‘The National Trust is strangely obsessed with race’ says our former Director

Our former Director, Zewditu Gebreyohanes, wrote in The Times on 16 May 2024:

A National Trust press release this week announced a “new project that aims to improve representation in the outdoors by supporting people from the global majority to become qualified walk leaders”. “People from the global majority”? What do they mean?

For those not in the know about the latest updates to politically correct terminology, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) has helpfully provided a definition of this term, which apparently refers to “all ethnic groups except white British and other white groups, including white minorities”. Why, in the 21st century, are some people still transfixed by skin colour? Far from representing progress, this suggests society is regressing, simply flipping racism in the other direction.

Terms such as these help nobody. Making any group feel insignificant and unimportant only foments resentment and polarisation. And implying that everyone whose skin is not “white” can somehow be lumped together as a huge homogeneous bloc is ignorant and patronising to all — as is suggesting that white itself is one uniform race, with English and Romanians, Spaniards and Poles basically being the same.

The strange thing is that some people are advertising their promotion and use of “global majority” and patting themselves on the back for it. Many museums and heritage organisations have adopted this terminology on the advice and encouragement of the Museums Association, the NCVO and similar-minded groups.

Some institutions have already stopped talking about the “global majority”, having realised that such divisive rhetoric does the very opposite of solving the supposed societal problems it claims to address. But why would sensible institutions have so uncritically accepted these weird phrases in the first place? They should surely be doing other things — fulfilling their actual functions might be a good place to begin.

The National Trust press release also refers to “individuals from African and Asian minoritised backgrounds”. Again, what does “minoritised” mean? Either people of African and Asian backgrounds are minorities within the nation’s demographic make-up or they are not; they cannot be “minoritised”. This is a reminder that something is deeply wrong in the National Trust. They may argue that this kind of language is costless but using the term “global majority” indicates that they have forgotten for whom and for what they were created. The clue is in the name. It’s the National Trust, not the Global Trust.