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. “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 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.”

For a whole year the BME Network was just Deborah alone, but it now has over 200 members from across the University. “It’s a huge community where we can integrate our experiences, regardless of our level, our discipline, or where we are situated around the University.”

Recognising that the celebration of Black lives should not be reduced to a single month, the BME Network established Black History Year – an event series to acknowledge Black stories year-round.

“The reason we shifted from a month to a year, is that Black history is an everyday experience. For me, Black history is not something that happens in October. It happens every day of our lives.”

Over the academic year, the Black History Year steering group (made up of members and allies of the BME Network and led by Deborah), created a blog of resources and stories of Black lives at Westminster, and hosted 13 online events, welcoming speakers from an array of different disciplines and backgrounds.

“We decided to take a really thematic approach and concentrate on the contribution that Black people have made, not just at Westminster, but globally and throughout history,” Deborah explains. “For example, we looked at Black people in activism, in the creative industry, in professional services, in wellbeing and mental health.

“This isn’t about a slick production,” she adds. “We’ve just got people to come into this space and say what the reality of race and inequality is for them. So we’ve had experts, but we’ve also had lay people, and we’ve had people through Q&A articulate their own experiences.

“We have heard the lived experiences of real people. Hearing it broken down, from ‘the horse’s mouth’, so to speak, makes it so much more meaningful.”

For alumna Lubaba Khalid, the fact that the Black History Year series simply exists is a “massive achievement” in itself. “It’s so important as a platform for having those difficult conversations that we wouldn’t be having otherwise,” she says.

As former Vice-President of Welfare and former BAME Officer of the Students’ Union (SU), Lubaba has experience with these difficult conversations.

“When I started as a Sabbatical Officer, it was very hard to have certain conversations, because some people just don’t understand,” she says. “As a Black woman, if I go into certain spaces and challenge things, it looks like I’m being ‘emotional’ or ‘aggressive’. And so many people are still in denial of the fact that our society is racist.

“But I worked hard on changing the culture at the SU. By the end of my two years, for example, the new sports strategy had in it specific interventions for Black students and for Muslim students, which was amazing. And now people are so much more comfortable having the conversations that they were scared to before.”

In her role at the SU, Lubaba also hosted Westminster’s first ever Black History Month events.

“At the time, I had students coming up to me, saying ‘thank you so much for recognising Black History Month!’. So it’s good that we now recognise that one month is not enough. This is not a tokenistic campaign.”

Black History Year has been very well-received both within the University and externally, with over 1,000 attendees across the series. In one of the most popular events, historian and author Dr Miranda Kaufmann presented a talk on Black Tudors.

“That was a real eye-opener for us,” says Deborah. “We often think about Black people in Britain being the end product of slavery, coming in around the 1800s, but they were there in the 1500s, the 1600s, and living quite peaceably, having valid occupations and being real contributors to society. John Blanke was a famous Black Tudor, a trumpeter for Henry XIII who announced the arrival of his son. And even asked Henry for a pay rise!”

Meanwhile, for Stephen Bunbury, Senior Lecturer at Westminster Law School, the talk which resonated the most was Mental Health in Black Men, presented by Damien Ridge Professor of Health Studies at Westminster, and Associate Professor of Sociology Jason Arday.

“When you’re in a space that is not filled with people like you, you can feel alone, or like you’re being too sensitive. But I could really relate to their stories,” Stephen recalls.

“It’s not easy to learn about the achievements of Black people unless you go to some of these events,” he adds. “There are things that I have learnt about Black people in this series, which I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know before. “Hearing these stories empowers me as a Black person. It empowers me, gives me confidence, and gives me the ability to challenge certain structures.”

The series also plays a role in educating people who are not Black, he stresses. “Hearing Black stories also inspires people who are not from BME backgrounds. We have a lot of allies who are champions of trying to challenge inequalities, raising their own awareness or developing their knowledge.”

Stephen’s commitment to addressing inequality at Westminster does not stop with his contribution to the Black History Year series. Alongside his teaching, Stephen is also Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Lead for Westminster Law School and a member of Academic Council.

“We make sure that our EDI principles are addressed in teaching, learning and assessment; that these principles are embedded in the school; and that we are consistent across the University,” he explains.

The new EDI strategy is the first of its kind at Westminster. Along with an action plan, timelines and targets, the strategy lays the foundations of a long-term plan for enabling a supportive and diverse learning and working environment at the University.

“For the sector, we should aim to be leading on the EDI front,” says Stephen. “And we should be showing across the institution that whatever you do at Westminster, EDI principles are embedded into everything – the moment you step through the door, regardless of any protected characteristic.

“This work can be burdensome,” he adds. “It involves engaging groups who aren’t comfortable speaking about these things, or don’t know how to. But I feel very optimistic. We’ve made a lot of progress towards our BLM commitments – they are happening; they’re not just on paper – we have the EDI committee, we have a lot of allies, we have networks.

“We are making progress and we are moving in the right direction, but we have to be realistic because these things take time. We just need to keep our foot on the gas.”

It’s the unique experiences of Deborah, Lubaba, Stephen and the rest of the Black History Year steering group that have really helped to shape the series, ensure its success, and influence the broader mission at the University to tackle discrimination is all its forms.

“Senior leaders have mentioned how pivotal Black History Year has been in shaping EDI at the University,” says Deborah. “I think what we’ve done is brought the experiences, the energy and the intelligence of Black people into that EDI agenda moving forward.”

Praised for the bold, sustained and refreshing approach to championing inclusivity, Black History Year will continue into the next academic year, with plans to go even bigger.

“The next run might look a bit more hybrid,” suggests Deborah. “We might have some workshops or some activities where our audiences do some work for themselves and take things away from the sessions. We want it to be more reflective going forward.

“We’re still taking a themed approach, so some of the things people can look out for are Black people in sports, professional development, and possibly religion. We want to look at domestic violence too. We’re going to finish with a look at the criminal justice system, as we think there’s a whole piece in there about restorative justice that needs to be addressed.”

With all the support and positivity surrounding the Black History Year series, alongside the University’s work on diversity and inclusion, is the hope of becoming an actively anti-racist institution well within Westminster’s grasp?

According to Lubaba: “There is still a lot of room for improvement. The building blocks are there, and the series has started helping us achieve a cultural shift. But it’s very much an ongoing process.” “I think it’s been a really interesting year,” says Deborah. “And whether people recognise it or not, we have all changed in some way. Some events have revealed that those changes aren’t as sophisticated as we would have hoped – the recent incidents of football hooliganism, for example.

“There’s a bravery about everything now. And I think the challenge for us is to change that bravery into braveness for good.”

BLACK HISTORY YEAR

To find out more about Deborah, Lubaba, Stephen, the rest of the steering group and upcoming events, visit the Black History Year Blog: blog.westminster.ac.uk/blackhistoryyear