Sonita Alleyne, the Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, issued a passionate ‘personal message’ about the killing of George Floyd on her college’s website: ‘The message posted on the College Twitter account “If one man can’t breathe, we all can’t breathe” were my words,’ she revealed. ‘Be angry at this moment.’
Ms Alleyne’s message was published on 5 June — the day, in 1989, when the world watched the famous pictures of a young man confronting a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Soon 10,000 Chinese could not breathe, being dead. I have recently drawn attention to the adulatory approach of the college’s China Centre to the regime of the Chinese Communist party, which this year banned commemorations of the killings. Ms Alleyne comments readily on the events in Minneapolis, but has forbidden dons to speak to the press about her college’s relationship with China.
This article is an extract from Charles Moore’s Spectator Notes, available in this week’s magazine.
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