she said.
Speaking regarding recent cases of CRT appearing in mainstream media reports, Ms. Badenoch said, “Too many organisations (and news outlets) use misleading race statistics to alarm ethnic minorities and whip up tensions around history and racism.”
Baroness Fox also expressed her views on the recent importation of CRT from the United States and its impact on British discourse. She noted that while the origins of CRT can be traced to French philosophy, its incorporation into the UK educational landscape stems from a failure to challenge the ideas associated with it.
Peer Suggests CRT Leads to Anti-Semitism
She stated, “Failure to challenge these ideas has allowed them to take root and become completely normalised,” adding that it had “taken a very nasty turn” with consequences now becoming “a very real social problem.”Baroness Fox emphasised the need for critical engagement with these concepts, arguing that the fusion of imported theories with domestic victim politics has led to potential anti-Semitism.
“The consequences are that young people in this country are expressing views like ‘Jews are the colonial settler state, Palestinians are the victims.’ The failure to challenge these ideas has allowed them to take root and become completely normalised.”
She also underscored the normalisation of such ideas in academia and their infiltration into schools, raising concerns about the potential consequences for social cohesion and understanding.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the BBC for comment.
