Slay In Your Lane. Yomi Adegoke
agents”, so there is this idea that black women, regardless of the discipline that they’re in, simply cannot be seen as academic experts. I think that is the biggest issue and problem of black women: under-representation.’
Althea Efunshile agrees, adding that this dearth can impede the quality of education, too:
‘We want black people everywhere, so of course it matters. If there are whole tranches of areas of public life where it’s just white men that you see, then that means that there are whole tranches of parts of our community, our citizens, our people, who are likely to be thinking, “That might not be for me, so let me go over there instead,” but your choice about “let me go over there, let me do that” is really just because you see that there are other people like you over there. That, to me, is not acceptable, it’s not justice, it’s not equality. So of course it matters. You want to be taught, or advised, or cured by experts, you want the best people, so obviously if it’s a white man, it’s a white man, but why would you want all the experts in your field to be white men? Diversity is important because it leads to different perspectives and different ways of looking at things.
‘And not just in terms of race or gender, but also social class, or where you come from, or age and so on. In education, it matters, because education is about helping you learn how to think. It’s not about the student as an empty vessel into which you pour a pot of knowledge. If it were, maybe it wouldn’t matter who was pouring in the knowledge, you just pour it in. Education, especially at higher levels, is really about, “How do you think? What are the sorts of questions you’re being taught to ask? What’s the critique you’re being taught to apply?” because we’re thinking people, sentient beings. So it matters who’s teaching you how to do that thinking and teaching you how to do that analysis. It matters.’
As with other professions, there remain barriers to progression within the university workforce for black academics. In the Runnymede report,46 minority staff reported having little access to ‘academic gatekeepers’ and feeling locked out of the networks that would be able to provide them with the means to further their professional development – support networks they described as ‘vital’. BAME academics and university staff remain ‘outsiders’ in higher education, and their place of work remains the preserve of those who are white, middle class and predominantly male, among the senior staff.
Stereotypes can plague university staff, too. Some academics noted that because of their race, it was not only assumed by their white peers that they were interested in or working on the topic of race and racism, but they were also expected by their colleagues to take on roles that were related to diversity and equality issues, simply because they were not white. Respondents said racism affected all aspects of their working lives, ‘whether this was related to how they were treated by their white colleagues or students, the roles they were asked to perform or how they were judged in the academy’.47 Alongside this, several spoke of a typically British kind of racism: passive aggressive and subtle, and difficult to provide evidence for. This leaves them reluctant to report inappropriate incidents to line managers because they are ‘hard to prove’. For those who did bite the bullet and report it, they said their complaint was rarely taken seriously.
‘The attitudes haven’t changed,’ Heidi Mirza says. ‘And in higher education we have not actually done much in our training of lecturers, teachers, to improve it, for it to filter down into the system. You just meet hardcore racist views. Now, we’ve got a culture of denial, so all you have to say is “I’m not racist!” – people will declare that. And, “Oh yes, I told them to become a hairdresser, it’s not because I’m racist, it’s because I care!” And so if you just declare yourself non-racist, you become non-racist. We call it performativity. You perform it. You hear people say the most horrible things – sexist, racist things – and they go, “Well, no I’m not racist, I’m just telling you like it is.”’
Ethnic minority students who decide to take up roles within the student body also often encounter racism, and find themselves not only under scrutiny from other students, but also from the wider public. In 2017, Jason Okundaye, a student at Cambridge who headed the university’s Black and Minority Ethnic Society, was targeted by mainstream right-wing press outlets for his tweets addressing institutional racism. A selection of those tweets were re-posted out of context, and the racist backlash went on for several days.
Esme Allman, who was elected to the position of the Black and Minority Ethnic Convenor at Edinburgh University, encountered a similar pattern of behaviour. A fellow student had commented on a Facebook post under the news of a US strike against ISIS; ‘I’m glad we could bring these barbarians a step closer to collecting their 72 virgins.’ It was reported that as a result of a complaint lodged by Allman about the post, the university began investigating the student in question. This caused uproar in the press. In fact, the University of Edinburgh confirmed that the student was actually being investigated for a breach of the student code of conduct rather than for mocking a terrorist group – Allman hadn’t even mentioned ISIS in the transcript of her complaint. The university’s overall handling of Allman’s complaint and the subsequent media attention left much to be desired – they told her not to talk to journalists who had reached out to her, and, once the situation got out of hand as the story snowballed and online trolling from racists began, they simply assured her it would blow over.
For white students to make the news, they have to be actively racist and aggressive – black face, the N-word, the whole shebang – before mainstream outlets show an interest. And when these students are written about, they often have readers springing to their defence decrying what they see as a witch hunt for ‘a kid who doesn’t know any better’. When was the last time you saw a white student make headlines for writing a string of tweets? And when was the last time you saw a black student extended the benefit of the doubt?
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Each one, teach one
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Until recently, not a single institution in the country offered a degree programme in Black British Studies. But in 2016 the first UK undergraduate Black Studies degree course was launched at Birmingham City University.48 Given the vast number of degrees on offer in the UK, many of them very niche, it is a surprise that before then, no university had felt the need to offer a course exploring the history, experiences and background of a demographic that has been so key in shaping our country. With the black population in Britain being established more recently, we are a good 50-odd years behind our American counterparts, who began rolling out Black Studies courses in 1968, after their more diverse student body demanded that their history and experiences should be included in a curriculum that they too were learning from. Black Studies is now an integral part of US higher education, albeit only after several protests, boycotts and student occupations across the country.
But this isn’t to say the black community does not make it onto the UK curriculum. Indeed, we often have our experiences explained to us from a far more anthropological standpoint, and find ourselves being the objects of detailed academic scrutiny by academics. In courses such as Politics, Sociology, Psychology and History, the black British experience is often analysed and examined, but it is usually from a distance and – considering the makeup of the teaching staff in most UK unis – usually by white academics. As William Ackah, a lecturer at Birkbeck, explained in an article: ‘Black people are used to illustrate problems as diverse as educational underachievement, health inequality, and religious extremism.’49
The complex, diverse and nuanced stories of the black British population are sidelined by a narrative that only further adds to already existing narratives – backed up by research and through findings from the country’s brightest minds. While white academics backpat each other for their commitment to inclusion, black students remain alienated, only seeing themselves reflected in their curriculum when it is part of a course on crime. This dearth of diversity within academic studies led to the creation of the ‘Why is My Curriculum White?’ campaign founded at University College London in 2014 as a response to the lack of diversity found on university reading lists and course content. Over the past four years, the campaign