Читать книгу Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible - Yomi Adegoke - Страница 12

.....................................................

‘Lol my sisters oyinbo flatmates threw her yam in the bin cause they thought it was a tree log’

@ToluDk

.....................................................

When I learned I had got a place at Warwick University, I burst into tears. Not tears of joy, mind you: tears of fear. Aged 18, I had flat-out refused to apply to Oxford or Cambridge, my stomach churning at the stories of elitism, racism and all other kinds of ‘isms’ I wasn’t sure I would be able to handle on top of a dissertation. I thought I would much rather learn about those things in a history course than opt into being on the receiving end of them, thank you very much. So instead I applied to SOAS, a very good London-based uni (which even taught Yoruba) as well as Warwick, to please my league-table-obsessed parents. Once I was offered my place, I was ‘advised’ (read ‘ordered’) to go to Warwick by them; it was a decision for which I’m now thankful, but at the time it felt like a form of punishment. I was absolutely petrified I would end up being the only black girl within a 400-mile radius. Even the term ‘Russell Group’ was offputting: it sounded to me like a band of 60-plus cigar-smoking ‘Russells’ for whom fox hunting and racial ‘horseplay’ was an enjoyable pastime. It didn’t exactly scream ‘inclusion’. Of course, when I got there, I realised I wasn’t the only black girl. There weren’t many of us by any measure, but there were enough of us to warrant a populous and popular annual African-Caribbean Society (ACS) ball – and even its Nigerian equivalent.

University was one of the greatest times of my life, but it wasn’t without its challenges. If you are on your way to uni or are considering going there in the future, you will no doubt have already been given lots of advice from websites, teachers and those who have already graduated: don’t leave your dissertation to the last minute; label your food in the shared fridge; rinse the Freshers’ Fair for as many free highlighters and notebooks as you can; always accept the Domino’s vouchers – you will need them. But often one very important topic is left off this generic list of well-meaning wisdom, and that’s how to deal with racism. And when I say racism, I don’t just mean blackface Bob Marley costumes at every conceivable event (there will always be one). As I’ll come back to, statistics show that, like the police force, the health service and the workplace, university is a space where racism is embedded – beginning with the application process and continuing right up to graduation. From often alienating curricula to downright ignorance from flatmates, uni can be intimidating for any student, but this is especially so when you’re black and female.

.....................................................

‘We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.’

.....................................................

For many black students, university will be their first time living away from home and also often their first time living in a predominantly white area or environment. The beauty of university is that it often thrusts you into the midst of people who are vastly different from yourself, broadening your mind in the process. But this can also sometimes leave you feeling seriously homesick, isolated and generally disconnected.

Little recognition is given to the culture shock experienced by many students coming from predominantly ethnic areas. Maggi cubes become as rare as precious minerals, and weaves often stay on far longer than you’re used to, pretty much growing right off your head for want of a nearby hairdresser. People ask questions you may not be used to answering; for some students you’ll be the very first, real-life, 3D black person they’ve ever met and they will have endless questions about your apparently baffling existence – which has been taking place just two hours down the M40 for the past 18 years – questions which, by the way, you are under no obligation to answer.

When I went to university, my fear that I would be the only black kid on campus wasn’t quite realised, but on the other hand, Warwick wasn’t exactly Croydon in terms of diversity. It is normal for freshers to struggle initially with making friends, but by the end of week one, when one of my first conversations had been with someone who told me he believed there was ‘Me black’ and ‘Rihanna/Beyoncé black’, I had already decided I wouldn’t be spending much time at my halls or with my flatmates. Instead I found solace in the halls a stone’s throw away from me, which housed about half of the uni’s black female intake (again, this wasn’t much). But in those halls I soon found myself a best friend, a boyfriend and a community. Together we searched for hair shops and discovered the clubs that played black music (as much of a banger as The Killers’ ‘Mr Brightside’ was, we heard it more times during the entirety of our nights out than we did anything remotely ‘ethnic’). ‘Black music’ was relegated to a Thursday night and primarily consisted of Sean Paul’s discography.

We swapped eye-roll-worthy anecdotes on microaggressions and lamented the lack of available seasoning in our nearest supermarket. And the best friend I made? I could never have foreseen that eight years, several, several hours of phone calls and even more nights out later, we’d be co-writing a book together. Uni can really be the making of you, even if you don’t always realise it at the time.

Dr Nicola Rollock went to university many years before me and it’s interesting how similar her experience was:

‘I think there were quite a lot of things I took for granted growing up in South-West London, even though I went to this mainly white and very middle-class school. Going to find a black hairdresser’s or Black Caribbean food was normal. Brixton was down the road, Tooting … it was completely normal. I didn’t have to go out of my way to find these things, yet going to Liverpool in the early 90s – and remember this was before it was the European Capital of Culture – was a real challenge, and at 18 I didn’t actually know that I needed those things in my life. I didn’t know they were important to me because I’d really taken them for granted. Even going out was a challenge, in terms of the kind of music I was listening to as a young woman. I had to go out of my way to find venues that would play music I was interested in; there was something called “Wild Life” that happened once a month that played R&B, soul and hip hop – this was once a month at university. So we – me and the few other black girls – ended up befriending black local Liverpudlians and going to “blues”, as they were called, or “shebeens”,¹³ outside of the university context, because we were really hungry for and looking for places where our culture and identity was recognised and we could just relax.

‘I remember with “Wild Life” we went to enjoy the music, and it felt like some of our counterparts went to drink, and again this was something I wasn’t used to; I didn’t grow up in a house where our parents would say “Go and have a drink,” or, “Here’s some money, go down to the pub.” I didn’t step into a pub until university, and even then I remember saying, “But I’m not thirsty!” Which completely misses the point of going to the pub, as it’s not only about that, it’s about connecting and sitting down and a place to meet, but for me it was just outside of my cultural frame of reference. So I found, in terms of food, music, hair – because my hair was relaxed and straightened at the time – finding a space in which I could be myself and be with others was a deep, deep challenge, so I felt very, very isolated. Then there were the things that many students experience, such as not having any money. I ended up needing to work as well as study … I just found it incredibly difficult and isolating. I would get the train back from Lime Street to London and I would come via Brixton (this was before Brixton was gentrified) and I would walk up the steps at Brixton station and literally, quite literally, exhale, because foods were there, black hair shops were there, my culture and identity was all around me. It was as if I had arrived home.’

.....................................................

‘Ah, the racially insensitive party. A mainstay of primarily white institutions since time immemorial.’

Dear White People

.....................................................

For me and my group at uni, our friendship was a wonderful buffer between us and a lot of things that didn’t have nearly the effect on us as they might have done, had we not had each other. For instance, there was the time the cheerleading club decided to give its annual ‘slave auction’ (which in itself was a problem) a Django Unchained theme. Or when a Snapchat picture was uploaded to one of our university community pages on Facebook featuring a black man wrapped in a net with the caption, ‘I caught me a nigger!’ And let’s not even start on the Stockholm syndrome of other black students who would tell the predominantly black women who kicked up a fuss to ‘chill out’.

And the black face. My gosh, the black face.

Microaggressions (defined as a statement, action, or incident regarded as an instance of indirect, subtle or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalised group) can range from a flatmate throwing out your plantain because they think they’re rotten bananas, all the way to outright flagrant slurs. And in recent years, the racism that was once only whispered about among students has become a talking point on and off campus. Universities put to bed the dangerous myth that racism is the preserve of the ‘uneducated’ and ‘ignorant’ – in fact, it is often those in power who are the ones perpetuating it. Universities are, at times, so racist that they make headlines. The country gasped at the story of a black first-year student at my old university who had found the words ‘monkey’ and ‘nigga’ written on a bunch of bananas she had stored in her shared kitchen. Many black students tutted and sighed, not in surprise but in recognition.

Sometimes the racism is more subtle and underhand, as Afua Hirsch, a barrister, award-winning journalist and author, experienced at Oxford:

‘People always asked for weed, especially when I was with my friends, especially my male friends. They would just assume that they were local drug dealers. And it was always those really posh boys. In their brain, the only function of black men is to buy drugs from. That was one of the most infuriating and offensive things. Or you’d arrive at a party and they’d just assume that you were the local dealers showing up to supply. I hated that, I really hated that.’

A more ‘in-your-black-face’ form of racism is, well, black face. It was a costume staple at parties when I was a student, but at Cardiff University it actually made its way into a play written by medical students in 2016. A student actor blacked up and wore an oversized dildo to make fun of a black lecturer at the university, which unsurprisingly caused a feeling of ‘segregation’ between groups of different ethnic backgrounds.¹⁴ Eight students of African heritage complained, and this, according to the independent report commissioned by the university as a result of the incident, led to a ‘major backlash’. Some of the complainants were told by their fellow students they were being ‘very and unduly sensitive’ and that they should accept it as ‘tradition’, as the play was an annual occurrence. The students who had raised the objections felt they had been ‘ostracised’ and some decided to leave Cardiff.

Three years before, a couple of hundred miles away in York, four male students donned black face, too.¹⁵ They were depicting the Jamaican bobsled team from the film Cool Runnings. Over in Edinburgh, law students painted their faces to dress as Somali pirates for an ‘around the world’ themed party.¹⁶ Meanwhile, at the University of London, a student was actually rewarded with a bottle of wine for their racial insensitivity when they won a fancy dress competition at a union event by donning black face.¹⁷ And in Loughborough last year, students organising freshers’ events had to issue an apology after planning a ‘slave auction’ and ‘slave night’ as part of the entertainment for the university’s new intake.¹⁸ It is important to note that this kind of flippant racism is as common among those educated in the most elite of institutions as it is anywhere else. These are not isolated incidents but part of the very foundation of British society. They are being perpetrated by the bankers, lawyers and doctors of tomorrow: people who will become the managers who throw out CVs because they can’t be bothered to pronounce ‘Akua’.

A recent report¹⁹ by race-equality think-tank the Runnymede Trust highlighted the feelings of exclusion and rejection felt by many black university students as they navigate alienating curricula, come up against lower expectations from professors, and experience brazen racism on campus. The report emphasised the importance of universities becoming ‘actively anti-racist institutions’ – something that, as bastions of ‘progressive thought’ and ‘talented minds’, shouldn’t be such a big ask.

But very few universities have taken appropriate measures to prevent or punish racism, and students are often forced to take matters into their own hands. It was racist incidents such as those outlined above that led to the creation in 2013 of the Anti-Racism Society at my old university, run voluntarily by a group of undergraduates. It offers students advice or someone to talk to about race-related issues, and puts on events such as sleepovers, movie nights and panels offering often cathartic discussions about race and racism. Many students feel more comfortable reporting incidents to their peers, as opposed to their institution’s reporting systems, but those who run societies like this are under the same pressures – in terms of racial tensions and university work – as those who come to them for help. The frequency of racial abuse on campus is something that universities, not students, should handle better, but even so, these spaces, groups and organisations are important. Anti-racist societies are different to an African-Caribbean Society, where the basis of meetings isn’t always necessarily political; these societies exist specifically for tackling racism. Don’t be afraid to be the person to create that space at your university if it doesn’t already exist.

Sometimes the microaggressions can occur at the hands of the universities themselves. Femi Nylander was a recent graduate of Oxford when he found himself racially profiled. He was visiting a friend’s office in Harris Manchester College and was locked out, so he went to the office’s kitchen to do some writing, chatted briefly with staff and students he knew and then left. Later that day, a CCTV image of Nylander walking around the college was emailed to all of its staff and students, along with a message warning them to ‘be vigilant’ and to ‘alert a member of staff […] or call Oxford security services’ if they saw him. His presence, it warned them, was a reminder that the college’s ‘wonderful and safe environment’ can be taken advantage of, adding that its security officers ‘do not know [his] intentions’. No one once asked Femi who he was or why he was there.

Afua remembers her visitors also being on the receiving end of similarly racist treatment at Oxford years before:

‘I had this boyfriend in London who was black and I coped by running away a lot on the weekends and hanging out with him, and then he’d come and visit me and that was a big issue because he was a dark-skinned black man. One time when he came to my college, they wouldn’t let him in and the porter rang me and said: “You should’ve warned us if you were expecting someone who looked like a criminal,” and I’ll never forget that. Even then, I was like, I cannot believe I’m having to put up with this. It was like there was no sense that … It was really bad and I was very conscious of being with him at Oxford because it kind of drew further attention to me as a black woman.’

These types of everyday microaggressions have sparked several conversations and motivated various campaigns, one of the most high-profile being the ‘I, too, am Oxford’ series, inspired by the ‘I, too, am Harvard’ initiative in America. In 2014, Oxford students organised a photoshoot consisting of 65 portraits of BAME attendees of the university, with the hopes of highlighting the ignorance they came across at Oxford – and confronting it. ‘How did you get into Oxford? Jamaicans don’t study’, ‘But wait, where are you really from?’ and ‘I was pleasantly surprised … you actually speak well!’ were just some of the choice quotes written on the placards they held in front of them, forcing their peers to encounter the ugly face of university racism. It is hugely important that black students continue to have these conversations and to hold their universities to account, especially when white students so often centre racial discourse around themselves. During Afua’s time at university, even the ACS wasn’t a black safe space:

‘I joined the African-Caribbean Society only to discover that it was run by a white boy from one of the elite private schools in the country because he loved going to Jamaica to his dad’s villa in the summer holidays and he had fancied being a “DJ reggae man”. At the time, I was just like, this is completely off, but I couldn’t articulate it. It was classic white privilege, exoticisation.’

Perhaps as a result of the slowly increasing black student population, the voice of black students is beginning to be heard in universities in a way it hasn’t been before, as Afua explains:

‘For my book, I interviewed some black female students and it was interesting listening to them, because on one level they were describing the same microaggressions that we experienced, i.e. getting IDd when you were going to different colleges whereas white people weren’t, or porters confusing you with the one other black person in the college even though you looked nothing alike, that kind of thing. But their attitudes were so different: they had names for it. We didn’t have a word for microaggression and they had a confidence and ability to articulate their sense of oppression that I really admired. Even though on one level it was an acknowledgement that a lot of things hadn’t changed, I found it really positive and uplifting speaking to these students because they were much more organised and assertive and they called things out when they saw them, whereas we just didn’t feel able to. We would talk about it amongst ourselves but we just kind of had a defeatism about it.’

It may be that we now feel less apologetic about taking up space in a country that is rigged against us but which many of us still consider ours. But even with our newfound ability to speak up, some students still remain negatively affected by racism at university. In fact, the government was called on to take ‘urgent’ action after it emerged that black students are more than 50 per cent more likely to drop out of university than their white and Asian counterparts. More than one in ten black students drop out of university in England, compared with 6.9 per cent of the whole student population, according to a report by the UPP and Social Market Foundations.²⁰ The government have made a whole heap of noise about increasing the numbers of black students enrolled at certain British universities, but the problem of how to keep them has been largely neglected. London universities are more likely to have a higher proportion of black students in attendance – and it’s no coincidence that London has the highest drop-out rate of all the English regions, with nearly one in ten students dropping out during their first year of study.

‘My best friend at Oxford, she dropped out in the third year,’ Afua says. ‘She was doing a four-year degree and she dropped out because she felt like she wasn’t good enough. She just didn’t believe in herself enough, she couldn’t cope. It was literally just Imposter Syndrome, like, “Everyone else is better than me, cleverer than me and they deserve to be here.” She went to a state school, she had a multiple sense of illegitimacy there and she took a year out, she came back and she got a first. I found that interesting because there was no question about her intelligence or her deserving to be there; it was just that sense of acceptance. I think it’s really common – I was reading a report about how drop-out rates are higher for black students, and I’ve been mentoring a student, who, ironically, is from a very similar background to my friend and doing the same degree, and who just dropped out last year. It’s so frustrating that you can’t tell someone to stay somewhere that makes them feel unhappy but you do wonder, if this person had been supported, would this have happened?

‘I think universities just assume that their jobs are to just get a few black people through the door. They have no sense of the extra emotional burden that we carry by being there, so they don’t do anything proactive to support us. I nearly dropped out in my first year and it was basically like: if you’re not up for it, then good riddance. There was no “How can we support you?”, “What’s going on here?”, you know? There was just no intellectual curiosity as to what this phenomenon was, which ironically just confirmed why I wasn’t supposed to be there anyway, because the possibility of me not being here doesn’t remotely bother anyone.’

The reasons why black students’ drop-out rate is higher than other groups are complicated and multifaceted. According to one report,²¹ many universities struggle to respond to the ‘complex’ issues related to ethnicity, which tend to be ‘structural, organisational, attitudinal, cultural and financial’. Other factors mentioned were a lack of cultural connection to the curriculum, difficulties making friends with students from other ethnic groups and difficulties forming relationships with academic staff, due to the differences in background and customs. The report also cited research showing that students from ethnic backgrounds are much more likely to live at home during their studies, perhaps making it less easy to immerse themselves in campus life. But Dr Nicola Rollock believes that not enough is being done to investigate the underlying causes of this:

‘My concern is that these issues aren’t looked at in any fundamental way: when they are, all black ethnic groups are amalgamated into one mass, and they shouldn’t be. The data doesn’t speak to distinct differences. And there’s also a fear of talking about race. If they’re talking about black and minority ethnic students, race needs to be a fundamental part of that conversation, but I would argue that as a society, and certainly within the academy and within education policy, race is a taboo subject. People are scared of talking about race and when they do, they do so in very limited terms. They believe that treating everybody exactly the same is the answer. Or particular tropes will come out for example: “These groups need mentoring,” or “These groups lack confidence,” or that “There are not enough groups coming through the education pipeline,” and while I’m certainly not rejecting any of these points, I argue that to only focus on such issues is to miss the wider picture. Some people do have confidence but yet they are not progressing. How do you explain that? So I think there is a real limited and poor engagement with race both within the academy and education more broadly.’

.....................................................

‘Sound so smart, like you graduated college.’

.....................................................

Going on to higher education, wherever it may be, and for whatever period of time, is an achievement. To choose to extend your full-time education, to opt in to taking more exams and willingly take on ever-increasing student debt, is deserving of a pat on the back. But it’s notable that while black British youths are more likely to go to university than their white British peers,²² they are also much less likely to attend the UK’s most selective universities. This is not an indictment of the universities that aren’t ranked at the top of the league tables, nor is it an endorsement of the frankly elitist system that sees some universities undervalued. Further education is just that: the furthering of education, and wherever that happens it should be valued. But it’s important to interrogate why the under-representation of black people in these institutions occurs, especially when statistics show that there are more young men from black backgrounds in prison in the UK than there are undergraduate black male students attending Russell Group universities.²³ Black Britons of Caribbean heritage make up 1.1 per cent of all 15- to 29-year-olds in England and Wales and made up 1.5 per cent of all British students attending UK universities in 2012–13.²⁴ Yet just 0.5 per cent of UK students at Russell Group universities are from Black Caribbean backgrounds,²⁵ and there is little understanding of why this is the case.

One given reason is grades: black students are less likely to achieve the required results for entry to highly selective universities, which could help account for their lower rates of application.²⁶ The stumbling blocks that affect black students in school are outlined in the previous chapter, and help contextualise why this often happens. But the more pressing issue that many gloss over is that even when they do achieve the same results,²⁷ black applicants are less likely to be offered places than their white peers. In 2016, despite record numbers of applications and better predicted A-level grades (and the fact that UCAS predicted 73 per cent of black applications should have been successful),²⁸ only 70 per cent of black applicants received offers of places, compared to 78 per cent of white applicants.

In the same year, Oxford University’s offer rate for black students fell to its lowest level since 2013, with just one in six being offered places, compared to one in four white students. In 2016 again, just 95 black students were offered Oxbridge places – 45 by Oxford and 50 by Cambridge. The 50 black students offered a place at Cambridge were chosen from just 220 applications, but the rate of offers to black students was far lower than that of white students: 22.2 per cent of black students who applied to Cambridge were offered a place, compared with 34.5 per cent of white students. Similarly, at Oxford University the offer rate for black students was just 16.7 per cent, while 26.3 per cent of white students were offered a place. The lack of black students at these institutions often leads to confusion, shock and at times outright disbelief from those both in and outside the uni on the rare occasions when they encounter them. Afua was on the receiving end of this many times during her student years:

‘When I would go to the shops in Oxford and local people worked there, they would often try to be friendly, asking, “Are you a student?” and I’d be like, yes, and they’d say, “Brookes?” and I’d be like, no, Oxford, and they’d be like, yeah, “Oxford Brookes.” It was just, why do you care anyway? It was local people. Sometimes when I went to Oxford student things, people would assume that I was from Brookes and not Oxford. I never really felt comfortable going to the Oxford Union and I think that this was part of the reason why. I was conscious that there was this other university that had many black people nearby. It was just a very common, frequent, casual interaction with local people and students, clubs and bars where that would happen. Sometimes I would show my student card for a discount or something and they would be like, “Oxford University?” in surprise. It was just the classic microaggression, often not meant to be offensive, and it makes you feel you have to explain yourself, where a white student would never have to explain themselves.’

Outside of Oxbridge, the success rate of black students applying to other highly selective universities – such as Russell Group institutions – also remains an issue, despite a sharp rise in applications from qualified students and the apparent ‘commitment to diversity’ we continue to hear about from just about every institution. In 2016, 61 per cent of black applicants were awarded places in these selective universities – an improvement on the year before. But according to UCAS’s predictions, 64 per cent could have done so. Professor Vikki Boliver, a lecturer in sociology at Durham University who has carried out research on applications and acceptances of different ethnic groups at Russell Group universities, said this may also occur because BAME students’ grades are more likely to be under-predicted. If this were true, she said, it would give backing to the argument for a post-qualifications application system for universities, with ‘judgements based on fact, rather than predictions’.

She also suggested that name-blind applications could be the remedy for the current prevalent unconscious bias:

‘Leaving people’s names off UCAS forms would be an experiment to see if people are being influenced by names … If we don’t have very clear procedures when selecting people for jobs or places on courses that mitigate against those stereotypes, there may be the danger that we unconsciously fall back on them … We may feel that certain people will “fit in” better.’²⁹

The Universities of Exeter, Huddersfield, Liverpool and Winchester are currently piloting a system in which the names of applicants are hidden during admissions, in order to stop potential discrimination based on assumptions about students’ names. But this is a mere drop in a tsunami of prejudice, bias and stereotyping in higher education.

The Russell Group responded to these findings with the argument that minority applicants have lower offer rates than their white peers with the same A-level results because they are less likely to have studied the specific A-level subjects required for entry to their chosen courses.³⁰ They also cited research³¹ that suggests offer rates are lower because ethnic minorities are more likely to apply to heavily oversubscribed degree subjects such as medicine or law, perhaps as a result of the parental steering we discussed earlier. An in-house analysis of the data by UCAS also corroborated this, stating that a significant part of the reason for ethnic disparities in offer rates at Russell Group universities was down to subject choice.³² Neither UCAS nor the Russell Group, however, have published detailed statistics to support their arguments.

.....................................................

Education, education, education

.....................................................

We may be under-represented in the Russell Group and other selective institutions but, interestingly, black students are over-represented and white and Asian students under-represented in other higher-education establishments. In these other institutions, there is a 14.3 per cent under-representation of Asian students and a 3.1 per cent under-representation of white students, compared to a 56.4 per cent over-representation of black students across the student body, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

This over-representation of black students is especially apparent at newer, post-1992 universities, and institutions with highly diverse student bodies. While some universities are almost completely white (in 2014, Ulster only had a 3 per cent non-white student body),³³ at others minority students make up almost three-quarters of the student body with a corresponding under-representation of Asian and white students. Anecdotally, some think this imbalance may be due to a lack of information regarding university choices within the black community. Alexis Oladipo, founder of healthy food range Gym Bites, explains that for her, going to university was more about getting a degree, and not where it was from:

‘I wanted to go to Kingston and Hertfordshire; Kingston because all of my friends were going there, and then Hertfordshire because there was a course that was interesting. Hertfordshire was my first choice, Kingston my second. I didn’t get into Kingston and then for Hertfordshire, my grades weren’t good enough so they transferred me to a foundation course, so that’s why I had to go to clearing to get into Roehampton.

‘Initially before choosing, my school helped with basic stuff – personal statements and the rest of it – but nothing substantial. Then [with] my mum, it was just a case of going to uni so, “sort yourself out” and all that kind of stuff. I just kind of got on with it really. I didn’t have a great desire to go to university, I just knew that it was something [that] I had to do and something that was required of me and it’s just furthering your education – you go to school, then you go to college and now you have to go to university.

‘Me and education, we didn’t really get along from young. I’ve always kind of struggled so I wasn’t really excited to go. When I didn’t get the grades, I was really upset and then I remember calling my mum and telling her that I didn’t get into the uni that I wanted to get into and she was just like, “You need to find a uni, you not going to uni is not an option.” I had to repeat a college year, so I had already done three years instead of two at college, there was no room for a gap year or anything like that, so I just went through clearing. My college helped me go through clearing – there was a list of unis that were taking people and I literally just went “ip dip doo” and picked a course at Roehampton because it was the closest university to Kingston. I thought about my friends again – we’d be like 20 minutes away from each other.

‘I picked Media and Culture studies; I didn’t really know what it was. I didn’t enjoy it, I didn’t understand it too well. I got a 2:2. But what I can say is that when my mum saw me in my graduation gown, she started crying straight away. So, I mean, it was not for me, it was for her, if that makes sense. It made her happy, she was proud … She was really, really proud and she was telling everyone, you know, “She’s graduated now.”

‘So I did it more for her. I think if I took my time and really figured out what I wanted to do, maybe my journey would’ve been a lot more straightforward.’

A major reason why black students are less likely to be admitted to Russell Group universities is because they’re less likely to apply to these universities, and there can be a number of factors at play here. Fear of alienation is often one, but also wanting to remain close to family, friends (shops that actually sell plantain …) can be another. Some students choose to apply to polytechnics simply because ‘many prestigious universities … do not reflect the diversity of the cities in which they are located’.³⁴ There is also the fear of simply not being good enough. White and black students applied to Oxbridge with the same grades I had been predicted, but the niggling feeling that even if I did get in (which I was sure I wouldn’t), I would still be the runt of a very smart and even posher litter kept me well away. I felt that although I might have been eligible for something ‘on paper’, between the lines of that paper it read: ‘not for you.’ And while I don’t regret my choice at all, I do wish my motivation for not applying had been more about my wanting to go to my chosen uni and less about my hang-ups about other institutions.

A second reason, as Alexis’s experience shows, is a lack of awareness from parents, who were often educated outside the UK and so are unfamiliar with the differences between certain educational establishments and courses. But having a parent in the know doesn’t always mean they will be best placed to help you choose a university that is right for you: parents often simply assume that the higher up the league tables it is, the better it will be for you. Afua had a mother who knew all about the prestige of the university she was applying to, but this meant that Afua’s reasons for choosing Oxford were based on her mother’s preferences and not on how well suited she might be to it:

‘Why did I decide to apply to Oxford? It’s simple: African mum. It was “You are going to try to get into that university” and I have to say, I didn’t fully get it. I just didn’t get what the big deal was. I wanted to go to LSE. As far as I was concerned it was in the top five. I didn’t really understand. I didn’t really grow up in a proper establishment-type home so I just didn’t get the extra advantage that came with Oxbridge. I kind of applied to humour my mum because she found it so important, and I got in. I just didn’t see myself as an Oxford person, it didn’t really occur to me that I would get in and that all links back to the stereotypes. When I thought of Oxford, when I pictured Oxford, I did not see myself; I saw posh white people so I didn’t think I’d get in. I didn’t take it seriously and then when I got in, I had a complete crisis because I went to a private school and it was very white and I’d been literally counting down the days until I could get away from it.

‘I didn’t get the academic advantages of it but I definitely got the social implications, which was that I’d be cut off from the community, that’s what I felt. I’d be cut off from my whole scene, I was really into music journalism and I was in the new scene in London. I’d really worked hard to get away from the straightjacket of growing up in a very white area, so it was a big setback for me, that was my main concern. I just didn’t have any positive things to counter it at the time.’

Perhaps the most important reason, as we’ve looked at in the previous chapter, is a lack of incentive to apply to these universities in the schools these students are coming from. Without this, very few pupils can believe that a Russell Group uni or Oxbridge is something within their reach – for many, the idea is nothing more than a pipe dream. While there are, of course, black children who attend private schools, the majority are state-educated. This becomes particularly meaningful when you consider that between 2007 and 2009 just five schools in England sent more pupils to Oxford and Cambridge (946 in all) than nearly 2,000 other schools combined. Four of those five schools were private.³⁵ The 2,000 lower-performing schools sent a total of 927 students between them to the two elite universities. Many of these schools sent no pupils at all, or on average fewer than one per year.

Afua, who mentored school children while she was at uni, describes the black pupils she met at state schools telling her that her university was a place they could never even dream of aspiring to:

‘We all did mentoring talks in the summer. We would go to inner-city state schools and talk to kids and we were trying to say that whatever perspective you have of Oxford, it is like that but you can find yourself there. We would get them kind of motivated and interested and then at the end they’d ask, “What grades did you need to get in?” and I’d be like, “3 As” and they just looked completely deflated because no one at their school had ever got 3As, ever. It was unheard of. So then you just think, what’s the point of going round to all these places when they’re dealing with such a bigger structural unfairness? Oxford is very slow in recognising that a student at a really tough state school who gets Bs is possibly a better student and more talented than a student at a private school who gets 3 As, and I think other universities have been quicker to recognise that.’

Heidi Mirza also talks about the importance of these initiatives in raising the aspirations of young, black, largely working-class children:

‘The universities in the States, like Cornell and Princeton, are going into primary schools in black communities and telling kids about universities from a very young age so that universities aren’t seen as some kind of out-of-reach places; they’re actually part of a mindset. And they’ve actually invested money in these programmes.’

Andrew Pilkington, Professor of Sociology at the University of Northampton, makes the important point that for the last few years ‘the primary concern of widening participation strategies was social class’. Because of this, the important intersection of class and race has been ignored, and overlooked by policymakers. Therefore issues specifically affecting black members of the student body have been largely neglected.

The fact that there are more black students at university than any other ethnic group is largely as a result of how we view education. For many of us, as Elizabeth pointed out earlier, education is often posited as the antidote to racism. We believe we can educate ourselves out of inequality with the right qualifications and grades. But while education, especially higher education, can indeed do wonders for social mobility, it is unfortunately the case that inequality is still present on the way up. In order to get into university in the first place, black students must do better than their white peers, and they are still less likely to get into the more prestigious institutions, regardless of their A-level results.³⁶ As Dr Omar Khan, the Director of the Runnymede Trust, says: ‘What message does that send to young people who have heard for decades now that “education, education, education” will ensure their equal opportunities in the labour market?’

Even more alarmingly, after they have jumped through the hoops to reach university, black students will, on average, leave with lower university grades than their white peers. These are students who have proved by their A-levels that they have the ability to thrive in the world’s most elite institutions, but they fall short once they arrive. There has been little research into why this happens, but several of the issues discussed above – a lack of understanding surrounding the inevitable culture shock, multiple microaggressions at the hands of peers and staff – are likely to play a part. In 2010, 67.9 per cent of white students gained a first-class or upper-second-class degree at university compared to only 49.3 per cent of BAME students who entered with the same grades. Black students underperform compared to all other groups,³⁷ and this occurs regardless of the type of university they attend, while 72 per cent of white students who started university with A-levels of BBB in 2014 got a first or 2:1, compared with 53 per cent of black students.³⁸ Furthermore, despite an overall increase of BAME students in higher education,³⁹ they are still less likely to find jobs that match their education level once they leave, or to progress to professorships.⁴⁰ British ethnic minority graduates are between 5 and 15 per cent less likely to be employed than their white peers – and as if that wasn’t enough of a blow, for ethnic minority female graduates in particular, there are large disparities between their wages and those of their white counterparts. The same study shows that three and a half years after they have left university, the difference in earnings between ethnic minorities – especially women – and their white peers actually increases.

Even if they are from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, grow up with similar opportunities and have similar qualifications, ethnic minority graduates are less likely to be employed than white British graduates. So at present, black female students are paying £9,000 – and rising – for a much poorer university experience than their peers. And then, post-uni, they are also being short-changed in their earnings, making it even more difficult for them to pay off those rising fees.

.....................................................

‘I have written eleven books, but each time I think, “Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.”’

Maya Angelou

.....................................................

There is no one conclusive reason why black students are less likely to attend elite universities, just as there’s no single reason why we get lower grades, but racists will assure us it’s because we’re undeserving, lazy or simply not smart enough. They complain that the places meant for equally talented white students are being ‘taken up’ by black students, despite the stats clearly stating otherwise. Imposter Syndrome often eats away at even the most talented of students, as they internalise these slurs and feel as though they’re ‘taking up space’.

Once you are at uni, it’s important to remember you have earned your place – not at anyone else’s expense but against odds that actually make it more difficult for you to be there in the first place. Afua Hirsch summarises this perfectly:

‘My grandfather was a son of a cocoa farmer in the village in Ghana and he got a scholarship to Cambridge in the 1940s under the colonial system. In those days, they would pick who they saw as the brightest students in the country every year, it was part of the indirect rule. So, they would send them to Oxbridge so they could kind of condition them [to have] British values and then send them back to run the colonies for them. My grandfather benefited from that, he was really grateful for his experience and my cousin found all his letters from his time at Cambridge and it was so fascinating. I feel like, reading his letters, he was constantly apologising. If he didn’t get the grades he wanted, he’d write and apologise and he’d say something like, “I hope in future, other students from Africa will come and redeem the good name of our continent,” and he felt like he was the ambassador for the black race. Any failing on his part was a failing of the race – he just felt this great burden and I think that he felt like he had to constantly account for himself, and that really struck something in me. Even though my circumstance was so completely different, you do feel that sense of not quite belonging there, of having to explain yourself and having to account for yourself, as if, it’s not your birthright to be there. That goes deep and it’s an intergenerational thing about being a black person in a white institution where you don’t feel you fit in. For years, I couldn’t articulate it, I didn’t have a name for it, but once I read my grandpa’s letters something clicked and was like, “this is Imposter Syndrome.” This is exactly what we all go through. My grandpa went to Cambridge in 1944 and so here I was, 65 years later. It’s just crazy.

‘We question whether we belong there and whether we have the right to be there, and I think that you’ve got to try and flip that on its head and think, I need to rinse this place for every drop I can get out of it. I’m going to use it before it uses me. I worked that out at some point and it really helped. I was like, you know what, whatever I can get from this place is going to give me what I need for my journey, I’m going to rinse it. It gave me a sense of control and it’s hard when you’re 19; you don’t necessarily know what you want to do with your life and you don’t feel in control, but the more you can tap into it and feel like you’re running your own thing, that’s really healthy.’

.....................................................

‘Universities are not just complicit, they produce racism. They are no less institutionally racist than the police force.’

Dr Kehinde Andrews

.....................................................

Universities are predominantly white and middle class, not only in terms of attendance but also in terms of staff, which can often mean they also remain so in terms of syllabuses. More than 92 per cent of British professors are white; 0.49 per cent of professors are black; and a mere 17 of those are women.⁴¹

Only one black person is currently working in senior management in any British university. She is SOAS Director Valerie Amos, who is the first black female to lead a UK university and the country’s first black vice chancellor (the chief executive of a university), full stop. Among the 535 senior officials who declared their ethnicity in 2015, 510 were white. The figures also show that universities employ more black staff as cleaners, receptionists or porters than as lecturers.⁴²

Karen Blackett is listed as one of a handful of black university chancellors in the UK (a ceremonial non-resident head of the university) at Portsmouth, and out of 525 deputy vice chancellors or pro-vice chancellors, none are listed as black.⁴³ In 2011–12, there were no more than 85 black professors in the entire country, and for many of these, it isn’t exactly plain sailing. According to a report by Professor Kalwant Bhopal, many ethnic minority academics often feel ‘untrusted’ and ‘overly scrutinised’ by colleagues and managers, as well as overlooked when it comes to opportunities for promotion.⁴⁴ Another report by the Equality Challenge Unit stated that BAME academics are also more tempted than their white counterparts to flee to overseas institutions to progress their careers.⁴⁵

The issues regarding the retention of black staff are institutional, and have been the subject of many reports and papers that promise to bring about much-needed change through the reform of policies and programmes. But, as the Runnymede Trust noted in their report on race in higher education, it is all too easy for box-ticking and the filling out of required paperwork to become a substitute for real and substantial change. Many universities put their black students and staff front and centre on their prospectuses, but when it comes to actually ensuring they keep those members of the university body, they often fall far short of the mark.

For instance, the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 initially required universities to develop and publish their race-equality policies, but many universities were reluctant to do so. Now, following the implementation of the Equality Act 2010, this requirement has been downgraded to mere ‘guidance’. The lack of pressure on universities to retain their minority staff continues to affect the number of black lecturers visible to students. It’s a pressing issue, as Akwugo Emejulu, a lecturer at my old university, points out:

‘This under-representation of black women, not just as professors but throughout the academic staff in university, has lots of different effects. Firstly, it has a symbolic effect. Universities up and down the country, no matter whether they’re the most prestigious, Russell Group universities or they’re former polytechnics, they’re sending a very similar message that black women are not wanted here. They’re sending a very clear message that they do not value the research, interest and expertise of black women, they do not value black women as [being] authoritative, they do not value black women as scholars. I think there is this idea of “knowing agents”, so there is this idea that black women, regardless of the discipline that they’re in, simply cannot be seen as academic experts. I think that is the biggest issue and problem of black women: under-representation.’

Althea Efunshile agrees, adding that this dearth can impede the quality of education, too:

‘We want black people everywhere, so of course it matters. If there are whole tranches of areas of public life where it’s just white men that you see, then that means that there are whole tranches of parts of our community, our citizens, our people, who are likely to be thinking, “That might not be for me, so let me go over there instead,” but your choice about “let me go over there, let me do that” is really just because you see that there are other people like you over there. That, to me, is not acceptable, it’s not justice, it’s not equality. So of course it matters. You want to be taught, or advised, or cured by experts, you want the best people, so obviously if it’s a white man, it’s a white man, but why would you want all the experts in your field to be white men? Diversity is important because it leads to different perspectives and different ways of looking at things.

‘And not just in terms of race or gender, but also social class, or where you come from, or age and so on. In education, it matters, because education is about helping you learn how to think. It’s not about the student as an empty vessel into which you pour a pot of knowledge. If it were, maybe it wouldn’t matter who was pouring in the knowledge, you just pour it in. Education, especially at higher levels, is really about, “How do you think? What are the sorts of questions you’re being taught to ask? What’s the critique you’re being taught to apply?” because we’re thinking people, sentient beings. So it matters who’s teaching you how to do that thinking and teaching you how to do that analysis. It matters.’

As with other professions, there remain barriers to progression within the university workforce for black academics. In the Runnymede report,⁴⁶ minority staff reported having little access to ‘academic gatekeepers’ and feeling locked out of the networks that would be able to provide them with the means to further their professional development – support networks they described as ‘vital’. BAME academics and university staff remain ‘outsiders’ in higher education, and their place of work remains the preserve of those who are white, middle class and predominantly male, among the senior staff.

Stereotypes can plague university staff, too. Some academics noted that because of their race, it was not only assumed by their white peers that they were interested in or working on the topic of race and racism, but they were also expected by their colleagues to take on roles that were related to diversity and equality issues, simply because they were not white. Respondents said racism affected all aspects of their working lives, ‘whether this was related to how they were treated by their white colleagues or students, the roles they were asked to perform or how they were judged in the academy’.⁴⁷ Alongside this, several spoke of a typically British kind of racism: passive aggressive and subtle, and difficult to provide evidence for. This leaves them reluctant to report inappropriate incidents to line managers because they are ‘hard to prove’. For those who did bite the bullet and report it, they said their complaint was rarely taken seriously.

‘The attitudes haven’t changed,’ Heidi Mirza says. ‘And in higher education we have not actually done much in our training of lecturers, teachers, to improve it, for it to filter down into the system. You just meet hardcore racist views. Now, we’ve got a culture of denial, so all you have to say is “I’m not racist!” – people will declare that. And, “Oh yes, I told them to become a hairdresser, it’s not because I’m racist, it’s because I care!” And so if you just declare yourself non-racist, you become non-racist. We call it performativity. You perform it. You hear people say the most horrible things – sexist, racist things – and they go, “Well, no I’m not racist, I’m just telling you like it is.”’

Ethnic minority students who decide to take up roles within the student body also often encounter racism, and find themselves not only under scrutiny from other students, but also from the wider public. In 2017, Jason Okundaye, a student at Cambridge who headed the university’s Black and Minority Ethnic Society, was targeted by mainstream right-wing press outlets for his tweets addressing institutional racism. A selection of those tweets were re-posted out of context, and the racist backlash went on for several days.

Esme Allman, who was elected to the position of the Black and Minority Ethnic Convenor at Edinburgh University, encountered a similar pattern of behaviour. A fellow student had commented on a Facebook post under the news of a US strike against ISIS; ‘I’m glad we could bring these barbarians a step closer to collecting their 72 virgins.’ It was reported that as a result of a complaint lodged by Allman about the post, the university began investigating the student in question. This caused uproar in the press. In fact, the University of Edinburgh confirmed that the student was actually being investigated for a breach of the student code of conduct rather than for mocking a terrorist group – Allman hadn’t even mentioned ISIS in the transcript of her complaint. The university’s overall handling of Allman’s complaint and the subsequent media attention left much to be desired – they told her not to talk to journalists who had reached out to her, and, once the situation got out of hand as the story snowballed and online trolling from racists began, they simply assured her it would blow over.

For white students to make the news, they have to be actively racist and aggressive – black face, the N-word, the whole shebang – before mainstream outlets show an interest. And when these students are written about, they often have readers springing to their defence decrying what they see as a witch hunt for ‘a kid who doesn’t know any better’. When was the last time you saw a white student make headlines for writing a string of tweets? And when was the last time you saw a black student extended the benefit of the doubt?

.....................................................

Each one, teach one

.....................................................

Until recently, not a single institution in the country offered a degree programme in Black British Studies. But in 2016 the first UK undergraduate Black Studies degree course was launched at Birmingham City University.⁴⁸ Given the vast number of degrees on offer in the UK, many of them very niche, it is a surprise that before then, no university had felt the need to offer a course exploring the history, experiences and background of a demographic that has been so key in shaping our country. With the black population in Britain being established more recently, we are a good 50-odd years behind our American counterparts, who began rolling out Black Studies courses in 1968, after their more diverse student body demanded that their history and experiences should be included in a curriculum that they too were learning from. Black Studies is now an integral part of US higher education, albeit only after several protests, boycotts and student occupations across the country.

But this isn’t to say the black community does not make it onto the UK curriculum. Indeed, we often have our experiences explained to us from a far more anthropological standpoint, and find ourselves being the objects of detailed academic scrutiny by academics. In courses such as Politics, Sociology, Psychology and History, the black British experience is often analysed and examined, but it is usually from a distance and – considering the makeup of the teaching staff in most UK unis – usually by white academics. As William Ackah, a lecturer at Birkbeck, explained in an article: ‘Black people are used to illustrate problems as diverse as educational underachievement, health inequality, and religious extremism.’⁴⁹

The complex, diverse and nuanced stories of the black British population are sidelined by a narrative that only further adds to already existing narratives – backed up by research and through findings from the country’s brightest minds. While white academics backpat each other for their commitment to inclusion, black students remain alienated, only seeing themselves reflected in their curriculum when it is part of a course on crime. This dearth of diversity within academic studies led to the creation of the ‘Why is My Curriculum White?’ campaign founded at University College London in 2014 as a response to the lack of diversity found on university reading lists and course content. Over the past four years, the campaign has continued to challenge the existing discourse, and it has since spread onto several campuses. This also prompted a public talk at UCL in 2014, led by Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman and titled ‘Why isn’t my professor black?’, seeking an answer to that very question.

Coleman is one of a handful of black philosophy lecturers in the UK. He claims to have been rejected for a full-time job at UCL because his proposed ‘Critical White Studies’ course did not find favour with colleagues wanting to offer a Black Studies programme that was less critical of the white establishment. Much of Coleman’s work focused on university curricula being too white and excluding the writings of ethnic scholars in favour of ‘dead white men’. After his fixed-term contract at UCL ended, he was informed there was no job for him (such precarious positions are more likely to be filled by those who are young, female and from black or ethnic minority groups, as opposed to them being offered permanent roles; for example, 83 per cent of white staff in higher education in 2012–2013 held permanent contracts compared to 74 per cent of BAME staff).⁵⁰ This was despite what he believed was an outstanding record in teaching and having been awarded Online Communicator of the Year by the university earlier in the year. His application to become a permanent member of staff was rejected, as it would require the creation of a new Black Studies MA, which was deemed unviable. Jonathan Wolff, Executive Dean of UCL’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities, said that the proposed MA was rejected because ‘it became apparent that UCL [was] not yet ready to offer a strong programme in this area’.

But despite the lack of Black Studies courses in UK universities, whatever your degree, as a student, just being at university gives you access to a huge range of broad and engaging texts and resources. Despite my studying law, it was when I chose modules on race and feminism outside of my core curriculum that I fully engaged with learning during my final year, which essentially shaped the views that I have now. Afua did the same, and she speaks of the opportunities that were on offer to – to some degree – create your own curriculum:

‘I started taking African papers and studying postcolonialism and engaging with subjects that were manifesting in my experience, and which gave me access to black professors and black writers and academics and thinkers, and so I had this intellectual community in my head as well.

‘There is a lot of flexibility at Oxford. I was doing PPE; you can choose. There’s such a range of options and I consistently chose options about decolonisation and political theories of equality and race and feminist theories and African studies. So those were the academics who gave me access, and the subjects that I was immersed in, and I think that helped. It helped me reconcile why I was in this place.’

The US is ahead of us in terms of curriculum, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) provide a tailored educational space for black students that may well help in terms of engagement as well as attainment. Even US universities comparable to Oxbridge, such as Harvard, are much more forward-thinking than those in the UK in terms of diversity within the student body. The Harvard University incoming class of 2017 was reportedly the most diverse in its 380-year history – over half of the 2,056 students were non-white. But Professor Emejulu also believes that the US can learn a great deal from the UK.

‘Historically Black Colleges and Universities are a solution in some ways but they were set up in the beginning to serve a so-called “talented tenth per cent”. Those that were closest to whiteness, to be honest, to be quite frank. That history has been somewhat mitigated, but that still is a huge part, an underlying part of HBCUs. But they serve an important function. I think it’s important not to valorise them completely. That’s not to say that the existence of those institutions isn’t important; being pioneers in Black Studies is absolutely crucial, but I guess, I always feel like, I don’t know how much, in terms of the black diaspora, how helpful it is to always be looking to the United States. There were things that were in place here in Britain that have been dismantled that I think have been far more helpful, if we’re looking at this from a black student’s perspective.

‘First, there’s the issue of the maintenance grant. That in and of itself is essential for encouraging people into further and higher education. So I think that personally that has been far more consequential in terms of undermining people’s access to further and higher education. The institution of fees? That’s kind of the story that often doesn’t get told about the American context, so even though there are fees here of £9,000, back when I was an undergraduate in the US, my tuition was $25,000 a year – plus housing and everything else, it was something closer to $30,000 a year. And so, you know, HBCUs are no different from that; they have to charge as well. Also in terms of what can be learned, I actually think, the lesson doesn’t come from the US so much, it comes from South Africa and the movement for decolonisation. I think that has been something that is incredibly consequential in terms of thinking about dismantling the structures that we’ve been talking about; you know, those structural inequalities in terms of the pipeline from school to higher education, the dismantling of ideas of who gets to be a knowing agent, dismantling the idea that only some knowledge counts. Particularly, the knowledge of black women is somehow less valuable and less important. So these movements of decolonisation that began in South Africa have now spread across Europe and North America. For me, those are important models. In fact, the issue here in Britain was that there were key models that helped students in further and higher education that have now been dismantled, and so the thing is, how do we return to that? How do we take back control in that way?’

.....................................................

‘Told ’em I finished school and I started my own business / They say, “Oh you graduated?” / No, I decided I was finished.’

Kanye West, School Spirit

.....................................................

Education is hugely valuable, and getting a place at university is a massive achievement. But too many ethnic minority students choose to apply because they feel they have to, or because they believe that if they don’t, they will have in some way failed. This means that many end up on campuses they aren’t quite suited to, studying subjects for the sake of it, unable to make university work for them. One of the biggest takeaways from this chapter should be that doing your research is crucial – not simply so that you learn what your potential uni can offer in the way of courses and facilities, but also that you know what its vibe and culture is. This way you will find out off the bat if it’s somewhere that would suit you, or somewhere you can at least get the most out of. You should explore all your options: in terms of the choice of degrees on offer, the establishments themselves, when you should go, and indeed whether you have to go at all, as that, too, is of course an option. Increasingly, not all vocations require you to have continued into higher education, or at least not full-time. If she had known what she knows now about how her career has turned out, Alexis believes she would have taken a different route:

‘I personally would’ve taken another year out. I would’ve tried to find myself, because when you come out of college, you still don’t actually know what you want to do with your life, you’re still quite young, you’re 18. Coming from an African background, there is a lot of pressure to go on to university as soon as you come out of college.

‘I would’ve done more work experience in that gap year and explored my options and seen what I really wanted to do, then decided to go to university and kill it. I’m back in university now, I went back to do a masters, I’m doing it in business, which makes sense, and I’m excelling. I got a first in my first semester and I never thought that I could ever achieve a first-class – I’ve never ever got an A in my life! It showed me that there’s too much pressure on students to go to university, get a load of debt for a course they have no interest in or that they might change their minds about later on in life. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I realised what I was really passionate about, and it makes sense that I’m excelling in it because it’s what I want to do. I feel like people should just take their time, they shouldn’t feel pressured by society or their parents, even though it’s hard. Take your time and really explore what it is you really want to do. A lot of the time, you leave university after college and you still can’t get a job anyway because they tell you that you don’t have experience.

‘University is always going to be there, it doesn’t have to be done when you’re 18 and fresh out of college, when you have no idea what life is. The world has told you, you go to college and then you go to university and then you get a lot of debt – at least get into debt for something that you’re going to use!’

Sharmaine Lovegrove, publisher at the Little, Brown imprint, Dialogue Books, didn’t go to university until she was 21, when she attended UCL to study Politics and Anthropology. Before then she had wanted to be a documentary filmmaker and had decided the best way of going about it was to get some work experience first, by working with production companies and becoming a runner. She had chosen her degree specifically, after three years out of education, and while she didn’t end up taking the career path she had initially thought she wanted, her course led her right back to her first love: books.

‘If I were doing it now, I would look at universities and colleges that offered part-time degrees to get the qualification,’ Sharmaine says. ‘More and more places are doing online degrees, and I would have done that in the evenings and at the weekends and then worked during the day. I just think that, you’re paying so much money now, and most people I know, when I talk to them about coming out of university, they actually don’t know what they want to do. I think higher education shouldn’t be about buying more time until you work it out, it should be about actually attaining: in Germany, you only go to university if you’re going to then do the job [which requires that specific degree], and your degree [trains you directly for] the job. Whereas here, you can go to university and study almost anything and then do something completely different. Idris Elba said that we as black people need to work ten times harder and we know that, so I always think, if you have something that stands out on your CV, people are going to raise an eyebrow and consider you over others if you take the same course as your white peers.’

.....................................................

‘The minute black kids sit together in a cafeteria, white folks cry self-segregation. Never mind that white people have always sat together and always will.’

Dear White People

.....................................................

While uni goes some way towards preparing you for the real world and a number of the hurdles you may come across there, it is still very much not reality. My university was nicknamed ‘the bubble’ and it had a campus magazine of the same name. I spent the vast majority of my time at university on campus making memories and mates, but as I will talk about later in ‘Black Girls Don’t Cry’, it was also quite an overwhelming time for me, as is it for many students. And like many students, especially black female students, I suffered in silence, hesitant to alert my faculty to ‘mitigating circumstances’ for fear of how I’d be viewed. When I eventually made the decision to take a year out, a bit of space and objectivity really helped me appreciate just how much I enjoyed university and how much I missed it. But it doesn’t have to be that drastic – you’d be surprised what a drink with your friends back home or just some home cooking every few weeks can do for the soul. Getting off campus and getting out a bit more is often a much-welcomed and much-needed break, as Afua advises:

‘I think, you need to get away, if only for your sanity, because there’s a bubble. It’s not the real world, a lot of people you encounter would never have met a black person in real life before and so you’re on the front line of that experience of having to explain yourself or your hair texture and all these things. I have never lost the heightened appreciation I have for London having been in Oxford, because just the fact that I’m fairly anonymous is such a relief that I still value. I think I was impressed by the new generation of students who feel able, collectively, to own things, name them, call them out, and I think that the fact that they’re a network helps them, so I think that’s really important.

‘I found doing mentoring work and helping other students really helpful because it gave me a sense of purpose. Even though I felt very ambivalent about being there, when I saw younger people coming through, it made me think, do I want it to be the same for them? Would I be happy with the conclusion that they don’t belong here? And that would make me say no, we have every right to be here, so whatever I can do to normalise it, it’s my duty. So, I think that sometimes it’s good to step outside of your own self, your own sense of suffering and your own preoccupation of what you’re going to do, and think about the bigger picture. You’re not just there for yourself, you’re there to try and stop other people from going through the same thing and I found that really helpful to pack into a sense of purpose.’

For many, the chance to make new friends is as much of a draw as the academic opportunities offered by university. Finding your tribe will not only help you to settle but it could also make the time you spend there more enjoyable. You might discover your friends on your course, in your halls and on general drunken university toilet run-ins. But if you find yourself feeling isolated culturally, there are increasing numbers of societies focused on identity – for example, my university had an African and Caribbean society, a Nigerian society and ‘This Is Africa’ – all of which held events that I attended with differing levels of enjoyment.

ACS and similar societies don’t always work for everyone, and some students struggle to find their place at university at all. For others, the idea of trying to find your tribe at uni is not a priority. But if that’s your choice, it’s still important that you have a group of friends to turn to, even if it’s off campus, to ensure you don’t become socially isolated. Some students choose to hang out with other students from local, more diverse universities, as well as locals who aren’t students. Others have friends from before university who they keep in touch with, or they travel back home often. You can choose to immerse yourself in campus life or to build or maintain a network outside of it – just make sure what you do works for you, and you don’t underestimate the importance of support networks during your time spent there.

‘I did make friends with other black people, and we sought each other out from other colleges and then we’d meet up and do stuff together,’ Afua tells us. ‘I felt like it created a bit of hostility with some of my college friends. They just couldn’t understand why I had to have friends outside of the college, even though it was quite obvious that we were all black, and so, there was just this awkwardness because they didn’t want to say, “Why are you hanging out with these black people?” They were like, “Why are you always doing stuff with other people?” I didn’t want to explain to them why I had a need to create a social group of black peers, so, it was just that awkwardness.

‘Having other friends – and they don’t have to be black friends – obviously I had white friends from all backgrounds. When I look at the people I’m still friends with, they’re not all people of colour, [but] what they all have in common is a slight sense of outsider-ness. So, whether it’s because of their class background or their religious heritage or whatever … just [those] that have not come from what they felt was like, the conventional background and having gone through those same types of questions. So, they’re not exclusive to race, I think obviously if you’ve got that visible difference, it’s heightened because it constantly manifests in all your interactions. So, surround yourself with people who can relate to you for whatever reason, or who you can relate to and who are supportive.’

Alexis also speaks about the importance of her friendships at university – many of which have continued several years later:

‘I didn’t find it difficult socialising at all. I think the best thing I learnt about Roehampton was my social experience; it being an independent space from home, paying my own bills, just being an adult and starting to live an adult life and living myself. Even in the first year, I didn’t live on campus, I lived with two guys in a house and everyone was like, “Aren’t you scared to live with two guys?” And I was like, “No,” and I thank God because the two guys, they were like my brothers. They literally were like brothers to me, it was a blessing … they looked after me and I looked after them. It was a really good experience, I met some really good people out there and most of the people I met are coming to my wedding; we kept our friendships.’

.....................................................

‘The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.’

Timbuk 3, The Future’s So Bright

.....................................................

The long and short of it is that everyone’s university experience will be different. Some people will end up going exactly where they wanted to go and then realise it’s not what they had expected; others will go to their backup choice and find that it’s the best thing that ever happened to them. The most important thing is to arm yourself with knowledge: before you make any life-changing decisions, make sure they are informed ones. That information may lead you to take a completely different route in itself: university is full of opportunity, but so is the world.

‘To sum it up, don’t think of higher education as simply the next step after A-levels, think of higher education as a pathway into a career,’ says Sharmaine.

‘When you think about higher education as the pathway to your career, you think about it in terms of its practicality. When you are at university, if you do decide to go to university straight away, then make sure that there is a lot of time in between writing essays; in your second year, make sure that you are getting those placements. Don’t leave it to the university to do everything for you, actually think about it practically: what is it that I have to do to be better? Listen to your friends and then just think of ways that you can try to do things a little bit differently to stand out. Don’t be afraid to not follow the crowd, but do it in your own, subtle, private way. Don’t let people second-guess you, be like, “This is what I want to do,” and go and speak to people in the industries and write to people and ask them to mentor you or ask people who do that job. Find the experts.

‘My second thing is, be an expert. Be brilliant and bold and brave and know your industry inside out; know how it works and know the history and the culture, and just know it and breathe it and live it. I think that’s just so important, when you get to university, it’s not just about passing exams, it’s actually about learning. Really learning a skill or a trade or having an understanding of a topic or a subject, and so really take it on board. See it as an opportunity to have the time. It is all part of the process. I think what’s really important is that studying law or medicine to make your parents proud is a very different thing to actually studying it.’

Despite all the fuckeries and tomfoolery, university is still a brilliant place, where those who are lucky enough to go can find themselves, and so much more: lifelong friends, political views, endless knowledge and sometimes even a long-term partner. While there is still a long way to go in terms of diversity and inclusion, an increasingly self-assured and unapologetic student population is continuing to right wrongs at an unprecedented rate. I mentioned to a current Warwick student that there had been a slave auction during my time at uni and she told me ‘they wouldn’t dare’ host one these days – let alone a Django-themed one. I only attended four years before her. And as Alexis mentioned, the newfound freedom is particularly wonderful, for all students, sure, but more often specifically for black freshers who are sometimes still under a form of curfew for way longer than their white peers. The transition from having to barter and bargain with parents regarding nights out to simply going out whenever you please is just one of the many priceless things about uni, and in itself it is almost worth all the deadlines and all-nighters.

A culture shock can be just that – shocking – but it can also give you the opportunity to meet people and have experiences you would never have had otherwise. Like most things in life, it’s important to enter university aware, but also optimistic, as your future (as well as the future of these institutions) is set to get a great deal brighter.