It was my daughter’s reluctance to wear a pair of sandals made of embroidered Chinese fabric that made me realise that something had shifted. When I asked why she wasn’t wearing them, she said: “I just feel like there’s a chance I’ll offend someone.” In that moment, I understood that my daughter was coming of age in a world radically different from the one I grew up in, a world where even the fabric on a pair of shoes could feel politically charged. Where self-censorship had become the safest form of self-expression.
When a black professor was branded a ‘white supremacist’ I knew our universities had lost the plot
