Solidarity with @GoldAntiRacism #goldoccupy #myracistcampus

It is the 43^rd night that undergraduate students of colour, led predominantly by Black, brown and Muslim women and queer folx and supported by white allies, have been in occupation at Deptford Town Hall, the face of Goldsmith’s University Campus in New Cross, South East London. The students are campaigning against the numerous manifestations of institutional racism they have encountered, many of them in their first year of university life. Considering the outstanding community organising undergirding the occupation, it may be surprising that most of the students were not previously involved in activism of any kind. Yet, in this final portion of the academic year, they have powerfully articulated and mobilised around a common cause and put their bodies and livelihoods on the line to attain the outcomes they seek, and in so doing have created the longest-standing student occupation in the history of Goldsmith’s University.

The analysis and activities of the occupation are deeply and inherently intersectional, demonstrating the distillation of theory into practice by this generation of young people, especially women, femmes,  queer and trans folks of colour, who have learned to link struggles and centre the needs of the most marginalised. It is they, not academics or recognised intellectuals, who are advancing this knowledge and practice as they discuss and share it through digital media and implement it in their political struggles. This is represented in the Audre Lorde quote they have posted on the entry door, enacted in the way they have organised, signposted, and offered resources in the physical space in the occupied rooms, and outlined in no uncertain terms in their manifesto: our struggles are interconnected and intertwined. We will only achieve true, full liberation for all if we boost and listen to the voices of the most marginalised.

Audre Lorde quoted on the entrance

While the students have made explicit and unflagging critique of the statues of slavers and a slave ship adorning the building they occupy, they also argue that Deptford Town Hall is, as a Town Hall, meant to be a community space, and that it was promised as such by Goldsmith’s leadership when it was purchased. However, the students protest, until the occupation, the ornate, palatial building was closed to the public and used primarily for music recitals and for the offices of senior management. The students have flipped this state of affairs on its head, with their occupation causing senior management to flee the premises, without returning, within minutes of the occupiers’ collective entrance. They have struggled with management for the open access to the building they now enjoy (open doors to students, staff and invited guests from 9AM-7PM) as well as against the arbitrary rules and power trips of white members of security staff. They have taken over at least four substantial rooms of the upper floor of the town hall, designating gathering, study and sleeping areas, art and mental wellness space, meeting, and prayer rooms, as well as a back office in which they found a telling book laughably left behind by university senior management, “Secrets to Winning at Office Politics”.

Shared resources – toiletries

Signposting on prayer/quiet room

Self-care flowchart

Art space

Mental health space

Banner at entrance

Goldsmith’s University, like so many others, has an disreputable history of ignoring the protests made against it regarding structural oppressions at the institutional level, particularly in regard to accusations of sexual harassment of students by staff, and the pattern here continues. Current management strategy appears to be to disregard the students as much as possible, so as not to legitimise their struggles, expecting them to exhaust themselves until the problem simply disappears. However, management sorely underestimate the occupying students’ sheer willpower and determination to stay in occupation until their demands are met. They have been locked in by security and had hostile and violent exchanges with university management, describing these escalations as stressful, tense and scary times. But, sitting in the fully stocked, peaceful and well organised kitchen area, it was difficult to imagine the scale of the animosity that the students had not long ago had to endure. The occupation was triggered by blatantly racist attacks on the posters of a student of colour running for a leadership office. Once in occupation, doors to the Town Hall were locked and supplied had to be hoisted in through the balcony. Security staff with whom students had a rapport were suddenly taken off their posts and replaced with strangers. They described recently preparing a full cooked meal for a visiting student group that had travelled from four hours away, when at the last minute that same group was barred by security from entering, without any notice. This turned into a three hour standoff with some violent physical struggle, and is indicative of the type of vicious response of which the institution is clearly capable and prepared to mete out at will to frustrate and discourage the occupiers.

However, thankfully, the vibe today was much more relaxed and positive – Beyonce’s newly streamable Lemonade was being projected onto a screen and played on speakers, while students of colour, Black, Muslim, South and East Asian, offered tea and birthday cake, sat and studied, or just relaxed with each other, at the same time extending an open invitation to use the space with a warm hospitality that eminently captured the love with which they have undertaken this profoundly political and radical act. Although the Goldsmith’s Anti-Racism Occupation students struggle against the violence of white supremacy, they do not replicate the monster they are fighting, with its adherence to hierarchy, privatization and status preventing it from being responsive, transparent and accountable. Instead, the form of the students’ activism echoes its function, demonstrating the best of human social life: collective action – pooled resources, held in common, responsibilities shared, where the reproduction of everyday life is a collaborative effort, enacted with care, consideration and compassion.

We at Sisters of Resistance are incredibly inspired by these students, who build so beautifully on the legacies of freedom fighters before them, and we offer our wholehearted and unconditional support and solidarity for them and their occupation. We commend and thank them, and all other anti-racist and intersectional student activists, for their tirelessness, bravery and dedication in demonstrating that another university is possible – one that is ours for the making, if only we have the courage to demand it.

View the full manifesto and sign the endorsement here!

Is Decolonizing the New Black?

We begin this critique by invoking our foremothers: Audre Lorde, bell hooks, June Jordan, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, Frida Kahlo, Yayoi Kusama, Jayaben Desai, Hortense Spillers, Gloria Anzaldua, Grace Lee Boggs, Gabriela Silang, and our grandmothers. We recognise and consciously continue their tradition of resisting colonising forces and speaking truth to power from the margins, and doing so, as they did, from a perspective of fullness and abundance rather than scarcity and lack. Their work laid the foundation for the radical intersectional politics that informs the powerful and formidable anti-oppression activist movements of our day, and  shapes our enquiries and analysis here. In this vein, we wish to pose a question that, while painful in its vulnerability, is necessary in order to preserve the revolutionary aims at the heart of the decolonising movement, at a time when its radical politics are both under attack and gaining legitimacy: Is Decolonising the new black?

Within UK Higher Education, the call to decolonise, alongside other agendas that seek to address inequalities (e.g. Athena Swan and the Race Equality Charter Mark), is becoming a familiar demand heard by institutional actors.While Charter Marks serve Universities as mechanisms for gaining access to funding, we interrogate the acceptability of decolonising rhetoric as a sign that is it becoming co-opted by capital. Decolonising has entered consumers’ imaginations, and with it, a new kind of consumer has emerged: one that is politically astute and critical of Whiteness, but also firmly entrenched in conservative market forces that reproduce value through competitive means. In parallel, the ever increasingly marketised realm of British Academia is discovering (many would say in painful ways) that it is no different to consumer markets.

Whereas newer ranking systems such as the Teaching Excellence Framework have recently commoditized learning, the Research Excellence Framework has been creating competitive markets in academia for over a decade. The now acceptable notion of REFability points to the normalised attribution of financial value to knowledge, and its subsequent outcomes: job security, opportunities for promotion and mobility to other institutions. As a result, the motivation of publishers and authors has become mediated by the production of market value while the ancient University sector’s elitist, male, white, straight networks of power are reproduced. In this configuration, the possibility for political action through academic work has been muzzled; in a sector where one is no longer asked to publish or perish, but to publish in 4* academic journals or perish, other kinds of knowledge work recede due to their lack of marketable value (niche research is not the same as unmarketable research).

The financial and White structures that permeate British academic publishing should make us suspicious. Whiteness pervades and structures the socio-political context within which Universities operate and does so by articulating, promoting and sustaining practices that privilege neoliberal dynamics of exclusion and inclusion. In this respect, we should be especially vigilant when a journal title, academic conference or publisher associates a paper, sub-stream or book with the words ‘Decolonizing’ or ‘Black’ in their title with delivering some kind of value-added. This is not only concerning because of the mainstreaming and normalisation of oppression it suggests, but also because we are aware of how hard it is to do the work whilst fighting forces that continually pull towards assimilation into White capitalist structures of power, privilege and patronage. Here, we must state that we are not against decolonising work being embraced and used to overturn structures of power, nor are we against decolonising academics being valued and promoted. We are, however, critical of the accelerated circulation and consumption of decolonising within an archaic and elitist institution.

In asking whether decolonising is the new black, we mean: is decolonising becoming familiar to power structures in ways that its consumption, circulation and reproduction in the academy is diluting its radical politics? We question whether the rapid uptake of decolonising as the new buzzword of critique has become a new form of academic production that adds value to one’s reputation as a critical scholar while also opening a pathway to profit through making the histories, bodies, and experiences of Black people and people of colour consumable and marketable, transforming them into a viable subject for the entrepreneurial academic agenda. We identify a new form of appropriation, where it seems that decolonising is becoming factionalised along a political spectrum so that only parts of it are easily absorbed by Universities (and the people who govern them). This in turn supports the legitimation of HEIs as inclusive spaces without demanding that they engage in the painful process of self-accountability.

We welcome critique that leads to talking openly about and taking action against racism, imperialist ideologies, and colonial violence. However, when this critique is primarily rhetorical, and the accounts and histories of Blackness and its systematic structural oppression are denied presence and scrutiny in institutional narratives, as well as in everyday engagements between White management and academics and students of colour; then the critique is false, and as such must be called out and challenged.

We recognise false critiques all around us, which seem to emerge in the form of new practices and strategies of appropriation. These practices and strategies see the jubilant uplift of the privileged in taking elements of the Other away from the Other, re-configuring them in ways that no longer allow the Other to experience them as benefits, whilst simultaneously creating a branded image of ‘the oppressed’ that erases the possibilities for a resistant subjectivity. This process is one of recolonising in classical capitalist colonial form: Othering and claiming that which is the Other, seeking to assimilate it, exploiting and profiting from it all the while.

In other ways, this configuration materialises in the consumption of Blackness that simultaneously silences critiques of Whiteness. For example, we notice how when writing about people, dynamics and experiences in/of the Global South, White decolonial scholars have failed to reflect on their own privilege in and power over knowledge production. Whiteness thus remains the transparent structure that needs no naming, and with which critical engagement is impossible. When these issues are raised and addressed, whether in critical firsthand accounts of marginality, isolation and racist oppression or theorised in rigorous scholarly ways, they are often responded to with either hand-wringing and pearl-clutching by well-meaning White folks, or anger, aggression and victim-blaming by others. In this way, White fragility and anger are used as material strategies to diffuse responsibility in the articulation and perpetuation of dominant structures of oppression (i.e. if I didn’t care, this wouldn’t affect me so deeply). As a consequence, oppressive practices are rendered as isolated, individualised incidents, not taken for the structural issues manifesting in everyday occurrences and microaggressions that they are.

Given the political nature of academic production, we must also ask: who is doing this work, and for what reasons? As we noted, a number of White scholars are using decolonizing frameworks in their work without interrogating their own Whiteness/White-passing and their complicity in upholding White structures. In tandem, we note the consistency of this type of superficial engagement, and the surprising rate at which decolonizing work is being produced and circulated. The increasing use of the term alongside a lack of self-accountability potentially undermines the more radical politics of doing the work, in which the worker makes themselves vulnerable in situations where they encounter resistance. This is inherent to the experiences of those who engage in practices to dismantle power structures, but it is not evident in the way White scholars produce great value from adopting the term.

Further, it appears that academics with little evidence of anti-racist politics in previous scholarship and practice are emerging as leaders in these debates. This move should not only be questioned in terms of how it is impacting their positionality in their own institutions and amongst ‘critical’ scholarship communities, but also more fundamentally, in terms of the effects they seek (or do not seek) to bring about through their work. If the work they circulate is producing value for them in ways that multiply their privilege in the system, then it cannot be so easily claimed that their work is overturning the power structures within which it is being produced. Decolonising is radical because it identifies the current structures as inherently violent towards people of colour. Producing value in this system therefore strengthens it rather than dismantles it.

However, these discussions should not be seen as emerging exclusively from the academic domain. This work is facilitated by the present historical context, where there is a global anti-migrant and anti-refugee consensus, a re-emergence of fascism in Europe and the Anglo-American empire, and the overall systematic dumbing down of Western public discourse and popular education. A key feature of the current landscape is a lack of inclusive histories stacked up against the dismantling of democratic political processes in the Global South and the Global North, which has led to citizens being denied structural routes to influence decision-making, hardening their political positions and encouraging polarisation. These developments are not entirely new and have deep historical roots in colonialism and Cold War politics, but are certainly framed as such in the gestured surprise and confusion White Europe and Global North media outlets proclaim. This element of surprise correlates with how decolonising is being framed as a ‘novel’ or ‘new’ critique in academic circles so that it can be attributed some intellectual value (new ideas always get the most ticks and clicks!).

Nevertheless, despite the danger of superficial engagement with decoloniality multiplying, the need, importance and urgency of collective political work that democratises structures and creates inclusive platforms cannot be understated. In that respect, we recognise that opportunities are being created, spaces are being claimed and moments are being seized by different actors, where we see a breach opening up in the power structures of Whiteness, which is being enacted in ways that are politically radical and ethically nuanced. The fresh, radical and militant voices of Black and Brown young people worldwide continuing the unfinished antiracist and decolonising work of the 1960-70s have brought about this historical moment. Global youth of colour are challenging long-standing white supremacist institutions to grapple with their historical legacies of active participation and complicity in oppression. In the UK, student movements like #whyismycurriculumwhite, #whyisntmyprofessorblack and #rhodesmustfall have injected a vitality to Black liberation politics that has not been witnessed in decades in British Universities. Doing decolonising work in this context is powerful and brings a real possibility of becoming collective and transformative.

Decolonising is an incisive methodology countering the hard-right’s myopia, individualization, and competitive obsession. Decolonising work sets out to destabilise epistemic understandings, building consensus among the marginalized about a critical understanding of the White capitalist structures that continually de-value them. As such, its aims are always collective, collaborative and anti-competitive. Thus, the decolonising academic cannot seek to gain legitimacy in existing violent structures; doing so would only serve to reproduce these structures and deliver individual benefits. We argue that rather than measure and value the success of decolonising work through normative means e.g. number of publications, grant money accrued, and conferences attended, academics should measure the effectiveness of the work in its own terms, through serious engagement with the following:

• Engaging with Whiteness with a sense of responsibility and self-accountability while acknowledging that for centuries people of colour have been denied their role in producing and shaping intellectual ideas and knowledge, even about themselves. One way is reading and citing what people of colour have written, and engaging with their ideas from a perspective that recognises the role of Whiteness in their struggles as well as the role of White complicity in reproducing oppressive structures. Another way is to engage critically with the global reach of Whiteness, making it central to discussions of pedagogy, anti-racism and decolonizing.

• Re-narrating institutional histories so that narratives of racism and imperialism are not forgotten and are instead used in ongoing work that looks to reform universities, in ways that significantly make them anti-racist, anti-imperialist spaces. It is important to go beyond symbolic efforts that increase the brand value of universities (e.g. celebrating Black History Month) and engage with activities and practices that make universities vulnerable to external and internal critique.

• Developing, applying and regularly reviewing organizing principles as a way of translating anti-racist and decolonizing ethics into applied and measurable methodologies. For this, it is central to actively work with students and staff of colour to seek to de-centre Whiteness in the curriculum, in classroom dynamics, in supervision relations, in staff promotion policies, in any disciplinary or grievance procedures, in mentoring and support relations, in knowledge production practices, and in administrative practices.

• Working against intersectional racist structures so young people of colour can step into positions of power. This means addressing elitist, racist and sexist institutional structures and cultures, challenging and training those in power instead of demanding change from the most marginalised, and working to roll back the neoliberal university practices that result in the marketization of knowledge, because of which students of colour and poor students suffer, Black students in particular. Understanding and addressing these racial and class-based disparities is essential to decolonial work.

• Organising within their own institutions to challenge racist practices and processes, including stepping back and giving up privileges, earned or unearned, as well as not continuing to hurt, violate or reduce the participation of people of colour in institutional spaces and processes (e.g. through admissions policies, IELTS policies, funding support, visa restrictions, and closing the attainment gap). The effectiveness of this organising relies on the involvement and leadership of students and staff of colour, whose voices and perspectives are central to understanding the impact of these processes.

• Making oneself vulnerable in the act of political struggle with White capitalist patriarchy. Decolonising ethics involve a consistent de-centering of the self as well as encountering Whiteness in structures, arrangements and relationships, where personal desire, intentions and underlying assumptions should be brought under sustained scrutiny. This does not equate to using reflexivity as a way of legitimising what one is involved in and how one thinks about it. Decolonising work is a form of agitation; it is dangerous and powerful. If you are not putting your intentions under scrutiny, on your own and by those deemed Other, then you are not doing the work. If you are not upsetting Whiteness by doing the work, you are not doing the work.

• Embracing solidarity as a radical act of self-effacement, where the Other determines the strength and quality of a relation. Respecting the autonomy of the Other is fundamental to wrestling with power dynamics that we co-construct when doing research that seeks to produce knowledge about the Other.

We believe that it is by focusing instead on these and similar priorities that genuine decolonising work is done. Anything less is simply recolonising.

This piece is a collaboration among Sisters of Resistance, Left of Brown, and Jenny Rodriguez.

The Post-Strike Landscape

A Collaboration with Left of Brown

‘In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action.’  – Audre Lorde

The current industrial pensions dispute taking place in UK higher education has exposed a serious rift in the sector, through which has broken the pent-up frustration and anger of staff and students alike over changes made in the past decade towards the marketized model of higher education. In this piece, we unpack and critique the present conditions which should be reflected in the emergent demands for a post-strike landscape, and put forward our suggestions.

While the union-led rolling strike and concomitant campaign against pension reforms are laudable in their mobilisation of thousands of staff, supported by student activists from across 68 universities, to enact unprecedented industrial action, we argue that they still fall short of their potential to address the wider problems within the sector. Some of these problems, such as the reproduction of intersecting white supremacy, gender bias and class oppression, are historical, normative, and generally unacknowledged. Others, such as the neoliberal ideological framework that enables and encourages the unbridled marketization of all sectors, are given lip service but have not been meaningfully addressed in the ongoing discussion around protecting pensions.

We note that protecting pensions is in itself a neoliberal demand. Neoliberalism reduces society to a conglomerate of agentic individuals competing against each other for scarce resources. It promotes the individual as sacred, and as such, an attack on the individual condition, like the future value of personal pension pots, gives cause for legitimate action. To illustrate, a key tool used to galvanise support for the strike was a spreadsheet circulated in which you could model your future expected pension payouts before and after the proposed reforms, in order to see how much you could be expected to personally lose. Pensions here became signified by a dispute over individual losses, rather than a structural impediment to the sector or assault on a public good. We take issue with this because of the existence of myriad structural conditions that merit collective resistance, and have yet to be addressed by the union or any other representative body.

The present pensions dispute is the result of a historical strategy led by successive governments that have changed the legal framework within which universities operate. The strategy was initiated as a partial marketization (monetizing knowledge through the REF and later commodifying learning via the TEF) to a more explicit assault on gold standard pensions that were the defining marker of public sector workers’ wage structure. According to Mike Otsuka, who has been writing extensively about the dispute, any deficit that may exist is traceable to a ‘pensions contribution holiday’ by employers from 1997-2009.

A marketized education system that has prioritised profit and growth over all else is unjust in many ways: it relies on the casualisation of labour and the precarity of employees, it follows the US model to charge outrageous student fees that produce debilitating debt, and allows the exorbitant remuneration of senior management in universities and USS, the pensions body (482% more in 2017 than 2008). The tools for structuring the HE market include various accreditation and ranking mechanisms such as the REF, TEF and the upcoming KEF (Knowledge Exchange Framework), which are widely acknowledged to be gamified and thus useless as measures of quality or legitimacy.

In the current institutional environment, it is undeniable that structural inequality amongst both staff and students is reproduced and in many cases exacerbated. However, national policy is way behind local initiatives that address intersectional inequality. University management is still overwhelmingly made of white males from the middle and elite classes, while women and people of colour, women of colour in particular, are confined to the lower ranks. To date, in the UK we have not had a single black principal or vice chancellor. According to Black British Academics, of 19,630 professors in the UK, 30 are black women – not even a quarter of one percent (0.15%). These kinds of blatant racial inequalities are commented on in news and media outlets, however, material interventions (such as affirmative action) have not been regarded as a viable approach by British labour jurisdiction. Instead, black mentoring and/or black networking are offered as voluntary initiatives that universities may wish to experiment with. To date, there is no evidence to suggest these initiatives are making any progressive changes to the working conditions of people of colour.

Regarding students, attainment gaps for students of colour and/or working class students are often reframed as issues of aspiration and lack of social capital. This is levelled by the right as well as the left of the political spectrum. Again, political discourse – and policy – reductively attributes a structural issue to the level of the individual, who is now easily blamed for their own supposed deficiencies.

Meanwhile, mechanisms such as the Athena Swan and Race Equality Charters enable the claim that inequality is being sufficiently ‘managed’ so that it no longer poses an issue, which furthers the illusion of a post-race/post-feminist society. Hitting these charter marks is now tied to application for future research funding; thus, the incentive for the mark is itself marketised rather than being motivated by a genuine aim to reduce inequality at that institution. Institutions which undergo these audit exercises can thus cite their participation as ‘evidence’ that a true market solves the problems of social and structural inequality. This fits squarely with the neoliberal belief that the invisible hand of the market works to adjust any disparity within systems.

If it were not already crystal clear it is this model that has been thrust upon us and that is being used to justify the attack on pensions, one need look only at the former asset-fund and corporate mining managers who make up the USS board of trustees to ascertain the modus operandi at work. Perhaps the tendency towards unethical behaviour in their former industries explains the incoherent evaluation of the health of the pensions fund that has been challenged by numerous experts in recent days. Claiming that the fund is in debt when it is not reduces liabilities and assists in the future borrowing which is expected to be the means by which to build shiny new buildings and attract more fee-paying international students.

While the proposals UCU has tabled at Tuesday’s ACAS talks (which were surprisingly brought forward from Wednesday after UUK was directly engaged via Twitter on Monday night) are sensible, there is a general lack of organising to form demands or even a position statement that goes beyond protecting pensions to firmly place the pension fight in the broader context of neoliberalism.

Pensions law specialist Ewan McGaughey takes a useful corporate governance perspective that moves us closer to imagining what a post-strike list of demands might look like, which we have built upon in some of our demands below. However, a significant limitation of this work is its implicit assumption that equitable governance is even possible within the existing framework. Drawing upon the critique offered by Audre Lorde, we are doubtful that the master’s tools can be used to dismantle the master’s house.

Visionary demands that explicitly critique the status quo drive community organising and political movements, and offer a focal point for negotiations as well as a rallying cry for those who support the position of those who are taking action. While the academic evaluations of the health of the fund have doubtlessly uncovered the surreptitious games being played with the sector’s future, we have yet to coalesce on a set of demands that address what we, who risk our reputations, job security (if there is any to be had), financial and mental health by striking and organising others to support the strike, would like to see going forward.

The ability to envisage a better future is integral to any social justice or liberation movement. It is the clarity of this vision that inspires people in their hundreds and their thousands to resist systemic oppression and to create lasting change. To that end, we offer below an initial list of demands suited to the current discussion of debt and value that we believe have the potential to radically alter the direction of travel of our sector. We call for a future that is less profit-driven and more focused on values aligned with institutions of higher education: equity, critical thinking, progress and social transformation, as opposed to simple reproduction.

1.  Accept and implement UCU proposal. The UCU proposal put forward at ACAS talks on Tuesday 6 March, including the reversal of the J23 changes to the September risk valuation, is accepted and implemented unconditionally.

2. Disband UUK. Once the J23 changes are reversed, UUK is disbanded based on a vote of no confidence from their member institutions. Current requests to make UUK accountable to public scrutiny via Freedom of Information requests is a misplaced demand. This dispute has unequivocally demonstrated that UUK membership and voting is skewed towards the interests of elitist university managers and that representatives have no amount of accountability to or responsibility towards university workers. Instead we ask for a Workers’ Council to be instituted that is composed of trade unions, non-union workers and elected representatives from every paygrade.

3. Accountability reform. The way universities, related bodies such as USS, and their leadership are held accountable must be completely reevaluated. Some suggestions to this end include: Each governing body should have a staff and student-elected majority.USS board members with potentially conflicting professional backgrounds should stand down, and the board should be comprised of a majority of staff members through direct election. VCs should not sit on committees that determine their own compensation.

4. Fees must fall. We do not mean a reduction, we mean an eradication of student fees altogether. Education should be a central part of governmental budgets, funded by taxes. If, across the sector, universities are looking to make savings, VCs should turn their attention to pay ratios and making compensation across an institution more fair. If they work together to do this collectively, there is little risk of any single institution being unable to offer a ‘competitive’ compensation package to their most senior management.

5. Revalue labour. The way labour at different levels of seniority is valued must be reimagined. Currently, outward-facing labour that promotes institutional reputation (i.e. high-ranking publications) is overvalued, while inward-facing, feminised and pastoral labour (i.e. teaching, administrative work) is undervalued. Yet it is this inward-facing labour upon which the university system runs, and it should be accounted for and valued accordingly.

6. Address overrepresentation and underrepresentation. We distinguish this from diversity initiatives that use a positivist logic to make a claim of equality based on numbers of black, brown, gendered bodies at boards, panels, professoriate, etc. Instead, attention to over- and underrepresentation would mean addressing institutional inequities, such as the blatant inequalities between groups (UG students, PG students, PhDs, paygrade 1 versus paygrade 8 and beyond) and the numerous ways in which extant hiring promotion, reporting and disciplinary policies have (un)intended consequences of reproducing such differences.

7. Dismantle white supremacy. Decentering white knowledge and scholarship is necessary for any meaningful reform of the sector. All managerial staff, but particularly white managers, should be trained to acknowledge and counter the subtle and overt racial discrimination that hinder the progress of people of colour within our institutions. While we acknowledge that the work intended by the Athena Swan and Race Equality Charter is needed, we believe that their aims should be written into the charters of all higher education institutions, which should actively encourage the reporting of discrimination and take concrete, measurable steps to address and rectify the issues identified. As Shirley Ann Tate asks, what if tackling racism became part of university performance indicators? That, she states, would be a revolution, because accountability to these indicators would require White Supremacy to acknowledge its own entitlement to the world it has created.

The case against having children

I am a thirty three year old woman with a secure job in a long term relationship with a man seven years my junior. We are both at the start of promising careers, me in education and he in catering and music. We have been together for five solid years, are deeply in love, and live together part of the time with the intention of soon making it full time. Nearly all of the couples we know have children. He is godfather to a bright and beautiful six year old girl, who we see often; we have close friends with one and two year olds, and at family parties there are usually five or six little ones running round and playing in the back garden. We are active in their care, babysitting on request and voluntarily; there is no shortage of interaction with children in our lives. We smile at their sweetness, sigh over their cuteness and giggle along with them at their silliness. We head them off if they are about to hurt themselves, cuddle them when they cry, play with them, speak to them gently, and truly love them. 

And yet. The likelihood that he and I are going to have children of our own is a possibility growing further and further away with each passing year. My rejection of the social script to progress from the stage we are now at, to marriage, and then children, at the expectation of others is a commitment that in my mind is nearly as strong as our commitment to each other. When people ask me, “Do you want kids?” my standard answer is, “It varies…between ‘maybe’ and ‘hell no!’” The older I get the more it has become clear that the conscious choice I have always made to prevent pregnancy has been the right one for me.  

That I have come to this conclusion surprises me as much as it confuses others. Most of my life I have wanted to be someone’s mother. I have daydreamed about what I would name my children, how I would teach them to be good people, what languages they would speak and what family heirlooms I would pass on to them. But as I have come to the realisation that having children is not something that makes sense for me in the immediate or short term future, the rationale has taken shape in my mind. So, I present below the reasons that make up my current case against having children, for reasons other than not liking them, loosely organised into THINGS I WANT and THINGS I DON’T WANT.  

I want to remain the protagonist of my life. I don’t want to have to constantly be thinking about someone who for at least 20 or so years (until I am in my 50s) cannot care for themselves. I do not want to spend my 30s changing diapers and bedsheets for a being that wees and shits all over itself and me. I do not want to have year after year of very little sleep and sore nipples from breastfeeding. I do not want to research the best things to feed toddlers or then latest parenting method; instead I would rather work on my research papers. I do not want to have to go to bed early so I can wake up to wash them, feed them breakfast, and take them to school at 8am. I do not want to move houses so we can be in a better school catchment area. I do not want to clean crayon off the walls or have small items around the house suddenly go missing. I do not want to take a tiny being to expensive places like Disneyland and put all my effort into making them happy when they are young if it will be just a blip in their memory when they grow up.  

I want to spend my money on myself, on gifts for loved ones already living, on traveling and have something saved for retirement. I don’t want to feel obligated to buy the latest toy to make them smile only to have them forget about it a few weeks later. I don’t want to be hassled at the grocery store where the aisle of sweets is strategically placed at a child’s eye level. I don’t want the negative vibes that come from continuously denying the requests of someone I love, minor and ridiculous though they may be.  

I don’t want to raise a child in late capitalism who will be socialised into a generation so far removed from my childhood that I don’t understand their culture, logic and way of thinking. I don’t want to to be disturbed by the music they listen to, the technology they are obsessed with. I don’t want to have to speak in child-friendly language and terminology for days or months or years at a time. I don’t want to have to explain everything, because I would feel that responsibility. I don’t want to have to deal with teen sexting and adolescent porn use and the impact these will undoubtedly have on their self-esteem and sexual development. I want to have adult conversations and I also want to be able to avoid the lies that parents sometimes have to tell. Like that the world will be ok when they grow up, or that I am sure they will find a job and pay off that student loan. I don’t want to raise a child with Western expectations of material pleasure and success without the means to help them actually achieve those objectives. I don’t want to watch my child’s generation be less successful than me, as this is the trend we are currently in and which doesn’t look like it will end anytime soon.  

I want to drastically reduce my carbon footprint in a way that I could never do simply by keeping the heat down and the lights off. I want to be able to distribute my love widely and not have it concentrated on one or two precious beings who will then keep my hands full and unable to serve others. I want to follow in the traditions of religious who devoted themselves to their work and to their spiritual practice by not marrying and having a family. I have always been inspired by women of the cloth, as in generations past that would have been the only way for someone like me to have a life of the mind. I understand how much effort it takes to live a life that intentional and for this reason I love that their clothing was referred to as ‘habit.’ If we make our clothing a habit the energy we expend on selecting items of dress and beautifying ourselves is much reduced and there is effort left over for other, more important things. Once children arrive, they become the subjects of ultimate importance, and as such, assume their rightful place in the priority list. If all is as it should be, everything else comes after. Babies are helpless beings who depend on us to satisfy their every need. I associate this relationship of dependency, at least the way we have arranged it in contemporary Western nuclear-family capitalism, with a requirement for selfless, unconditional giving on one hand, and a learned behaviour of demanding and taking on the other. If it was a relationship between adults I would call it abuse, but it is not in a child’s nature to do anything different. This imbalance is enough to drive one to mental illness, as the many mothers with post-natal depression will tell you. Thus, much like nuns once opted for uniform clothing, I choose to be child free in order to preserve energy and sanity for my work in the world.  

Non Sequitur

We have a big problem –
big, big, big. I have complete
power. 1.6 billion to build

a wall. Nobody can build a wall
like me. Part of the beauty of me
is I’m very rich. It doesn’t matter

what the media write as long as you’re rich
and you’ve got a young and beautiful
piece of ass you can grab by the pussy.

Just locker room talk. Fake news. The truth is

we need the nukes. North Korea is bored,
nothing to fear. He didn’t do the shot.
I did the shot. Don Jr is innocent –
Ivanka is hot. I’d date her

if I wasn’t her dad. Sad! American might
is second to none. China should make
a move. Let Obamacare fail. My company
is extremely successful.

The Russians don’t meddle. Comey, Sessions,
and Mueller – all traitors. I have no mafia ties.
A media witch hunt. Extremely unfair. Investigate me?
You’re fired! I know the bad people. Believe me,

do I know bad people. I know a lot.
Nothing changes. The White House is functioning
perfectly. I guarantee you there’s no problem.
I guarantee.

---

Originally posted by FeminismTips at Medium.com