Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy

411 Pages·2018·3.65 MB·English

by  Jason Arday

DISMANTLING
RACE IN HIGHER
EDUCATION
Racism, Whiteness and
Decolonising the Academy
Edited by Jason Arday
and Heidi Safia Mirza
“a timely
intervention…
about access, equality
and the legacy of
colonialism and empire
in our universities”
THE RT HON DAVID LAMMY,
MP, THE LABOUR PARTY
Dismantling Race in Higher Education
“In this impressive collection, editors Arday and Mirza tackle the perennial sta-
tus of racism in the academy. Beyond the common refrain that Whites are the
center of the problem, the contributors rightfully focus our efforts at disman-
tling the ideology of whiteness itself. They argue that decolonizing higher edu-
cation means confronting the white occupation of academic knowledge and
unsettling its grip over mundane as well as high stakes decisions. The authors
launch a compelling assault on whiteness that not only grabs our attention,
it renews our commitment to democracy and simple decency. Their brave
response is a welcomed voice during these challenging times.”
—Professor Zeus Leonardo, University of California, Berkeley, USA
“Arday and Mirza have brought together some of the most exciting and highly
respected voices in contemporary anti-racist research. They explore the pro-
cesses by which a war is being waged to determine the knowledge that uni-
versities are allowed to teach and the racialized nature of the staff and student
body. This superb collection is a landmark intervention into one of the most
important debates of our time. The World’s universities are becoming a key
battleground in the ongoing struggle for racial justice, equity and respect.
From Cape Town to Berkeley, Oxford to Sydney, Harvard to Toronto, a bat-
tle is being waged for the soul of Higher Education. Minoritized scholars,
students and communities are making their voices heard as never before but
the forces of repression have many weapons and shamelessly deploy concepts
like ‘free speech’, ‘choice’ and ‘meritocracy’ as loaded devices that camouflage
White self-interest behind the hypocrisy of grand-sounding ideas.”
—Professor David Gillborn, University of Birmingham, UK
“This collection is a long awaited and much needed challenge to institutional
racism in UK universities. It insists on the necessity for present/future decolo-
nization for racial equality and social justice transformation within these white
spaces.”
—Professor Shirley Anne Tate, Leeds Beckett University, UK
“Dismantling Race in Higher Education is a must read edited volume for those
individuals who are really interested in understanding the influences of race
within the UK higher education enterprise. Both Dr Jason Arday and Professor
Heidi Safia Mirza assembled an all-star team of UK ‘race studies’ scholars and
researchers to put this book together. In my opinion, it includes important
content that may stimulate a new generation of ‘race studies’ thought leaders
in the UK. This edited volume has immense potential to become a classic text
for higher education scholars and researchers throughout the UK higher edu-
cation system and beyond.”
—Professor James L. Moore III, The Ohio State University, USA
“This collection of essays is a timely intervention given the discussions going
on in Whitehall and on campuses about access, equality and the legacy of colo-
nialism and empire in our universities. Whilst of course attention must be paid
to who is able to participate in higher education, we must also focus on issues
of race within the institutions themselves.”
—Rt Hon David Lammy MP, Higher Education Minister 2007–10, House of
Commons, UK Parliament
“Covering multiple experiences, histories, policies and pedagogies,
Dismantling Race is an impressive contribution to scholarship on higher edu-
cation. Across a set of beautifully curated chapters the imbrication of whiteness
in the British Academy is catalogued, reported and explained. Few, having read
the book, will doubt that higher education is institutionally racist; and few will
doubt the urgency of contemporary decolonizing initiatives.”
—Professor Robbie Shilliam, Johns Hopkins University, USA
“This landmark publication takes on an ambitious project: fiercely critical anal-
yses intertwined with intersectional visions of hope and tools for a different
practice. A new generation of critical voices takes us closer to the tipping point
where ‘enough enough’ can trigger genuine transformation.”
=
—Professor Philomena Essed, Antioch University, USA
Jason Arday · Heidi Safia Mirza
Editors
Dismantling Race
in Higher Education
Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising
the Academy
Editors
Jason Arday Heidi Safia Mirza
University of Roehampton Goldsmiths College
London, UK University of London
London, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-60260-8 ISBN 978-3-319-60261-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60261-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938347
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Foreword
Dismantling Racial Inequality Within
the Academy
The foreword to this volume argues that in Britain issues of race and rac-
ism continue to be viewed as ‘outside’ academia’s domain. The greatest bar-
rier to addressing race equality in higher education is academia’s refusal to
regard race as a legitimate object of scrutiny, either in scholarship or policy.
Consequently, there is little recognition of the role played by universities in
(re)producing racial injustice. The contributions to this collection challenge
this studied ignorance by drawing attention to academia’s racialised culture
and practices, detailing experiences and outcomes among those Black and
Minority Ethnic (BME) students and academics who have successfully
accessed higher education but who still find themselves marginalised.
As a way of explaining why this collection of writing on race and
higher education in Britain is important and why it is overdue, let me
begin with an everyday story: a story of everyday racism. Some years back,
I sat on the equalities committee of an elite university. Since the univer-
sity’s physical environment was a regular agenda item, I raised the issue
of graffiti in the changing rooms of the gym. Now, I grew up on 1970s
v
vi Foreword
council estates and I am not liable to be shocked by scribble on walls.
However, this was not the odd mark but an accretion of racist, sexist,
anti-Semitic and homophobic scrawl. Layer upon layer, it must have
taken years of deposit. Once I had convinced the committee that I was
not mistaken, that the graffiti really did exist and that it was a problem,
the university acted: not just painting over the graffiti but resurfacing the
walls with a kind of meringue-like woodchip so that they could not be
defaced again. At the next committee meeting we congratulated ourselves
on having taken practical and immediate action—at which point, an
experienced member of the committee piped up, ‘Yes, it was terrible.
Perhaps it was done by visitors from outside the university’.
From outside the university. From outside the university. The most
powerful block to challenging and dismantling racial inequality in
higher education is glossed in those four words. For in British univer-
sities, race is rarely considered a legitimate object of scrutiny, either in
scholarship or in policy. Race very much remains the ‘outside child’
and its continuing illegitimacy means that often the most significant
discussions about race and racism remain at the level of corridor con-
versations: rarely surfacing in published papers, unlikely to attract the
validation of grant funding. The marginalisation of critical voices is
compounded at the institutional level, where equalities committees are
too often out of the executive loop, entirely separate from the senior
bodies that make decisions about learning and teaching, staffing and
funding. Consequently, too much of our energy is spent fending off
derision at the very mention of the ‘R’ word: going over and over the
same back-to-square-one arguments about the legitimacy of scholarship
on race and the need for institutional action on racism.
In particular, there exists a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that aca-
demia itself might be complicit in the (re)production of racial injustices,
that it does not just passively ‘reflect’ disadvantages already existing in
society but actively (re)creates inequalities. This current collection sug-
gests ways forward in the struggle to dismantle these inequalities but it
does not underestimate the extent of the challenge. The book’s starting
point is that race and racism are not ‘outside’ the university; they are
not prior entities, carried on to campus like a lunch bag. Academia—
like schools, the labour market and the criminal justice system—is one
Foreword vii
of the social sites in which race as a social relationship is constructed, in
a tangle of stratifications, exclusions, privileges and assumptions. Sadly,
in British academia Gargi Bhattacharyya’s words, written some twenty
years ago, still too often hold true:
The powerful hog the privilege of the norm and the rest of us squeeze in
behind, around, wherever there is room. Boys stride and girls cower, light
skin preens while dark waits.
(Bhattacharyya 1997: 250).
Remember also that in Britain issues of race in higher education are a
belated concern. Early post-war work on race and education in Britain
focused, for demographic reasons, on schooling. It was not until the late
1970s that education policymakers, confronted with unemployment
figures and deep urban unrest, began to contemplate the fate of BME
school-leavers and it was not really until the 1980s that BME access to
higher education became a fledgling policy item. One problem of the
current century is that the higher education sector got stuck for rather
too long on access. In strictly numerical terms, Britain’s minority ethnic
groups are now solidly represented in higher education. However, it has
taken the work of committed researchers, alert practitioners and, cru-
cially, the agitation of BME students to draw attention to the ‘inside’:
to experiences and outcomes among those BME students and academ-
ics who have successfully ‘accessed’ higher education but still find them-
selves marginalised.
In short, while widening participation is a necessary condition for
dismantling racial inequality in higher education (and in wider soci-
ety), it is not sufficient in itself. It is inadequate to recruit BME students
and staff while holding to deficit models, wherein the onus to change,
to fit, to come up to snuff lies entirely with those students and staff;
transformation in the university population necessitates transforma-
tion in policy and practice. As yet, the sector has responded only fitfully
to the challenge but the degree to which universities acknowledge the
need for change in what they do and how they think has increasingly
become a red line. It is apparent in contemporary student movements,
such as ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and ‘Why is My Curriculum White’, as well
viii Foreword
as in mainstream strategies, such as the Race Equality Charter Mark,
designed for universities that actively promote race equality.
The contributors to this volume include some of British academia’s
brightest hopes: new, passionate voices who have helped shaped the
current campaigns for racial justice. Other contributors are relative
veterans, with long-standing experience of the cycles of interest and
disinterest in race equality that have characterised education policy
in the UK. While the contributors address race and higher education
from different perspectives, drawing on diverse disciplines, they share
a sobering recognition that they are writing at a moment when issues
of race and racism are no more than a hoarse whisper in the national/
nativist conversation—the forgotten inequality. Eighteen years ago, the
Macpherson Report impelled universities, like other public institutions,
to acknowledge the pervasive nature of institutional racism. Since then
race has again slipped from the education policy agenda, and is usually
seen only through the prism of black underachievement.
For the most part, higher education has resorted—to borrow a phrase
from Nobel Prize winner Paul Beatty—to its old, haughty notions of
fair play. Concerns about institutional racism have been displaced by
shoulder-shrugging concept of ‘unconscious bias’—a voguish term that
has little purchase on structural inequality as it is understood by this
book’s commentators. Today, it seems that race is again ‘outside’ higher
education: outside a current set of interests that seem to be reducible to
‘quality’, ‘standards’, ‘markets’ and ‘employability’—terms not nearly so
neutral as they sound.
The structural, deeply cultural questions addressed in this book
confront many facets of academia’s self-reproductive power. How, for
instance, can a sector so dependent on the shoulder tap, on buying-in,
on headhunting commit itself to principles of equality in its recruit-
ment and promotion of academic staff? How can Britain retain BME
academics, for whom academic flight has become a rational response
to institutional neglect and to the disparaging of scholarship that dares
to treat Dubois, Said and hooks with same seriousness that it treats
Foucault? How are BME students to negotiate a sector that has his-
torically preferred to objectify black and brown bodies, rather than to
hear black and brown voices? These questions are now seeping through
Foreword ix
a cracked edifice. For, it is no longer possible to slap on a dash of paint
or plaster to disguise the stratification of our higher education system:
stratification that so heavily concentrates BME, working class and
mature students in one particular fraction of the sector (thirty or so new
universities, in the Greater London area or other ‘urban’ safe spaces).
And it is no longer possible to gloss over the racialised disparities in
undergraduate attainment or the blocked pipelines to work and post-
graduate study in which high-achieving BME graduates can find them-
selves lodged.
Often times, everyday culture and practice in contemporary British
academia feel like a continual rephrasing of the question posed by one
of the chapters in this collection: ‘Are you supposed to be in here?’ Yet
that is not the whole story. Within this collection multiple possibilities
for transformation are envisaged: possibilities rooted in already bur-
geoning activism, wherein BME students, scholars and their allies are
creating spaces of contestation, challenging academia’s business-as-usual
forms of mission, leadership, admissions and curriculum. The contri-
butions to this volume share a commitment to educational change; the
authors’ hopes are embedded in realism about where we currently stand
and therefore its prescriptions are as strong as its critiques. This book
is about contests that are central to higher education in Britain in the
twenty-first century, as told from the inside.
Coventry, UK Professor Paul Warmington
Paul Warmington is a Professorial Research Fellow in The Centre for
Research in Race and Education at the University of Birmingham. He
has taught, researched and written extensively on education and social
justice, focusing on critical theories of race and class, and on widening
participation. Beginning in the late 1980s, he has worked in both fur-
ther and higher education. His work has included developing pioneer-
ing black studies courses and Access programmes. Paul was also one of
the founders of Birmingham University’s Centre for Research in Race
and Education. His most recent book is Black British Intellectuals and
Education: Multiculturalism’s Hidden History (2014).