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Racial harassment, from open abuse to more passive mistreatment, is so commonplace in UK universities that for black staff members such as myself, it feels like something we just have to get used to. With the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s new report, we now have evidence to prove that racism is grossly under-acknowledged in universities. The figures show that, somehow, 43% and 56 % of universities thought that every incident of racial harassment against students and staff was reported. In reality less than half of staff said they had reported their experiences.
I have been in universities for almost two decades and cannot think of anything they are worse at handling than racism. I have experienced multiple episodes of racial harassment as both student and staff member. I never reported any of these because I had no idea how I would have gone about it, and even if I did would have had no faith in the university to take my experiences seriously. Perhaps, now we have some numbers, the report will be an impetus for change.
Despite this, I remain sceptical: the report is no panacea. It has failed to condemn universities for institutional racism by connecting incidents of racial harassment to the myriad of other symptoms of racism including the attainment gap, higher dropout rates, an ethnicity pay gap, and a lack of black professors. We cannot understand any of these isolation. The report also describes racism in an overly simplistic way: as the product of backwards individuals who hurl abuse to those who are not white, rather than existing in many, far subtler forms.
This is evidenced in the way the report reveals that 9% of white students have felt victims of racial harassment, for instance through “anti-English sentiment”. This minimises the significance of racism by reducing it to individual encounters. It is an insult to those who have experienced racial harassment rooted in deep seated prejudice and enabled by institutional racism to view this as comparable. Considering that the EHRC ignored direct appeals from the National Union of Students to exclude “anti-white” prejudice, its inclusion is a dereliction of duty.
Bodies like the EHRC exist because of struggles by victims of racism for recognition, representation and respect. My mum worked for decades for the forerunners to the EHRC and I can only imagine her pain to see the legacy of that work so cruelly distorted. The fact that the authors ever thought such a definition of racial harassment was appropriate shows just how out of touch and unfit for purpose the race relations industry has become.
According to the report, the solution to long-standing institutional racism in universities is more legislation and better enforcement. Yet Britain already has some of the most progressive race relations legislation in the world: the Equality Act of 2010 put the burden on institutions not only to avoid committing racist acts, but to proactively ensure that their practice is anti-racist. Sadly, the raft of research from across the higher education, along with other sectors, shows that this has had no meaningful impact on racial equality. Racism is not a collection of individual acts, but rather a systemic problem, and therefore no amount of legislation that attempts to deal with supposed bad apples can ever address the problem.
To combat racism in universities, as in other institutions, we need to stop focusing on individual incidents of racial harassment and fundamentally overhaul the structures that perpetuate it. The EHRC provides an opportunity to talk about experiences that have long gone ignored but does so in a framework that only adds insult to injury, missing an opportunity to drive forward this conversation. This will not come as a surprise to the ethnic minority staff and students who continue to push for meaningful change.
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