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