My experience of race and identity growing up was a very privileged one. I come from family of mixed culture, heritage and experience – my mother being Indian and my father Jamaican-English – I went to a school where every one of my friends was some new combination of countries, and I live in an area of London where I was always part of the ‘majority,’ as it were. But most importantly, I had always been told that if my colour made me different, it was just another part of my identity that was only to be celebrated.

What changed when I came to Oxford was that suddenly I was made aware of the fact I look different to other people. I became conscious of my skin as something other than just a good thing and I became part of a minority.  But what shocked me the most was that there were very few conversations going on about race and racial identity and there are very few spaces where race takes priority as part of a discussion. I think that the fact so many people came out in support of the ‘I, too, am Oxford’ campaign highlighted this gap in our daily discourse.

The nature of the collegiate system can leave you feeling outnumbered. I found myself biting my tongue whenever this new trend of ‘casual racism’ would raise its head, for fear of being labelled ‘the sensitive girl,’ which was something I had never consciously done before. It’s not that people are racist or prejudice – it’s that there is an ignorance about what could make people feel uncomfortable and a lack of awareness of the context in which they are speaking. This is partly due to where people have grown up – I understand not everyone has been exposed to different cultures, but we are meant to be one of the ‘best and brightest’ institutions in the entire world, the graduates are future leaders of public and private institutions.  Now should be the time to explore and to educate ourselves and our peers about the value of heritage, taste, racial sensibilities, traditions and cultures.  The ‘I, too’ movements and other forms of race dissidence are a means by which to transform our university towards a more inclusive environment, and there is a lot that could be changed about the representation of race in the curriculum, the student and staff bodies. CRAE have been campaigning for a more inclusive and racially diverse experience for students at Oxford, and we must keep demanding a discussion on race be taken seriously.  

It’s a pretty common for cconversation to pause during meetings of the Campaign for Racial Awareness and Equality (CRAE) — someone mentions, for ex­ample, another blackface incident at a bop, and someone else chimes in with another a racist remark on facebook, and someone ech­oes with their latest all-dead-white-men sylla­bus. Everyone pauses, and sighs: “oh, Oxford.”

We recognize that adding our Race Survey data to the conversation around race at Oxford is not going to make anyone’s day. As Oxford’s only dedicated campaign for racial equality, we know how easy it is to be discouraged in dealing with issues of race at Oxford that are prevalent and entrenched enough to look like a fact of life.

But even though racism is a constant pres­ence in people’s lives here at Oxford, we have also seen change for the better in this uni­versity and believe that even more change is possible. We wanted to share the gains we’ve already made, and the actions underway, be­cause knowing that there is something we can do is what keeps us engaged in trying to make things better. By sharing this here, we also want to ask for your feedback on what we’re doing. From CRAE’s various projects, we have found that conditions inhibiting racial equal­ity at Oxford fall into four categories:

1) A lack of diversity in the student body, which produces a ‘splinter effect’ isolating minority ethnic students in different colleges and departments

2) A curriculum that fails to capture the di­versity of non-Western thought, peoples, and cultures, including a lack of diversity in Ox­ford’s teaching staff that further prevents crit­ical re-evaluation of the existing curriculum

3) A pervading culture that struggles to wel­come differences in race and ethnicity, includ­ing through the normalization of racial ban­ter or unquestioned acceptance of racial and ethnic stereotypes

4) A sense of social isolation among minor­ity ethnic students, including through a lack of spaces that are perceived as ‘safe’ to discuss race

When we presented these findings and the data from our Race Survey to the University administration at our historic 2014 Race Sum­mit, we were extremely encouraged by their enthusiasm and support for tackling these issues, and especially their commitment to investigate how curriculum across the univer­sity might be adapted to promote an under­standing of all of the world’s best minds, not only those from the male, white West. Part of this will also involve an investigation into hir­ing practices to promote and support appli­cations by minority-ethnic faculty members, who play a hugely important role in the crea­tion of a respectful and vibrant multicultural academic community.

Beyond our work with the University, how­ever, we are making our own efforts to tackle these issues by creating new spaces for pub­lic discussion of race and ethnicity and all things related, especially in events with other societies like the OUSU Disabled Students’ Campaign and WomCam’s Women of Colour group. We are also looking forward to the 2014 launch of the Alternative Reading List Project, a student-driven website as a place for students to share sources from perspectives that are not on their reading lists—but should be. To get involved or find out more, CRAE meetings are every Thursday at 6pm in OUSU, and are open to all Oxford students regardless of race or ethnicity. We are also reachable by email at [email protected].

­I arrived at St Hugh’s in 1997. This was the era of Cool Britannia. Oasis, Blur, and Blair (the untainted, pre-Iraq version) were big. So was smoking. No one had mobile phones and if you wanted to access the web you had to use the college Computer Room. There were no online social networks and there was no instant messaging.

So, in many ways, Oxford in 1997 was a different place. Some things, however, don’t change much. I spent a good deal of my time at university supporting a now-defunct organisation called the Oxford Access Scheme, which aimed to get more “inner-city and ethnic minority people” (our language then) into Oxford. And the same debate rumbles on.

After many years working in this field, firstly at Oxford, then at Pearson, and then since founding Rare in 2005,  I have three observations and three suggestions.

Observations:

1. Let’s distinguish between international students and home students. Oxford is a publicly funded, UK university and it is reasonable to look at the subsidised UK population studying there and see if it is representative. And there is good data available on this. Obviously the experiences, and the voices, of international students are important: in analysing where we are in relation to race in the UK, however, it does not make sense to include international students in our calculations.

2. All minority groups are not the same. The headline stat is this: about 14% of the UK population is non-white, and about 13% of home undergraduate admissions to Oxford last year were non-white, so the two are about in line. Oxford has admitted about 91% of what it “should” admit if it was to be exactly proportional. This is more or less within a margin of error.
However, talking about non-white or black and minority ethnic (BME) people as a whole masks significant variations between different ethnic minority groups. I spent much of this morning looking at 2011 census data versus Freedom of Information (FOI) information about admissions to Oxford in 2013 (I couldn’t find 2014 numbers or information about race on the Oxford University site, so I used this). I compared the percentage of people in the general population with the percentage admitted to Oxford, and then I looked at what proportion of the people that “should” have been admitted actually were. Here are the results:

Now this is rough and ready, because I’m comparing with the general population and not with the population taking A Levels, but nevertheless it ought to be indicative. And here’s what it says: the “BME” category, in relation to representation, means nothing. Mixed white and Asian people are significantly over-represented at Oxford – much more so than white people, who are only very slightly over-represented. So are British Chinese and British Indian students. Mixed-race students of black heritage are mildly but not markedly under-represented.

And black, Bangladeshi and Pakistani students are very significantly under-represented, with fewer than half as many students from these backgrounds in the university as there should be. So if there’s one thing Oxford should do on race, it’s focus outreach efforts on these under-represented minority groups. Specifically, we need to (i) raise educational achievement in these groups (this is part, though not all, of the reason for their under-representation at Oxford); (ii) encourage bright students from these groups to study a wider range of subjects than just law and medicine (another part of the reason for their under-representation), and (iii) build relationships with bright students from these groups to show them Oxford is for them too.

3. It appears to be impossible for a minority student at Oxford to talk about any negative experience without (i) this being interpreted as an attack on the university per se and (ii) the national media picking it up. The I Too Am Oxford campaign – many of whose organisers and participants are prominent in access efforts – is a prime example of this. By contrast, efforts by these same students to broaden access to Oxford are ignored by the local and national media. It seems that “black student happy at Oxford, seeks to broaden pool of like-minded people” isn’t a story, but “Oxford racist” is.

Suggestions:

1. If you care, get involved. Two years ago I helped set up Target Oxbridge, a programme to get more black, state-educated students into Oxford and Cambridge. It works. We have a 50% success rate so far. We need volunteers to help us and there are other initiatives with similar goals out there. And if focusing on race, or on some ethnic minority groups, makes you uneasy, read Observation 2 above again.

2. Fight ignorance. If you hear a fellow student make a racist comment, stand up, be counted, and face that student down.

3. Lobby your college, the university, and OFFA to do more on race. The current government seems to regard the social mobility agenda as the answer to all problems of equality. It isn’t. The particular issues facing black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students are not just about poverty. There’s an interplay of factors including culture, religion, and gender which need separate and individual attention. A lack of social and cultural capital within these groups has a big impact, both on academic achievement and on the navigation of the UCAS process – in other words, the cumulative effect of people within your ethnic group not attending top universities (as a result of class and in some cases active discrimination) makes it less likely that you’ll have someone to advise you on how to go about getting in. This can be changed, by identifying promising students from these groups and building relationships with them, one by one. It would be great if, in another fifteen years time, the NSVPN for each of these groups were over 80% – this will only happen with pressure from the student body.

Raphael Mokades is the Founder and Managing Director of Rare. He has written on business, sport and social issues for the Financial Times, Guardian, and Times and is the author of six Rare research reports.