Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible. Yomi Adegoke
His presence, it warned them, was a reminder that the college’s ‘wonderful and safe environment’ can be taken advantage of, adding that its security officers ‘do not know [his] intentions’. No one once asked Femi who he was or why he was there.
Afua remembers her visitors also being on the receiving end of similarly racist treatment at Oxford years before:
‘I had this boyfriend in London who was black and I coped by running away a lot on the weekends and hanging out with him, and then he’d come and visit me and that was a big issue because he was a dark-skinned black man. One time when he came to my college, they wouldn’t let him in and the porter rang me and said: “You should’ve warned us if you were expecting someone who looked like a criminal,” and I’ll never forget that. Even then, I was like, I cannot believe I’m having to put up with this. It was like there was no sense that … It was really bad and I was very conscious of being with him at Oxford because it kind of drew further attention to me as a black woman.’
These types of everyday microaggressions have sparked several conversations and motivated various campaigns, one of the most high-profile being the ‘I, too, am Oxford’ series, inspired by the ‘I, too, am Harvard’ initiative in America. In 2014, Oxford students organised a photoshoot consisting of 65 portraits of BAME attendees of the university, with the hopes of highlighting the ignorance they came across at Oxford – and confronting it. ‘How did you get into Oxford? Jamaicans don’t study’, ‘But wait, where are you really from?’ and ‘I was pleasantly surprised … you actually speak well!’ were just some of the choice quotes written on the placards they held in front of them, forcing their peers to encounter the ugly face of university racism. It is hugely important that black students continue to have these conversations and to hold their universities to account, especially when white students so often centre racial discourse around themselves. During Afua’s time at university, even the ACS wasn’t a black safe space:
‘I joined the African-Caribbean Society only to discover that it was run by a white boy from one of the elite private schools in the country because he loved going to Jamaica to his dad’s villa in the summer holidays and he had fancied being a “DJ reggae man”. At the time, I was just like, this is completely off, but I couldn’t articulate it. It was classic white privilege, exoticisation.’
Perhaps as a result of the slowly increasing black student population, the voice of black students is beginning to be heard in universities in a way it hasn’t been before, as Afua explains:
‘For my book, I interviewed some black female students and it was interesting listening to them, because on one level they were describing the same microaggressions that we experienced, i.e. getting IDd when you were going to different colleges whereas white people weren’t, or porters confusing you with the one other black person in the college even though you looked nothing alike, that kind of thing. But their attitudes were so different: they had names for it. We didn’t have a word for microaggression and they had a confidence and ability to articulate their sense of oppression that I really admired. Even though on one level it was an acknowledgement that a lot of things hadn’t changed, I found it really positive and uplifting speaking to these students because they were much more organised and assertive and they called things out when they saw them, whereas we just didn’t feel able to. We would talk about it amongst ourselves but we just kind of had a defeatism about it.’
It may be that we now feel less apologetic about taking up space in a country that is rigged against us but which many of us still consider ours. But even with our newfound ability to speak up, some students still remain negatively affected by racism at university. In fact, the government was called on to take ‘urgent’ action after it emerged that black students are more than 50 per cent more likely to drop out of university than their white and Asian counterparts. More than one in ten black students drop out of university in England, compared with 6.9 per cent of the whole student population, according to a report by the UPP and Social Market Foundations.20 The government have made a whole heap of noise about increasing the numbers of black students enrolled at certain British universities, but the problem of how to keep them has been largely neglected. London universities are more likely to have a higher proportion of black students in attendance – and it’s no coincidence that London has the highest drop-out rate of all the English regions, with nearly one in ten students dropping out during their first year of study.
‘My best friend at Oxford, she dropped out in the third year,’ Afua says. ‘She was doing a four-year degree and she dropped out because she felt like she wasn’t good enough. She just didn’t believe in herself enough, she couldn’t cope. It was literally just Imposter Syndrome, like, “Everyone else is better than me, cleverer than me and they deserve to be here.” She went to a state school, she had a multiple sense of illegitimacy there and she took a year out, she came back and she got a first. I found that interesting because there was no question about her intelligence or her deserving to be there; it was just that sense of acceptance. I think it’s really common – I was reading a report about how drop-out rates are higher for black students, and I’ve been mentoring a student, who, ironically, is from a very similar background to my friend and doing the same degree, and who just dropped out last year. It’s so frustrating that you can’t tell someone to stay somewhere that makes them feel unhappy but you do wonder, if this person had been supported, would this have happened?
‘I think universities just assume that their jobs are to just get a few black people through the door. They have no sense of the extra emotional burden that we carry by being there, so they don’t do anything proactive to support us. I nearly dropped out in my first year and it was basically like: if you’re not up for it, then good riddance. There was no “How can we support you?”, “What’s going on here?”, you know? There was just no intellectual curiosity as to what this phenomenon was, which ironically just confirmed why I wasn’t supposed to be there anyway, because the possibility of me not being here doesn’t remotely bother anyone.’
The reasons why black students’ drop-out rate is higher than other groups are complicated and multifaceted. According to one report,21 many universities struggle to respond to the ‘complex’ issues related to ethnicity, which tend to be ‘structural, organisational, attitudinal, cultural and financial’. Other factors mentioned were a lack of cultural connection to the curriculum, difficulties making friends with students from other ethnic groups and difficulties forming relationships with academic staff, due to the differences in background and customs. The report also cited research showing that students from ethnic backgrounds are much more likely to live at home during their studies, perhaps making it less easy to immerse themselves in campus life. But Dr Nicola Rollock believes that not enough is being done to investigate the underlying causes of this:
‘My concern is that these issues aren’t looked at in any fundamental way: when they are, all black ethnic groups are amalgamated into one mass, and they shouldn’t be. The data doesn’t speak to distinct differences. And there’s also a fear of talking about race. If they’re talking about black and minority ethnic students, race needs to be a fundamental part of that conversation, but I would argue that as a society, and certainly within the academy and within education policy, race is a taboo subject. People are scared of talking about race and when they do, they do so in very limited terms. They believe that treating everybody exactly the same is the answer. Or particular tropes will come out for example: “These groups need mentoring,” or “These groups lack confidence,” or that “There are not enough groups coming through the education pipeline,” and while I’m certainly not rejecting any of these points, I argue that to only focus on such issues is to miss the wider picture. Some people do have confidence but yet they are not progressing. How do you explain that? So I think there is a real limited and poor engagement with race both within the academy and education more broadly.’
.....................................................
‘Sound so smart, like you graduated college.’
.....................................................
Going on to higher education, wherever it may be, and for whatever period of time, is an achievement. To choose to extend your full-time