Institutionalised whiteness, racial microaggressions and black bodies out of place in Higher Education

ABSTRACT

On the morning of Friday 3 February 2017, Femi Nylander – a Black Oxford alumnus – walked through the grounds of Oxford University’s Harris Manchester College. Later that morning a CCTV image of Femi was circulated to staff and students who were urged to ‘maintain vigilance’.

Whilst ‘post-racial’ ideology insists on framing such incidents as isolated aberrations bereft of wider structural and institutional context, in this article I draw upon the theoretical concepts of racial microaggressions and bodies out of place in order to disrupt this hegemonic interpretation.

Adopting the Critical Race Theory (CRT) method of counter-narrative, I centralise the voices of student campaigns as sites of legitimate experiential knowledge. These campaigns reveal a web of whiteness that undergirds Higher Education. It is this web, I argue, that ensnares Femi on the day in question. Thus, Femi’s experience cannot be understood in abstraction from structural white supremacy and institutionalised whiteness.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• racial microaggressions
• bodies out of place
• racism
• Higher Education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1.. Mixed-race.is used here to describe a social reality rather than to reify any biological (mis)understandings of ‘race’ (see: Joseph-Salisbury 2018).

2. This of course notwithstanding the long, whitewashed history of Blackness in the royal family (de Valdes y Cocom (no date).

3. Take Kant, for instance, his suggestion that ‘Africans are incapable of moral and aesthetic feeling’ should necessitate that his ideas are treated with a far greater level of criticality (and even skepticism) (Gabriel 2017: 26).

4.. ‘Rhodes.was.an.imperialist,.businessman.and.politician.who.played.a.dominant.role.in.southern.Africa.in.the.late.19th.Century,.driving.the.annexation.of.vast.swathes.of.land’.(Parkinson,.2015:.no.page).

5.. ‘Of.the.Europeans.who.scrambled.for.control.of.Africa.at.the.end.of.the.19th.century,.Belgium’s.King.Leopold.II.left.arguably.the.largest.and.most.horrid.legacy.of.all.…..Leopold.‘turned.his.“Congo.Free.State”.into.a.massive.labour.camp,.made.a.fortune.for.himself.from.the.harvest.of.its.wild.rubber,.and.contributed.in.a.large.way.to.the.death.of.perhaps.10.million.innocent.people.’(Dummett,.2004:.no.page).