Black, (Un)Like Me: #Embrace Equity?

In my academic career white women have been promoted and have gotten jobs over me – when they have been less qualified. Gender is always given precedence over race. #race #equity #gender #whiteprivilege

(Prof Kalwant Bhopal (@KalwantBhopal) tweeted at 9:19 am on 13 December 2022).

When I saw the above tweet by Professor Kalwant Bhopal, I was momentarily startled at her boldness with this public pronouncement of her experience of career progression as a female academic of colour in the UK Higher Education sector. The absoluteness of the phrase ‘gender is always given precedence over race’ unsettled me even though I have seen the stark data that underpins her claim. I thought I’d be more prepared with a sense of cognitive consonance when I saw this subsequent tweet two months later on 2 February 2022:

White women have been the main beneficiaries of policy making in higher education #equity #socialjustice #whiteprivilege

Yet again, I was disconcerted, and couldn’t understand how less than 140 words of this tweet had left me somewhat open-eyed and uneasy. This feeling was to some extent incongruous as my doctoral research of representations of places and regions was testament to my post-colonial positionality. Since the death of George Floyd, I had become immersed in the scholarship of anti-racism and had openly declared my advocacy for race equality as a scholar activist. In the past two years I’d undertaken a funded research project on the barriers to ethnic minority participation in leisure and domestic tourism in the UK and staged a Colloquium of Female Professors of Colour at my institution for last year’s Black History Month. These represent academic and public engagement activities that would have decimated any sense of naivety regarding the persistence of the blight of racial inequality, inequity, and disparity today in the UK Higher Education landscape.

Professor Bhopal’s tweets signposted her recently published academic article Competing Inequalities: Gender Versus Race in Higher Education Institutions in the UK, which examined the experiences of those involved in the institutionalisation of the equality charter marks in universities. Her research captured the weariness and fatigue of staff who having secured the Athena SWAN (ASC), faced the prospect of applying for the Race Equality Charter (REC) as another daunting exercise. She argues that with the alignment of the ASC with research council funding, there has been a prioritisation of gender equality over the Race Equality Charter (REC) in the HEI sector. Bhopal warns that these factors have tended to blur the distinctions of the equalities agenda to the detriment of addressing the persistence of racial inequality in the academy. It is this conflation that now poses some dilemma for female academics of colour. Women are increasing in number in both academic and professional roles in senior leadership teams across the HEI landscape. The latest Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data shows that the number of white female professors is increasing more than male professors. But while gender equality is no longer being second guessed in the academy, the comparative disparities in the career progression of black and brown female academics have been subsumed in the statistics purporting advancing women’s empowerment.

Recently, there’s been some universal celebration with the announcement in February 2023 of Jason Arday as the youngest black professor of colour at Cambridge University. From humble beginnings and despite the odds of global learning development delay, his accomplishments stand out as a beacon of achievement and Black hope. But to his singular credit, Professor Arday has been one of the most outspoken advocates for the female academic of colour. In his research and public engagement activities he has exposed the plight of black and brown women – in particular, those who have been at the forefront of the fight for race equality in the academy and also who have been the least likely to be promoted. In The Guardian article on his appointment, Arday pointed out that ‘black women were among the lowest paid in the sector, and out of 24,000 professors in the UK, just over 160 were black and just over 50 were black women.’ For Arday, this state of affairs in the academy is a stain, and he has called for university leaders to recognise and address the problem facing not just black and brown staff, but as he states: ‘more specifically black women in the sector, who to be quite honest are treated differently’.

Here’s the double jeopardy of the Black female in the higher education sector, who while hoping to navigate the glass ceiling with gender equality, then encounters the white, glass circle of white women, who are (Un)Like them. With her work on Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Bell Hooks exposes the neglect of conventional feminism in tackling racism, which represents even more rigid barriers to the advancement of women of colour than sexism. Most black and brown female academics attest that there is hardly much outspoken empathy for the ignominy of racial harassment and denigration they experience, even from stout-hearted, gender rights activist white, female colleagues. As Professor Uvanney Maylor pointed out in a 2017 article, Is It Because I’m Black? A Black Female Research Experience, throughout her career, some white colleagues demonstrated societal norms of othering and belittling her, while most were oblivious or indifferent to the cause as a ‘sister’ academic in the fight for social justice. According to Maylor, there’s an ‘inbuilt prejudice and fixed stereotypes of what it is possible for Black people to do’. The barrier is epitomised in never accepting that a black woman has the ability or competence to be appointed or to be promoted to a leadership position. This is even demonstrated by black male colleagues who oftentimes, unlike Professor Arday, display patriarchal attitudes that it is inherently a demotion to report to a black female in a senior position.

Unfortunately, there are some examples in the public space, of women of colour who when appointed in senior positions, discount charges of racial barriers and who claim that they have assumed these positions only on merit of their hard work and abilities.  This would be more credible if their discourse was not then larded with trite exhortations to their black and brown sisters to just get over ‘it’, that is, the trauma of racial prejudice and aggression. In some bewildering instances, such apologists had even contended that colonialism bequeathed some benefits to the colonised. Those who master this capacity to integrate into the collective habitus of Whiteness may more readily scale the slippery pole within and without the Academy. Senior teams who are more comfortable in maintaining the status quo of privilege while displaying some semblance of enlightened leadership, headhunt for such appointees who have assimilated and subscribed to the dominant ethos in almost every possible way except for their black and brown skins.

In writing this blog, I have probed the pain of my discomfort in the quest to understand the reasons for what I see as my disquiet with this intersectional reality of the competing interests of gender and race in the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) landscape. In this reflective process I recalled the classic real-life account, Black Like Me written in1964 by John Howard Griffin, a Texan journalist and novelist, who darkened his skin with medication and tanning to pass as an African American for six weeks to understand the black experience in the deep South of the USA. His harrowing tale of his encounters as an ostensibly black man gave some legitimacy to the outcries of the Afro-American community of the brutality of their lived experiences. But when he returned to his white world, his exposé was greeted with him being brutally beaten with chains and left for dead, and subsequently exiled him and his family from his country as they fled to Mexico in fear of their lives. Even if there has been some scepticism of Griffen’s motivation and accounts, his story has the enduring resonance of illustrating the gulf of the lifeworld(s) across the ethnic divide.

This may account for the alienation that I constantly encounter when making the case for race equality even in spaces where there is the commonality of gender, supposed feminist solidarity and voiced allyship. Usually, I’m not of a shared gender, but just Black, (Un)Like me to a White ‘sisterhood’. In this EDI contest in the Higher Education context, there is no space or scope to win for black and brown women of colour who stand up and inevitably stand out. It’s the contradiction of being the embodiment of denial, invisibility and inconsequence; a dilemma for bold, black women in the academy, though relegated as subaltern, dare to speak, and, with the enabling of scholarship, also write. It’s the price, precarity and perplexity of women who are repeatedly told if not in word, but in deed and praxis, there’s no equity to embrace here in the Academy, you’re Black, (Un)Like me.

Dr Marcella Daye

Dr Marcella Daye is the Co-Chair of the Global Ethnic Majority Staff Network and Senior Lecturer in Tourism Management at the University of Northampton.