How would you feel if you were told, by someone who knew very little about you or your upbringing, that because of one of your immutable physical characteristics you must have been the victim of oppression?For Jane Bradbury — who identifies herself as “Latino”, though she doesn’t actually know her ethnicity as she was brought up by white adoptive parents — being told, by a white colleague, words to the effect that she must have been subjected to oppression simply because of the colour of her skin left her feeling “very upset” and “distressed”. An employment tribunal recently awarded the former Sky Television engineer ￡14,000 in compensation on the grounds that this assumption was “a form of stereotyping” and amounted to racial discrimination.
Bradbury told her manager after the conversation that “I have never felt oppressed in my life”. And she didn’t appreciate her colleague — who, like her, was a designated “inclusion advocate” — assuming she had, “without even knowing anything of my background ethnicity or upbringing”.
In a world preoccupied with victimhood in which we are encouraged to be active “allies” to those who don’t share the privilege that we have — though the advantages conferred by class are often ignored — we appear to be removing what was once considered a transgression, being patronising (treating someone in “a way that is apparently kind or helpful but that betrays a feeling of superiority”, as the Oxford Dictionary has it), from the moral sin bin.