OUR BLACK HISTORY YEAR
OUR BLACK HISTORY YEAR Westminster’s Black History Year series is encouraging honest discussion, amplifying Black voices and accelerating the University’s progress towards becoming actively anti-racist. When George Floyd suffocated under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, his murder sent shock waves around the globe, re-igniting Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and forcing individuals, businesses and institutions to, once again, confront the ugly reality of systemic racism. It could be argued that, for many of these organisations, declaring support for the BLM movement and pledging to address their lack of diversity was merely a paper exercise or PR strategy, paying lip service for fear of otherwise being ‘cancelled’. But not Westminster. We know, as an institution based on a legacy of inclusivity and ‘education for all’, that we need to be leading in the crackdown on systemic racism in higher education; having honest and difficult conversations, and taking action towards becoming an actively antiracist institution. “Dealing with it through one-off unconscious bias training is never going to do it,” says Dr Deborah Husbands, Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences at Westminster and co-chair of the University’s Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Network.
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“The effect of systemic racism on the higher education sector is huge. It’s not that you would experience something different at one university to another – it’s across the sector. Many of these institutions were built on the back of slavery, and so when you’ve got that kind of legacy, it’s going to take a lot of hard work to unpack it. “And in the same way that racism is systemic, you’ve got to use systematised processes to do this unpacking,” she says. “Part of that will be through policies and looking at what our culture really is like. What are the problems? Let’s name those issues, call them out, and let’s be really honest.” Over the past year, the University has made tangible progress towards 15 Black Lives Matter commitments outlined last June; including publishing a new Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategy and piloting the Black History Year event series. Each of these accomplishments has been informed and shaped by the BME Network, initially founded by Deborah, who was feeling a sense of isolation as the only Black female academic in the School of Social Sciences. “It’s really weird when you consider
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how diverse our University is,” she says. “But you can have these kind of siloed experiences, and I was experiencing that quite profoundly. I felt both hypervisible and hyper-invisible because of my skin colour.” Deborah, who among her many accolades is also a Chartered Psychologist, Fellow of the British Psychological Society and Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, has had mixed experiences at the University. “One of the things I like to do when I meet students for the first time, is a quick straw poll to ask if they’ve ever been taught by a lecturer who looks like me. Most of the time, none of them have. On the one hand, that can be really exhilarating – I have Black female students coming up to me and saying, ‘you’ve made me feel that maybe one day I can be in academia’. Conversely, for some students, I am the opposite of what they feel a lecturer should look like, and they give you a hard time. “So, that was the reason for the BME Network, getting people to feel that we can come together as a community and talk about our issues.”
