\n<\/p>\n
F<\/span>or Tommy J Curry the question about Edinburgh University\u2019s institutional racism, or its debts around transatlantic slavery and scientific racism, can be captured by one simple fact: he is the first Black philosophy professor in its 440-year history.<\/p>\n As the Louisiana-born academic who helped lead the university\u2019s self-critical inquiry into its extensive links to transatlantic slavery and the construction of racist theories of human biology, that sharply captures the challenge it faces.<\/p>\n Not just that, Curry suspects he is the first Black academic in the UK to lead a university\u2019s investigation into its links to enslavement and empire. His goal is to guarantee he is far from the last Black professor.<\/p>\n <\/span> Composite: Guardian Design\/Alamy<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a first-generation person. I grew up in poverty, grew up at the end of segregation,\u201d he said. \u201cWhy is that important to not be the first? Well, it\u2019s important because everybody has an \u2018in\u2019, and if there\u2019s nothing left after your \u2018in\u2019, you just become a symbol for somebody else\u2019s story.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll be the subject of another report, but I won\u2019t have influence, I wouldn\u2019t have ushered in any of the people that look like me that the world said couldn\u2019t be.\u201d<\/p>\n The point is not to simply produce a report but to act, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe real fundamental issue is change. Not a symbolic apology, not a pay cheque. [How] do you create leagues of Black thinkers and clinicians and doctors and engineers and artists that fill the gap of what were lost by what white people engineered for centuries that deprived the world of Black human genius. That\u2019s why this report matters so much to me.\u201d<\/p>\n In turn, he added, Scotland could become better equipped to tackle the endemic problems of racial disparity in health outcomes, mortality, employment, housing, education. \u201cSo when you think of it this way, what does reparations mean if it doesn\u2019t mean dealing with the consequences that were created by the very institutions you want to write the cheque?\u201d<\/p>\n His singular status in Edinburgh\u2019s philosophy department (which lists 12 tenured professors) also, he added, points to one of the most important findings of its investigation: the \u201csevere underrepresentation\u201d of Black staff, the patchy recruitment of Black and ethnically minoritised students, and continuing staff and student experiences of racism.<\/p>\n The decolonisation review, which was co-chaired by Dr Nicola Frith, an expert in reparations policy, found that less than 1% (150 out of 17,260) of the university\u2019s employees were Black \u2013 a figure that has been static for some years. A different picture emerges with other ethnic groups. The number of Asians \u2013 a category which includes Japanese, Chinese and south Asian people \u2013 reached 9% in 2022-23, up from 7% in 2018-19.<\/p>\n <\/span>Dr Nicola Frith, co-chair of the working group that produced the report Decolonised Transformations: Confronting the University of Edinburgh\u2019s Legacies of Enslavement and Colonialism.<\/span> Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Among the university\u2019s 49,430 students in 2022-23, 34% of its undergraduates were Asian \u2013 driven largely by growing numbers of Chinese students \u2013 with just 2% Black. Among postgraduates, 44% were Asian, 5% Black.<\/p>\n The report says the increasing diversity in the university\u2019s population \u201cdoes not benefit Black staff and students\u201d yet Edinburgh prides itself on being a \u201cglobal institution\u201d. That means it should measure progress against the world\u2019s demographics too. \u201cWhile there is a dominant white racial majority in the UK, and especially in Scotland, the basis of comparison must not presume that small numbers of non-white racial and ethnic minorities in Scotland offer an appropriate baseline for comparison.\u201d<\/p>\n Scottish census data from 2021 puts the country\u2019s non-white minority ethnic population at 7.1%, but in Edinburgh that figure is just over 15% \u2013 nearly 77,800 people, 2.1% (10,881) of them Black. Across England and Wales, 18.3% of the population are from minority ethnic communities, 2.5% of them Black.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I ask this very seriously,\u201d Curry continued. \u201cIn the United States, before the end of Jim Crow segregation [in 1965], there was roughly 1.2% of Black scholars there. So roughly 1% of the people, PhDs, that were teaching faculty.<\/p>\n \u201cScotland is a free society. It claims it\u2019s a society that\u2019s free from racism and yet you have about the same percentage of Black people teaching here. So how does a free society that\u2019s free of racism produce the same kind of outcomes that a segregated, racist society produced in the United States?\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n That demonstrates a sequence, a chain of action and consequence which the university can now choose to break, he said.<\/p>\n The newly published slavery and decolonisation review urges Edinburgh to fund a new centre for the study of racisms, colonialism and anti-Black violence and to prioritise the recruitment of Black and ethnically minoritised academics, researchers and students \u2013 partly funded by new scholarships \u2013 and ensure equal access to research funding.<\/p>\n Frith points to the review team\u2019s decision to recruit paid Black and minority ethnic scholars and activists who specialise in colonialism, reparations policy and the repatriation of remains. Edinburgh has been a leading centre for reparations research for a decade, she said, since it held an international conference on reparations in 2015.<\/p>\n <\/span>A banner reading \u2018Glasgow Says NO to Racism\u2019 during the anti-racists protest called by the Stand up to Racism in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, 20 June 2020.<\/span> Photograph: Robert Perry\/EPA<\/p>\n The university, led by its principal, Peter Mathieson, made what Frith calls the \u201creally good decision\u201d to set up the review after a \u201ccollective groundswell\u201d from staff and students to respond to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, and Glasgow University\u2019s groundbreaking report in 2018 on its slavery debt, as well as a controversy at Edinburgh in 2020 over the renaming of a university building named after the philosopher and alumnus David Hume, author of a \u201cnotorious footnote\u201d in 1753 claiming \u201cthe Negroes\u201d were \u201cnaturally inferior\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t see that history as something that sits in the past with a closed door,\u201d Frith adds. \u201cIt is something that directly affects all of us today in very different and uneven ways, but it nonetheless does affect the shape of our society, our relations, everything.\u201d<\/p>\n Frith and Curry argue that if the university adopts their group\u2019s recommendations, the impact could be profound.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are very few things that stand beyond our lifetime,\u201d said Curry. \u201cA centre, an institute, the creation of Black scholars in the UK around this issue of racism, dehumanisation and colonialism is something that I think will change the intellectual tenor and academic climate of the country. Nothing like it exists.<\/p>\n \u201cSo when we\u2019re looking at why it\u2019s important, it\u2019s because if the University of Edinburgh served as the pinnacle of the 17th, 18th and early 19th century for this work, why can\u2019t it serve as the same centre to undo it in the 21st century?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For Tommy J Curry the question about Edinburgh University\u2019s institutional racism, or its debts around transatlantic slavery and scientific racism, can be captured by one simple fact: he is the first Black philosophy professor in its 440-year history. As the Louisiana-born academic who helped lead the university\u2019s self-critical inquiry into its extensive links to transatlantic<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13001,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[706,270,5642,580,6697,6698,2962,455,838,781,6181],"class_list":{"0":"post-13000","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-black","9":"tag-change","10":"tag-edinburgh","11":"tag-issue","12":"tag-philosophy","13":"tag-professor","14":"tag-racism","15":"tag-real","16":"tag-reform","17":"tag-university","18":"tag-universitys"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}