Counter-narratives in the First Person: Whiteness and the Limits of Diversity

Sara Bafo,Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan

doi:10.22582/ta.v10i1.582

Abstract

This short article focuses on Sara’s experience as the first-ever student BAME department representative at a large post-secondary institution in the UK. Written as a first-person testimonial but grounded in a dialogic method of ethnographic recovery and remembrance, we argue that diversity initiatives that seek to create inclusion and representation, without a careful engagement with power, end up reproducing the university as a white public space that centres white fragility. The article highlights two key experiences during Sara’s tenure as BAME student representative in a department of anthropology that show how the limits of diversity in higher education are found in the refusal to engage with whiteness. 

Highlights

In November 2018, I was recruited as the first-ever student Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME)i department representative at my university
These ‘gaps’ prompted the university and its departments to find some sort of solution, one of which, seemingly, was to create a representative voice for BAME identified students at the department level. In this short essay I, writing with Gabriel, describe and analyse two of my experiences as a BAME department representative. Through these experiences we show how institutions of higher education in the UK, in their attempts to ‘represent’ diversity, can sideline difficult conversations around institutional racism and racial microaggressions that have multiple, adverse effects on racially minoritised students
If we take diversity to mean a commitment to equalise different positions in the university, sidelining conversations around institutional racism only serves to reproduce the university as a white public space that centres white fragility

Summary

Introduction

In this article my experience as the BAME representative of an anthropology department stands as a counternarrative that reveals in specific ways how white public space and white fragility operate in higher education institutions It makes evident the ways in which British social anthropology reproduces itself as a discipline that is resistant to diversity even as it purports itself a purveyor of it. This article – in its content and its style of narration – offers an example of how one might collaboratively write ethnography that centres the voices of those who experience institutional and everyday racism and amplify their accounts as necessary critique This critique, to be clear, is not meant to offer solutions but to provide a diagnostic from my position as a Black Muslim woman of how whiteness limits diversity from realizing itself as a vehicle to radically remake the university

Decentering Anthropology Forum

BAME Anthropology Report

My Resignation Letter

Conclusion