To celebrate Black History Month 2017, the Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Staff Network have teamed up with Liverpool John Moores University’s to present a joint event with keynote speaker Dr Nicola Rollock who will present her lecture ‘White Privilege: What is it and does it really exist in UK Higher Education?’.
Dr Nicola Rollock is Reader in Equity & Education at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is interested in strategies to further racial justice in education and the workplace. Nicola is lead author of The Colour of Class: the educational strategies of the Black middle classes, published by Routledge in 2015, which won second prize inthe 2016 Society for Educational Studies’ Annual Book Awards. She featured as ‘oneto watch’ in the 2014 Powerlist of UK’s most influential Black Britons and was recognised, in 2015, as a Woman of Achievement by the Women of the Year Council.Nicola was also winner, in 2016, of the PRECIOUS Award for Outstanding Woman in Professional Services for contributions to race equality.
Dr Rollock says:
“White Privilege is generally understood as a set of advantages enjoyed by white people in common everyday situations. The term is often used to highlight differences in experiences between those racialised as white and people of colour. In this session for the University of Liverpool’s Black History Month, leading academic Dr Nicola Rollock argues that white privilege alone is insufficient to understand continued racial inequalities in higher education and society more broadly. She highlights, instead, how white privilege operates alongside power, white fragility and denial to shape the experiences of students and faculty of colour and ultimately limit any meaningful progress towards racial justice.”
Dr Zainab Hussain, Chair of the BAME Staff Network at the University of Liverpool says:
“The assumptions that universities are inclusive and have adapted to increased diversity should be challenged as research from the Equality Challenge Unit suggests that nationally the gap between the proportion of white students and BAME students obtaining firsts and 2:1 degrees is 15.2 percentage points. Often when presented with these findings the first question may be ‘ well what were their entry qualifications?’ which is a question that removes us as a University from culpability and importantly HEFCE research finds that even after accounting for prior attainment (and other factors) there is still a significant gap. Thus we need to really examine the issue of white privilege and the impact this has on many of our BAME students.”
This free event will take place on Wednesday 25th October. Further information and booking can be found at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/black-history-month-tickets-37196348279
There a number of events taking place to mark Black History Month available at: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/hr/diversityandequality/events/bhm/