Building the anti-racist university: next steps This is a repository copy of Building the anti-racist university: next steps. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/106669/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Tate, SA and Bagguley, P (2017) Building the anti-racist university: next steps. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 20 (3). pp. 289-299. ISSN 1361-3324 https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2016.1260227 © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Race, Ethnicity and Education on 26th December 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13613324.2016.1260227 eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. mailto:eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ 1 Building the antiracist university: Next steps Shirley Anne Tate1 Paul Bagguley University of Leeds, UK Introduction: First steps This special issue emerged out of the continuing concern with how best to deal with institutional racism in HEIs that we have long shared as colleagues in the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS) at the University of Leeds, as discussed by Ian Law in this volume. The 2013 conference ‘Building the Anti-racist University: Next Steps’ was focused on looking forward to what needed to be done now in the 21st century drawing on 20th /21st century experience of institutional gains followed by their attrition in some cases and fundamental institutional inertia in others. Both of these responses to addressing institutional racism worked against organizational change even as equality and diversity policies aimed at changing the face of universities were instituted. The papers in this special issue are the results of the thinking instantiated by the call for papers and the transdisciplinary, transnational theoretical and practice based discussions at the conference on experiences of institutional racial equality change processes and strategies as both partial successes and abject failures. We take both successes and failures forward as lessons learned into the new arena for anti-racist work in which we find ourselves, the neo-liberal, ‘post-race’ university which by and large still caters for national/ international elites, where some knowledge is commodified on a global scale and others continue to be erased. What is distinctive about this special issue is the international character of the collection demonstrating common political concerns globally about racism in higher education. Yet there remain some puzzling absences – no contribution from mainland Europe, the Caribbean or Australia and New Zealand for example. This may perhaps reflect our networks, how we framed the conference or be an indication that racism in higher 1 Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS 2 9JT. Email: s.a.tate@leeds.ac.uk 2 education does not get much attention in these contexts in which anti-Black and anti- Indigenous racisms persist. Notwithstanding these absences, one goal of this special issue is to further expand the global debate on racism and anti-racism in universities. The papers highlight a multiple range of issues regarding students, academic staff and knowledge systems but all seek to challenge the complacency of the ‘post-race’ present that is dominant in, North West Europe and North America, Brazil’s mythical ‘racial democracy’ and South Africa’s post-apartheid ‘rainbow nation’. The papers also originate from a variety of disciplines – Sociology, Economics, Pyschology, Education, and Youth and Community Work. For the countries represented by the papers- Brazil, South Africa, Canada, the USA and the UK – what is clear is that we are not yet past the need for antiracist institutional action. What these nations share in common is that they were all touched by the machinations of European empire whether as colonized or colonizer. This has led to the instantiation of European whiteness as superior and abjection of the difference of racialized others. From within this colonial psyche which still exists in the 21st century these nations actively deracinate politics, subjectivities, political economy and affective relationalities when they re- imagine themselves to be ‘post-race’ states where all citizens can have a share in the good life because now only class matters. Universities have also taken on the mantle of upholding societal ‘post-race’ status through those very same equality and diversity policies and strategies which have not been effective (Ahmed 2012). Frances Henry et al’s article on higher education in Canada foregrounds racism as a critical variable shaping racialized and Indigenous peoples' lives and experiences. This issue is pronounced in Canadian universities, where employment equity, diversity, and other policies aimed at equality amount to no more than well-worded mission statements and some minor cosmetic changes which leave structural racial inequality intact. In Canada inequality, indifference, and reliance on outmoded conservative traditions characterize the modern neoliberal university which continues to work on racial lines. Whether one examines representation in terms of numbers 3 of racialized and Indigenous faculty members and their positioning within the system, their earned income as compared to white faculty, their daily life experiences of racism within the university as workplace irrespective of status, or interactions with colleagues and students, the results are that racialized and Indigenous faculty and the disciplines or areas of their expertise are, on the whole, low in numbers and even lower in terms of power, prestige, and influence within the higher education institutions (HEIs). From the viewpoint of the USA, Ryan P. Adserias, Lavar J. Charleston and Jerlando F.L. Jackson assert that implementing racial diversity agendas within decentralized, loosely-coupled, and change-resistant institutions such as colleges and universities is a global challenge. They see a shift in organizational culture as imperative in order to produce the change needed for a diversity agenda to thrive. This article synthesizes the literature on proven strategies and offers case studies of how a variety of leadership styles has and can fuel much needed racial diversity efforts or lead to institutional inertia. More work needs to be done into the 21st century because of, not in spite of, the ‘post-race’ consensus in order to develop a maximal, transformative approach to institutional change, rather than a minimal meeting of legal obligations in those countries where an anti- discrimination framework exists. In the UK progress in the field of anti-racism in HEIs has slowed and has dissipated across the sector within a proliferation of policy statements on equity, diversity and harassment as well as ethnic monitoring of staff and student access and progression, for example. These approaches have been inadequate and do not reflect the necessary institutional effort required to establish real and lasting anti-racism in the UK higher education sector, or indeed, in Canada, the USA, Brazil and South Africa built on a foundation of innovative and effective policy and practice. This special issue draws together the foci emerging from the debates within each paper on curriculum, pedagogy, access, policy, process, experience, outcomes, racialization and racism in HEIs in Canada, the USA, the UK, Brazil and South Africa to help in crafting an agenda for building the global anti- racist university into the ‘post- race’ 21st century. 4 To aid in this endeavour, the papers in this special issue look at the following key themes in their locally contextualized debates and research on institutional racism in HEIs in Canada, Brazil, South Africa, the UK and USA: 1) Institutional whiteness: How is it produced and reproduced through affect, structures and processes? How might it be resisted and transformed? 2) Transforming organizational cultures: What are the challenges of such transformation? What are the conflicts and contradictions of transforming HEIs ‘from within’? Are our efforts always destined to be turned into another managerial process? What role does intersectionality play in transforming organizational cultures? 3) The Black and minority ethnic (BME) and Indigenous presence and experience in HEIs: how can we best map these in terms of both staff and students? Can we draw in meaningful ways on these experiences to produce change in HEIs’ approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, recruitment, retention and progression? 4) Developing curriculum interventions: what can be done to enable anti-racism within a context of professional autonomy, disciplinary inertia and organizational resistance? 5) Widening participation and organizational change: What does widening participation mean in the context of anti-racism? Should anti-racism be a part of the outcomes of higher education curricula? 6) Future directions for racial equality and diversity in a ‘post-race’ era; what are the implications and symptoms of ‘post-race’ for HEIs? What impact does ‘post-race’ have on the possibility for the development of anti-racist strategies? Institutional whiteness is shared across all of the papers in the issue so let us turn next to briefly look at whiteness and institutional racism in contemporary university spaces in the ‘post-race’ UK. Whiteness, institutional racism and universities as ‘post-race’ spaces 5 We began the debate within Racism Studies about whether or not we are yet ‘post-race’ societies some time ago (Goldberg 2015). Whatever side of the debate on which we fall what this special insists is that institutional racism is still very much a part of the fabric of the university spaces we inhabit, texturing our experiences and this is the case no matter how much we might wish that it were otherwise. Academia is an institution in which faculty and administration continue to be predominantly white especially at professor, vice chancellor and top management levels and the curricula continue to be unashamedly white as well. Continuing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs led to the emergence of student- led campaigns in the UK on ‘why is my curriculum white?’ (http://www.nus.org.uk/en/news/why- is-my-curriculum-white/) and ‘why isn’t my professor Black?’ (http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/isnt- professor-black-reflection/). These concerns with the lack of change in terms of racial justice transformation have led over the last few years to the mobilization of thousands of students to public meetings in universities across the country and their political attachment to other global campaigns such as ‘#Black Lives Matter’ in the USA and ‘Rhodes Must fall’ in South Africa. Much of this public debate and campus based campaigning has emerged since our conference, yet they indicate its political timeliness. The UK student mobilizations became more apparent after a historic panel at the UCL on 10th March, 2014 entitled ‘Why isn’t my professor Black?’ The members of the panel were Professor Michael Arthur President and Provost (UCL), Dr. Deborah Gabriel (Founder and CEO of Black British Academics), Dr. Lisa Palmer (Newman University), Dr. Shirley Anne Tate (University of Leeds), Dr. William Ackah (Birkbeck College, University of London) and Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman (UCL) who organized the panel. The event was ‘sold out’ within days and a bigger venue had to be arranged in order to seat the hundreds of people who attended. The UCL panel is widely seen to have been the catalyst for anti-racist student campaigns and student calls to decolonize the university in the UK. At this panel the Vice Chancellor of UCL asserted that that university would develop the first Black Studies programme in the UK to show its commitment to this area of academic endeavour globally. http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/isnt-professor-black-reflection/ http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/isnt-professor-black-reflection/ 6 However, this has not yet materialized at UCL and progress on this achievement seems to have dissipated. In South Africa and the UK there has also been the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign and in South Africa the ‘Fees Must Fall’ campaign. All of these student-led mobilizations have been a call to action for anti-racist change not just within universities but also societally. Cynically, UK universities have responded with once yearly well-publicized Black History Month events as part of their equality and diversity strategies, part of a public demonstration of their commitment to anti-racist change. These are sometimes run as public events by their Public Relations offices to show ‘there is no racism here’, irrespective of the fact of the shameful BME employment statistics within UK HEIs at present and the prevailing issue of BME student lack of achievement. There continues to be under-representation of BME staff even while there has been a year on year increase in BME students (Equality Challenge Unit, 2015 http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/equality-higher-education-statistical- report-2015/ accessed 1st August, 2016). The numbers of BME staff has increased from 4.8% in 2003/4 to 6.7% in 2013/14 (ECU 2015). Further, Black staff members continue to be low paid and low status in comparison with white colleagues (ECU 2015). Whilst much previous work in the UK focused on racial inequalities in access to university (McManus et al 1998; Connor et al 2004; Bagguley and Hussain 2007) more recent work has revealed a significant ‘attainment gap’ between white, Black and ethnic minority students. Data from the United Kingdom’s Equality Challenge Unit (http://www.ecu.ac.uk/guidance-resources/student-recruitment-retention-attainment/student- attainment/degree-attainment-gaps/accessed 1st August 2016) showed that in 2012/13 57.1% of UK-domiciled BME students received an upper second class or first class degree, compared with 73.2% of White British students. This is what the ECU refers to as an attainment gap of 16.1%. Whilst the gap varies between minority ethnic groups, 43.8% of self-classified ‘Black Other’ students achieved a higher class of degree - a gap of 29.4% compared to White students. Such an attainment gap should make universities ponder what it is about what happens within their walls, classrooms and curricula that suppresses the http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/equality-higher-education-statistical-report-2015/ http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/equality-higher-education-statistical-report-2015/ http://www.ecu.ac.uk/guidance-resources/student-recruitment-retention-attainment/student-attainment/degree-attainment-gaps/accessed http://www.ecu.ac.uk/guidance-resources/student-recruitment-retention-attainment/student-attainment/degree-attainment-gaps/accessed 7 emergence of BME student excellence. Students have already highlighted those aspects of university life which impact their experiences negatively in terms of the campaigns mentioned above, that is, continuing institutional racism, curricula which continue to be Euro- centric and faculty which do not reflect the UK’s demographic diversity. These very issues were raised in terms of schooling by Bernard Coard’s (1971) How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in British Schools and Maureen Stone’s (1981) The Education of the Black Child in Britain: The Myth of Multi-racial Education. One could say then that the UK education system has not moved past race and, indeed, is configured to maintain the dominance of those racialized as white. This dominance is also maintained through a second feature of the university landscape in the UK that has been receiving increasing attention. That is, the lack of progression of black and ethnic minority students into the academic workforce. For example at the time of writing there were only 18 Black women full professors in the UK (the Times Higher 17/8/16). One particular paradox here is that whilst Black and ethnic minority students are more likely than white students to study for a taught Masters, they are less likely to move on to a PhD (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2016/201614/) which is the first step towards an academic career in the UK. In contrast, white graduates were almost twice as likely as BME graduates to go on to a research degree soon after graduating. This research by the government’s Higher Education Funding Council demonstrates some level of official concern, but this contrasts with the lack of real action for change within universities, such as student mentoring and scholarship possibilities. Indeed, if the majority of UK BME students attend non-Russell Group universities this already means that they stand less chance of getting an ESRC/AHRC scholarship than their Russell Group counterparts. The organization of scholarship funding through the doctoral training centres/ partnerships model potentially could be the location of unwitting racial exclusion even though on the face of it the system seems to be operating on a meritocratic basis. Such enduring inequalities at the heart of UK higher education institutions supposedly built upon those long-held Eurocentric http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2016/201614/ 8 virtues of fairness and meritocracy reveal an ongoing monumental structural racial inequality and ongoing racist practices. ‘Post-race’ we are not (Goldberg 2015) indeed, nor are we in the grip of Eduardo Bonilla- Silva’s (2014) ‘colour-blind racism’. Racism is not colour blind nor is ‘race’ ‘post’. In his paper Ian Law addresses this issue by firmly locating the work of CERS within the long sociological tradition placing ‘race’ and racism at the centre of the making of Western modernity, from Du Bois, Cooper, Césaire and Fanon to contemporary theorists including Hall, Hesse, Collins, Goldberg, Glissant and Winant. For him it is important to keep the spotlight on racism as a primary field of research and practice in order to enable the global transformation of HEIs. At the curriculum level, this necessity is also highlighted by Ronelle Carolissen and Vivienne Bozalek’s paper which draws on an interdisciplinary, inter-professional teaching, learning and research project set up across a historically disadvantaged (Black) and a historically advantaged (white) HEI in Cape Town, South Africa, and across differently valued professions (Psychology, Social Work and Occupational Therapy) in order to address the historical and current racial inequities caused by apartheid’s instantiation of racial difference and unquestioned white privilege irrespective of class. As these papers show, ‘post-race’ and ‘colour-blind’ are pervasive institutional discourses which provide us with ways in which we can understand the insidious neo-liberal racialization within which we find ourselves in the societies from which the papers in this issue draw. Pete Harris, Chris Haywood and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill’s article explores this neo-liberal racialization by exploring the experiences of Black and Muslim students by looking at how ‘teaching otherwise’ can create an alternative representational space. This space in turn enables a transformation in perspectives of self through pedagogy which is much needed in the future in UK HEIs if neo-liberal racialization is to be effectively tackled. Neo-liberal racialization continues to be difficult to deal with because it is catalysed by whiteness or ‘whiteliness’ (Yancy 2008; 2012) which are discursive and non-discursive aspects of institutional life which 9 […] becomes a deeply political, existentially lived, social category that shapes the subjectivities and future racialist/ racist practices of whites. Whiteness is a way of performing both one’s phenotypic white body / one’s subjectivity structured around a specific white racist epistemic orientation (Yancy 2008, 48). The social body as skin, subjectivity and epistemology are central to whiteness. As such, whiteness continues to be the motor of the egregious institutional racism which continues unabated even in the face of affirmative action programmes. Joaze Bernardino-Costa and Ana Elisa De Carli Blackman look at the theme of the struggle against racism in Brazil and the adoption of affirmative action policies through the public universities of the nation because of the anti-racist actions of the ‘movimento negro’ (Black rights movement). Affirmative action sprang from a Supreme Federal Court ruling in 2011 on the constitutionality of racially targeted policies in the University of Brasilia and the subsequent National Congress approval of quotas to be adopted by all federal universities in Brazil. However, even after much public debate, campaigning and law making the article shows that much still needs to be done, such as the adoption of affirmative action in postgraduate schools and in the contracting of teachers as well as the reconfiguration of the curriculum and of the research agendas of Brazilian universities. From the viewpoint of the USA, Gary A. Dymski looks at the institutional and specific disciplinary uptake of the diversity imperative and its successes and failures at the University of California Riverside (UCR) through its outreach, student support and ‘pipeline’ programmes. The strong performance of UCR in attracting and retaining students of colour in 2014 led to its being ranked first in a poll of US universities meeting the “Obama criteria” of access/diversity/affordability/success. However, Dymski shows that much more still needs to be done into the future at both discipline and institutional levels as well as within political economy if students of colour are to succeed in entering the professions. The necessity for affirmative action policies illustrates that whiteliness is the bedrock of organizational culture and is embedded within institutional structures and processes as well 10 as knowledge production and canonization which in combination enable racism ‘to melt into thin air’ (Gordon 1997). Whiteness works through a governmental (Foucault 1980) process of subjectification motivated by self-interest, personal benefit and entitlement to undisputed privilege which Charles Mills (1997, 40) makes clear in the Racial Contract Both globally and within particular nations, then, white people, Europeans and their descendants, continue to benefit from the Racial Contract, which creates a world in their cultural image, political states differentially favouring their interests, an economy structured around the racial exploitation of others, and a moral psychology (not just in whites sometimes in nonwhites also) skewed consciously and unconsciously toward privileging them, taking the status quo of differential racial entitlement as normatively legitimate, and not to be investigated further. Whiteliness is at the centre of our putatively ‘post-race’ world and indeed has mythologized ‘post-race’ as a new form of ‘racialized governmentality’ which rules Black, minority ethnic and white psyches, social spaces and institutions alike. This is a racialized governmentality in which those racialized as non-white can be accused of racism against those racialized as white in a sleight of hand and perversion of knowledge and history which refuses white power and privilege as foundational to a description of racism. This is illustrated in Diane Watt’s pedagogical focus on those ‘difficult conversations’ on racism aimed at enabling students to develop a critical understanding of the significance of anti-oppressive thought and practices. She found that when reflecting on anti-oppressive practices was made a core part of the curriculum this faced resistance from some white students who sought to undermine classroom debates about these issues effectively silencing those white students who wish to actively engage with anti-racist theory and practices. British Black and South Asian students also felt marginalised by this resistance having to defend their experiences, or sometimes strategically avoiding the debates for fear of adversely affecting their relationships with some white students. Watt’s paper powerfully illustrates the potentially contradictory outcomes of attempts at anti-racist practice within university teaching 11 environments. Of course, this racialized governmentality is very little different from the evasive racism which Ruth Frankenberg’s (1993) White Women Race Matters: The Social construction of Whiteness described in the 20th century. ‘Anyone can be racist’ underlies racialized governmentality and must be critiqued as well as opposed as a mind-set or perspective on the world if we are to change universities into workplaces which are not zones of toxic shock for faculty as well as into places of study in which students do not feel alienated. What is interesting is that the pervasive power of whiteliness continues to be denied and indeed is balked at, remaining unsayable within universities. This regime of unsayability allied with the deniability of white power and privilege is why anti-racism has not worked. We cannot ameliorate something which we think does not exist because it is unsayable and deniable. Further, if we do notice and say ‘this is racism’ our acknowledgment is always tied to an individual failure or pathology on the part of both BME students and faculty and their white anti-racist allies. This culture of blame making means that we continually refuse institutional accountability for failure to address racism. Moreover, and much more insidiously, since the problem is constructed as that of those racialized as not-white and their allies racialized as white who continue to say that whiteliness is the root of the problem of continuing racial inequalities in universities, this claim falls on deaf ears. Such falling on deaf ears brings to mind Gayatri Spivak’s (1995) subaltern who could never be brought into the scene of representation as recognizable political subject. Beyond the body racialized as Black or minority ethnic, subalternity also continues to be the circumscribed space of antiracist thought, practice and knowledge systems within UK universities. Anti-racism has not worked as we can see in the continuing struggles for racial equality represented in the papers in this volume in societies in which ‘race’ continues to matter even though we might wish it were otherwise. Mark Christian’s contribution highlights this persistence and its impacts at the level of the individual. His article speaks to Black British male experience in US colleges and universities. It is an autoethnographic study in terms of 12 relating, witnessing, and noting both learning and teaching experiences. The paper highlights the need for greater access and opportunity for Black scholars to teach and study without stress and strain on their minds and bodies especially for those facing the daily reality of teaching and researching within the context of Africana or Black Studies in higher education. Christian notes that academia should be a place where liberal arts of all genres and their teachers are accepted and respected but there is still a long way to go before we can attest to the affirmative of this point of view. Although saying anti-racism has failed fills us with feelings of political despondency, especially in the current UK context of BREXIT, failure must be acknowledged in order to build possible futures from the materials at hand in each country represented in this volume. The local is important to bear in mind because there cannot be a one size fits all approach to change even though we can say that we can learn from successes, failures and hopeful shoots of change in each context. What we are talking about here we must remember is a very specific understanding of racism which has very specific Black Atlantic foci and approaches to its amelioration as we see from Mills (1997) above. What can we say though about anti-racism’s failure within neo-liberal institutions and neo-liberal racialization? Anti-racism’s failure within universities What institutionalized anti-racist policy and practice within institutions has done is to seek institutional transformation through changing structures and processes which militate against equality of access, process and outcome because of the impact of whiteliness. This has basically been a liberal inclusive approach based on a commitment to diversity which has not taken on board the pervasiveness of the Racial Contract. The Contract’s pervasiveness is assured by the intensity of the affective attachment to privilege of those who benefit from it. It is further embedded within the psychic life of institutions and those who occupy and build them so that they can continue to occupy a world of instutitionalized racial inequality while chanting the ‘post-race’ mantra. In fact, to speak of being ‘post-race’ denies racism’s contemporary existence (Goldberg 2015) and relegates it to a best forgotten past. It is 13 interesting how one can say that racism does not matter while watching the events unfold which led to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign in the US, or the shooting of Mark Duggan and its aftermath in the UK, or the continuing under-representation of Indigenous People in universities in Brazil and Canada, or the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign in South Africa. How can this will to silence continuing racism through asserting ‘post-race’ status in UK universities be explained? By way of explication, let us turn again to the Racial Contract and the process of becoming white. This latter ‘has nothing to do with a so-called genetic racial substratum, but everything to do with what happens at the level of social constitutionality, how the human being comes to be the white self that is both constituted by and constitutes white racism’ (Yancy 2008, 48). The process of becoming white is linked to the Contract which itself is based on keeping European and European descent white superiority in place for its signatories at the levels of political economy, culture, psyche and epistemology. This ensures the continuation of racial exploitation and a normative position in which white privilege need not be questioned. Racism is silenced through what Mills (1997, 18) calls ‘epistemologies of ignorance’. However, ‘ignorance’ does not mean ‘unknowing’ as we would expect from its etymology. Rather, what we have instead are ‘white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion and self- deception on matters related to race’ (Mills 1997, 19). In the 21st century what Mills’ white ‘mis’ means is not that we live with white understandings, representations, evasions and deceptions which are abnormal, bad, wrong or divergent, all of which would be the normal understandings of ‘mis’. Rather, what walks amongst us and stalks the halls of academic life is a knowing ignorance of whiteness and its racist impacts so that whiteness remains innocent of racism and un-problematically claims that space because of its ‘unknowledges’. Whiteliness and white supremacy do not need to be defended against the charge of racism because of ‘unknowledges’. ‘Sometimes these “unknowledges” are consciously generated, while at other times they are unconsciously generated and supported (…) [but] they work to support white privilege and supremacy’ (Sullivan and Tuana 2007, 2). 14 ‘Unknowledges’ are linked to pervasive institutional racism through helping to maintain racism’s deniability. These deniability regimes are crucial to the continuation of whiteness in universities through its racial affective economies and cultures of disattendability (Tate 2013), curricula and interpersonal relationalities which lead to promotion or lack of it, student/staff experiences of racial privilege/ disprivilege and denial of access to the institution in the first place (Gutíerrez Rodríguez 2010; 2016). This is the weight of whiteliness which anti-racism has not managed to erase or even ameliorate even with all of the equality and diversity paperwork which exists in the different contexts examined in the papers here. This is its failure. It is not a failure produced by anti-racists but is one that was a direct result of its institutionalization and colonization as ‘equality and diversity’ after it had been stripped of its potential for critique and action. After all, it is impossible to allow unfettered institutional access to something which has such a fundamental critique of that from which you benefit and that which ultimately is not in your interest to change. We continue to struggle to name racism and to act against it within the university sector because of ‘equality and diversity’ as the preferred approach to racial inequity and institutional transformation. Recognizing the basis of institutional inertia around racism or the erasure of past anti-racist changes leads us to now think about how to re-engage with the continuing necessity for anti- racist action in ‘post-race’ times. The question for the conference was ‘Building the Anti- racist University: What next?’ as it is for all of those who strive for racial intersectional equality. That ‘next’ is an important, indeed a vital shift, which will takes us into thinking about how we can take forward the student campaign’s call to decolonize the institution as our future option in the face of anti-racism’s failure to make lasting and fundamental anti- racist changes to UK HEIs. Decolonizing the university in ‘post-race’ times What is it that we mean when we use this buzzword, what is it to decolonize this whiteliness 15 and white supremacy to which even those living with and through racial dis-privilege can ascribe because of the pervasiveness of the Racial Contract? Let us begin from looking at what Édouard Glissant (1997) tells us about epistemological, societal and self- liberation within his take on creolization as a rhizomatic movement which disrupts identitarian politics as it produces new subjectivities, a new ‘common’ ( Hardt and Negri 2009) which recognizes white supremacy and racism as we break away from knowing unknowledges. Glissant locates the Caribbean archipelago as a zone of diversity which separates it from continental thought based on the One of universalism. His work makes us see the ‘poetics of relation’ within the decolonial moment as a break from the ‘One of the West’ (Glissant). The ‘One of the West’ here is whiteliness whether read as psyche, institution, process, structure, affect or political economy, for example. Let us begin to think the university as a contact zone, a zone of creolization which still continues to imagine itself as the place of imperial whiteness. Glissantian creolization is an ongoing relational process which inscribes the principle of non-hierarchical unity with a relation of equality with and respect for the other as different from oneself within a natural openness to other cultures. The principle of equality and respect for the other as different not inferior is crucial to the decolonial moment as it is through this that we can begin to prise open what Bob Marley (1980) calls ‘mental slavery’, what Fanon (1986) would term the ‘colonial psyche’ and what Mills (1997) has called ‘a moral psychology’. This lays out the necessity for psychic and epistemological decolonization which both looks at whites’ and at racialized others’ complicity in keeping the status quo in 16 place because of the benefits that they feel they gain. Creolization, like decolonial thinking, does not universalize itself unlike the One of the West but ‘brings into Relation’ hitherto disparate constituencies (Glissant 1997, 90). Relation produces new identities through erranty, a psychic mode of affirming racial identities as an antidote for and in opposition to exile which can potentially erode one’s identity (Glissant 1997, 20). Errantry builds a new racialized and racializing common as it includes both collective and individual in knowing that ‘the Other is within us and affects how we evolve as well as the bulk of our conceptions and the development of our sensibility’ (Glissant 1997, 27). This recognition of the fact of whiteliness within us as individuals and communities is essential in decolonizing racialized psyches whether those are Black, Indigenous, People of Colour or white as we build what Glissant describes above as a non-hierachical unity. A unity which for our purposes is an anti-racist common. Decolonizing epistemology is an essential aspect of the work of decolonization and it is not a happy coincidence that UK students have this firmly in their sights with the campaign ‘why is my curriculum white?’ This question has been a long time coming but is a significant one especially if one thinks about the ‘post-race’ context. That is, if ‘race’ does not matter then why is there still a blinding whiteness in terms of what counts as knowledge, in terms of what has become the canon, what gets taken up and what remains erased? What we now need is a necessary re-reading of ‘post-race’ which sees it as pointing only to the construction of a present and future time and space in which whiteness as ‘race’ power and privilege is erased, in which the anti-Black/People of Colour/Indigenous racism it generates ceases to exist. 17 For the first time in UK history and that of Europe, there is a Black Studies degree in a university- Birmingham City University. This did not emerge at UCL-home of the Galton Collection and Galton Lecture Theatre in memory of the man who first coined the term ‘eugenics’ in 1883- even though its promise began there. This development is quite momentous and must be applauded as a response to the issue of the white curriculum. This does not take away from all the work which has been engaged in for years by colleagues at other UK institutions but begs the question of why the Russell Group as a whole did not make a similar response. Similarly, it is important to ponder why this innovation came from a new university in a multi-racial city like Birmingham with its rich Black intellectual and activist history, including being the home of the now defunct Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This makes us note the affects attached to white epistemology across the university sector where even now very few courses which look in a sustained and in-depth way at racism and Black Studies exist and those that do are currently being dismantled. These whitely affective attachments create a connection between the white body irrespective of gender, class, sexuality, age and location and the white epistemological tradition constructed as superior, whatever the discipline. Both bodies and epistemology attain value because of this connection so, of course, it is clear that a Black Studies programme already sets into train a destabilization of these certainties. This inherent critique of the value of whiteness as body and knowledge is perhaps what led to the demise of many Black Studies programmes in the ‘post-race’ US and what has led to the demise/diminution of those few courses that there were in the UK. What has changed in the Higher Education sector to now enable the emergence of a Black Studies programme at undergraduate level in the UK? Perhaps it is that very same neo- liberal racialization and commodification of knowledge to be sold to niche international and national markets which has enabled this development. Perhaps everything is related to political economy in the end as the profit imperative in marketized UK universities necessitates the development of an international/national market in students willing to pay 18 for a ‘British education’. Ironically, marketization might be the motor which drives the development of curricula which attempt to be non-Eurocentric as it ‘brings into relation’ previously disconnected constituencies. It continues to be necessary to draw together the issues emerging from the debates throughout the articles in this special issue on curriculum, pedagogy, access, policy, process, experience, outcomes, subjectivities, racialization and racism in HEIs in Brazil, South Africa, Canada, the USA and the UK to craft an agenda for building the anti-racist university into the ‘post- race’ 21st century in contexts where white privilege and power remain. These must be ‘the next steps’ but ones which are continuously reiterated and re- inscribed as racism morphs because white privilege will continue to be maintained in the face of future decolonial assault. References Ahmed, Sara. 2012 On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. 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