Invitation to Priyamvada Gopal to take a Lie Detector Test in Cambridge
We would like Priyamvada Gopal to take a lie detector test in Cambridge, or anywhere else she finds convenient.
Gopal hit the headlines last week with some highly provocative tweets. One stated “White lives don’t matter. As white lives” and the other “Abolish whiteness”.
Twitter suspended her account and then reinstated it having been given an explanation. However the social media platform deleted the “White lives don’t matter” tweet following mass complaints about it.
Ms Gopal has since sought to justify the tweets. In an interview with the Washington Free Beacon she said “My Tweet said whiteness is not special, not a criterion for making lives matter. I stand by that.” One might question why she didn’t tweet “Black lives don’t matter, as black lives” if colour is not a criterion for making lives matter.
Who is Priyamvada Gopal?
A teaching Fellow of Churchill College, Ms Gopal works in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University.
Born in Delhi, India she came from a privileged background being the daughter of a diplomat. She got her BA and MA in India before relocating to the United States. In 2000 she obtained her PhD, at Cornell University, in colonial and postcolonial literature. Around a year afterwards she moved to Cambridge University and is shortly to be promoted to Professor despite the controversy she created with her tweets.
Gopal spreads negativity and division
Priyamvada Gopal appears to take a negative view of almost anything British. Whether it is the empire, colonialism, imperialism or ‘whiteness’, she has nothing positive to say about these issues. Despite living and teaching in a predominantly white country she criticises whiteness in power structures and appears to suggest it has something to do with race. In reality It probably does, in the sense that in a predominantly black country, you are more likely to find blackness in power structures.
She is not keen on her opinions being challenged as was evidenced in a 2006 debate on ‘Start of the Week’, a BBC Radio 4 programme. She opposed historian Niall Ferguson’s assertion that the British Empire was mainly a virtuous and benevolent project. Matters weren’t helped when another participant in the programme (an Indian woman) said that Gopal’s opinion was not shared by all young Indian people. Rather than accepting this, Gopal accused the BBC of “playing off natives against each other”.
In a 2019 tweet Gopal tweeted “I resist urges to kneecap white men every day. So, no **I** am the hero.” This allegedly was due to her being mugged by a white person. So are we to assume that she blames all white people for the crime of one? Or was this something she made up? It’s one question we would ask if she accepts our invitation to take a lie detector test in Cambridge. However, no matter which way you look at it, this is a provocative, divisive tweet.
As a believer in ‘systemic racism’ within the UK she has rather proven that it doesn’t exist, certainly not at Cambridge University. She has been fully supported by the University as can be seen in the tweet below.
Playing the victim
As with several of her other tweets, Priyamvada Gopal must know that anyone tweeting “Abolish whiteness” in a predominantly white country, is likely to attract criticism. “White lives don’t matter,” followed by an afterthought of “As white lives” is provocative in the extreme.
Excluding the alleged death threats she says she received, the veracity of which we can’t comment upon due to her locking her Twitter account, she surely must have expected a backlash. Naturally we condemn any threats of death or violence. Criticism of the tweets should be encouraged since it is not only academics that have the right to express their “lawful opinions”.
It is interesting that she threatened to sue the Free Beacon for quoting her as saying “white lives don’t matter.” This is reminiscent of when the media reported Donald Trump as saying “Ban all Muslims” without also reporting the end of the sentence which was “until we figure out what is going on”. We don’t remember Ms Gopal being outraged by this omission.
In addition, a petition created by students that had attracted in excess of 20,000 signatures was deleted by Change.org. The petition demanded that Cambridge University dismiss Gopal but Change.org curiously stated that because it was targeting one person, they considered it to be “bullying”. We would love to know what they consider a call to “Abolish whiteness” is.
Hypocrisy of Cambridge University
Despite its defence of the rights of their academics to express lawful opinions, it seems that the same support has not been extended to historian, David Starkey. In a recent interview with Darren Grimes, a conservative commentator, Dr Starkey said “Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain would there?”
This unfortunate, though true, statement has resulted in Dr Starkey falling victim to ‘Cancel Culture’. Harper Collins, his book publisher, has stated they will no longer publish his books. He has been forced to resign his honorary fellowship at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and he has been pilloried relentlessly in the media.
His crime was to say “damn blacks” because it’s clear that slavery was not genocide, indeed it was the reverse. Slaves in the West were bought and sold and exploited in terms of labour, for which they were needed. However, black people do not have the monopoly on being exploited in this way. White people were enslaved and oppressed in the same way as black people were, if not more so, as can be learned from the video below. And of course, they were exploited by exactly the same people who seek to divide us now. History also blows a hole in the concept of “white privilege”.
Again, Dr Starkey’s experience proves that there is no systemic racism at Cambridge University because surely it would have stood by him, if there was. Or is the alleged systemic racism at the University biased in favour of non-white people?
Why we believe Priyamvada Gopal should take a lie detector test
We would like to know whether Gopal is guilty of racist behaviour, whether she has ever discriminated against anyone during her career and if the mugging story is true. If anyone would like to know anything else, please contact us.
We believe that parents at home and abroad, considering sending their children to Cambridge University, need to gain greater insight into this professor’s divisive behaviour. A polygraph examination will go some way toward that aim.
As one of the most welcoming nations in the world, we are tired of being accused of racism. Naturally racism exists in most countries but to define a whole nation or race as racist is absurd and it needs to stop.
We welcome our readers’ thoughts as always.
