Whitening up for Black professors

Students from the National Union of Black Students Campaign organised a demonstration where they whitened up their faces to demonstrate the opposition to the sacking of one of the UK few black Professors, Dr Nathaniel Coleman teaching at University College London.

At a recent UCL open day for new student and parents, NUS Black Students organised a ‘whitening up’ protest, borrowing from the creative theme that underpinned our recent and massively successful OBV election campaign.

Starring David Harewood and Tinnie Tempah our inversion of “blackface” turned on its head, the now disgusting tradition of white people using paint to imitate black skin.

This new and increasingly popular ‘whiteface’ protest sees black people paint themselves white to highlight the lack of representation within our democratic and civic institutions, and the reality of racism that demands total cultural assimilation.

Here in the UK, there is a racial divide within higher education establishments that I believe is more pronounced here than in any other western nation. Take any large diverse city university or college and this divide can be most starkly seen in the hyper multicultralism of the student body and the staid monoculturalism of the teaching staff and governors.

The ubiquitous whiteness of British education is summed up in that well known phrase ‘academics in their ivory towers’. And it’s not just the towers that are ‘ivory’.

When it comes to the British education establishment, in particular universities, Britain’s history of slavery and colonialism are an ever-present reminder of the symbiotic relationship between Empire and academia. Intellectual, philosophical, theological and scientific justifications for racism were gleefully pioneered by such institutions, lecture halls, study centres, endowments and huge donations of cash, saw some of the country's most ardent racists and colonial oppressors, praised, garlanded and immortalised by universities.

So much for the inglorious past, but what of the future?

Speaking to The Voice Newspaper, Dr Coleman said:

“The post graduate program that I proposed was to shine a spotlight onto white hegemony.

“Whiteness loves the limelight but we should study whiteness under the spotlight, and it’s the spotlight rather than the limelight that puts the fear of God into white hegemony and persons who are complicit in it, which includes persons who are not racialised as white who’ve been given incentives to stay in white hegemony.”

The National Union of Students Black Students Campaign (NUS BSC) has been leading a 15 year-old campaign to challenge racism in Britain’s top universities. They argue statistics show universities are failing black students.

According to the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) a registered charity, that works to further enshrine equality and diversity procedures for staff and students in higher education, there is a “considerable gap” between white British students receiving a top degree compared to black British students.

In 2012/13, 57.1% of Black students received a top degree, compared with 73.2% of their white British counterparts; a gap of over 16%.

Malia Bouattia, Black Student’s Officer (NUS BSC) who has been leading a campaign and organised a protest to highlight academic racism, recently spoke to the Buzzfeed website:

“Structural racism is active in many ways, including in our studies – from the content to the form of our education system.” 

“Black thought is either omitted or misrepresented. We have courses that erase the historical contributions of 80% of the world’s people in favour of European thinkers and theories, while attempts at ‘diversification’ in the curriculum are usually steeped in racism and orientalism”

The decision by UCL not to renew Dr Colemans position or pioneer a new MA in Race and Philosophy course, in part reflects the continued and damaging contemporary legacies of both slavery and colonialism.

Racism is reflected in the way in which knowledge is constructed and dispensed in universities. History, it is said, is written by the victors and nowhere is that more true than in British academia who, for the most part have sought to ignore its own oppressive history and collude with a form of historical revisionism and amnesia that would make the devil himself blush.

The construction of knowledge and history as taught in British universities starts from the default setting of global white supremacy. This is the implicit basis of learning in the UK. To prove my point, let me give you little test. Name me one University that benefited from either slavery and or colonialism and has made a real virtue of that fact, in its marketing or in the courses it offers or the staff it employs? Just one will do.

The fact is most of British universities were either founded or profited in some way from the generosity of wealthy slave plantation owners or British imperial colonialists. And not just universities. Libraries, schools, hospitals, town halls, museums, art galleries, parks, hospitals were all funded by the gargantuan profits generated by Britain's colonial past. Yet universities, the supposed epicentre of objective learning, are failing to come to terms with their past and ensure that their own complicity in colonial oppression, cultural appropriation and economic exploitation are acknowledged and fully explored.

In a multicultural Britain and an increasingly globalised world, this is a critical error.

The result of these failures is the fact that today we have fundamentally white universities, white tutors and Chancellors, teaching a largely white curriculum, to huge numbers of black conscious students who are appalled at the colonial teaching culture they face.

And progress is slow. Although there has been a visible black presence in the UK for over 2000 years, the number of universities, professors, chancellors in the UK are not only minuscule, they are a national disgrace. A recent study by the Runnymede Trust found that of the 18,500 professors in the UK, just 85 are black. That’s less than 0.5 per cent and only 17 of those are black women, this in 2015.

Malia continued:

“This protest has been sparked by UCL’s decision to scrap a new Masters on the Philosophy of Race and the termination of a black academic’s position, responsible for leading this groundbreaking course.”

The NUS BSC has also been leading the widely supported “Why Is My Curriculum White?” campaign group that has highlighted the deep colonial legacy of formal learning and knowledge, and the day to day contemporary racism suffered by black students and lecturers.

Speaking to Buzzfeed, Areeb Ullah, an officer at King’s College Students’ Union said:

“I’m whiting up “to protest at the way UCL have treated some of its prominent black academics.”

“For too long we’ve had to compromise as a community because our views would not be heard, forcing us to assimilate. Whiting up is a metaphor of the current state of affairs.”

Student Hajera Begum explained:

“We whitened up as a visual metaphor for the many unreasonable compromises a student racialised as BME has to make to succeed, or even survive, in the white power structure that is the British university.”

“From the treatment of our black academics, to having your voice completely silenced, and courses that neglect and disrespect our past.”

UCL must, I believe, reinstate the professor and facilitate his MA course. Britain’s universities must work with NUS BSC to ‘decolonialise’ higher education in a radical attempt to offer a complete break with Britain’s colonial past.

In the US their exists Historical Black Colleges such as the Moorehouse University of Dr Martin Luther King and Spellman attended by Michelle Obama. Both are targeting black students offering an uncompromising black focused curricula, and cultural and academic activities that inspire and appeal to all.

Their doors are open to anyone, lets repeat that ‘o-p-e-n to a-n-y-b-o-d-y’ and both have around 35% non black intake for students looking for world class educational excellence with a commitment to social justice, cultural respect and a strong tradition in fighting racism.

Across Europe there are enough black and white students to make such a university a viable proposition. We certainly have enough people of wealth and stature to fund such an incredibly important initiative.

My worry is we could be waiting a might long time for British universities to get this right.

They used to say Britain is always some 30 years behind the US in terms of identifiable social and political trends. Let’s hope we can find some wealthy black individuals that would come together and help fund the UK’s first Black University.

Either that or we can wait another 30 years for British universities to wake up and smell the colonial coffee.

by Lee Jasper