Inclusive Practices Blog Post 3: Race

I’m white, middle class and a Londoner – born in Bethnal Green and grew up in Stoke Newington. When writing about race – I think you need to be aware of your positionality. There is often a fear amongst white people of saying the ‘wrong thing’ and therefore people tend to shy away and stay within a form of white psychological safety. Asif Sadiq says he isn’t offended by questions, he is offended by assumptions…’We remember experiences…it’s how we learn’¹ he breaks down investment in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in his talk for Ted x Croydon, the ambition appears to be to ‘drive change’ within institutions (very much echoed by UAL’s ‘anti racist action plan‘ which hasn’t been updated since 2021…). It feels like the diversity training; implicit bias and anti racist models are just box ticking exercises which aren’t inclusive in their teaching & their delivery, they don’t take into consideration that people learn in different ways. James Orr and Arif Ahmed completely disregard this form of training in ‘The Charity turning the UK universities woke’² for the Telegraph, their standpoint seems to suggest that anti-racist and implicit bias training are one-sided and as universities, we must remain ‘neutral’, it was, to me, an incredibly disconcerting take. To refer to the basic training model as ‘ideological’ feels racist, when I would argue its the bare minimum we can do as a society, and agree with Sadiq that the efforts are important but maybe often misaligned. Speaking with colleagues, we agreed that anything that is seen as ‘mandatory’ always feels like accompanied with an eye roll – and that having important training and learnings about racism and unconscious bias lumped together with step ladder and fire safety felt odd. Circling back to the quote about experiences from Sadiq – we discussed whether a better way of encouraging and celebrating diversity was to embed more diverse cultures and activities within UAL campus mentality – to play with the idea of people remembering experiences, UAL often serve some specific cultural dishes (jerk chicken, curry goat) around black history month – something that could and should be expanded on more widely.

‘The better we understand how identities and power work together from one context to another, the less likely our movements for change are to fracture.’³

Advance HE is heavily criticised by James Orr, stating the core principles in the processing of ‘decolonising’ was creating an oppressive environment – when I think an argument could be made that the statistics presented in ‘Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK
higher education‘ (Garrett, R 2024) 90.1% of professorships are white, and the particular stark data of 61 out of 23,000 professors in the UK are black women, directly showing that intersectional identities affect career trajectories and that universities ARE oppressive – universities ARE white institutional spaces. Academic identities are constructed through colonial histories of the UK institutional landscapes interspersing ‘images of whiteness’ as the norm. These ‘norms’ must be critically interrogated. An example of ‘the norm’ was the physical exercise activity shown in the Channel 4 doc ‘The School that tried to end Racism‘⁴ who found a way to physically represent privilege. As the divide widens students share their feelings of frustration, when faced with unconscious bias. I loved how the school dealt with this, it was critical, sensitive and necessary, bringing awareness to the white children about their own state of privilege – not at the expense of the others. I wonder how students at UAL would feel if they were shown the depressing awarding gap data in UAL’s Access and Participation Plan 2025–29⁵ (University of the Arts London, 2024).

‘When you don’t critically engage with colonial structures, you appear to devalue creative and diverse approaches’⁶

Alice Bradbury in ‘A critical race theory framework for education
policy analysis: the case of bilingual learners and
assessment policy in England‘ written in 2020, shows that racial inequality maintained by policies and that ‘bilingual students deemed a challenge’⁷ – reflected in many Ofsted reports, particularly in inner city schools, showing how race issues in education are not a priority for government, and that white dominance is still prioritised within education policy.

As an white educator working in Higher Education in central London these resources, particularly ‘Racism shapes careers‘ resonated with me – the stats alone show black female educators have a ‘triple burden’, which summarised the epitome of intersectional barriers faced. I saw Beyonce perform at her Cowboy Carter tour last week, and was thinking about her song Cozy from the Renaissance album released in 2023. She used a sample from a rant TS Madison did on YouTube – the algorithm did it’s job post show, and sent me endless videos including the one below⁸ where Beyonce’s mother Tina Knowles interviews Madison speaking about her experience of intersectionality as a black trans woman and her feelings and responses to the anger at the loss of George Floyd and the beating of trans woman Iyanna Dior.

I have been thinking a lot whilst writing this why people struggle to write about race, and what I have taken from these resources and this unit as a whole is the importance of acknowledging and anticipating different perspectives. As Sadiq said ‘it’s not about agreeing, that wouldn’t be diversity.’ He describes the behaviour and ‘work’ the D,E&I investment is wanting is a ‘lifelong journey’ and that our learning as a whole must be continuous. This is something we as educators should be encouraging in general.

1. Sadiq, A. (2023) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: Learning how to get it right. TEDx Talks. [YouTube video] 2 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw (Accessed 12th June 2025). ↩︎
2. Orr, J. (2022) Revealed: The charity turning UK universities woke. The Telegraph. [YouTube video] 5 August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRM6vOPTjuU (Accessed 12th June 2025). ↩︎
3. Crenshaw, K.W. (2006). Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 43(2-3), pp.7–20. doi:https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i2-3.28090. ↩︎
4. Channel 4 (2020) The School That Tried to End Racism. [YouTube video] 30 June. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I3wJ7pJUjg (Accessed 12th June 2025). ↩︎
5. University of the Arts London (2024) Access and Participation Plan 2025–26 to 2028–29. Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0030/458346/University-of-the-Arts-London-Access-and-Participation-Plan-2025-26-to-2028-29-PDF-1297KB.pdf [Accessed 23rd June 2025]. ↩︎
6. Garrett, R. (2024) ‘Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, pp. 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2024.2307886 (Accessed 12th June 2025) ↩︎
7. Bradbury, A. (2020) ‘A critical race theory framework for education policy analysis: The case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England’, Race Ethnicity and Education, 23(2), pp. 241–260. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2019.1599338 ↩︎
8. Outlaws with TS Madison (2025). Tina Knowles: Interview Your Mama While She’s Here | Outlaws with TS Madison. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa1QBq54NaA (Accessed 20th June 2025). ↩︎