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Anonymous

I have deliberated over the assigned question for quite some time and pondered over not on what to say but rather on the how. My brief tenure at Cambridge has conditioned me to expect the Great British deference when engaging with crises. It is this (pseudo) politeness that has consistently engendered rife acquiescence that has hindered critical engagements with and confronting racism, a crisis born out of Western modernity more than 500 years ago in America, the continent (not country) I am from. This crisis has withstood the passage of time and continues to inflict pain on the minds, bodies and knowledges of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC). In considering the how, I mindful of my positionalities- brown, queer student from the ‘Global South’ prominently located in an unwelcoming white institution. I am cognisant of the lived experiences and testimonies of Black, Indigenous and Students and Staff of Colour who have repeatedly decried the ridicule imposed on their bodies, minds and epistemologies at the University of Cambridge. I am acutely aware of contemporaneous transnational decolonialsation movements rooted in the calls of BIPOC and decolonial thinkers for centuries. I am conscious, as Audre Lorde pens, that “Your silence will not protect you”. I am therefore unmuting myself: The University of Cambridge is deeply racist. This admission will be greeted with odium, unequivocally challenged, addressed using performative platitudes or simply dismissed. Those shielded by the comfort of their whiteness may not see it, but it was and never has been invisible. A perusal of the University’s newspaper, the stories of and by BIPOC and open letters written by students across different faculties and colleges challenging systemic racism supply copious evidence of the continued crisis of racism.

How can a crisis be remedied if it located as whispers in closed spaces? For change to be effectuated, speaking out against racism must first become normalised in academia. This seemingly obvious pronouncement is by far the most powerful and necessary step for transformation. Its salience, however, remains elusive, bounded by academic deference, fragility, defensiveness, narcissism and ignorance of students and staff who overwhelmingly remain hypnotised by the assumed superiority of Western thought. The homogeneity of the Faculty of Education’s compulsory research methods courses affirms this. For systemic change to materialise, inter-epistemic conversations must move from the perimeters to the centre stage. Students must demand that it be situated as not additives, but permanently marked in our curriculum. This shift in epistemic location, long advocated by decolonial thinkers, BIPOC and white allies, is how we begin to deal with this crisis.