Unlearning Racism in Higher Education

Hello {{ first name | friends}},

I gave a talk a while back on racism in higher education, sharing some telling stats as well as suggesting a starting point for dealing with it. Today's article includes a brief section setting the scene, for all subscribers, as well as a bonus section for newsletter supporters, which suggests some approaches to dealing with the issue. Some of those will also be useful for anyone looking to create educational resources. Read on…

I'd like to focus on a hard truth that many academic institutions want to ignore.

There is no such thing as a neutral space. Let me repeat that. There is no such thing as a neutral space.

Walking through the halls of academia might lead you to believe that it's a space where there's true meritocracy, where only the quality of your ideas matters. But the truth is very different, both in foundation and in execution. The curriculum we're told to master is often based on Western ideals about civilisation. If you truly study history, you'll know that many of the places in the Global South that were colonised and oppressed had flourishing civilisations of their own before the arrival of the Europeans. The curriculum is often based on which banks of knowledge are considered worth studying, and there's a preponderance of European and American men in almost every curriculum.

Once you get into the hallowed halls, presuming you actually achieve that, your day-to-day can still be filled with experiences of racism. From security questioning your right to be in a space, to people underestimating your knowledge base, making presumptions about your culture, and calling on you to represent a history that's often traumatic, or an experience that's not your own, because you've been lumped in with other people from the same country or culture.

The data tells the story here. Current research from Universities UK reveals that 24% of students from what they call "ethnic minorities", but I call minoritised, to reflect the fact that this is a process that is imposed rather than some unchangeable aspect of identity, have experienced some form of racial harassment in higher education. This figure rises to 45% for Black students specifically. And the most common form? Racist name-calling. Insults. So-called jokes experienced by more than half of those who face racial harassment.

There is also the awarding gap. And isn't it a supreme irony that the countries that were so free to colonise and invade now have strictures on the accessibility and presence of those they colonised? Only 4% of UK-domiciled postgraduate research students identify as Black, and that means there's a continuing lack of a Black academic staff pipeline.

All of this compounds the Black tax: the exhaustion that Black and global majority students feel and face because of existing in that identity in majority white spaces.

So that gives us an idea of the scale of the issue, of how embedded it is. But now let's talk about the unlearning piece — about how we change within our institutions, how we make change, how we become active anti-racists.

Supporter Bonus Below: Five Ways to Make Change