This paper presents the preliminary findings of a small-scale qualitative study examining racialised faculty and student experiences of internalised racism within Higher Education (HE) within UK. The paper specifically sheds light on experiences of internalised racism enacted by one BPoC member towards another member of the racialised community and how racialised staff and students make sense of such incidents. Whilst there is established and growing scholarship highlighting how racism in higher education is sustained within higher education through racist attitudes, policies, unwritten codes, and formal and informal practices that promote racial silence among faculty and students of colour (Bhopal, 2015), less is known about internalised racism within racialised groups. Race scholars researching higher education have examined the narratives of faculty and students of colour around microaggression (Pittman, 2010), bullying, citation politics (Ahmed, 2017), gatekeeping practices in knowledge production (Johnson and Joseph-Salisbury, 2018), implicit and explicit bias in course evaluations (Saul, 2013) and deliberately reducing employability and career progression by White management, faculty and/or students (Sensoy and DiAngelo, 2017). However, there is an absence of narratives around internalised racism, frustration and anger affecting relationships between people of colour, whether between senior management and faculty, senior and junior faculty, faculty and students, or between students themselves. 

Black feminists such as bell hooks (1995) and Lorde (1984) have highlighted that there has been a reluctance to research internalised racism within academia for fear of airing dirty laundry in public, which limits us in finding meaningful solutions. They suggest that we need to uncover more narratives from faculty and students of colour about how they experience internalised racism at various intersections, to gain a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which it feeds into the racist structures of neoliberal universities. Whilst Kohli (2014) has examined the narratives of Black, Latina and Asian American women students in teacher training programmes in the USA, and Harper (2007) has researched the accounts of African American students in US universities, there is a dearth of research within a British context. This research draws on critical feminist perspectives of intersectionality (Hill Collins and Bilge, 2017) to shed light on individual narratives of internalised racism between people of colour at various intersections within UK HE is setting. Hill Collins and Bilge (2017) posited that, combating the social injustice faced by women with hybrid identities was only possible if we understand their experiences of social inequality, which were constructed by an intersection of race, gender and class. The current research explores the experiences of racialised staff and students at the intersection of racism, AntiBlackness, patriarchy, ableism, and Islamophobia.

The research was a small-scale qualitative study utilising semi-structured interviews with nine participants of which four were postgraduate students studying in a UK university and five were members of academic staff. The research aim was to document the narratives of internalised racism among and between different racialised groups in higher education, and present different examples of how it operationalises within higher education as well as see how these incidences sustain racist structures within higher education. The participants are geographically dispersed within Britain, situated at the intersections of race, gender, religion, culture and immigration status. The interviews were carried out online through Zoom or MS Teams due to Covid restrictions and lasted nearly 16 hours and were audio recorded. The participants belong to a mixture of universities that have a higher percentage of racialised students, staff, and faculty such as with some post-92 universities, and universities that may have a lower percentage of BPoC students, staff and faculty such as with some Russell Group Universities. The research design drew on snowballing and network technique for sampling as the topic was of sensitive nature. Data from these interviews were transcribed verbatim and a thematic analysis was used to develop important themes.

Preliminary analysis will be presented along three main themes: the nature of such incidents, how racislised staff and students who bully are often viewed and rewarded by wider institution and lastly, the repercussions of calling such acts out in higher education spaces. The findings show that participants were critical of how acts of internalised racism enacted by other racialised members towards them were done with an intention of seeking proximity to whiteness and to gain power over them. Participant experiences also varied at different intersections, with many participants reporting on sexism, antiBlackness, xenophobia and Islamophobia in their narratives. This research sheds lights on narratives of hope of solidarity within the racialised community and how racialised staff and students envision dismantling of racist structures within HE. The presentation concludes with a discussion on how racist incidents affect unity within different groups in racialised community and what can be done to address these internal fractures.

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