Part 2 - Oxford: At Odds with the Real World

OXFORD AND ITS WAYS…

Was I apprehensive about Oxford? Yes, in many ways I was.

                One of my friends at church when I told him I was going to Oxford said, “You’ll be the first black person there!!” Hilarious, but gives you an idea of the kind of impression that Oxford gives people of its racial mix-up.

I am used to being the only chocolate person in a milk-coloured environment, though. Although my first primary school was majority black, my second primary school was in a small, upper-middle class white town and I was the first black student they had there in 101 years, by the time I joined! (If you were wondering why, it was because my mum worked in the next town and logistically it was just easier.) At my secondary school I don’t believe we ever had more than 13 black students in a school of around 1,300. (I counted. And there were no black teachers.) There were two of us in my year (and we happened to be in the same form), until we got to sixth form. Then it was just me.

                It didn’t bother me at all. I had my friends, and it didn’t matter to them what colour I was. And as Manchester is a very diverse city culturally and ethnically and my school wasn’t far from Manchester, ignorance wasn’t something I had to deal with very often. (Definitely less than in some other circles).

It was just as well I’d gotten used to being the only black people in a lot of my social circles, as I was very often the only black person in a lot of places in Oxford. I was the only black person doing Italian in my year and I was the only black person in choir. In many other circles I was one of about two or three black people.

                Although I was pretty used to being the odd one out colour-wise, I realised that in Oxford I was pretty much that ALL THE TIME. You could literally play a game of “spot the black people in Oxford”. No joke: it literally became a thing walking down the cobbled streets of Oxford that when you passed a fellow black person you’d give them a little nod and smile, as if to say, “Well done for getting here, I know there aren’t many of us!” On the other hand, some black people seemed to quite deliberately avoid all other people with the same colour of skin as them. Guess they were trying to play a game of assimilation.

                And of course such a lack of diversity plays into abundance of ignorance. I was shocked after my first term at Oxford at the plethora of actual stupidity I heard every time I went to an Oxford Union debate. The things that people would stand up confidently and say about ethnic minorities and women and working class people would actually leave me speechless. It’s largely because of the culture of places like the Oxford Union that I say that Oxford is a rich white man’s paradise.

The Oxford Union

                The Oxford Union (not to be confused with the Oxford University Student Union, which I’ll talk about more later) is one of the oldest debating societies in the world. Founded in 1823, it prides itself on having brought great thinkers and speakers to the doorstep of Oxford students for centuries. I loved going to Oxford Union events, but the Union was also a very large thorn in my flesh.

                The Union is really tailor-made for members of the elite. For one thing, membership currently stands at £262.65. Admittedly, this is life-long, meaning that once you have been an Oxford Union member you remain so for the rest of your life. HOWEVER, everyone knows students are not exactly the richest people in the world, and not many people just have £262 to give away. I debated for some time over whether it was going to be worth becoming a member, but decided in favour in view of the fact that: one, Freshers in the first few weeks were eligible for a discount which reduced the membership price by about £30; secondly, I could go to a large range of events with people present that I would possibly never meet anywhere else; thirdly, I could go to these types of events as many times as I wanted.

                The Oxford Union was honestly one of my favourite things about Oxford. I got to meet people that I had admired and respected for years: Doreen Lawrence, Greg Rutherford, Emeli Sandé… The most riveting event I went to was a Black Lives Matter panel we had in my final year where the mothers of young black men murdered in America addressed us, including the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland. I cried in that one, I was so moved. I even went up to Trayvon Martin’s mum afterwards and gave her a hug; so much did I feel her pain.

(Below is a video of Sandra Bland's mother speaking at that riveting Black Lives Matter panel.)

 But it was also the bane of my life.

                As well as the assumption that everyone has that much money – OK, so the Union now has a special Access membership rate, but I don’t remember that being a thing when I was a Fresher – the Union was obsessed with flaunting this image of opulence that was completely unnecessary. At every debate the President, Librarian and other members of the Standing Committee would dress in white tie – so the guys in black suits, and the ladies in posh ball gowns. If you were a girl on the Standing Committee, you’d be expected to wear a different dress to every debate. OF COURSE this puts off those who don’t have the financial means to own eight different posh gowns. It also makes a lot of people feel like they don’t fit in. Most people that end up having positions on the Standing Committee come from a private school background, and from some of the most prestigious in the country – think £30,000-a-year Eton, St. Paul’s…

                The best way I can explain the very prevalent attitude which annoyed me so much in Oxford was that which comes from “living in a bubble”. I’m not slating people for going to public schools, but I do slate them for the wilful ignorance that their background enables and perpetuates. So many people, by virtue of having gone to schools where they only interacted with rich white young boys like themselves, simply had no inkling of how “the other half” lives. They knew nothing of prejudice, living on a regular income, had no shame in talking about women any which way…

SERIOUS SEXISM

Towards the end of my first year in Oxford, the then President of the Oxford Union was arrested on charges of rape and attempted rape. The whole thing kicked up a storm which abated only once the charges were dropped months later. In the whole event, the student refused to take a leave of absence, which angered many.

                Irrespective of the fact that he was released without charge, such an influential figure being accused of so serious a sexual crime threw the epidemic of “laddish culture” into the limelight in Oxford. Now, laddish culture isn’t something that runs rampant only in Oxford, of course. It’s a problem in universities across the country. But the brash arrogance that it is coupled with in elitist institutions like Oxford doubles its force.

                In my second year in particular, things appeared to take a turn for the worst. I’ve only recently discovered just how bad things were and actually that I knew (or thought I knew) some of the people that were responsible. At my college there were supposedly a group of boys that latched onto the Freshers in particular, but specifically took advantage of younger girls. I’ve even heard people talk of “pimps”. What was going on led my college principal, Alice Prochaska (love her!) to talk to the media about the very worrying behaviour taking hold on our university grounds: she wrote an article for The Guardian (available here: Tackling Laddish Culture, Alice Prochaska ) and spoke on Radio 4’s Today programme. Sexual consent workshops are now standard in Oxford.

So, we’ve made headway in that department. Things are changing for the better. But there’s no doubt that it’s a work in progress.

RIDICULOUS RACISM

      On race-related issues, you can forget it. Oxford gets a big thumbs down from me. I’m talking about Oxford, the institution, the power – not individual colleges or individual people.

      Fortunately I generally had a good experience as a black person in Oxford. I didn’t come against some of the downright malicious comments that some of my friends had to deal with. But I did come face-to-face with ignorance very often and as a black person was made to feel collectively marginalised.

      I’ll bring the Oxford Union up again as an example.

      Why, tell me please, did the Union have to invite the French right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen to speak uninterrupted for 45 minutes on her very, very worrying views? Why give a platform to someone of her nature in a place where ethnic minorities already feel marginalised and unwelcome? What, you just want to air her nasty views because “everyone has a right to free speech”? You mean to say by letting her give a speech on why it’s OK to be racist and Islamophobic you are not condoning her views? OK, so why didn’t you have her as one of the speakers in a debate with four people on each side as you so often do?

      Some say that giving someone with unintelligent and unfounded views a platform to speak and then pointing out the holes in their arguments actually makes them look stupid. OK, maybe so. But how exactly does that work when the person chooses the questions she wants to answer and ignores the rest? And how does it work when the woman barely speaks any English and thus you have to do everything through a translator; her own translator, who can water down what he likes as he communicates from one party to the other? Come on, now.

      I didn’t go to that event, if you didn’t guess. I actually went outside the gate – to PEACEFULLY protest, believe it or not.

     An invite from the Oxford Union is a big compliment to anyone. It says, “You are important. People like you and want to hear your views. WE, a prestigious institution, like you enough to want to have you address our members. We value what you have to say.” Ask anyone that’s been invited to the Oxford Union and they will definitely not tell you they took it as a snub. 

So, ahem, WHY, did Marine Le Pen receive this honour? (And yes, if you were thinking, “I bet Ruth’s glad Le Pen didn’t get elected French President this year”, you were right.)

That oh-so-dearly-loved princess-of-the-people polemicist KATIE HOPKINS has been invited to the Oxford Union TWICE. And that’s twice in the time I was there. For all I know, they might be planning to have her again.

WHY on Earth would you want to hear something new that someone that referred to thousands of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean as “cockroaches” has to say?

All of this is worrying enough.

But I haven’t told you yet about the infamous “Colonial Comeback” cocktail.

That debacle led to even the Oxford Union condemning itself as “institutionally racist”. You might have seen the national headlines which came about as a result of what happened on that night in May 2016.

Along with some friends, that evening I went to a debate entitled:  'This House Believes Britain Owes Reparations to her Former Colonies.' It was set to be a big event. And of course, due to the nature of the topic, there were more BME students there than normal. The mood was lively, spirits were high: there was an anticipatory flavour in the air.

And then we saw it.

Laid out on the wooden tables in the bar were promotions of that night’s specially concocted drink. Coupled with an image of black hands in chains, “the Colonial Comeback!”

I was speechless. I was mad, but the kind of mad where you don’t have words. The kind of mad where you just find yourself trying to figure out what on earth was going through someone’s mind when they decided that on the night of a debate held to question whether or not Britain owes reparations to her former colonies, it was a good idea to advertise an alcoholic drink trivialising the atrocities of slavery and colonisation. There was also another advertisement for the same drink which had a map of Africa partitioned amongst European powers.

I was flabbergasted at the thought that not only had someone come up with this idea and then printed out the leaflets, but someone else had seconded it and laid them out on the table. And it took a group of mainly BME students sitting in the bar to sound the alarm bells. I mean, what were they thinking?

Well, it’s not hard to imagine that we got pretty annoyed. A couple of the people I was with got up and asked why on earth such things were there. There was quite some consternation before the debate began, and the President apologised before the debate began that such an insensitive promotion package had been put forward at all.

But to be honest, I wasn’t happy with that “apology” and neither were my friends. It was just some little “we’re sorry” without understanding the gravity of it. The idea of suggesting that the aggressive foreign policy of colonisation, which involved plundering people’s land, maiming human beings and destroying the culture and livelihood of many people, should COME BACK, is not something we ought to take lightly. 

Well, some people quite literally did not take that sitting down. A small group of the people I had been with in the bar stood up in silent protest. It was that night that the Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford movement began. [You can read more about what went down at that debate here, in an article I wrote for the British newspaper ‘The Voice’.] 

It was largely due to the nonconformist boldness of those four people at the debate that the dialogue surrounding race and racism in Oxford started to change. Flyers for Rhodes Must Fall were handed out after the debate and it got a strong following thereafter. People were waking up to the epidemic of racism in Oxford and wanted to do something to help cure it. If some of the things said at that debate and “The Colonial Comeback!” cocktail weren’t enough, the affront of an attendee in the bar after the event, labelling a student in my year “a black barbarian”, underpinned just how bad things were.

It was obvious to all of us, but the Oxford Union took a while to see it our way. It ended up making three apologies because the first two missed the mark. The third apology was made after a 5-hour meeting in which the Union’s Standing Committee met with leading groups for social change in Oxford, including the Student Union’s Campaign Racial Awareness and Equality (CRAE) and of course, Rhodes Must Fall. In this apology, the Oxford Union Society condemned itself as “institutionally racist” and committed to holding mandatory race and anti-racism workshops as part of induction into the committee. Good, positive change.

But as much I’d like to say that Oxford’s love affair with racism ended there, it did not.

Not long after all of this happened, I went on my year abroad and so was out of Oxford for a year, and watched events from the sidelines. So hopeful for change when I left, over the course of the year I got more and more frustrated with the system’s stubbornness to change.

Rhodes Must Fall

Rhodes Must Fall really did get up and running in that year. Yet, it was met with so much hostility from every side. People just didn’t want to engage with the issue at hand: that Oxford as an institution celebrates and benefits from the horrendous actions of slave-owners and colonialists to this day. I’m not going to go into it here, but basically Cecil Rhodes was the architect of apartheid and enabled the deaths of millions of black people in Southern Africa. Yet his name is all over Oxford, and a huge statue of him emblazoned on his former college, Oriel, lords it over the High St.

Our Chancellor didn’t get what the problem was. According to him, the last colonial administrator of Hong Kong, people that didn’t like Rhodes being celebrated “should think about being educated elsewhere”. Oh, he’s also known to have claimed that having more BME students in Oxford would “erode standards”. Translated: if we let more ethnic minority students into our universities, everyone will get dumber.

It’s probably not much of a surprise that in a place where views like this are given a platform, change doesn’t go very far.

In December 2015, Oriel College finally started listening to the protests of Rhodes Must Fall: considering the significance of affording such a place of high esteem to an undeniable racist, and recognising Rhodes’ position as emblematic of institutional racism within the university as a whole. We got excited. They said they would consider removing the statue and that in the meantime they would remove the plaque celebrating him, and would place a notice clarifying who Rhodes was and how the college did not condone his actions; moreover that his views were “incompatible” with the “inclusive culture” of a modern-day university.  A six-month discussion, involving the council, alumni and other parties was to take place before the final decision would be made.

Fast-forward six weeks, and it had all been cancelled. No more. Why? Oxford always bows to the power of money. The very, very rich donors to Oriel College were fuming that a colonial racist who is known to have said things such as “I prefer land to ni****ers might actually lose his position as revered god, and immediately began to threaten to remove their generous funding to the college. Response of Oriel College, and Oxford the institution? “Hold on, we’ve changed our minds. Money, money, money, we need your money, it’s a rich man’s world.” Because OF COURSE, in Oxford, money comes before ethics, compassion, before all else.

I was a lot more hopeful back then about change in Oxford than I am now, a few months after having finished my four-year degree. [For more on Rhodes Must Fall and the aftermath of that decision, you can read the feature article I wrote for ‘The Voice’: Rhodes Must Fall].

My final year was the year in which, like I said before, I truly got fed up of Oxford. I couldn’t wait to leave. Don’t get me wrong: despite the things I have talked about, I had missed Oxford on my year abroad. I had missed my friends, missed being part of the groups that were so intrinsic to my time there: the Christian Union, church, choir… But not long after I came back, the reality of Oxford and its strange ways hit me again.

In the second term of my final year, one of my friends, who had graduated the summer before, had a CCTV image of him circulated around the entire mailing list of his friend’s college, where he had stopped by for the night. He tells the story best himself: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/10/oxford-university-circulate-criminalised-image-black-man. As Femi says, there is no other reason that a porter would send out an email warning staff and students to “be vigilant” and “alert a member of staff [...] or call Oxford security services” if they saw him other than that they feared he was dangerous because he was black. This was the last straw for me. It’s not uncommon at all in Oxford to be stopped around the university grounds because you are black. Most have their own story. I’ve been stopped when walking into college grounds when others, that are white, can walk straight in – because there is this question in some people’s minds of, “Is she in the right place? She’s black, she can’t belong here.” I remember another time I was walking around a college with a friend (her college) and we were asked if we were in the right place, if we knew where we were going. We knew we wouldn’t have been asked that question if we were white.

I would laugh things like that off, though sometimes they did irritate me. I found it amusing and silly that people would get me mixed up with the only other black girl around. That type of thing, and worse, was documented in an initiative called ‘I, too, am Oxford’ in my first year [available here http://itooamoxford.tumblr.com/.] But something as bad as someone’s CCTV image being circulated around an entire college as representative of someone to be afraid of simply because he was black, that was different. It wasn’t a “micro-aggression” or something to wave off lightly.

It made me mad. I was properly mad for more than a week. It wasn’t just this, it was this combined with feeling marginalised by the university as a whole up until now. It was the incident itself combined with the fact that there was no apology made. It was Oxford and its relentless pursuit of “othering” people of colour.

In my second year – which was my favourite year in Oxford, more on that later – I harboured a real sense of optimism about the state of things in Oxford. I believed in change, and was a part of taking steps to make it happen. By my fourth year, I had lost it completely. I was fed up and disillusioned with the static status quo. Now I say: I don’t want my future kids to go to Oxford. Not unless things change. People have been saying the same thing about Oxford for the last 20 years, and the 20 years before that (“when I was there the racism was terrible”, “I felt I didn’t belong because I wasn’t rich, etc etc”) and there still doesn’t seem to be much hope of change. Do I want my kids to experience the same sense of not belonging and continued othering at their university? No. I’d rather they experienced life at a university which is more like the real world. Oxford is not the real world.

CULTURAL CAPITAL

                So many people take their privilege so much for granted that they fail to realise the cultural capital that they have over their counterparts.

                Though English is my native language and I was born and bred in the UK, I am a product of the background I am from. My parents emigrated from Nigeria to study in the 80s and so though although we speak English at home, we don’t speak upper-class Southern English, like some people in Oxford might hear at home.

                Sometimes in classes some idiomatic expressions would come up that I had never heard before, probably mostly because they aren’t widely used anymore, but also because they are used most often by the upper classes. And people would look at me like I had two heads because I didn’t know what they meant. Soz mate, I’m from Manchester and we don’t speak the Queen’s English there. I remember being laughed at by a fellow student once in a translation class because I didn’t know the difference between certain types of guns. It’s like, I’m sorry, but I didn’t grow up in a mansion where the family activity was shooting!

                Now I’m from a middle-class family and I felt like I didn’t fit in with the general cultural capital in Oxford. I mean, I have nothing against them – indeed, a lot of them were and are my friends – but the majority of people in Oxford come from London, Surrey, and Kent. I tell you, every time I heard anyone with the slightest tinge of a Northern accent, I would latch on to them. We were rare.

                If you’re working class in Oxford, I think it’s fair to say you would feel like you didn’t fit in a lot of the time. Some people would be made fun of because of the way they spoke. Think about the amount of balls and formal dinners we have in Oxford each term and that makes you realise even more how much you can be excluded from the opulence of Oxford because of your background.

Click here to continue reading... Next post:

Part 3: Oxford Quirks (Good and Bad)