Friday 12 June 2009

Royal Agricultural College: Make us more like Brixton Poly

At the website of the Royal Agricultural College, a profile of Visiting Professor Chris Mullard:

The pathways of Chris’s career to date have produced considerable experience at a high level of management, organisation and the development, modernisation and multiculturalisation of national and international agencies.

His academic career (principally in the political sociology of race relations, education and development) reached its peak in the late eighties/early nineties when he held the Royal Chair in Ethnic Studies and Education at the University of Amsterdam. Since the publication of ‘Black Britain’ (Allen & U 1973) and ‘Race, Power and Resistance’ (Routledge 1985) he has been published extensively and provided keynote speeches at national and international gatherings.

But perhaps the ultimate manifestation of Chris’s passion, drive and ability can be found within Focus Consultancy, which he co-founded in 1986 as a multiracial agency, specialising in the provision of research, development, social marketing and other key consultancy services in the field of the social management of change within global and multicultural contexts.

Chris received his CBE in 2004 for services to race relations from the 1960s when he was Secretary of CARD (the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination). He recently resigned as Chair of London Notting Hill Carnival after a tenure of six years and he is currently Honorary Consul for South Africa for the South West of England and a Deputy Lieutenant for the County of Wiltshire.

He is a keen golfer and his other hobbies include gardening, travel and theatre.

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It seems unlikely that anybody at the Royal Agricultural College really thinks the countryside needs the blessings of diversity that our cities have ‘enjoyed’ or wants our village fetes to more resemble the Notting Hill Carnival. Yet none can say so. Every organisation must act as though diversity is beneficial even though most of its staff know full well that it’s a nuisance at best. I wouldn’t be surprised if his colleagues and students quietly despise Professor Mullard; no-one ever comes out of a pro-diversity lecture thanking God for diversity, it’s all about making it plain to the White folks that they better just shut up and take what’s coming. That’s what is meant by ‘the social management of change’ and on occasion Mullard has spelt that out all too clearly.

In the early 1980s he was Director of the Race Relations Policy and Practice Unit at the London University of Education, the country’s largest teacher-training college. In that role he wrote about what would happen if institutions and businesses, public and private, did not institutionalise anti-White attitudes and put people like him in charge of race policy:

The battle will be a bloody one. Black and White will have no choice. The liberals… will be caught in the middle. In the end they too will have no choice - they will have to side with black or white…

Blacks will fight with pressure, leaflets, campaigns, demonstrations, fists and scorching resentment, which, when peaceful means fail, will explode into street-fighting, urban guerrilla warfare, looting, burning and rioting. Critics will argue smugly that this cannot possibly happen here. Most of them will be white, blind to what is already happening, wrapped in cocoons of isolation and utopian dreams of multi-racialism, confident that white is might.

To these I say ‘Watch out Whitey, nigger goin’ to get you!’

(quoted in Anti-Racism, an Assault on Education and Value, ed. Frank Palmer, Sherwood Press, 1986).

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