A mixed-race university lecturer accused of being racist by the white actor Laurence Fox has been bombarded with hate messages via social media, she has told the Observer.

Rachel Boyle, a researcher on race and ethnicity at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, clashed with Fox during a TV discussion about the press’s treatment of the Duchess of Sussex.

Since the row, Boyle, 39, says she has received a barrage of online abuse, mainly from people who appear to be of the alt right, via Twitter and email.

“At this stage I’m not worried but I’m going to monitor it closely,” she said. But positive responses to her appearance on BBC Question Time on Thursday far outweigh the abuse and she would “absolutely” make the same points again, she adds.

“The lad sitting next to me in the audience leant over and said: ‘You’re going to go viral tomorrow you know’. I started laughing like ‘Oh yeah, whatever’. In terms of how it’s unfolded I’m incredibly proud of how I handled the situation, of what I said. I’m proud to be this voice, proud to have this platform.”

Play Video 0:59 Lecturer clashes with Laurence Fox on Question Time over racism and Meghan – video

As the panel discussed the media coverage of the duchess, Boyle said from the audience: “Let’s be really clear about what this is, let’s call it by its name – it’s racism. She’s a black woman and she has been torn to pieces.”

“It’s not racism,” Fox responded from the panel. “We’re the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe. It’s so easy to just throw your charge of racism at everybody and it’s starting to get boring now.”

Boyle then described Fox as a “white privileged male”, which led the actor to label her as racist.

Boyle believes it was Fox’s immediate response to her comments – rather than the point she made about the press – that made the row “go nuclear”. “It was the way in which he dismissed my perspective, talked over me and then made really ridiculous statements for which he has no basis apart from his own personal position.”

Fox later responded on Twitter since the pair clashed, provocatively tweeting a quotation from Martin Luther King. “I was just speechless when I saw that,” Boyle says. “I thought how can you conflate what you said to me, your viewpoint, your position, with the views of a civil rights activist who was shot and killed? There was a moment yesterday when I thought: Oh my word. But being a black academic researching race and ethnicity is not easy. Having conversations with people such as Laurence Fox is not easy, dealing with the fallout is not easy. But ultimately this is what I came to do. You don’t sign up for this and think it’s going to be easy.”

Her decision to highlight white privilege has been heavily influenced by the work of the US activist Peggy McIntosh. “She talks about the invisible, weightless knapsack of privilege,” Boyle said. “Within this knapsack there are special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, passports, blank cheques [which] you carry around. You have no idea that it’s there, but you also have no idea of the privilege that whiteness affords you.” The media’s treatment of Meghan, Boyle suggests, clearly shows there was a need to question privilege and to be alert to racism.

“The way she is treated by the press deeply worries me and makes me uncomfortable. The comments that I’ve seen in both the press and on social media do have racist undertones.”

In contrast, she recalls how she felt when Barack Obama was elected US president. “I saw that as the paradise moment – as in there’s somebody on the television who I recognise because you look like me, you look like my family and you are in a position of power and that had never happened before.”

Now she fears the clock has been wound back. “With Trump I felt like we came right back,” Boyle says. “ I feel like I’m 15 again and I’m in school and nobody cares about how I feel in terms of racism,” she says. “And the other side is being given all kinds of light.”

Boyle comes from one of the oldest black families in Liverpool. “My family have been here since the 1800s. My great, great-great grandfather was a slave of the island of Barbados.”

Her experiences of what her mixed-race parents went through in Liverpool in the 70s – “lots of micro aggression, incidents in isolation that form a pattern” – and the racism she encountered as a teenager that her secondary school chose to ignore, have influenced her chosen career.