I'm Angela Martinez Dy, Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Loughborough University
London, member of the BAME staff network and also the Strategic Architect of the LU Race
Equity Strategy. Today I'm going to be taking you through the race equity guiding principles which
have been developed in order to help people get a baseline understanding of how to approach doing
race equity work especially since we are committed to the action plan of the race equality charter.
It's understandable that people don't necessarily have the knowledge that they need to know how to
approach addressing this centuries-old problem so the first thing that we ask is for people to
think through whether the actions that they're planning to take are potentially harmful to BAME
staff and students and if it's not possible for an individual to see what the potential harms might
be, there are lots of places that you can turn to talk about it before you start doing that thing.
So you could approach the BAME staff network for a consultation,
you can talk to some of our student groups right now we have the ACS (Afro-Caribbean Society) and
the EMN (Ethnic Minority Network) but we're also soon going to be having a BAME student council
and it's really important not to assume that the thing that is going to be done is necessarily
going to help because it could also be harmful so please check with people if you're not sure
and if there's any question about whether or not somebody might be made perhaps more vulnerable
or somebody's story might be being shared without permission that's the next principle
um there is there's lots of resources and lots of people that you can turn to
to get a bit of advice on whether or not this is going to actually help the cause or harm it.
One of the issues that we deal with when thinking about racial inequality is under-representation
right so numerically we often find that b-a-m-e or uh people of color as I say are those people
are fewer in number as compared to white people, white british people in particular
in this context and so because there are fewer of us we stand out more we are seeing uh the word
that we use is hypervisible and yet sometimes are invisible so this paradoxical situation
means that we run into a particular issue when people want to try to increase representation the
few of us that do exist often have our pictures and our stories shared without our permission
so in order to make the University look more diverse they might put the pictures of certain
students or staff of color on materials without asking whether or not it's okay and so they become
ostensibly or effectively the face of something that they didn't really agree
to be the face of so this is the first kind of example of one way in which harm can be done
with the intention of wanting to do something positive which is increased representation.
So one of the fundamental things about racial inequality especially as it shows up
in the western world or the global north, is that in many cases if we're talking about institutions
like universities, staff and students of color are often the only ones who look like them in their
particular setting and when that happens we can experience things like isolation, alienation. We
can we can feel like we're being othered there are aggressions that happen whether they're
microaggressions or macro aggressions and that can be really damaging so in order to address that
one of the things that we need are safer spaces in which we can gather with people who might
have some shared experiences in which we don't we can safely assume that we're not going to have to
deal with things that we deal with in our everyday experiences so those safer spaces are really vital
and they're not racist because we're not messing with the power structure we're not we're not uh
saying you're not allowed because we don't like you we're saying we need space for ourselves in
order to be able to um to to share our experiences with each other and support each other and that's
it should be it should be again something that's really simple and it shouldn't be a hard ask.
So very often when we're trying to make points or make a case for something that needs changing that
would help get us closer to us hopefully closer to a state of equality in terms of race and racism
we hear that one uh white person has spoken to one other person of color and that person
of color has told them that this is not the case or that they shouldn't believe
this because this doesn't happen and that can be really damaging because what we're doing in this
case is something like tokenism where we're using one individual voice to deny the lived experience
or the collective truth of an entire group of people so we ask that if you are confronted with a
situation in which one single person of color has told you something that contradicts what is being
asked for by the collective such as the entire BAME staff network or the BAME student council
that we prioritize the collective opinion over the solo opinion of somebody who may or may not be
coming from the same angle as the informed opinion of the group.
Point five is really about making space for BAME staff and students to become leaders within the
institution one of the key findings of REC (race equality charter) is that the leadership of the
university is predominantly white is predominantly male these are things that we are really familiar
with we don't have to necessarily um uh debate because it's pretty obvious but it's going to take
time in order for those um formations to be um to to evolve so what we're asking here um and what
we're hoping to achieve is that new leadership structures can be created and that new pathways to
leadership from diverse individuals can be opened up while at the same time you know making sure
that our the the leadership of the institution is as stable as it needs to be and this can happen
through a variety of different ways we can open up seats at tables which has been done in the
past couple of years with um the co-optation of of BAME staff onto certain committees um
and it can happen in in more bottom-up ways like the formation of the the BAME Student Council
which is something that's launching this year we can create mechanisms for being leadership
in a way that actually adds to and enhances our current leadership processes and structures.
So one of the pitfalls that we see often is that BAME staff and students are tasked with creating
environments that are safer for themselves because if they don't do those things then
the environments can be quite difficult to bear so they do the work to create a greater sense
of safety for themselves, greater conditions of equity for their colleagues and for students who
look like them and yet those contributions are very often swept up into the processes of the
institutions such that they are not acknowledged for all of the labor that they've done so for
example the creation of these principles we made it very clear at the bottom of all the text that
these were created by the BAME Staff Network if we hadn't done that it likely would have looked like
the principles were created by the institution itself and that's just not the case so we need
to get into the habit and the practice of making sure that recognition goes where it is due and if
staff and students of color are creating things are developing things they need to be recognized
for that whether that's in just acknowledgement, whether that's in the creation of a leadership
position like in principle number five, or whether that's in in some other way
that is meaningful and that demonstrates how this leadership is actually taking place um
without it being erased or swallowed up by just the typical processes of the institution.
The process of undoing racism is a long long journey, it's a lifelong journey.
What we're challenging here are actually centuries of a mindset that has been
implanted into the various ways in which we run the world. The system of white supremacy is a
very very old system that evolved with colonialism and it taught us that there's a hierarchy of races
in which white people are on top and black people are on the bottom and there's a full
uh strata of racialized people in between and even saying it like this shows how silly it really is.
We understand I think fundamentally these days that this is not the case but that conditioning
is a part of so much that we do and it's a part the ways in which we make decisions and
the assumptions that we make about each other and what this principle is trying to get at is that in
order to address this grand issue it's incumbent on all of us to think about how this system
has shaped the way in which we work, shape the way in which we think,
shape the way in which we move through the world, the assumptions that we make about other people.
What this principle is not asking us to do is to get really self-conscious or to get
really paranoid about the language that we're using it's actually asking us to think about
how history influences the present and how we can make choices in our everyday lives
to view more clearly how that past is appearing in our current day-to-day practices and I really
believe that um this is actually a kind of an adventure, an adventure of learning that people
can embark on that really opens up a new way of looking at the world I find it very compelling,
I find it very exciting to want to create a world in which there is more equality between people
of different backgrounds and one of the ways that we can get there is by understanding our history.
Intersectionality shows up in lots of different ways.
It may mean that people have experiences that are more complex than we're assuming,
it may also mean that we're forgetting about people at particular neglected points of
intersection and so it's become kind of a blanket term to talk about uh the diversity
within a group but what it really means is we need to make sure that we're paying attention to
other possible dimensions of either oppression or privilege that people could be experiencing
and that it's not necessarily limited to just race or just gender or just class for example.
One of the ways in which we confront institutional racism is the assumption that there are white
people and there are BAME people and that they're necessarily going to be the same in each group
and that's just not the case. So B-A-M-E is a catch-all term, it's a contested term some people
really dislike it, some people are for it and we can understand why because it groups a huge number
of people with a very diverse set of experiences into a group that makes them look like they're all
alike. So that's the homogenizing part. When we talk about BAME people or as I say people of color
what we are trying to point out is the differences that they will have from typical experiences of
white people and in this case mostly white British people and there is likely to be a differentiation
there but what is not being said is that that group of BAME people are all experiencing exactly
the same thing so it's a catch-all and contested term it's imperfect um but what we're trying to
get at is the differences in their experiences from the experiences of most white British people.
This final point that I want to make is that somehow we've gotten to a point in society where
because people can get behind the notions of equality, diversity and inclusion it seems to be
assumed that it's easy to do that work, that it's easy to get us closer to those things because we
all want it, because it's desirable, that we all know how to do it and that's simply not the case.
It is challenging to learn how to undo structural oppressions. They are the water in which we swim,
they are the air in which we breathe and to notice them first of all
and then to try to take steps towards um unpicking them and putting in new ways of working that's all
very difficult work and so with this principle what we're asking is that people don't assume
that simply because they don't want to be racist or they don't think that they're racist they know
what to do to undo racism. What we are asking for is the willingness to recognize expertise in this
area and to take a steer from people who have been doing the work for a long time people who really
understand how structural racism shows up, how intersectionality makes a difference right and why
things like safer spaces are important and to listen and to be willing to learn.