“Why Me?”– Questions of Racial Equity and Institutional Racism in Academia

Abstract

Beginning with the necessary question “Why me?,” I look at a system which bars BIPOC bodies and theory. In her open letter to the US Black Studies academic community, Sylvia Wynter (1994 ) spoke about the problem of “no human involved” (“NHI”) in the policing and incarceration of Black bodies as being pertinent for how Black studies was positioned institutionally. This same white supremacist governance and surveillance “NHI” exists in universities on both sides of the Atlantic. There is something very wrong with the system of which I am a part that persistently and consistently bars BIPOC bodies and theory and only avails our presence and thought a marginal position on the proviso that the status quo of whiteliness ( Yancy 2008 ) is not disturbed. Nothing really changes in terms of anti-BIPOC racism. Rather, it remains strangely the white supremacist (settler) colonial same within Canadian race-evasive multiculturalism and UK ‘post-race’ racism.