Racism in Higher Education : ‘What Then, Can Be Done?’

Abstract

The launch of this Collection represents an important moment of critical intervention into the wider debates concerning the future of the Higher Education sector in Britain. 50 years on from the progressive twentieth century reforms to expand higher education, the birth of the concept institutional racism, and the landmark civil rights and Race Equality legislation in Britain and America, we find ourselves at a moment of consolidation and reflection. The chapters in the book document the scale of ‘What’s to be done’. We see how the entrenched mechanisms of institutional racism, from the overt admission processes, to covert everyday microaggressions operate to keep the academy an enclave of white privilege. We dismantle the ruse of equality and diversity policies which have become no more than a sham, a slick bureaucratic performance which contains the problem, but leaves the rot. We hear the voices of students and scholars who speak back to these institutions of higher learning with their revolutionary calls to decolonise the still impenetrable hub of imperial white knowledge production—and like them, we ask not ‘What’s to be done’—but ‘How can we do it?’