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.
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 Citation2018).
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 Citation2017: 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,.Citation2015:.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,.Citation2004:.no.page).