Black at Higher Education

Karima Kadi-Hanifi

doi:10.13189/ujer.2013.010207

Abstract

This is an exploratory paper, drawing on the author's experiences as well as those of three other black lecturers in Higher Education (HE). Three interviews were carried out, asking the same five questions around themes of concern to the author. These are about the learning and teaching approaches used by these lecturers; their experiences of racism in HE; the professional role that they feel they play in HE; their strategies for the empowerment of black students and finally the meaning of academic 'success' from their perspective. The individual narratives that emerge are explored and commonalities between them and with the author's own experiences and hopes are identified.It is the desire of this work to add to the scholarship on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Pedagogy and to emphasise the need for more counter-hegemonic narratives from the 'black' experience in HE. This is explored through the voices of these academics as they recount their strategies for a more equitable student experience in the classroom, on modules and on curricula, based on their lived experience and shared history of racism.

Highlights

It might be argued that the common mainstream view in academia these days is that we are ethically sound, civilised and humane
As a response to these worrying trends and findings from recent literature, this paper reports on small scale exploratory work with three black academics, like myself, reflecting on their subjective experience of race and racism in academia today
In addition to the results above, I carried out a count of content words in the whole narratives of the lecturers, to get a feel for their overall individual philosophy and concerns regarding the central theme of being ‘Black at Higher Education (HE)’

Summary

Introduction

It might be argued that the common mainstream view in academia these days is that we are ethically sound, civilised and humane. Much seminal work [1,2,3,4] has advanced academic thinking about issues of identity linked to race, ethnicity, gender and class and it can be re-assuring to think that we have emerged better balanced and more equal as a society today. Why was it that I still found myself experiencing instances of inequality of treatment as a black lecturer in HE?Some of these were very subtle ones, of the kind identified by Rollock [5] as ‘racial microaggressions’. This paper uses the phrase ‘Black at Higher Education’ for two main reasons.The first one being that the ‘at’ in the phrase reinforces the commitment and attachment that I and my black colleagues have for HE.The second reason is to link with anti-racist work across the Atlantic and was inspired by the films ‘Black at Yale’ and ‘Still Black, at Yale’.The films powerfully show how the experiences of racism by Yale black students in 1974 (captured by the student film maker Warrington Hudlin) had not necessarily shifted thirty years on in 2004 [6], when black students at this Ivy League university still felt that they were being considered ‘suspicious’ on campus by white staff and students, among other negative race-related experiences

Methods

Results

Conclusion