Abstract
Drawing on the autobiography of an immigrant Black African female scholar, we introduce and conceptualize the notion of dual structural advantages that racism potentially affords elite White male academics. These hegemonic scholars enjoy two types of possible advantage. First, as gatekeepers to a racist academic system, powerful White male scholars protect their interests by epistemically excluding the ‘Other’ from knowledge production. Second, these hegemonic agents ironically utilize racism as a hermeneutical resource for ‘impactful’ research output, grounded in progressive, anti-racist theorizations in collaboration with Black male scholars. Such work is disseminated and perpetuated through elite academic outlets, thus substantially leveraging the agents’ careers and university rankings. Foregrounding double advantages in debates on racial equality accentuates the necessity of changing the agential practices of elite White male scholars in order to transform racist institutions.
Highlights
Historically, British academia is a white male patriarchal system reserved for middle class white men (Wright et al, 2007) and built on White supremacy (Johnson, 2018), as conceptually “the idea that the White ‘race’ is superior by virtue of its being White” (Grimes (2001: 135)
Epistemic exclusion denotes “unwarranted infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers” (Dotson, 2014: 115), based on prejudicial assessments of the individuals as lacking legitimacy and credibility (Settles et al, 2019; 2020). This is demonstrated in our analysis by Bola, an African immigrant admitted into an elite British Business School as the only Black person among thirty-five doctoral candidates
Black female scholars are often isolated and lack access to information pertaining to institutional policies, informal rules and procedures affecting the individuals’ careers (Settles et al, 2019), as revealed by Bola’s narrative
Summary
British academia is a white male patriarchal system reserved for middle class white men (Wright et al, 2007) and built on White supremacy (Johnson, 2018), as conceptually “the idea that the White ‘race’ is superior by virtue of its being White” (Grimes (2001: 135). Bola was nearly forced out of academia by Abel (pseudonym), an ostensibly racist powerful White male heading the Management group (anonymized) at GBBS, who degraded Bola’s Africa-centric research (c.f. King et al, 2019) as nonsensical and lacking fit with the elite GBBS.
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