by Nathan Richards Follow @umanyano

“There’s an intellectual hierarchy in the world, where European cultures and intellectual traditions are seen as superior. So even if you have a very sophisticated philosophy or art form and it is somehow associated with blackness, it is automatically seen as inferior. And that’s the very nature of white supremacy; it is possibly one of its defining features.”

Adam Elliott-Cooper, Absent from the Academy

Research suggests that within the national academies of higher education (universities) there are only 85 black professors out of 18,550 (0.4%) throughout the United Kingdom. This figure does not reflect the demographic make-up of black people in this country, and as such raises a number of important questions.

If universities and higher education institutions exist as key sites for the manufacture of culture and knowledge, what impact does this lack of representation within Higher Education have on our nations and institutions? When we discuss issues such as institutional racism within the Metropolitan Police, or the excessively high rates of black underemployment, or growing ethnicity related health inequalities, is it possible to make sense of these phenomena without also looking at cultural reproduction? How are such phenomena created and shaped by experiences and discourses within the academies?

With these questions in mind I wanted to use film to find out more about what lies behind the dearth of black professors within Higher Education. Absent From The Academy attempts to trace and uncover the impact that the lack of black professors has on the UK. I won’t go into too much detail here about my findings, as you can watch the film below. There were however a number of tangents that I was unable to include in the film, a few of which I think would be relevant for us to discuss now.

https://vimeo.com/76725812

In footage that didn’t make the final cut of the documentary Dr. Robbie Shilliam speaks about the importance of having black people present around the proverbial ‘table’. While these individuals need not necessarily be ‘radicals’, Shilliam feels that just their sheer presence in the room will foster another kind of conversation,

If there’s a meeting, whether it’s a governmental meeting, or university department meeting, and that meeting is about black people, and there are no black people around the table, those present will be saying certain things and assuming certain things, and allowing themselves, despite themselves, to have certain assumptions that they wouldn’t have if there was just one black person around that table. The presence of difference in these institutions around a table makes a difference; because it means people have to check themselves. The more senior you get, the more tables you sit round, the more power and influence you have. If there are no black academics moving up, then you end up with a lot of precarious black labour in universities, with no power and no ability to set an agenda or to even check an agenda that is being set.”

In both the UK and the United States massive racial underrepresentation and flagrant misrepresentation also blights much of the media industry. The discourses and practices that feed into this industry, incubated in universities around the world, are marked by an implicit whiteness. I was reminded of this in the Award Season Roundtable series, featuring director Steve McQueen that took place in 2012. In the presence of some of Hollywood’s most well renowned directors, all of whom were white (and male), except McQueen – the interviewer asks McQueen specifically, why there are so few female and black directors. At this point it is only possible to imagine the conversation that would have ensued without the presence of McQueen.

Alas, instead of answering the question posed, McQueen sidelined it in favour of another, asking instead how it is possible for directors to make films set in places such as New York and LA and not cast a single black or Latino person in any role of relevance. ‘Why is that?’ asks the interviewer, ‘I don’t know’ McQueen responds, ‘Ask them’, pointing to his fellow directors.

The silence that follows is mesmerizing. McQueen has shone a light directly onto their previously invisible and naturalized whiteness. There is little they can say by way of response. The only option available is to question their own motives, their own positions in relation to accepted modes of Hollywood practice. They of course collectively decline to engage in such a conversation, but by that point it doesn’t really matter, the implications resonate across our screens.

On another kind of show, in another segment, it may have been possible to further interrogate the racial and sexual disparities and discourses that circulated within the media industry. We could have had a conversation about the history of black and brown representation in Hollywood, why films with all black casts automatically become ‘race themed’, or perhaps, in a lecture setting, we could have deconstructed the racialised and gendered connections between blackface minstrel shows of the early 20th century and contemporary corporate Hip-Hop.

Yet it was just by McQueen’s presence that we were able to glimpse in that moment an entirely implicit body of knowledge that is shaping the Hollywood dream. This is what I think Dr. Robbie Shilliam was getting at with his observations about the bodily significance of having black academics in our universities.

Though certain voices and experiences, often embodied in black and brownness, can be vital sources of knowledge beneficial to education, it would be unwise to reify ‘experience’ or to think of these academics as existing solely to deal with race topics. This would only serve to further entrench the marginalization of these academics and would fail to recognise the diversity of black academics across disciplines.

Both Rob Berkeley and Dr. Shilliam spoke off-camera with me about black academics that have specialized in topics such as German philosophy or Greek ethics, only to find gainful employment in those fields a struggle. A struggle not because they lacked the relevant knowledge to teach or to pursue further research in these areas, but because they were often overlooked for those roles, as they did not fit the image of such a scholar.

This notion of racial specialization plays itself out everyday in HE in obvious but unchallenged ways – such as in the notions that Indians excel in computer science, blacks the arts, East Asians in mathematics. These types of stereotypes exist within universities and can impact upon the ways in which heads of departments, lecturers, teaching assistants and senior administrators interact with new academics and learners, as well as who gets funding and additional support.

Professor Laura Pulido, in her book ‘Black, Brown, Yellow and Left’, explores how such subtle forms of racialisation exist relationally – with meanings and associations of one group being contingent upon that of another. This type of differential racialization Pulido concludes ultimately benefits the dominant racial group.

It is also important to understand that the sociocultural phenomenon of whiteness and its interrelations with patriarchy, play a crucial role in shaping the ways in which women and black and brown bodies enter and exist within the academy. And this brings me to another important fact I discovered while working on this project in the UK. Out of the 85 black professors in this country only 17 are black women, less than a quarter, around 0.1% of the overall figure for professors. This data reflects the national statistics on female professors in the UK in general. And the figures are not any better at the general academic staffing level.

A recent study, Global Gender Index 2013, undertaken by Thomas Reuters in association with Times Higher Education, found that out of the top 400 ranked research universities across the world, less than 35% of academics employed within the UK’s 48 institutions that took part in the study, were women. The only country in fact that came close to reaching a gender balance was Turkey, where women made up 47% of academics in HE. These types of disparity are hard to ignore and are at the heart of discussions on women in science, politics, management and national policy.

We should not forget that the make-up of our institutions also affects our everyday experiences. In her essay on the Phenomenology of Whiteness, Sara Ahmed has discussed the ways in which whiteness can operate within institutions. Ahmed identifies reciprocal relationships between bodies and institutional spaces. She writes,

‘Spaces also take shape by being orientated around some bodies, more than others. We can also consider ‘institutions’ as orientation devices, which take the shape of ‘what’ resides within them. After all, institutions provide collective or public spaces. When we describe institutions as ‘being’ white (institutional whiteness), we are pointing to how institutional spaces are shaped by the proximity of some bodies and not others: white bodies gather, and cohere to form the edges of such spaces.’

Ahmed goes further, outlining how these processes inform the recruitment practices of academic institutions,

‘Some bodies more than others are recruited, those that can inherit the ‘character’ of the organization, by returning its image with a reflection that reflects back that image, what we could call a ‘good likeness’. It is not just that there is a desire for whiteness that leads to white bodies getting in. Rather whiteness is what the institution is orientated ‘around’, so that even bodies that might not appear white still have to inhabit whiteness, if they are to get ‘in’.’

Ahmed’s point is that not only can Black and brown people appear as aberrations within the spaces shaped by institutional whiteness, our bodies can also feel the weight of whiteness. We do not blend into the environment. Instead we can remain in a perpetual state of an excruciating Fanonian self-awareness ‘exposed, visible and different’, with our aspirations, capacities and habits held in check by the structures around us.

While our experiences of university life can be personally disorientating and problematic, I don’t think we should be discouraged. There are increasing numbers of inspirational black academics and for that matter, fellow students, that are transforming the classroom, institutional cultures and knowledge itself. There is much to be gained from our presence.

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Nathan Richards is a freelance digital journalist specialising in digital video production for the web. He is currently a doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths University with a focus on Digital History, and online communities. @umanyano

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This article was commissioned for our academic experimental space for long form writing curated and edited by Yasmin Gunaratnam.

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