Understanding black students experiences in global HE: A view from CRT indispensable

• In Event: Addressing race & racism in global higher education through research, teaching, and praxis

Proposal

PRESENTER 4 will next discuss the need for research and scholarship on the lived experiences of black students in global higher education to apply CRT as an analytical lens that foreground race and racism for a just and complete analysis.

CRT asserts the permanence of racism and acknowledges that ‘race’ and racism are central and permanent, and not aberrant, in society. CRT also expounds that ‘race’ is a social construct and, as Carbado (2002:181) would argue, its meaning ‘…does not exist “out there,” ontologically prior to its production and instantiation in discourses’. Racial meaning (i.e. what it means to belong to a certain ‘race’) is constituted in societal discourses that change over time and place. The idea of the existence of different ‘races’ within society is made, re-made, and perpetuated by these discourses that normalize racialized social hierarchy. The concept of ‘race’ is coded and recoded as a response to ever-changing social, political, and economic contexts of society, but the purpose remains the same – the creation and recreation of racialized social hierarchies. In this way, CRT argues that racism takes different forms and at the same time remains an embedded, fluid, and permanent feature of ‘the usual way society does business’ (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001:7).

In this session the presenter will argue that we need to teach students that higher education institutions are culturally constructed spaces and sites of power, privilege, and hierarchy masquerading as sites of meritocracy, objectivity, and neutrality. We need to help our students critique that mainstream curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment draw upon majority discourses and their grand narrative which disadvantages students from minority backgrounds. Teachers need to ensure that research, scholarship and teaching expose this obfuscation and facilitate conditions to help students understand that all texts are socially constructed, draw on the grand narrative, are not neutral and there are always gaps and negations which can be oppressive to black students.

Author

• Solomon Zewolde, IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society