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Prominent academics and student leaders have criticised the government’s equalities watchdog for including anti-white harassment in its inquiry into racism in UK universities.
They accused the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) of drawing a false equivalence between what it described as racial harassment against white British students and staff and the racism suffered by their black and minority ethnic peers.
According to the watchdog’s student survey, 9% of white British students experienced racial harassment, compared with 29% of black students and 27% of Asian students.
The report, Tackling Racial Harassment: Universities Challenged, highlighted examples of anti-English sentiment at Scottish and Welsh universities.
A white English member of staff told the inquiry that two Welsh colleagues used a slur when referring to English people: “She was speaking in English and changed to Welsh for that word thinking I wouldn’t understand. I’ve never come across so much racism as when I moved to Wales.”
Heidi Mirza, a visiting professor of race, faith and culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, said the EHRC’s inclusion of anti-British sentiment watered down the impact of racism on people of colour.
“Anti-black, anti-Asian and Islamophobic and antisemetic racism is on a different scale to the anti-English sentiment,” she said. “The experience that the Scottish and the Welsh students might experience will not equate to what skin colour and visible difference means to students on campus.”
Fope Olaleye, the black students’ officer at the National Union of Students, said the EHRC had ignored pleas made at a roundtable event with the inquiry team earlier this year to exclude anti-white harassment from their report.
She tweeted: “I remember sitting at one of the round tables and a bunch of students and myself had to explain in excruciatingly detail that ‘anti-white prejudice’ should have no place in a report on racial harassment but I see we were not listened to.”
She later added: “There was a definite tension with the students in the room who were concerned by how they were defining racism in the report and many of us pressed and challenged it.”
However, Rebecca Hilsenrath, the EHRC chief executive, denied that including anti-white harassment minimised racism against black and minority ethnic staff and students.
She said: “You’re talking about people’s thresholds to life and to employment and to future economic wellbeing. It may be because you’re black or because you’re Welsh in an English university. But often these things are cumulative. You’re away from home and still a young person. And it’s difficult to argue that there are different grades of racism in that sense because clearly we’re looking at an objectively tough outcome for people in terms of what the impact is.”
But Priyamvada Gopal, a reader in the faculty of English at Cambridge University, said this was a false equivalence because it ignored the political and historical context of racism in the UK. She added: “Anti-English sentiment in Wales is emphatically not the same as targeting or disadvantaging black people as a vulnerable minority.”
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