Black Achievement in the Age of Colourblindness
It’s been a year since the sun set on my graduation, and I can say with some reflection my degree failed me as a Black student.
Reading Creative Writing, I enrolled because I thought it would help me develop my writing skills (which it did), as I want to be an author one day. Yet, despite that, it wasn’t an inclusive course — for me, as a Black student. And its reading lists were not diverse. It was a course where The Bell Jar (1963) was considered contemporary literature — and how I supposed to critique colonialism in Victorian-era novels with an objective lens? How can a Black person read the The Island of Doctor Moreau without bias?Whilst in my first year we did study Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala, my encounters with Black people in literature within the “safety of a classroom” had always been negative. And for someone who has never had a Black teacher — from aged five to my now twenty-four years on this planet, every teacher I’ve ever had has been white. Granted, I went to private school but should that cut me off from seeing myself in who is teaching me? Should fee-paying schools be any less representative in terms of their teacher-base than he state? Should school curricula be #sowhite because the mass of faces are white?
Shouldn’t the texts read at in education be representative of the society, not just student population of that class?
I did a Creative Writing degree and graduated with a 2.1; shouldn’t I be grateful? But I was a full stop on a white background. Whilst studying Small Island (Andrea Levy) in my first year — a fantastic book — the narrative of Black people in this country has always been of slavery and immigration. It’s tied up in the clichés of Black history. No, we’re more than slaves and poor immigrants. We are part of those stories but we are so much more than that.
Our narrative is Andrea Levy novels but it’s also White Teeth, If Beale Street Could Talk, Boys Don’t Cry, The Good Immigrant — and films like To Sir, With Love.
What about the people of colour that do the same old stuff as white people? Why do stories that include Black people have to include struggle? On my American Literature module, we did the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs (first year). And in the second year, there was The White Boy Shuffle. Where’s my Love Actually with melanin? Sometimes, it wouldn’t be so bad to have silly stories where your race is an afterthought.
On the English side to my degree, I soon saw, that like history, it’s impossible to be truly objective. You may be banned from using “I” in an essay but your opinion will still be your opinion, regardless if you dress it up in academic lingo. Academics work with “facts” but what about when I view those facts through a racialised lens? How can I critique the colonial undertones of Dracula with anything but the eyes of a Black person who is still living with the genetic trauma of colonialism? From the Windrush Scandal to Slavery to the Scramble for Africa — the colonial baggage of history is a trauma that every person of colour in this country carries, even if they don’t admit it.
The thing about whiteness; it’s that hostility that comes when you try to debate the British Empire, and the heroes and villains of our historical past, as well as the number of people that say “it wasn’t that bad.” Obviously, I would polemically disagree with them. However, in these debates more often than not, people listen to respond rather listen to listen. These battles were often machine guns against spears — empire was class oppression and slavery. It was bringing four guns to a fist fight and implementing laws that can still be seen in practice today — from parts of Africa to the Indian subcontinent.
I am othered by society, do I need to be othered by education too? Education should be paving the way for society to follow. But the resistance to decolonisation is just as prevalent in education as it is in the world outside.I love reading about how people got from A to B, but where were the Malorie Blackmans on my course reading? However, on nonfiction, I felt more represented. I wasn’t bludgeoned by the existential anguish of old White men! I would have liked to have looked at the essays of James Baldwin. How about Audre Lorde and the prose of Maya Angelou, and the books of Paul Gilroy?
Where was Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie? What an inspiration. Where was Purple Hibiscus, Chinua Achebe, and Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth?
It wouldn’t have hurt to have some contemporary poetry. Your Benjamin Zephaniahs and John Agards and Salena Goddens in the roars of the Harlem Renaissance and the Beat Generation. Poetry, the vocation I one day want to go into — didn’t feel inclusive. Where were the poems about Africa written by Africans? What about the poems that dissect race and class in a post-9/11 world? And the 20-somethings, poets effortlessly sticking it to The Man?
It soon became evident I wasn’t going to get a diverse poetry experience through the course’s reading lists, especially the primary reading — The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry — filled with some great pieces but nothing I can see myself in. Out of it, I grew to enjoy war poetry but there was still a feeling of isolation. There were no poets that looked like me. And I realised I would have to seek out extra information on my own.
Yet, is being othered a bad thing? Was there a way I could use my “other” experiences to benefit my writing? But the stories of race and class, and to a degree gender, and their intersections were absent. And in writing my dissertation, why did I feel bad for writing about race? That I felt a need to write about it, and identity, because those subjects weren’t covered on my course. In my writing about race, I indirectly gaslighted by the society around me.
I was part of a system that doesn’t do enough to cover my experience as a person of colour. And this is tied up in how we interact with our academic staff, lecturers (if at all) and if we do well at the end of our three years.
Is this tied up in the ethnicity award gap? Quite possibly. Identity and inclusion, and to feel unincluded on a degree you’re paying for — it’s a crisis for people like me who are the second generation or even the first generation of their family to be born in this country — coming from places that were colonised by the British to begin with. And to have their stories omitted — from industrialisation on business to diverse stories on arts degrees to the erasure of The Slave Trade on Law — why is it Anglo-Europe and the Rest?
When we talk about the Industrial Revolution, we need to talk about how it was paid for — that Britain still profited off US slavery long after its own regime was abolished.
But I’m just one of those lefty millennial snowflakes, right? And the minute number of Black professors in this country is at crisis point. From decolonisation to the ethnicity award gap to identity politics — people have said we are complaining about problems that don’t exist. The concept that students of colour have to prove their experiences are real is maddening.
We are being crushed by whiteness in academia, and in the world outside. When discussing achievement, shouldn’t we be talking about how Black children have been failed by the education system years before they enter university? The whiteness of my degree ruined my experience of it. My experiences were watered down to slavery, child soldiers in Africa and poor people in The Projects (as far as fiction was concerned). Whilst I enjoyed nonfiction, it was vague enough to include everyone without poking the bear.
And honestly, as long as academia continues to pander to whiteness, Black and brown students will continue to struggle — whether we’re talking academics or community integration, and I truly believe this is a considerable factor in the UK’s 24% award gap between black (55.5%) and white students (79.6%). I know we are capable. It’s much ado with other factors, including inclusion and whitewashed curricula and the lack of support that Black students get in knowing how to operate in White institutions (and more).
I graduated with a 2.1; I achieved. I left with a good degree but what about the clearly intelligent Black student that can graduate with a first class or a 2.1, and don’t?
The achievement of Black students will change, but it’ll take more than students “applying themselves.” From reading lists to academic staff and lecturers listening to their students’ stories on racism at university to integrating into community and then some — Black people are already at a systemic disadvantage in society just by being born outside the gates of white privilege. Black students are being failed by the system at every stage.
My parents raised me on the notion “You gotta work twice as hard for half as much” — you work harder for less and just hope you turn out okay because the system is stacked against you from birth. Yet, I beat the odds. The award gap is no quick job. It’s a variety of factors, I think date back to adolescence, when specifically young Black boys and girls begin to look older and start to mature. When fourteen year-old boys are six feet tall being followed around the shop by the security guard (because they might steal something). Yet, we know that at GCSE Black students start to catch up to the white counterparts because their grades are marked externally by people that don’t know them.
