The Welsh Government has invested more than £1.2million in a virtual reality educational platform designed to lecture students about “white privilege”.
Described as the “world’s first anti-racist virtual world,” the immersive 3D environment has been deployed in colleges across Wales for pupils aged 16 and above since 2024.
Students navigate through a digital space featuring a central atrium decorated with portraits of civil rights figures, including Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and Betty Campbell.
The platform contains interactive lessons covering “black feminism” and “decolonising politics,” with one section examining “sociology through an anti-racist lens.”
It also explores how “whiteness” manifests in language, policies and research, and how privilege affects social, educational and workplace settings.
Among the key terms students are encouraged to learn are “patriarchy” and “imperialism,” alongside the concept of “white privilege”, which the platform defines as “inherent advantages possessed by a white person, which means that during their day-to-day life, they do not have to consider their race.”
One room in the metaverse platform is devoted to a “world timeline”, designed to teach pupils about colonialism and the intertwined histories of Europe, Africa and India.
Within the India section, the Bengal famine of 1770 is explicitly compared to the Holocaust.
The Welsh Government has invested more than £1.2million in a virtual reality educational platform designed to lecture students about ‘white privilege’
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“Although partly down to weather conditions and droughts, most historians agree that the vast loss of life was directly down to the policies of the British,” a narrator states.
“During the famine of 1770 the agricultural tax was increased from 10 per cent under the Mughals to 50 per cent under the British East India Company, leading to the loss of 10 million lives in Bengal, equivalent to the Black Death in Europe or the Holocaust,” the platform preaches.
The metaverse also presents various strands of feminist thought, including psychoanalytical feminism, a 1970s theory which draws on the work of Sigmund Freud.
The platform describes this as a “theory of oppression that asserts that men have an inherent psychological need to subjugate women.”
Within the India section, the Bengal famine of 1770 is explicitly compared to the Holocaust
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It adds: “This branch of feminism seeks to gain insight into how our psychic lives develop in order to better understand and change women’s oppression.”
The curriculum further contends that feminism remains insufficiently taught in schools, attributing this partly to patriarchal influence over conventional education.
The platform had labelled a campaign leaflet by former Wales Secretary David TC Davies as an example of “dog whistling” over his calls for greater consultation on traveller site developments.
References to Mr Davies were subsequently removed following media enquiries, reported The Telegraph.
Elsewhere in the virtual space, a billboard shows a leaflet circulated in 2022 as “part of a collaborative campaign to prevent Jimmy Carr performing in Wales”, following controversy over anti-gypsy remarks in one of his Netflix shows.
The initiative forms part of Wales’s broader anti-racist action plan, unveiled in 2022, which aims to make the nation the world’s first anti-racist country by 2030.
An official report underpinning the strategy identified “deeply rooted racial inequalities experienced by black, Asian and minority ethnic people in Wales”.
It stated that “ethnic minority people are disproportionately disadvantaged at nearly every level of every system.”
Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake condemned the project, describing the use of political campaign material within the platform as “outrageous” and tantamount to accusing MPs of racism.
A billboard in the space presents as ‘part of a collaborative campaign to prevent Jimmy Carr performing in Wales’
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He said: “Hard-pressed Welsh taxpayers will be disgusted to know that Welsh Labour are spending their cash on this kind of nonsense.
“It is also outrageous that the Welsh Government is using state funding to support attacks on other parties’ MPs, accusing them of racism just for standing up for their constituents.”
Mr Hollinrake declared that the “woke metaverse” demonstrated Welsh Labour was “living in a virtual reality.”
The Welsh Government defended its investment, with a spokesman stating: “We have invested £1.2m in the further education curriculum for anti-racism since 2022.
“This pioneering project has delivered overwhelmingly positive outcomes and reflects our commitments to an anti-racist Wales, as well as reflecting similar offers within English institutions.”