“SOAS students call for ‘white philosophers to be dropped from curriculum’” read the headlines. “Ditch white philosophers’, students tell London university.”

I’m on the phone to Amarachi Ninette Iheke, who works as the people of colour officer at SOAS’ students’ union, and was at the launch of the Decolonising Our Minds campaign (who have been campaigning for the changes to the curriculum), and she’s frustrated. “Decolonising Our Minds was never, at all, asking for philosophers to be removed from the curriculum,” she says. “It was asking that we broaden the way we talk about the ‘other’, which is what SOAS is based on as an institution.”

Looking at the Educational Priorities set out on the SU website, which appears to be the source of the news stories, it looks like she’s right. The section on “Decolonising SOAS” reads that the SU wants “to make sure that the majority of the philosophers on our courses are from the Global South or it’s diaspora. SOAS’s focus is on Asia and Africa and therefore the foundations of its theories should be presented by Asian or African philosophers (or the diaspora).” There is no mention of ridding the curriculum of its white philosophers at all. “Given the inaccuracy of some media reports, it is important that we clarify that there is no question of ‘white philosophers’ being removed from the curriculum at SOAS,” the instructors of the BA World Philosophies programme said in a statement released yesterday. “Plato and Kant will remain at the table.”

“SOAS’s focus is on Asia and Africa and therefore the foundations of its theories should be presented by Asian or African philosophers (or the diaspora)” – SOAS SU

And yet, in the past few days, there has been an uproar from the right wing media and beyond about the claims, with commentators such as philosopher Sir Roger Scruton calling the students ignorant. “You can’t rule out a whole area of intellectual endeavour without having investigated it and clearly they haven’t investigated what they mean by white philosophy,” he told the Mail on Sunday. Which is ironic, considering the inaccuracy of the news he was commenting on. “Books have been written,” says Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, an academic at the University of Birmingham about Scruton’s failure to understand the colonial context around the philosopher Kant's work. “Let Scruton use the skills in which he has supposedly been trained to seek out and to read those books.”

The battle lines have been drawn and redrawn, following on from similar instances of conflict between so-called “snowflake” students and the “reasonable”, right-wingers who believe PC culture is being used to infringe upon their freedom of expression. Last year, they were up in arms about the campaign for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Oxford; a white supremacist and coloniser who many students felt shouldn’t be given the prestige of immortalisation.

As put by university lecturer Tom Whyman in the Guardian, “the stereotype of students as easily ‘triggered’ special snowflakes who use political correctness to police their teachers is one I simply don’t recognise”, and the backlash and harassment that the students involved in Decolonising Our Minds are now facing seems telling. It reveals how strongly the institutions and powers at be seem want to maintain the systems of oppression that allow them to get away with prejudice and racism.

What’s also worrying is that SOAS’ ideas have even been deemed as radical. What would be truly radical is if, say, the university actually decided not to teach any texts by white people for a set period of time. Campaigns such as Decolonising our Minds and ‘Why is my curriculum so white?’, wouldn’t have to exist if we were already giving enough focus to black and brown voices at our universities, and it’s always been a struggle for black and brown people to educate themselves about our collective history.

“Black people have always had to go through strife and struggle to educate ourselves about ourselves, and my main feeling now is that the stories of my ancestors should be prioritised in institutions that have been so complicit in our subjugation” 

In a fascinating piece by Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker, she tells the story of Albert Woodfox, a man who spent the longest period of time ever in isolation while in prison in America. He was a Black Panther, and spoke to her about how they educated themselves while in prison. “Eighteen members of the Black Panther Party, waiting to be tried for shoot-outs with the police, held classes on politics, economics, sociology, and the history of slavery,” she writes, “They ripped apart Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” and divided it into sections, so that each inmate could study a chapter and teach the others what he’d learned.”

Although I’ve heard grandiose, Latin-speaking posh boys wax lyrical on the likes of Kant and Plato, and even learnt a bit about them as part of my English Literature degree, I only became aware of the work of Frantz Fanon, a revolutionary psychoanalyst and post-colonial philosopher, when I saw the news on Afropunk that a documentary about his life was being crowdfunded.

As Woodfox’s story reveals, black people have always had to go through strife and struggle to educate ourselves about ourselves, and my main feeling now is that the stories of my ancestors should be prioritised in institutions that have been so complicit in our subjugation. I had never heard of Fanon, despite his level of influence, because his philosophical contributions to society are not deemed “worthy” enough by wider white society.

Looking back through my own academic history it’s nauseating how few black or Asian journalists I was taught about on my Masters, and that I genuinely wasn’t expected to read a book written by a black woman until my final year of my English Literature degree.

That’s why I’m fully in support of campaigns like Decolonising Our Minds. The concept might seem abstract, but the effects it can have are very real: people of colour need to feel as though our ideas are valid and can even be intellectual.