5.1. Critical Race Theory

In the early 1990s, US-based critical legal scholars Lawrence III, Matsuda, Delgado and Crenshaw founded Critical Race Theory (CRT) as an interdisciplinary approach to understand and challenge racism and racial inequalities, with six defining elements:

1.     ‘CRT recognizes that racism is endemic to American life.

2.     CRT expresses skepticism toward dominant legal claims of neutrality, objectivity, colour-blindness, and meritocracy.

3.     CRT challenges ahistoricism and insists on a contextual/historical analysis of the law.

4.     CRT insists on recognition of the experiential knowledge of people of colour.

5.     CRT is interdisciplinary and eclectic.

6.     CRT works toward the end of eliminating racial oppression as part of the broader goal of ending all forms of oppression’ (Gillborn and Ladson-Billings, 2019).

Although CRT emerged from the US law school it has influenced thinking and practice in other countries and disciplines, especially education, in which the endemic nature of ‘racism is figured in the distribution of material and educational resources and even in teachers’ notions of ability, motivation, and good behaviour’ (Gillborn and Ladson-Billings, 2019). 

Just as decoloniality promotes pluralism to expose and challenge the colonial illusion of universal knowledge, CRT exposes the endemic, implicit colonial logic of racism in society and its structures, making this visible to challenge it. Decoloniality connects past and present, mind and body, land and life, knowing and being, in the same way that CRT analyses racism within its wider, historical context. CRT recognises the power of experiential knowledge in this process, in the same vein as decolonial onto-epistemology and the knowing-through being and doing of practice research, and it supports eclectic and interdisciplinary approaches for facilitating alternative ways of knowing and sensing, another element that aligns to decolonial praxis. CRT also promotes the principle of intersectionality (discussed in Chapter 3.2), critiques assumptions around meritocracy and colour-blindness and offers the idea of 'interest-convergence'.   

This latter principle, coined by Derrick Bell, ‘argues that apparent advances in race equity are accommodated only when they converge with the interests of White elites’ (Gillborn and Ladson-Billings, 2019) and that:

‘it is only when racist practices threaten to destabilise rather than secure elite power that it is in the self-interest of elites to address racism through legislation and policy’ (Warmington, 2020).

This principle can be applied to understand how the three projects served the interests of the White-led institution sponsoring them. Universities have ignored racism and racial inequalities for too long, leaving students to call this out and demand action through other means and platforms. This harms the reputation of universities and their leaders so it is in their interests to take action or at least be seen to be. 

Following the student-led campaign #UALSOWHITE (Occupy UAL, 2015) and ‘Is UAL too white?’ article (Artefact Magazine, 2016), UAL had to be seen to do something. The publishing of a zine on curriculum decolonisation in 2018, amidst other ‘attainment’ projects, was an example of interests converging, between students, front-line staff and UAL leaders. Interests could also be seen to converge in UAL employing student Changemakers to co-develop anti-racist, decolonised curricula with staff. Wikimedia UK is another public institution with whom interests converged for the Decolonising Wikipedia Network in 2020. In the final DWN Panel Discussion 3 (10 May 2022), Wikimedia UK representative Richard Nevell explains how public knowledge platforms like Wikipedia replicate colonial power structures and how the DWN project is a chance to change the story through democratising information and diversifying the stories being told. In these different ways, the projects exemplify interest convergence and a growing interest in marginalised students voicing their (hi)stories and experiences.

Student voice initiatives are common practice across the HE sector as it serves institutional interests to listen to, and learn from, student experience, especially around issues of racial inequity. In ‘Changemakers Talk: Decolonising the Curriculum London x Sao Paulo’ (February 2022), Ramneek Kataria explains how LCC Changemakers have been engaging with listening rooms as a method for eliciting and capturing student voice, a method pioneered by Sheffield Hallam University. While in ‘Changemakers Talk: Decolonising the Curriculum London x Kent’ (June 2022), former Kent changemaker Jasmine Sargeant emphasises the need for universities to implement actions after hearing student voice, and that the creation of safe spaces alone is not enough and can lead to student frustration if no action is taken. 

Student voice initiatives relate to CRT’s promotion of experiential knowledge and storytelling as methods for understanding and challenging racism:

‘Inspired by the scholarship of Bell, and the centuries-old traditions of storytelling in minoritized communities, critical race theorists often use narrative and counter-storytelling as a means of presenting a different reading of the world; one that questions taken-for-granted assumptions and destabilizes the framework that currently sustains racial injustice’ (Gillborn and Ladson-Billings, 2019).

In other organisations, the voice of minoritised communities is increasingly sought to inform organisational development and outputs to ensure that the needs of those communities are met. In DWN Panel Discussion 1 (2 November 2021), Kirsten Dunne and Sara Dos Santos, from the Mayor of London’s Culture Team, present ‘Untold Stories’, a flagship project providing funds for different groups to ‘test, develop, grow and create projects which share your community’s stories with the city’, with emphasis on the untold (hi)stories of underrepresented groups in London being told and seen in the public realm. While in DWN Panel Discussion 2 (8 February 2022), London Metropolitan Archives representative Claire Titley describes the initial hesitance of some towards such histories being uncovered and the power of these histories for those marginalised in the UK today, saying that history ‘makes the past immediately relevant’. This supports CRT’s insistence on historical analysis as well as decolonisation principles of restitution and reparation. 

Samuel and Ortiz (2021) write about ‘Storytelling as decolonial praxis in the psychology of racialized peoples’ and explain how storytelling in groups reveals patterns of racism and how individual stories ‘are embedded within larger stories that form and inform histories, experiences, and communities’. However, the authors state that ‘storytelling is not inherently decolonizing’ as this outcome depends on how storytelling is used by researchers. Research can be carried out as part of an anti-racist and/or decolonial praxis to facilitate solidarity, healing and resistance from racialised, colonial trauma and to promote alternative ways of knowing, sensing and being. Or it can be used to perpetuate colonial extractivism and exploitation, and to appropriate, distort and further oppress knowledge to support dominant racial ideology. 

When I led these projects, I was not operating as a 'researcher' but as an educational developer, project manager and curator, facilitating the projects in line with institutional objectives, but with care and compassion for those I was working with and the stories they shared. Samuel and Ortiz (2021) state that decolonization involves the protection of stories and storytellers ‘as real and distinct entities, as opposed to aggregated data, in order to preserve the intended meaning’, in which ‘the storyteller is viewed as sharing their knowledge for mutual benefit, as opposed to the researcher taking the data for their own uses’. Within these projects, stories came together but they were not analysed as anonymous, aggregated data sets. Individuals were supported to take up space to share their stories as they wished, within collective project sites, on and offline, set up to make each story and storyteller visible and audible. 

A degree of extraction and aggregation happens now in this analysis, however, as I reflect on individual stories and seek to exemplify theories underpinning them in pursuit of a PhD. I feel some discomfort in extracting and interpreting quotes from the stories in this thesis, as I want the distinct, intended meaning of each story to remain intact. I do not want them to be distorted or decontextualised; my intention is to protect and preserve the stories as I draw on them as examples. However, I need to acknowledge the benefit this may bring me, following Samuel and Ortiz's call to researchers to ‘critically examine their relationship with these stories to expose whether their perceived ownership over the data serves their own agenda versus the community's’ (2021). I do not claim ownership over people’s stories here; the stories remain theirs and I use this opportunity to make them seen and heard. However, I do claim ownership of my theorisation and interpretation of these stories as data in pursuit of a PhD. I reconcile this to some degree by critically reflecting on this here. In the next section, I further reflect on the facilitation of counter-storytelling within the projects and exemplify this with project ‘data’ preserved in public platforms hosted by UAL, YouTube and Wikimedia.