Anti-Racism: Policies, statements, resources

The events of recent weeks, including the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Public Health England’s findings that BAME people are disproportionately affected by COVID-19, have brought into sharp focus the realities of racial discrimination in our society and across the world. They have also led to questions about how history should be taught and what we should learn about the development of structural inequalities in the past. I want to take this opportunity to let you know how the department is responding to these challenges, to acknowledge that we need to do more, and to encourage you to let us know your views about what we are doing.

Many of the issues facing us are helpfully discussed in the Royal Historical Society’s Race, Ethnicity and Equality report of 2018, which underlined that school and university history curriculums remain Eurocentric and fail to incorporate diverse histories; that BAME students and staff are underrepresented within the discipline; and that they experience racism and discrimination in UK universities. We accept that we need to work both in the department and across the sector to address these issues. In the wake of the RHS report, we set up a working party with students and staff. That working party produced a report in May 2019, and we have been working towards its recommendations, and will continue to do so.

As a department we actively support the University's Race Equality Strategy and Action plan.  We are committed to supporting all our students and to providing an inclusive learning community. At the start of the year we held, for the first time, a BAME student network event, and we are hoping to support similar events in the future. We have included BAME student reps on the student-staff forum and the department’s Undergraduate Affairs Committee. We are very aware that our staff and student body is not as diverse as it should be, reflecting some of the inequalities mentioned above, and we want to attract more BAME students to the department. We need to improve the pastoral support for BAME students, and that is a key departmental priority. We are also aware of a BAME awards gap, and we seek to address its root causes and eliminate it.

We are also working to provide a diverse and inclusive curriculum. The department has been striving for some time to broaden and globalise its offering (for example, launching an MA in Global History in 2017), and over recent years we have:

• made, or are making, changes to core modules such as HST120, HST112, HST202 and HST3000 to diversify readings, broaden coverage and/ or address issues of inequality

• globalised the Level 1 survey module HST117 The Making of the Twentieth Century

• redesigned the US History survey course HST122 around the long history of civil rights 

• offered new modules including a Level 3 thematic HST3307: Conflict, Cultures and (De)Colonisation (which explicitly seeks to bring the past to bear on contemporary debates about race, globalisation, migration, and decolonisation), Special Subjects on Resistance and Liberation in South Africa, and Slavery in the American South, new Level 2 modules on Decolonisation and Asian Britain, and MA modules on the Japanese Empire in East Asia and Working Class Lives in Colonial South Asia

• encouraged all colleagues to reflect on the breadth and diversity of the authors featured on their reading lists. 

It is important to note that teaching on BAME history does not just happen in stand-alone modules - issues of race, discrimination and inequality can, and do, emerge in many modules across the curriculum. We have made more progress in some areas (global history) than others (black history) and we will reflect on this. We also recognise that the categories we use - BAME/BME - can be problematic, and that history is a useful tool for interrogating these.

Our activities extend beyond the classroom. In May 2019 we held an event on Race, Decolonisation and History, with participation from historians Sadiah Qureshi and Jonathan Saha (co-authors of the RHS report), and the bestselling author Reni Eddo-Lodge. Sarah Miller-Davenport is the co-author of a History Workshop piece on decolonizing history, and other colleagues have contributed to events on this topic, or written on our History Matters blog. The History Society has been in touch about a programme of events for next year on BAME history, and we will be working to support that. Rosie Knight is also looking to lead a project next year on Sheffield and slavery, about which we will share details in due course.

We are always keen to receive ideas about how we could improve and diversify our curriculum, and we welcome feedback from you about your ideas and priorities. You are welcome to write to me at adrian.bingham@sheffield.ac.uk, or you could talk to your tutors about any suggestions. This is also on the agenda for the History Society, and I’m sure they too would welcome your thoughts. As a Department, we take these issues very seriously, and we acknowledge that there is still much for us to do, particularly in diversifying our student and staff body and supporting students when they are here. We want to ensure that all members of our department feel valued and are confident about the University’s approach to race equality. We seek to make changes with the active participation of BAME students and staff, while recognising that the burden of this work should not fall on them. We are absolutely committed to long-term actions that will improve race equality and provide an inclusive and supportive culture for all our students.

Professor Adrian Bingham, June 2020