I was well into my thirties before I realised that The Sneetches, Dr Seuss’s fantastical story of bird-like creatures whose star-bellied variants looked down on the plain-bellied sort, was about racism. I’d known the book all my life – my mother read it to me when I was little. But it was only when started reading The Sneetches to my own children that the penny finally dropped.
When it did, I couldn’t figure out why I’d been so dim. After all I’d grown up amid the tense sectarianism of Northern Ireland; and I’d seen plenty of the world, encountering different cultures, histories and ethnicities while working in Europe, America and Asia to forge a career in science. By the time I settled in multicultural London with my young family, I thought I had a good working knowledge of our diverse, fractured societies.
And I did, after a fashion. But I hadn’t realised the full scope of my advantages as a white, middle-class man, which is why Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race knocked me off my feet when I read it last year. I’m still picking myself up. Eddo-Lodge fills in the blind spots for anyone who has never had to make daily calculations of the cost of not belonging to the majority grouping in our society:
When white people pick up a magazine, scroll through the Internet, or switch on the TV, it is never rare or odd to see people who look like them in positions of power or exerting authority. In culture particularly, the positive affirmations of whiteness are so widespread that the average white person doesn’t even notice them. Instead, these affirmations are placidly consumed. To be white is to be human; to be white is universal. I only know this because I am not.
And:
White privilege is a manipulative, suffocating blanket of power that envelops everything we know… It’s brutal and oppressive, bullying you into not speaking up for fear of losing your loved ones, or job, or flat. It scares you into silencing yourself: you don’t get the privilege of speaking honestly about your feelings without extensively assessing the consequences.
If you find yourself raising an indignant finger at Eddo-Lodge’s vehemence, can I suggest you fold it away? Her raw honesty is kindly meant. She may be exasperated but she is out to explain, to tell her story – not to foist guilt on white people who, like myself, didn’t know any better.
In my professional domain the penalties paid by those who do not enjoy the happy accident of white privilege have been laid out in another recent book. Kalwant Bhopal’s White Privilege: the myth of a post-racial society paints a dispiriting picture of the persistent impact of racial discrimination in Britain – conscious and unconscious – on the school, university, and post-graduation experiences of young black and minority ethnic (BME) people.
The picture is complex. There are variations within and between different ethnic groups within the contested designation BME; and white people from some cultures, such as traveller communities, also encounter systemic discrimination. But table by table, chart by chart Bhopal reveals the stark reality of racial disadvantage in our education system. Black children are far more likely to be excluded from school and far less likely to gain entry to a Russell Group university. Though more BME students are getting into university overall these days, they are still less likely to stay the course, or to get at least an upper second class degree.
These disadvantages accumulate in life after university. BME graduates are more likely to be unemployed and will earn on average 10% less than white graduates. For black graduates that pay gap is 23%. The top jobs in the UK are still largely the preserve of white people, even in our schools and universities, which we might suppose to be among our more progressive institutions. Only 227 of over 22,000 head teachers in the UK are from a BME background; fewer than 100 of Britain’s 14,000 professors are black.
The statistics are grim but this isn’t just a numbers game. ‘How much diversity is enough?’ is in some ways the wrong question. Just as important in Bhopal’s book are the case studies that bear testimony to the lived experience of discrimination. Bernadette, for example, a black Caribbean academic who was proud to be a role model for her BME students, but could not find a way in to the predominantly white managerial networks that ran her university; or Julian, a black lecturer who saw no real shift in the status quo despite his university making lots of noise about diversity and inclusion.
The reaction from some quarters is to dismiss such accounts as anecdotal. And we do need to be careful – life is messy, views are subjective. But the blow-back to any murmur of complaint about white privilege is too often lacking in understanding of minority perspectives. Giles Coren bemoaned the “endless chunter about diversity” when David Lammy objected to the low admission rates of black students to Oxford and Cambridge. Toby Young, who got into Oxford only because his baronial father was able to brow-beat the admission tutors, came up with the astonishing hypothesis that Lammy himself might be to blame because he keeps banging on about Oxbridge’s poor admissions records. In a similar vein Lionel Shriver’s response to Penguin’s efforts to provide more opportunities for BME writers wrapped threadbare arguments about the meritocracy in heavy sarcasm.
What unites these commentators is the absence of any attempt to listen to the experiences of exclusion among BME people, to acknowledge that the barriers they face are real, or to understand the research that demonstrates the ethical, educational, and economic benefits of taking diversity seriously.
We have to do better. Fortunately, university policies are not dictated by newspaper columnists who have never felt the friction of discrimination in their glide through life. However, they are formulated by a leadership that remains predominantly white and male. Only around 3% of senior university leadership teams (among whom I must now count myself) are BME, compared to a national baseline of 13%. Do we really understand the problems?
On the plus side, there’s a growing awareness of race equality issues in academia and lots of work going on. The challenge of the Race Equality Charter, which aims to identify and remove the barriers to progression for BME staff and students, is being taken up by more universities.
Even so, across the sector those in power still need to spend more time talking to the people at the sharp end of discrimination. That was the message over and over again from BME academics and student representatives at a recent higher education leadership summit, who said they were tired of being “mistaken for the cleaner”, tired of “always having to succeed against the odds”, tired of being told they “weren’t quite ready for promotion”, and tired of confidence-sapping pronouncements that obviously discriminatory appointments had been “made on merit”.
Those conversations may take university leaders into unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory. But they are necessary to prick the numbing complacency of white privilege and to peel back the stereotype to see the individual talent underneath. Of course, it’s not just a matter of talking — there are no easy solutions here. But as Atul Gawande, a wise American from an ethnic minority, once wrote, “people talking to people is still the way that norms and standards change”.
@Stephen_Curry is the Assistant Provost (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) at Imperial College. He writes here in a personal capacity.