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This is wonderful

Prof Wale Adebanwi, another signatory, is the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations. The professorship was created in the early 1950s, following a donation from the then Rhodesian Selection Trust, who requested it be named in memory of Cecil Rhodes.

There’s actually a Rhodes Professor of Race Relations? At Oxford?

That the current holder is demanding the removal of the statue is just icing

7 thoughts on “This is wonderful”

  1. The problem with smearing everything as ‘racism’ is that it’s just not the same order of magnitude.

    On the one hand, you have people abandoning everything, leaving homes and possessions behind because they fear they are about to be killed, imminently, unless they do.

    On the other hand, you have a handful of overpaid pseudo-intellectuals whining about a statue.

    When they flee the UK and claim asylum in another country, perhaps then we might take their claims of racism seriously.

  2. It will be lovely if the Rhodes bequest is contingent on the name of the college and the statue, so the removal of the statue will result in the abolition of the Chair, the closure of the College and the ceasation of the Scholarship.

  3. @ jgh
    Oriel is not quite as old as my college but it predates Rhodes by several centuries: its charter was granted in 1326 so removing a statue of some guy born 500-odd years later [NB the Fellows are not proposing to remove it] would not make Oriel vanish in a puff of smoke.
    OTOH Professor Adebanwi should refuse to accept his salary if he feels that strongly about Rhodes.

  4. ‘When they flee the UK and claim asylum in another country, perhaps then we might take their claims of racism seriously.’

    But if they were gone, there’d be no reason to think about them at all.

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