Tackling racism

If you feel that you are being subjected to harassment or bullying in any form, there is help available to you at the University through our Report and Support service.

We have appointed and trained a network of Harassment Support Workers who will listen to you and offer advice and support. Also, it’s important to know that black and minority ethnic students can request support from black counsellors.

Essex Students’ Union Advice provides free, confidential and impartial advice on many issues giving students support if you’re worried, or just fancy a chat.

You can contact the service Monday to Friday 10am-4pm during term time and Monday to Friday 1pm -4pm during vacations, and also to book a 1-2-1 appointment over Zoom or telephone with an adviser.

The Essex Global Forum is a staff-led network which promotes, celebrates and emphasises the rich cultural diversity among Essex staff.

The Forum is part of our University's efforts to promote equality related to nationality, race, ethnicity, language and religion. The Forum is open to all members of staff regardless of nationality, race, ethnicity, language and religion.

The Black Asian and Minority Ethnic community (BAME) Staff Forum is a community group made up of staff, including academic staff, professional services and PhD students, who identify as BAME or people of colour (POC).

If you would like to know more about the Forum or would like to be added to the mailing list, please get in touch with the Forum’s chair Sandya Hewamanne.

As individuals we can raise our own awareness of what constitutes a racist incident.

For example,  microaggressions, explained in this BBC blog are:

“Brief queries, comments or actions sprinkled throughout day-to-day life that make others – particularly those in marginalised groups –feel bad about themselves.”

Also, micro-incivilities, explained by Professor Binna Kandola on the Advance HE website. He says:

“The blatant forms of prejudice have been called 'old-fashioned' racism,and can include verbal and physical abuse, as well as overt stereotyping. It's the sort of thing that many of us could never imagine ourselves doing. 'Modern racism' however is a different thing altogether. It is subtle, oblique and indirect in its manifestation, yet its impact on the people on the receiving end can be just as devastating, and sometimes more so.”

Think you're open minded?

We all like to think we are open-minded and objective but research has shown that beliefs and values gained from family, culture and a lifetime of experiences influence how we view and evaluate both others and ourselves.

The University has an Automatic Bias Essentials course on Moodle, which explores how the beliefs and values gained from family, culture and a lifetime of experiences heavily influence how we view and evaluate both others and ourselves.

You can also log into HR Organiser and search for ‘Unconscious bias’ to book your place on the next workshop.

As part of the University’s commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion, and to comply with the Equality Act 2010, it is compulsory for all members of new and existing staff to the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Essentials training module. It gives an insight into what is expected of us as members of our diversity University community, and our rights and responsibilities.

It’s important that we contribute to a positive culture, where staff and students feel able to bring their whole selves to their work and study.

We can all learn how to positively intervene and challenge microaggressions and negative behaviour in our bystander intervention training.

University staff can search for staff training by searching ‘bystander intervention’ on HR Organiser and students can sign-up via our student wellbeing service.

• Education Committee paper 25 September 2020: Decolonising the curriculum (.pdf)
• Education Committee paper 28 September 2020: Analysis of student performance on Capstone modules by ethnicity (.pdf)

We are developing a series of resources to support our departments to decolonise their curricula. Some resources already exist, including the Achieving Potential Toolkit and the reading lists created on Talis by the anti-racist pedagogy working group. These will be reviewed and developed as necessary and added to this section.

• Decolonising the curriculum - presentation to the Senior Staff Conference, October 2020 by Dr Hannah Gibson, Department of Language and Linguistics (.pdf)
• Essex Achieving Potential Toolkit (.pdf)
• Talis reading list: decolonising the curriculum
• Talis reading list: anti-racist reading group
• Library services - Decolonising the curriculum guide 

Examples from other universities

• Decolonisation In Practice conference recordings - Guild of Students, University of Birmingham
• Keele manifesto for decolonising the curriculum
• Decolonising SOAS Learning and Teaching Toolkit
• University of Kent: decolonise UKC
• Sussex Students' Union: decolonise Sussex
• Kingston University Inclusive Curriculum Framework
• UCL: Liberating the Curriculum
• UCL Inclusive curriculum health check
• UCL Race and Space Curriculum
• UCL Why is my curriculum white?
• University of Bath Learning and Teaching Hub

Work specific to science

• THE article: science curricula must be decolonised too
• Cave, S., & Dihal, K. (2020, Aug). The Whiteness of AI. Philosophy & Technology
• Guillory, D. (2020). Combating Anti-Blackness in the AI Community (.pdf)
• Chinoy, S. (2019). The Racist History Behind Facial Recognition. New York Times
• Hofstra, B., Kulkarni, V. V., Galvez, S. M.-N., He, B., Jurafsky, D., & McFarland, D. A. (2020). The Diversity–Innovation Paradox in Science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(17), 9284–9291

The way we communicate is fundamental to upholding our approach to tackling racism. To help guide you in getting your written communications right, take a look at these useful resources:

• Advance HE guidance on approaching terminology around race and ethnicity
• Reporting guidance from the National Union of Journalists and Race Forward.
• Anti-racist resources: a list of books, videos, films, podcasts, lesson plans, ideas for action and activism.

Staff are encouraged to use the resources being created by the Advance HE project. Resources include a range of blogs and a series of webinars.

The ‘Tackling Racism on campus: Raising awareness and creating the conditions for confident conversations’ project has been funded by the Scottish Funding Council (SCF) to develop evidence-based resources to be used by Scottish universities and colleges as they respond to the findings in the EHRC inquiry report.

The predominately BAME Group quickly recognised the need to openly name racism. This ‘naming’ was recognised as a way to support tackling the systemic nature of racism across FE/HE education settings, in both physical and virtual campuses, as microcosms of society. These elements amplified the pressing need to address the hidden characteristics of racism embedded in how our institutions work and push for necessary structural change. As part of the project, the steering group have published a range of blogs and hosted a series of webinars.

University of Essex alumni and students come together to share their experiences of being Black at Essex in the past and present, and to share ideas around how universities like Essex can and should move forward, for Black History Month 2020

What do you think when you look at this speaker? Well, think again. (And then again.) In this funny, honest, empathetic TED talk, Yassmin Abdel-Magied challenges us to look beyond our initial perceptions, and to open doors to new ways of supporting others.

In this British Academy webinar with Guardian journalist and writer, Gary Younge, among the discussion is the use of the term 'BAME' and 'Black', in the final Q&A section, which makes for interesting viewing.

In this SEED (Seeking Education Equity and Diversity) text, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" including notes for facilitators,written in 1989, author Peggy Macintosh explores how she:

“[Has] come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.”