Institutional Racism [1 ed.] 1032033878, 9781032033877

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INSTITUTIONAL RACISM

Institutional Racism explores the role of colonialism, truth, and knowledge in creating and maintaining institutional racism. It documents how the manipulation of truth and knowledge facilitated colonialism and epistemicide to create a perpe­ trator perspective of institutional racism that maintains the illusionary status of equality and justice and continues to conceal the breadth and depth of victimisation. The chapters present an understanding of how epistemicide, critical race theory, post-colonialism, white racial frames, white privilege, and insidious trauma can be used to critique the discourses and mechanisms that sustain a perpetrator perspective of institutional racism and how these concepts facilitate a victim perspective of institutional racism that documents the cumulative psy­ chological and physical harms of institutional racism. The second half of the book provides grounded case studies of institutional racism in the areas of education, policing, the war on terror, and Covid 19 to demonstrate how con­ temporary processes of colonialism and epistemicide maintain and reinforce institutional racism to negatively impact physical and mental health and con­ tribute to cumulative trauma. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, criminal justice, history, law, and politics, and those studying race, ethnicity, and racism, as well as anyone interested in learning about racism, structural inequality, and institutionalism racism. Shamila Ahmed is an interdisciplinary academic who uses the disciplines of law, criminology, international relations, social policy, political science, and psy­ chology to provide understandings of the impact of structures, institutions, and discourses on individuals’ perceptions, beliefs, values, and experiences. Her work focuses on positively impacting laws, policies, and institutions to reduce inequalities, injustice and discrimination.

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM

Colonialism, Epistemic Injustice and Cumulative Trauma

Shamila Ahmed

Cover image: ©LUVLIMAGE / Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Shamila Ahmed The right of Shamila Ahmed to be identified as author[/s] of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ahmed, Shamila, author.

Title: Institutional racism : colonialism, epistemic injustice and cumulative

trauma / Shamila Ahmed.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledhe, [2024] |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023042787 (print) | LCCN 2023042788 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781032033907 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032033877 (pbk) |

ISBN 9781003187073 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Racism. | Equality. | White privilege (Social structure)

Classification: LCC HT1521 .A336 2024 (print) | LCC HT1521 (ebook) |

DDC 305.8--dc23/eng/20231122

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023042787

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023042788

ISBN: 978-1-032-03390-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-03387-7 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-18707-3 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003187073

Typeset in Sabon

by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Preface 1 Tracing the origins of institutional racism: Colonialism,

injustice, and power

vi

vii

1

2 Understandings of institutional racism: Theories and

concepts

23

3 The maintenance of institutional racism: Reconceptualising

structures

44

4 Understanding the impacts of institutional racism: Presenting

the framework

65

5 National curriculum

85

6 The ‘war on terror’

102

7 Policing

115

8 Covid 19

129

9 Conclusion

140

Index

162

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my grandad, Mohammed Zaman. Thank you for everything, you are deeply missed and leave an empty space in my heart. Books continue to be written about the legacy left by you and the first generation of commonwealth immi­ grants that sacrificed their home, language, religious and cultural freedoms, and security to come to the UK in the hope that future generations would achieve equality, and flourish with the recognition, rights, and humanity that all deserve. Although the journey started with you, the battle to secure what you wished for us, continues with us and future generations.

PREFACE

In 2023, a United Nations report concluded that racism in the UK is systematic and institutional and it continues to have a traumatic impact on minorities in the UK (OHCHR, 2023). The term institutional racism has become the accep­ ted term to refer to the rules, procedures, and other operational mechanisms within institutions that give rise to ethnic inequalities. A recent report by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission highlighted the existence of institu­ tional racism across many institutions in the UK (EHRC, 2020). In highlighting the pervasive existence of institutional racism, the report found evidence to demonstrate that black minority individuals are three times more likely to be excluded from school, more likely to be unemployed, more likely to live in poverty, more likely to be physically restrained in police custody and more likely to be prosecuted and sentenced (EHRC, 2020). Therefore, as Unnever and Chouhy (2022) contend, the racialised ladder cuts across institutions to impact health, employment, income, education, and incarceration to not only limit social mobility and life chances, but to also decrease the quality of life. Given the devasting impacts of institutional racism and its continued exis­ tence within UK institutions, this book analyses the origins, maintenance, and impacts of institutional racism. In analysing the origins, the book explores the continuities between colonialism and the contemporary processes which main­ tain institutional racism. It reveals how white privilege, white frames, and epistemic imperialism continue to obscure the creation, existence, and cumula­ tive impacts of institutional racism. The inclusion of colonialism, epistemic injustice, and cumulative trauma in the title of the book signify how the book challenges contemporary social constructions, explanations, and understandings of institutional racism that reproduce and maintain colonial power and the perpetrator perspective. In deconstructing ethnocentric constructions and lit­ erature on institutional racism, the book provides a victim centred perspective

viii Preface

which makes visible the breadth of institutional racism, and thus its existence in multiple institutions, and its depth, through making visible the traumatic phy­ siological and psychological impacts of institutional racism. As the book demonstrates, the articulation of institutional racism through epistemic imperialism continues to silence, oppress, and dehumanise those subjected to institutional racism and thus, victims not only suffer the impacts of institutional racism, but also from the legacies of a colonial past which continues to shape understandings of their experience. The book furthers understandings of how institutional racism is maintained as a perpetual form of injustice (as opposed to an isolated form of injustice) that limits the recognition, rights, and humanity of victims through mechanisms of white privilege, white frames, and epistemic imperialism. The book demonstrates how white privilege, white frames, and epis­ temic imperialism, as processes of epistemic arrogance that silence and deny agency limit the possibilities of forging a universal epistemology, and through doing so, serve as a direct contradiction to western claims of civilisation, enlight­ enment, and progress. The book considers the relationship between power, truth, knowledge, oppression, and impact, because without exploring the fluidity of this relation­ ship, institutional racism appears to just exist. It also advocates equality as a central component of justice and in doing so, it fully embraces the language of justice / injustice so not as to dilute the existence and impact of institutional racism as something less than injustice. In exploring the intersectionality between origins, maintenance, and impacts, the book reveals how reductionist articulations of the impacts of institutional racism constitute additional forms of injustice. However, even though institutional racism involves the injustice of having equal recognition removed, this book seeks to re-distribute recognition through attempting to prioritise the impact on the victim and using assessable and relatable concepts such as injustice, so the reader is better able to under­ stand the experiences discussed. The book is therefore designed to make the reader feel, and in doing so, connect and understand the victim perspective. The book conceptualises institutional racism in terms of its immense victimisation, and as one of the biggest threats to humanity and our co-existence, acting to violently dissect commonality through constructed difference and legitimising the suffering of groups through constructed difference. This chapter introduces the topic of institutional racism and the main aims of the book and concludes by presenting the structure of the book.

Definitions of institutional racism The term ‘institutional racism’ was first used by Carmichael and Hamilton (1967) to describe acts by the white community against the black community in the United States. Interestingly, rather than emphasising the role of individuals, the definition highlighted the role of the collective community in perpetrating racism. Carmichael and Hamilton (1967) wanted to highlight how social

Preface ix

structures and organisational patterns disadvantaged blacks, while allowing whites to improve living standards, including housing, health, and life span, and enjoy better neighbourhood amenities, educational facilities, employment, income, and wealth. Carmichael and Hamilton (1967: 4) presented institutional racism as ‘less overt, far more subtle’ and ‘less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts’ because it persisted ‘in the operation of estab­ lished and respected forces in the society.’ They went on to state, it relies on ‘the active and pervasive operation of anti-black attitudes and practices’ but it cannot be reduced to them. The inclusion of institutions deviated from previous definitions in highlighting how institutions could also perpetuate racism. However, Carmichael and Hamilton’s (1967) definition of institutional racism was vague. It failed to provide an adequate understanding of how insti­ tutional racism originated and / or was maintained, thereby reducing the pos­ sibility of eradicating the factors which maintained its existence. For example, without an adequate conceptualisation of what ‘established and respected forces’ were, there was no possibility of identifying these forces, understanding how they came to exist and how they contributed to the manifestation of institutional racism. The definition also failed to suggest at what point indivi­ dual responsibility could exist because although Carmichael and Hamilton (1967) highlighted that the processes which give rise to institutional dis­ crimination could never be completely unintentional, they also suggested that racism can occur without the deliberate discriminatory actions of prejudiced individuals (Carmichael & Hamilton, 1967). Although the definition is not without criticism, it did highlight the relationship between institutional ‘estab­ lished and respected forces’ and institutional racism. The emphasis on estab­ lished suggested that any attempt to understand these forces must also consider the social construction of entities that have been constructed as ‘respected forces’. However, although the definition by Carmichael and Hamilton (1967) highlighted the need to consider the ontological social construction of mechan­ isms which exist within institutions, this posed larger questions relating to how is social construction judged? And how and why are some forces labelled as respectable? More importantly, questioning the process of social construction also meant questioning power. For example, is the definition of what con­ stitutes ‘respected’ universal? Does one judge and define respectable based on social construction or on impact? Can something be respectable if it gives rise to inequality? How does power intersect with these processes? To eliminate, challenge and counter institutional racism, the intersectionality between power, ontological bias and privilege had to also be scrutinised. This meant, amongst other things, critically exploring established and respected forces from a place of equality. As this book demonstrates, such a process not only has implications for adopting equality as a standpoint, but through doing so, it reveals the per­ vasive existence of colonial power in privileging knowledge and systems of social control which maintain the existence of colonial power over oppressed groups.

x Preface

The fight to eliminate institutional racism is therefore part of a larger struggle to remove privilege and the power produced and maintained through ethnocentric constructions of the world. It is only through exploring how equality and inequality intersect with the creation, maintenance, and impact of institutional racism that it is then possible to establish what these forces are and measure their impact on institutional racism. The failure to historise the forces which sustain institutional racism maintains their invisibility and it feeds into the fallacy that contemporary institutional racism, with its forces, rules, procedures etc., is some­ how separated from colonialism. This constructed disjuncture serves a powerful purpose in allowing the historic ideologies, and procedures which led to racialisa­ tion and maintained practices such as slavery, to be firmly placed in the past and be conceptualised as having no continuity and influence on contemporary institu­ tional racism. As the book demonstrates, such ethnocentric assertions purposely deny how the historic policies used in slavery were formed on attributing recogni­ tion, rights, and humanity based on one’s identity, and it is these same processes which exist within contemporary institutions and lead to institutional racism. The abandonment of a universal epistemology was superseded by race. The elevation of race above humanity and its lasting impact on knowledge, truth, and power have meant that one needs to deconstruct the ontological construction of both colonialism and institutional racism to arrive at an understanding of institutional racism which doesn’t constitute another layer of injustice through reaffirming white privilege, white frames, and epistemic imperialism. In demonstrating how a universal epistemology progresses understandings of institutional racism, the book places the impetus to counter institutional racism on all groups. It is hoped that through tracing the continuities from colonialism to institutional racism, the reader will become aware of how colonial forms of power continue to privilege the very rules, discourses, and procedures which create and maintain institutional inequality as the norm. As the book demonstrates, governmental responses to institutional racism continue to deny its existence, attempt to eliminate the very word from political discourse, and blame minorities for their own victimisation. These governmental responses demonstrate the need for this book and how after 50 years since institutional racism was first used in the UK, shifts in narrative, response, responsibility, and understanding are required to progress modernity, justice, and equality. Ann Dummett was among one of first to deploy the phrase ‘institutional racism’ in academic writing in Britain in 1973 in ‘A Portrait of English Racism’. ‘A Portrait of English Racism’ further highlighted the need to historise institu­ tional racism to shatter its socially constructed autonomous appearance. Dum­ mett (1973) highlighted how racist institutions perpetuate inequalities regardless of individual behaviour. Thus, according to Dummett (1973) even if racist atti­ tudes ceased to exist, black people would still be subjected to racist practices. Dummett (1973) highlighted that although institutions are not autonomously created, once created their mere existence can perpetuate discrimination. How­ ever, its wasn’t until 1999, following the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993,

Preface xi

that institutional racism was accepted as existing within institutions (Mac­ pherson, 1999). The Macpherson report defined institutional racism as ‘the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin’. ‘It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviours which amount to dis­ crimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people’ (Macpherson, 1999: 34). The report led to an awareness of how institutional rules and procedures, regardless of individual intentions have a disproportionately positive impact on members of dominant groups and a negative impact on members of subordinate groups (Unzueta & Lowery, 2008). Although the report contributed to the increased acknowledgement of institu­ tional racism in UK political and sociological discourses (O’Grady, et al., 2005), it failed to provide understandings of the processes that maintain institutional racism across institutions, and how institutional racism could be challenged. Further, through conceptualising institutional racism as the failure ‘to provide’ for non-whites, the report reproduced the whiteness of institutions (Ahmed, 2020). The existence of such a standpoint demonstrated how rather than nor­ malising the need for institutions to provide for all (a standpoint if equality), they continued to be conceptualised as entities that were required to provide for the dominant white majority and then consider the needs of minorities. Such con­ ceptualisations meant that challenging institutional racism required addressing the contemporary impacts of colonialism on knowledge, culture, and socialisa­ tion. As Jones (1997) explains, racial inequity exists throughout culture, within ideological beliefs and the everyday actions of people in their culture, and these processes are passed on through generations. In highlighting the relationship between racial inequality, culture, and socialisation, Jones (1997) elucidates how institutional inequality is part of a bigger and more pervasive cultural discourse which not only ensures that colonial exercises of power are reproduced with each generation, but they are reproduced as norms free of ideological construction, bias, and inequality. Thus, generations grow to accept their privilege as the norm and through doing so, fail to learn and develop the reflexivity that this book argues is essential to tackling institutional racism. Without such scrutiny and questioning these norms are not only sustained but engagement with them and indeed sustaining them becomes represented as involving ‘unwitting ignorance, thoughtlessness’ and thus autonomous processes, actions, and behaviours. In such a conceptualisation, there can be no individual responsibility for engaging in actions that reflect the dominant epistemic processes of socialisation and culture. This therefore suggests that for institutional racism to be eradicated, cultures need to be re-examined in terms of the inequality and injustice they represent because it is only through these being labelled as unacceptable that can the behaviour that reflects such discourses be problematised. Without constructing and labelling the discourses which maintain white privilege as socially unac­ ceptable, equality will not be achieved.

xii Preface

Although as Dworkin and Dworkin (1999) argue, institutional racism is such a pervasive ideology that to escape institutional racism, one would have to escape society, Trepagnier (2017) rightly highlights how regardless of the vast impacts of such a pervasive ideology, sociology has yet to explain the role of actors in the production and maintenance of institutional racism. There remains little understanding of how these discourses and practices of domination and oppression ‘enlist subjects’ to their constructed discourses (Iedema, 1998). According to Goldberg (2015), unconscious bias is used to maintain the status quo of whiteness. Institutions obscure the structural dimension of racial inequality to reproduce and maintain existing structural inequality. As Better (2008: 11) states, ‘institutional racism functions to reinforce white skin privilege in all facets’ of life. Although institutional racism has become synonymous with autonomous actions and thought processes, questions around privilege help to reveal how social constructions represent the interests of some groups over others and thus, how institutional racism is neither neutral in creation, mani­ festation, maintenance and / or impact. This book explores the relationship between institutional racism, culture, and knowledge and through doing so, it highlights how colonial forms of power and injustice shaped societal discourses and processes of socialisation to ensure that white privilege would remain embedded in cultural and institutional ideologies and practices.

Aims of the book The first aim of the book is to explore how race and colonialism facilitated the existence of institutional racism through discussing the wider processes of his­ toric and contemporary British institutional racism. The book considers how racism is part of a larger, longer spread of pervasive post-colonial power and oppression. In detailing the origins of race, racialisation, and racism, the book provides an understanding of the core concepts which created and continue to sustain institutional racism. Deconstructing the origins, maintenance, and usage of these terms will empower the reader to not only understand how such terms came to exist, but also how they are maintained and used, so that they are able to recognise and perhaps challenge the often-invisible processes that maintain institutional racism. It is through tracing the relationship between race, colonialism, culture, and knowledge that the book details how the social construction of knowledge, progress, and modernity became entwined with privileging white interests. The book explores how any understanding of institutional racism must include the processes through which ‘white’ knowledge became privileged as the only legitimate form of knowledge, at the expense of a universal epistemology, to create and embed epistemic imperialism as the dominant culture. As the book demonstrates, the failure to consider the racialisation of history not only obscures how colonial practices and knowledge were used to inform the crea­ tion of modern institutions, but also the central role of the state in this project.

Preface xiii

The second aim of the book is to adopt a non-state centric perspective which explores the role of the state in creating and maintaining institutional racism. In investigating the role of the state, the book demonstrates how the failure to explore how state practices, particularly those related to colonialism, created, maintained, and institutionalised racism, omit the most powerful entity through which institutional racism is maintained: the state. Through analysing the role of the UK state, the book brings together the concepts of power, knowledge, privilege, structure, and injustice to demonstrate how these not only maintain white privilege but through doing so, restrict the language, discourse(s), and perspective(s) through which institutional racism continues to be understood. The third aim of the book is to document the nuanced continuities between the historical construction of race and the contemporary mechanisms which maintain institutional racism through exploring the ontological construction of knowledge and truth. According to Mills (2017), this process necessitates that one must consider the causes and roots of oppressive social structures, and how these serve to create ‘illusions’ which give the appearance of ontological neutrality. In the case of institutional racism, this involves considering the very creation of institu­ tions and whether the knowledge and truth used to create these institutions was neutral. Or if it served the interests of some groups more than others. Such a perspective avoids the pitfalls of adhering to biased grand narratives and dis­ courses which maintain the binary privileging of some cultures and the de-privi­ leging of others. Further, it does not simply recognise differential institutional outcomes and inequalities, to then adopt cultural discourses which restrict such narratives through epistemic arrogance (adapting narratives to fit existing struc­ tures of white privilege), but rather, it recognises the racialisation of history and through doing so, it privileges a universal epistemology that seeks to attribute equal recognition, rights, and humanity to all cultures. The enormity of this task can be grasped from previous discussions in this chapter which have stated how differential institutional outcomes, inequalities, and racism have been attributed to, amongst other things, ‘unwitting ignorance’ and ‘thought­ lessness’. To consider this using gender equality, in the fight for equality men must exercise equality and thus it is unacceptable for men to display ‘unwitting ignor­ ance’, ‘thoughtlessness’, and behaviours which lead to discrimination. Such is the imposition of equality that any man claiming these as defences would find that the social consensus is that they should know better and as such, they are responsible. The language and discourses around gender inequality recognise the inequality of the past, but now insist that equality is the standard and individual responsibility will be established for any behaviour that falls below this standard. Where institu­ tional racism is concerned, there exists a need to use the same mechanisms to establish responsibility. Therefore, it is essential to demonstrate how the discourses, language, and mechanism that maintain ethnic inequality are socially constructed, just as the biased ontological construction of gender has been shown to be an illu­ sion. This also involves the necessity of deconstructing the role of the state and cri­ tically questioning the extent to which colonial practices still exist.

xiv Preface

As the book demonstrates, standing for equality means eradicating white privilege and exposing its influence on socialisation, culture, and norms. How­ ever, it is the pervasive influence of white privilege on institutions, social norms, and systems of socialisation, knowledge, and truth that make it difficult to eradicate. As McHugh (2017: 272) states, it is communities of resistance [that] counter the dominant framework that dehumanizes them, that denies the significance and validity of their experi­ ence and knowledge, and that speaks for them and frames the groundwork for knowledge and epistemic legitimacy such that the voices of oppressed people are invisible, silenced, and discredited. The book explores how the mechanisms which maintain institutional racism will only be dismantled when those that maintain and benefit from such privi­ lege and power decide to become part of ‘communities of resistance’ and where such action does not exist, claims of equality serve as further illusions. How­ ever, these ‘illusions’ perpetuate harm, and silence victims through giving the appearance of ontological neutrality. Thus, the silencing of the past and indeed the present breeds the selective empowering of some voices and complete iso­ lation of others. Therefore, as Ray (2019: 26) argues, scholars must address ‘the role of organizations in the social construction of race’ and ‘racialization theory must account for how both state policy and individual attitudes are filtered through—and changed by—organizations’. The failure to address the racialisa­ tion of truth, knowledge, and power has stagnated progress aimed at counter­ ing institutional racism. Put simply, these mechanisms not only silence voices but do so through having the ability to represent epistemic arrogance as epis­ temic empathy and compassion. In exploring the racialised historisation of institutional racism, the book challenges the ontological neutral construction of truth, knowledge, and power to reveal how the racialisation of truth, knowl­ edge, and power maintain the dehumanisation of minorities and the existence of institutional racism. The fourth aim of the book is to expose how historical processes of raciali­ sation continue to oppress and shape the daily lives of black minorities and how such realties intersect with other minority group experiences. Through explor­ ing this co-existence, the book demonstrates unity in the experiences of groups, and key differences to ensure that the book is all-inclusive without essentialising the impacts of institutional racism. It highlights the importance of the black lives matter (BLM) movement through demonstrating how the processes, mechanisms, discourses, and language used to maintain institutional racism inflict harm on all minorities and thus, movements like BLM should be impor­ tant for any individual claiming to want equality. In considering the broader spectrum of racialisation, the book meets the urgent need to demonstrate the intersectionality of racism between different minorities and different institutions through providing institution specific case studies.

Preface xv

The fifth aim of the book is to ground institutional racism through providing case study chapters that detail institutional racism within the areas of educa­ tion, the war on terror, policing, Covid 19, and mental health. These case study chapters are designed to give readers an insight into the extent of institutional racism within these institutions. As stated previously, the purpose of this book is to deviate from any perspective which claims institutional racism is autono­ mous and has a minimal impact. The legitimacy gained through providing such evidence is that it reduces the power and ability of those that deny urgent change is needed and that discrimination does not exist. The sixth aim of the book is to demonstrate how current understandings of institutional racism maintain a perpetrator perspective. The colonisation of truth and knowledge have created invisibility around the structures, norms, discourses, and language that maintain white privilege. Such uses of power have also reinforced the restrictive barriers which reduce the recognition afforded to victims of institutional racism and the active role of individuals in maintaining institutional racism. To prioritise the victim perspective and challenge how epistemic imperialism obscures both the mechanisms that maintain institutional racism and its cumulative impacts, the book uses the framework of epistemicide to explore the relationship between knowledge, truth, and identity. As is explored in the book, questioning the extent to which understandings of insti­ tutional racism represent a universal epistemology facilitates a critique of insti­ tutional racism thereby allowing illusions of equality that maintain white privilege to emerge and become visible. Such visibility not only allows the power and mechanisms which sustain institutional racism to be recognised and labelled, but in doing so, such identification makes change possible. The illusion of institutions as ontological neutral entities has delegated the eradication of institutional racism to the creation of added on policies which seek to treat institutional racism as an additional facet of institutions, as opposed to existing in the structural foundations of institutions. Such a perspective forgoes and instantly dismisses the existence of white privilege in the creation of institutions and the extent to which it is reproduced through societal processes of sociali­ sation and culture. It could therefore be argued that there is a need, as Graham (2011) contends, to see truth as less final and instead as something we can re­ make. It is only through adopting a standpoint of equality that it is possible to assess the active construction and use of power in all areas and re-make the truth that dismisses such construction. It could thus be argued that a victimcentred perspective challenges such illusions and reveals them as being some­ thing less final. In advocating a universal epistemology, the book demonstrates how current understandings, approaches, and policies around institutional racism maintain a perpetrator perspective and how the need to embrace a victim-centred perspective is essential in earning the right to claim a universal perspective, as opposed to the illusionary embrace of such a perspective. The seventh aim of this book is to utilise a victim perspective to document the traumatic cumulative impacts of institutional racism, silent racism,

xvi Preface

passivity, and privilege. Silent racism produces everyday racism and indirect institutional racism. Similarly, ‘passivity endorses and encourages the racist decisions, actions, and policies of other white people’ (Trepagnier, 2017: 12). According to Mills (2017), structures are created and maintained through human action to privilege some groups and deprivilege other groups. Victims can also experience what has been called hermeneutical injustice—the injustice of having an area of one’s social experience distorted from collective under­ standing because the group in question suffers from epistemic marginalisation (Tsosie, 2017). Therefore, identity defines one’s right and ability to share victi­ misation and have it accepted, or to have it opposed, dismissed, and silenced. As stated earlier, it is not enough to simply describe the impact of institutional racism: true recognition begins with articulating impacts in a way where the reader can take the position of the victim, leading to increased empathy and understandings of the inner psychological impacts of institutional racism. Any writing which fails to reveal such impacts, reaffirms privilege through display­ ing the ability to create and use illusions. Literature on epistemic injustice and more generally epistemicide advocates a new language from which to articulate perceptions and experiences of institu­ tional racism. The lack of engagement with this literature, literature that enables victims to be empowered through revealing the silencing and brutal impact of the illusion of equality on beliefs and values, highlights the extent to which voices and recognition remain shackled. Not only does the right to speak remain controlled through cultural discourses of socialisation that maintain white privilege, but these mechanisms of power still control the language and thus humanity through which victims are able to represent their perceptions and experiences. In seeking to highlight the cumulative impacts of institutional racism in a way which recognises one’s humanity to feel, thus ensuring that any contours and boundaries to such feelings are shaped by victims, the book explores the relationship between institutional racism and trauma. Literature on trauma not only allows the breadth of cumulative impacts to be discussed through prioritising how multiple forms of institutional racism impact victims, but it also reveals depth via considering the deep psychological impact of institutional racism. Clark (2016: 175) contends that as with other academic forms of knowledge, ‘the discursive framework of trauma functions to efface the naming and addressing of the real harm and violence done through colonial systems, at both the structural, and what Fanon called the ‘psy­ choaffective’ level’. As Andermahr (2016: 1) argues, ‘rather than forging rela­ tionships of empathy and solidarity with non-Western others, a narrowly Western canon of trauma literature has in effect emerged, one which privileges the suffering of white Europeans, and neglects the specificity of non-Western and minority cultural traumas’. Given the colonisation of knowledge and truth it is not surprising that as Rothberg (2008: 226) highlights, in recent years there has been a shift towards ‘decolonizing trauma studies’ to develop the methods and tools necessary to oppose colonial and racial violence. The fact that

Preface xvii

dominant models and writings have had to be challenged to provide the foun­ dation from which the recognition of trauma is extended beyond the category which demonstrates the extent to which white privilege has shaped under­ standings of trauma. It has therefore not only continued to produce victims but has also shackled the naming and understanding of their victimisation. These systems of knowledge which have prioritised status and expertise over lived experience and emotions not only entrench structures with deeply embedded inequality but also create vast impacts that should be named as forms of epis­ temic violence. The power to represent and supress recognition has a long his­ tory, with Craps (2013) highlighting how neo-colonial constructions constitute a form of cultural imperialism. As stated previously, this book aims to avoid cultural imperialism through using case studies to further the post-colonial legacy of documenting minority lived experiences and using literature on epis­ temic imperialism and epistemic injustice to reveal the epistemic violence minorities continue to experience. In articulating the cumulative impacts of institutional racism, the book draws upon ‘double consciousness’ to situate the how institutional racism contributes to the development of mental conflict associated with dual identities (Du Bois, 1903; Fanon, 1967). The book discusses how it is the space between these forms of identity / consciousness that literally fracture the psyche and where these can’t be reconciled, they split the psyche through forming indigestible trauma. Such a standpoint could also be conceptualised as adopting a double con­ sciousness which recognises the normalised white privilege saturated reality, and its distorted illusionary status thus contributing to the ability to bear wit­ ness to another reality. As Donnor and Ladson-Billings (2018) state, minorities recognise interest convergence at structural and individual levels because they occupy a liminal space between marginalised culture and the dominant culture. Indeed, it is argued that through witnessing the impacts of white privilege, institutional racism, and the racialisation of institutions and thus the illusionary status of truth and knowledge, victims are better able to hold a universal epis­ temology, where there is no epistemic loss. The final aim of the book is to situate the harm perpetuated by institutions. Literature on institutional racism has failed to explore the intersectionality between institutions, beliefs, values, and socialisation. Institutions have an enormous capacity to cause harm with research demonstrating how ideas of equality and fairness are part of our socialised beliefs in relation to institutions (Frijda, et al., 2000; Turner, 2007). Thus, perceptions and experiences which fracture our belief in the equality and fairness of institutions constitute injus­ tice, leading to the existence of vast negative emotions (Correia, et al., 2001; Orth, 2002; Skinner & Taylor, 2009). This process of adaptation involves accepting that our beliefs, as they once were, were false. However, also within this process, the need for adaptation and reconciliation also becomes plagued with pain and powerlessness. For example, how is one meant to re-establish their faith and trust in such establishments? Especially when the very

xviii Preface

perceptions and experiences which have fractured trust are based on identity? This book reveals how actions that are socially constructed as normal, and reproduced through socialisation, cultural consensus, and institutional rules contribute to institutional racism. In revealing these processes and how their existence contributes to institutional racism, the book provides an under­ standing so that ignorance cannot be claimed. In doing so, it firmly increases the expectation placed on all individuals and groups to counter the processes which contribute to institutional racism.

The theoretical framework Given how language and discourses have restricted understandings of institu­ tional racism, this book uses language, concepts, and theories which facilitate a non-ethnocentric perspective through which institutional racism can be recog­ nised, named, explored, and challenged. This section introduces the theoretical framework of the book. The book embraces critical race theory and post colo­ nialism as perspectives through which a victim-centred understanding of insti­ tutional racism can emerge, and it uses the concepts of white privilege, white frames, and epistemic injustice and imperialism to deconstruct the ideological construction of knowledge and truth that intersect with the mechanisms that maintain institutional racism. In highlighting the reasons for choosing these perspectives, and thus the relationship between perspective, epistemology, and knowledge, it is hoped that readers will also critically question the production of knowledge and their own role in this process. As stated above, the book will deconstruct the processes which lead to racism because without deconstructing and detailing these processes, they remain invisible. The task of deconstruction involves exploring the relationship between discourse, ideologies, and practice, because as Fairclough (1992) highlights, ideologies are constructions of reality that inform discursive practices, and contribute to the production, reproduc­ tion, or transformation of relations of domination. This critical conception of ideology highlights how illusions maintain processes of asymmetrical relations of power and inequalities and in doing so, they sustain domination. Thus, any quest or actions that claim to reduce inequalities and domination must scruti­ nise how hegemonic practices perpetuate claims of equality, whist providing ideological legitimacy to the very rules, processes and practices that sustain inequality and racialisation. To provide scrutiny of these illusions and practices, and meet the aims of the book specified above, the book uses critical race theory and post colonialism. Critical race theory and post colonialism facilitate a deeper understanding of institutional racism through incorporating stand­ points which allow the possible existence of ontological bias to be explored. As this section explores, it is only through carving open such possibilities that it is the possible to consider the mechanisms through which such bias is maintained and how epistemic imperialism functions in denying victims recognition, rights and humanity, whist also asserting the illusion of their existence.

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Critical race theory (CRT) refers to concepts and ideas about racism that were developed by ethnic minority scholars (Cabrera, 2018; Collins, 2019). Since the 1960s, anti-racist politics, movements, and policies have emerged as an ideological, social, and political force to counter racism. The development of CRT reflects how new ideological, social, and political developments were required because prior to existence of CRT, such forces, including academic literature maintained ethnocentrism and through doing so, failed to produce understanding that reflected a universal epistemology. As Crenshaw (2010) highlights, the past was pivotal to progressing anti-racism in both an academic and social activism context. Thus, critical race theory prioritises the need to explore the past and therefore history in contemporary analysis of the dialectic relationship between race and informal rules and regulations, and race and legal discourses and the law. In advocating the exploration of such continuities, CRT wasn’t developed as a theory, but rather as a way in which to give recognition, rights, and humanity to oppressed groups. It therefore suggested a different approach and one which made visible the inherent bias of non-CRT approaches to understandings systems of inequality such as institutional racism. In demon­ strating the pitfalls of being shackled by socially constructed language and dis­ course, it revealed the vast implications and limitations for truth and knowledge when ethnocentric power is not used to maintain the illusion of equality. In highlighting how power, based on true equality led to ideas that were outside the boundaries of normative discourses of culture and socialisation, it made visible the illegitimacy and limiting nature of such illusions. Although it is not the aim of this book to engage in pre-defined socially constructed binaries, there are core differences between standpoints that main­ tain white privilege and those of minorities. For example, as stated above ethnic minorities experience the world through the ideals of equality only to perceive and experience a different reality. Their reality and lived experience of society, culture, and institutions is therefore completely different to those that benefit from white privilege. Although this standpoint should give minorities a sense of legitimacy in explaining and being experts on inequality, by virtue of benefitting from the primacy of perceptual and experiential experience, constructed epis­ temic status defines one’s ability to contribute to the truth. The existence of such processes highlights the necessity to critically explore how the racialisation of knowledge and truth maintain domination and white privilege. Therefore, as Christian et al. (2021) contend, academia would benefit from a greater engage­ ment with critical race theory to explore how the social sciences aren’t neutral. Such is the existence of white privilege and power that injustice is multifaceted and layered to curtail the recognition, rights, and humanity of ethnic minorities in every sphere, including academia. In decolonising these processes, Neville and Pieterse (2008) highlight the need for a psychosocial model of racism that links individual, institutional, and macro structural forms of racism. The book engages with CRT to challenge the existence of neutral hegemonic construction of discourses, thereby revealing the

xx Preface

power dynamics at play in creating and maintaining racism. Through including case studies, the book explores the cumulative impacts of these practices, thereby deviating from colonial positions which seek to reduce the impact, and severity of institutional racism. In conjunction with CRT, the book will use post colonialism which will serve as another avenue through which to demonstrate a non-illusionary standpoint, thereby allowing the illusionary claim of equality to be made visible and critiqued. The importance of post colonialism cannot be underestimated given that it developed as a perspective from which to afford minorities recog­ nition, in opposition to colonial discourses which silenced minorities and removed recognition of their humanity. As Nayar (2010) contends, post colo­ nialism emphasises the need to critique and counter discrimination, racism, and exploitation through using critical methodological approaches that allow us to recognise colonial discourses and practices. Through drawing from post colo­ nialism, it will be possible to consider how white privilege is maintained and how this discursive power functions to dominate the ‘orient’ through language, discourse, and structure (Said, 2003). Post colonialism therefore not only offers critical methodologies from which to reveal illusions, but it also highlights the need to explore the numerous continued impacts of colonisation on colonised societies and colonising societies (Cannella and Viruru, 2004). It therefore pro­ blematises ‘periodising our history in the triadic terms pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial’ … which ‘privileges as primary the role of colonialism as the principle of structuration in that history’ (Ahmad, 1995: 6–7). Through prior­ itising those that are subjected to their effects and power, it will be possible to fracture the boundaries of these triadic terms and demonstrate the illusionary status of post-colonial equality. As the book demonstrates, to provide any understanding of institutional racism that withstands white privilege involves ontological and epistemological scrutiny. Such scrutiny can’t be conceptualised as a simple movement, but rather as a series of thoughts, actions, and intentions to move from the white privilege perpetrator perspective to the victim perspective. Given the illusionary appear­ ance of recognition, rights, and humanity as being synonymous with equality, and the constant reinforcement of such an illusion in socialisation and culture, devising a methodology through which to expose such an illusion requires a multifaceted and multi-layered critical approach. In moving towards the victim perspective, the book engages with critical race theory and post colonialism as perspectives which provide guidance on how to expose a victim perspective which leads to both the dominant and oppressed receiving equal power. In conjunction with revealing this perspective, the book also exposes and names the mechanisms that maintain such power, inequality, and dominance, so that their illusionary autonomous existence can be challenged. As previously stated, the book utilises the literature on epistemicide to explore how recogni­ tion, rights and humanity are abstract principles and their application is based on one’s identity. Terms such as epistemic oppression, epistemic imperialism

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and epistemic injustice provide an understanding of how knowledge, and episte­ mology maintain colonialism as an ideological truth that informs systems and institutions (Kidd et al., 2017). Through using this literature it is possible to explore how the intersectionality of identity, recognition, rights, and humanity facilitate the existence of a predetermined partial truth which maintains white privilege, with the ‘epistemology of ignorance’ signifying the normalisation of an ‘epistemology that was created precisely to exclude other groups’ (Tsosie, 2017: 361). In exploring these intersectionalities, the book draws on the concepts of ‘epistemic imperialism’, ‘epistemic oppression’ and ‘epistemic injustice’ to name the epistemic power and structures that maintain ‘knowledge production’ (Kidd et al., 2017). These concepts therefore highlight the relationship between knowledge, truth, and institutional racism and thus, the mechanisms through which institu­ tional racism is maintained. In maintaining white privilege, epistemicide works to maintain a perpetrator perspective where the white frames of white distancing strategy, white fragility, denial of agency and responsibility, white ignorance, white solidarity, and denials of cumulative impacts can thrive and co-exist. Although the silencing of perceptual and experiential forms of knowledge contribute to a perpetrator perspective. To demonstrate the victim perspective, the book considers how this epistemic violence impacts epistemic trust, thereby allowing readers to grasp the often-hidden cumulative impacts of institutional racism. Through engaging with the cumulative impacts of institutional racism it is hoped that victims are given their right to feel, perceive and experience, and thus their humanity. Although this means that at times difficult concepts, such as epistemic arrogance (which denotes the right of the privileged to speak as the true authority for victims, thus dismissing their perceptual and experiential knowledge) will be explored, it is only through demonstrating the brutal exis­ tence of epistemic imperialism that victim’s humanity is not minimised to reduce the plight of white fragility. According to Sabourin (2021), Kant defined the Enlightenment as the mature use of one’s own understanding. ‘Both Locke and Kant claimed that a unitary quality of the self was the necessary ground for conscious thought and, in turn, for moral and/or political choice (agency), self-guided thought (autonomy), and responsible freedom’ (Barvosa, 2008: 3). Understandings remain based on par­ tial knowledge, thereby problematising claims of achieving a universal episte­ mology. Further, the unitary existence of the self remain tied to identity because agency and autonomy do not exist equally for all and thus, until our under­ standings can reflect the mature inclusion of all, we remain limited in our knowledge of embracing a universal epistemology that reflects an enlightened capacity and maturity to consider all vessels of knowledge. It is hoped that through demonstrating the vast mechanisms and impacts of institutional racism, that ethnocentric claims of enlightenment and equality are demon­ strated as ideals, thereby highlighting how there still exists the need to work towards achieving enlightenment, and a true post-colonial world that reflects a universal epistemology through incorporating all truths and knowledge.

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Structure of the book The historic processes The first chapter contributes to the literature on institutional racism through discussing the influence of colonialism on legislation, policies, socialisation, cul­ tural consensus, truth, and knowledge. In charting the creation of institutional racism, it explores the institutionalisation of race at the level of the state and how discourses of scientific racism and eugenics were used to legitimise practices such as slavery and forced sterilisation. The exploration of slavery demonstrates the huge accumulation of wealth through dispersing and implementing imperialism into policies and institutions, and therefore how the state created policies to produce inequality to facilitate white privilege, power, and wealth. The intersectionality between discourse and practice demonstrates how socially constructed discourses influenced political agendas to shape policies that would maintain white privilege and institutionalise race through education. The chapter goes onto highlight how the enlightenment shaped the role of truth and knowl­ edge and thus, how discourses and practices were colonialised and racialised through being created as being synonymous with reason, rationality, and progress to maintain epistemic imperialism. The chapter facilitates the deconstruction of epistemological realities as illusions, thereby revealing how institutional racism was created to maintain epistemic imperialism, a perpetrator perspective and the white frames which sustain white privilege. The chapter concludes by demon­ strating how contemporary ideologies such as neoliberalism, capitalism and meritocracy retain the same racialisations as created during colonialism. In summary the first chapter demonstrates how race, colonialism, and slavery led to the emergence of processes, such as racialisation which facilitated the creation, existence, and maintenance of institutional racism. The second chapter discusses how the book uses critical race theory, post colonialism, epistemic imperialism, and white frames to analyse institutional discrimination. The chapter explores how the focus of critical race theory on counter narratives, interest convergence, whiteness as property, critique of lib­ eralism, intersectionality, and social activism are relevant to progressing understandings of institutional discrimination. Through using these concepts, the chapter considers the racialisation of the state and the state as the most important mechanism in sustaining white privilege. Using racial state theory and post colonialism, the chapter then goes on to explore the ontological status of the state to demonstrate the state and its institutions as non-ontological neutral racialised structures. It therefore demonstrates how the hierarchical existence of race within the British empire was institutionalised into British society. In demonstrating the relationship between knowledge, power, and identity as conveyors of socially constructed status, the chapter highlights how knowledge, power, and status were created to privilege western identities and discourses, and their powerful role in maintaining white privilege.

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The chapter then explores how instead of acknowledging the harmful impacts of white privilege, a white racial frames perpetrator perspective reinforces the symbiotic relationship between whiteness, power, and status through asserting white grievance and victimisation. It therefore details how contemporary white culture is shaped by ‘white racial frames,’ as ‘an organized set of racialized ideas, stereotypes, emotions, and inclinations to discriminate’ (Feagin, 2006: 27). It is argued that institutional racism can only be challenged through the dismantling of these white frames, because white fragility, white distancing strategy, denial of agency and responsibility, white ignorance, white solidarity, and denials of cumu­ lative impacts maintain white epistemic privilege and institutional racism. In responding to these contemporary mechanisms and their inherent illu­ sionary discourses, the chapter explores the relevance of an intersectional methodology, with its focus on ontological engagement, structural grounding, and intersectional lived experience in developing a victim perspective and thus, a universal epistemology. In developing a victim perspective, the chapter explores epistemic imperialism and how epistemic injustice, hermeneutical injustice, epistemic arrogance, epistemic violence, epistemic ignorance, and epistemic oppression maintain the colonisation of truth and knowledge leading to an epistemology of victims that incorporates cumulative victimisation and violations of epistemic trust. It is argued that through witnessing and experi­ encing the impacts of white privilege, institutional racism, and the racialisation of institutions, and thus the illusionary status of truth and knowledge, victims are better able to possess a universal epistemology, and how it is the ability to hold such a position, and thus perceive the difference between a universal epis­ temology and epistemic imperialism, that leads victims to experience vast harms and violations of epistemic trust. In summary, the second chapter highlights how institutional racism was created and continues to be sustained to reveal the necessity to use concepts and methods that elevate a universal epistemology through which the vast harms of institutional racism and thus a standpoint epistemology can emerge. The third chapter explores the intersectionality of knowledge, truth, and struc­ tures, and thus how the dismantling of the mechanisms that maintain institutional racism rests on the ability to disrupt the truth and knowledge upon which their existence is based. Within these contemporary processes of colonisation, dichot­ omous reasoning, hierarchical ordering, objectification, and the abstraction of experience from knowledge (Nunn, 1997), the conditioning of knowledge accord­ ing to status silences the knowledge and truth that emerges from groups con­ structed as occupying the lower hierarchies. The chapter details how epistemicide works to create epistemic arrogance, allowing those with higher socially con­ structed status to override the claims to knowledge made by those of lower status and thus, how the classification of knowledge according to status leads to false claims over knowledge. It goes onto explore how this silencing, via the prioritisa­ tion of status over lived experience and emotions contribute to discourses that maintain illusionary neutrality and restrict any space within which the impacts of

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institutional racism can be articulated. The chapter demonstrates how knowledge intersects with structures to produce institutions that maintain classifications of knowledge that emulate the very processes of racialisation which determine the validity of knowledge according to preassigned racial categories. In summary, through elucidating the intersectionality between structures, knowledge, hierarchies, status, and emotions, the third chapter provides a vital insight into how structures not only maintain the claim of neutrality, but through doing so, obscure the very mechanisms which create and maintain institutional discrimination and deny the cumulative impact of institutional racism. The fourth chapter explores how the mechanisms that created and continue to maintain institutional racism conceal the cumulative impacts of institutional racism. It explores how epistemicide, hermeneutical injustice, epistemic imperi­ alism, epistemic ignorance, and epistemic arrogance distribute agency according to one’s constructed epistemic status, thereby deprivileging perceptual and experiential knowledge of institutional racism. By highlighting these mechan­ isms, the chapter explores how they contribute to the epistemology of victims; victims that not only endure the epistemic violence of institutional racism, but also suffer from the deeply ingrained and dispersed institutional inequalities which limit their ability to be heard and fracture epistemic trust, safety, and security. In exploring these vast impacts, the chapter highlights how perceptual and experiential knowledge must be decolonised so that it can reflect the depth and breadth of experience thereby creating space for a standpoint epistemology. The chapter presents the value of a standpoint epistemology in providing a framework within which to explore structures and their impact, thereby facil­ itating a victim perspective which affords knowledge and thus, recognition to the cumulative impacts of institutional racism. The chapter utilises literature on trauma to portray the often-hidden cumulative impacts of institutional racism. In attending to what Sandoval (2013) calls the methodology of the oppressed and highlighting research on sensitivity to race and physiological arousal (Mendoza-Denton et al., 2002), the relationship between discrimination and poor health outcomes including hypertension, obesity, diabetes, depression, asthma, infections and all-cause mortality (Brondolo et al., 2009; Burris et al., 2002; Krieger, 2000) and how the anticipation of racial discrimination creates fear, anger, sensory vigilance, and increases blood pressure to create hyperten­ sion (Krieger, 2000), the chapter challenges the events-based trauma model of racism, arguing that insidious trauma is a more accurate term because it includes the traumatogenic effects of oppression, including violence against the mind, soul, and spiritual psyche. The chapter explores that whereas the privileged are socialised to legitimise their privilege, victims are socialised to witness and experience their construc­ tion to reinforce the colonisation of their emotions, thoughts, cognitive abilities, and their mind. Institutional racism thus not only maintains external domina­ tion but also as Fanon (2008) states, comes to exist as a pathological presence in the victim. Thus, rather than the victims possessing the security that their

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knowledge will be received, every decision to speak is accompanied by experi­ ences of insecurity knowing that what has been shared may never be heard or judged as epistemologically worthy. Where epistemic injustices, margin­ alisation, and exclusions fracture epistemic trust, beliefs in right and wrong, in justice and epistemic democracy have no security and where there is no security, there is no safety, and every spoken word and action become infused with the possibility that they may bring the psychological injury that accompanies epis­ temicide and epistemic injustice. It could therefore be argued that epistemic status leads to the otherisation of consciousness for those constructed as not having the epistemic status to contribute to truth and knowledge. In recognising cumulative impacts, the chapter reconfigures institutional racism as a form of epistemic violence that causes continuous harm. Such an understanding poses questions regarding the risk of institutions to mental health in not only creating an instance of institutional racism, but in perpetuating epistemic imperialism to silence victims and perpetuate their otherness, their marginalisation, their sup­ pression, and their victimisation. In summary, the chapter highlights how the contemporary racialisation of truth, knowledge, practices, and institutions provides the means through which institutional racism causes continuous and perpetual traumatic injuries and how these deep psychological and physiological impacts shape victims outward view of the world, and how they perceive and engage with themselves.

Contemporary realities The second section of the book provides case studies of institutional racism in the areas of education, terrorism, policing, and health. These chapters demonstrate how although racism continues to exist at multiple levels, including interpersonal, social, political, institutional, and cultural, it is continuously reinforced within these institutions through governmental policies and legislation. Collectively, these chapters demonstrate how the post-colonial context still gives rise to ‘vast traumatic conditions which rather than being acknowledged and countered are often ignored and denied’ at the level of the state (MartínezFalquina, 2016: 128). Thus, as Mills (1997) contends, an epistemology of ignorance not only requires the construction of ignorance but also the accep­ tance of ignorance. Such denials and ignorance not only maintain institutional racism, but they also lead to epistemic injustice, because as Frost-Arnold (2014) argues, for a sense of epistemic justice and trust to be perceived there must be trust in institutions, practices, and the social structures. Epistemic injustice continues to be sustained through utilising epistemic status in the manufacture of evidence, thus demonstrating the contemporary use of discourses from which to create racialised evidence and practices. Thus, the structure of agency mutuality within contemporary institutions continues to disempower and reduce internally derived self-worth, self-capacity, and self-knowledge. Within this intersectionality between construction, discourse, hermeneutical ignorance,

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epistemic injustice, and contributory injustice, a hermeneutical gap remains to not only deny victimisation and healing through restricting the space within which victims can work through their trauma, but perceptual and experiential knowledge of institutional racism in one area, such as employment, is likely to be further compounded through institutional racism in another area, such as mental health. In summary, this section makes visible why and how institutional racism remains through detailing state responses to institutional racism, and demon­ strating how the evolution of racialised discourses into contemporary mechan­ isms such as white frames continue to maintain institutional racism and subject the cumulative traumatic impacts of institutional racism on social mobility and all aspects of health to epistemic imperialism. Chapter 5 discusses how education represents the power of the state to con­ trol the national curriculum. Through education, the state can regulate what is socialised into being accepted as the truth. Thus, whilst the privileged are informed of their dominant status, the de-privileged are placed on the journey of developing their double consciousness. Education thus becomes a mechanism whereby victims experience and learn of the colonising mechanisms through which they must endure life. In discussing the role between policy and dis­ course, the chapter highlights the ideologies behind the Education Act (2002), and the Counter Terrorism and Security Act (2015). It also details state responses to the Rampton Report (1981), the Swann Report (1985), and the Macpherson Report (1999). These collectively demonstrate state responses that promote British values, at the expense of multiculturalism and equality. This chapter explores how the national curriculum renders invisible British policies, laws, and interventions which have led to, and continue to contribute to the existence of institutional racism. The chapter details how debates around the teaching of white privilege and critical race theory are not value free jud­ gements, rather each decision represents a decision to either progress towards epistemic universalism through dispersing equality into consciousness, or alter­ natively to facilitate the existence of epistemic arrogance and epistemic ignor­ ance as mechanisms of epistemic imperialism and epistemic oppression. In summary the chapter demonstrates how schools are racialised places that not only form mechanisms of oppression that negatively impact social mobility and the ability of children to achieve their potential but work to maintain white privilege, white ignorance, and epistemic imperialism through processes of socialisation. The sixth chapter demonstrates the various ways in which the ‘war on terror’ has been constructed to further institutionalise racism. It explores both the national UK and global dynamics of this institutionalisation to provide the reader with an understanding of how the processes which constitute racialisa­ tion and racism not only impact black communities but have evolved to impact other minorities. This process of institutionalisation follows that of the British empire whereby the construction of the racialised identity according to biolo­ gical traits that signify risk and threat are used to create institutional

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mechanisms to control the group to minimise their constructed risk and threat (Ahmed, 2014). Thus, the chapter demonstrates the ability of new events to create new minorities as the victims of institutional racism. The chapter considers the absence of Islamophobia in (anti)race legislation and how this denial of racist victimisation reaffirms the perpetrator perspective as the only perspective deserving recognition. In considering the CONTEST and Prevent strategy and the Shawcross review, the chapter demonstrates the state use of sus­ picion and epistemic arrogance as representing an epistemic truth and knowledge that is used to criminalise Muslims and subject them to punishment. It further highlights how counter terrorism measures through legitimising denials to the right to a fair trial and other measures which attribute the ability to share perceptual and experiential knowledge, further limit, by law, a standpoint epistemology. The chapter also details the dispersal of such racialised discourses, practices, and laws through exploring how the constructed threat and risk was used to place a legal duty on all institutions to consider the terrorist threat of all Mus­ lims. The chapter thus demonstrates how the governmental thesis governing all spaces doesn’t just seek to promote assimilation as the remedy for the con­ structed risk and threat of Muslims, but embeds procedures, rules, and institu­ tional mechanises that facilitate suspicion, and thus beliefs void of epistemic validity leading to vast denials of human rights. In summary, the chapter demonstrates the use of extreme measures through which the state denies victimisation and indeed restricts the ability of Muslims to epistemically share truths and knowledge based on their Islamic identity, thereby reducing the epistemological worth and epistemic status of Muslims. Having explored how racism was institutionalised into the UK, the seventh chapter explores how and why institutional racism remains in the police. The chapter highlights the relevance of the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, and the Scarman Report (1981) in setting the context through which minorities would be policed. It goes onto discuss how the Commission on Race and Ethnic Dis­ parities (2021) advocated using the term disproportionate instead of racism in government funded research, even though institutional racism, sexism, mis­ ogyny, and Islamophobia exist in all areas of policing (Inquest, 2017, 2018, 2021; IOPC, 2022). It highlights how consecutive governments have continued to accept reviews that amplify the threat of minorities whilst rejecting the full recommendations made by those that call for equality and governmental recognition of institutional racism, sexism, misogyny, and Islamophobia. It demonstrates how legislation such as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Court Act (2022) deviates from policing by consent to promote a more colonial form of policing that protects the powerful against the powerless. It is therefore a measure which exacerbates inequality to increase the power of those that already possess epistemic status and further reduces the epistemic status of those already denied epistemic status. In summary, the chapter highlights how state responses to policing have not only further institutionalised racism and other forms of discrimination but

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continue to exploit epistemic arrogance to amplify the threat of minorities and reduce their recognition as victims of institutional racism. The eighth chapter explores the Covid 19 pandemic to demonstrate how the pandemic exacerbated existing inequalities. The chapter demonstrates how min­ ority groups are likely to be treated in future crises and how such events can be used to further institutionalise and embed racism and discrimination into existing state structures. The chapter thus demonstrates the ability of new events to create new spheres of institutional racism. The relationship between race, inequality, and injustice is so deeply embedded and dispersed, that as with Covid 19, these struc­ tures shape and contour new phenomenon according to predefined categories of inferiority and their resultant lack of recognition, rights, and humanity. Poor treatment that results from structural racism is even more concerning given that there are higher rates of hypertension in black populations, diabetes in south Asians, black women are five times more likely to die during pregnancy than white women, and black people have a greater risk of detention under the Mental Health Act (Go et al., 2014; MBBRACE, 2019; Unnikrishnan et al., 2018). As Becares et al. (2022) contend, the inter­ personal racism and poor treatment provided by healthcare providers has negatively impacted health, with existing literature demonstrating the detri­ mental association of these experiences on health. It could therefore be argued that Covid 19 represents how new and emerging phenomena, far from representing opportunities for the government to promote equality and a universal democratic epistemology, provide further opportunities for the government to create discourses, rules, processes, policies, and laws that reinforce racialised systems of inequality. In summary, the chapter details how the state response to Covid 19 rein­ forced existing inequalities and how rather than explore evidence which demonstrated such differences with the aim of reducing the institutional factors which exacerbated inequalities, the state engaged in epistemic ignorance through removing such evidence as epistemologically unworthy. According to Bonilla-Silva (2012), white power continues to pass through the bodies of ethnic minorities to maintain white privilege. The final chapter explores how the themes in the book can be integrated to form a cohesive understanding of institutional racism which the reader is able to take forward in developing their own reflexivity so that they can recognise, counter, and eliminate the mechanisms that sustain institutional racism. The chapter seeks to disrupt the processes of racialisation through detailing the need for space where minorities can define their own identities and have the power to define themselves. Within this new space of resistance, attention should be given to allowing narratives to emerge according to the language used by victims. This involves recognising how economic and political issues shape institutions and understandings of trauma (Mengel & Borzaga, 2012) to avoid epistemic arrogance and epistemic ignorance. Through deconstructing, decolonising, and reconstruct­ ing the space within which the impact of these processes can emerge, it becomes

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possible to establish a more universally equal epistemological truth. It also allows cumulative impacts to emerge that are no longer shaped, exploited, and interpreted through transient forms of contemporary colonial power and epistemic inter­ pretivism. However, the recognition of impacts also involves addressing the pla­ cement of emotions as being inferior entities. Although recognition, and validation are essential for healing, Dalley (2016: 25) notes, healing comes when the ‘trau­ matized victim finds validation through recognition, and a narrative that not only makes sense of her experience but turns it into the basis for interpersonal solidar­ ity’. Institutional racism leads to multifaceted impacts, and it is only through recognising each layer of oppression that it is then possible to create a space where the full cumulative impacts of these layers can emerge and be heard. On an inter­ personal level it signifies the ability to transfer power to facilitate an unbiased truth and one that remains free of human construction and manipulation. Such a posi­ tion subverts the processes that limit progress thereby allowing one to exercise their agency to contribute to the eradication of larger structures that maintain institutional racism. The chapter highlights how the continued state use of laws, policies, truth, and knowledge maintain conditions of epistemicide and institutional racism and through doing so, they reinforce the traumatic intrusion of the conditions that give rise to victimisation and thus reinforce victimisation. The trauma thus forms the very lens through which the victim encounters the world and works to limit the ability of the victim to place past experiences of victimisation in the past. The continuity of epistemic loss represents nothing less than the death of epistemolo­ gies that would elevate human consciousness and unity through facilitating a uni­ versal epistemology that incorporates emotional intelligence, empathy, and compassion. As the book and chapter demonstrate, if empathy, compassion, and the ability to consider multiple truths and diverse knowledge are markers of epis­ temological progress, then minorities possess these to a greater extent, thereby highlighting how double consciousness represents a progressive and enlightened epistemology. It is argued that through witnessing the impacts of white privilege, institutional racism, and the racialisation of institutions and thus the illusionary status of truth and knowledge, victims are better able to hold a universal episte­ mology, where there is no epistemic loss. In summary, the chapter highlights how a reflexive turn can be constructed through raising awareness of the issues that require thought, exposure, and action to achieve a democratic epistemology and thus, how individual reflex­ ivity can be used to counter the discourses and practices that maintain epistemic imperialism and epistemic injustice to sustain institutional racism.

References Ahmad, A. (1995). The politics of literary postcoloniality, Race & Class, 36 (3), pp. 1–20. Ahmed, S. (2014). Constitutive criminology and the ‘war on terror’, Critical Criminology, 22 (3), pp. 357–371.

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1 TRACING THE ORIGINS OF INSTITUTIONAL RACISM Colonialism, injustice, and power

This chapter contributes to the literature on institutional racism by situating the creation of institutional racism in a discussion about the influence of colonial­ ism on legislation, policies, socialisation, cultural consensus, truth, and knowl­ edge. The chapter starts by exploring how race, colonialism, and slavery contributed to the emergence of institutional racism. The second half of the chapter explores the relationship between knowledge, forms of domination, and the historic and contemporary mechanisms that sustain institutional dis­ crimination. In demonstrating the continuities from colonialism to institutional racism, both in terms of epistemicide and processes, the chapter explores how race continues to maintain the racialisation of institutions. It is detailed how the enlightenment led to the racialisation of truth and knowledge and how epistemic imperialism, white privilege, and white frames have remained as the dominant systems of knowledge and truth. As the book documents, the failure to reach a universal epistemology based on epistemic equality has meant that new concepts, such as white fragility, have emerged to reinforce the perpetrator white privilege perspective as the dominant perspective.

Race According to Hannaford (1996), prior to the social construction of race in the 17th century, religion and language were the most important signifiers of iden­ tity. By the 17th century, race emerged as a concept to separate humanity into distinct identity categories that were either associated with positive character­ istics or negative characteristics. These socially constructed categories came to not only inform beliefs regarding the existence of pre-determined objective characteristics of groups, but also their status, intelligence, and humanity. The construction of race was based on utilising physical traits and physical DOI: 10.4324/9781003187073-1

2 Tracing the origins of institutional racism

differences, such as skin colour and hair type (Schaefer, 2008), with these dif­ ferences leading to the construction of the categories Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid (Gannon, 2016). Thus, each group was differentiated according to physical differences and these differences were seen to represent both beha­ vioural characteristics and biological traits. In the 18th century, race further developed as an ideology. European colonisers and traders travelled around the world and compared physical differences between groups of people to create a hierarchy of races based on physical traits (Young, 2015). Therefore, race as a form of identification continued to evolve to incorporate the hierarchical con­ struction of identity whereby those at the top were labelled as culturally superior, and those at the bottom were labelled as culturally inferior. By the early 18th century, race had become the standardised form of identification (Poliakov, 1982). This period not only marked the creation of race as a hierarchical ideology, but also the emergence of European and Western social constructions being elevated as hierarchical superior forms of knowledge and truth. The European construction of human civilisation constructed Europeans at the top of the hierarchy, Arabs, Indians, and Chinese in the middle and Africans and Aus­ tralian aboriginals at the bottom (Young, 2015). The socially constructed rela­ tionship between race, truth, and knowledge signified a dangerous process whereby those at the bottom of the hierarchy were denied autonomy, thus marking a clear difference in the recognition, rights and humanity afforded to whites and the recognition, rights and humanity afforded to all other groups occupying the middle and bottom of the hierarchy. As the chapter demon­ strates, through using the concepts of recognition, rights, and humanity it is possible to see how the construction of race on physical differences was used to legitimise lower groups deserving less recognition to justify the denial of their rights. The ability to socially construct discourses represented the power to create the mechanisms necessary to ensure the existence of inequality, thereby facilitating the maintenance of white privilege and white frames. The relationship between recognition and rights was further developed from the 1860s onwards when according to Young (2015), race was developed as a cultural ideology to legitimise the appropriation of other territories and the mistreatment of indigenous populations. The appropriation of territory required the creation of rules, procedures, and processes to meet these aims. Practices, rules, procedures, and processes were therefore created to be imple­ mented based on one’s identity and this created inequality based on this iden­ tity. One can therefore possibly conceptualise the creation and implementation of these rules, procedures, and processes as an early example of racialised practices that constitute what would now be defined as institutional racism.

Tracing the origins of institutional racism 3

Scientific racism and eugenics During the 19th century, ethnologists and physical anthropologists employed crude anatomical systems, including measurements of physical bodies, and brain size and volume to try and validate the superiority of whites (Ansell, 2013). By the late 19th century, Francis Galton coined the term eugenics to denote the science of improving the biological constitution of human beings to achieve racial purity (Levine, 2017). Although as Hall (2017) contends, identity is a process that is constantly evolving, as opposed to singular and complete, variations of identity, its processual nature, and the right to define one’s own identity were replaced by crude forms of objective labelling. The objectification of identity denied autonomy by muting the reality of identity being processual and subject to change. Instead, identity was created as a fixed entity that sig­ nified cultural, behavioural, and intellectual traits. The power to define one’s identity and then inferred beliefs regarding their cultural, behavioural, and intellectual traits led to the institutionalisation of these constructs. Within medicine, forced sterilisation was imposed on those believed to be racially inferior to eliminate reproduction and restrictions were imposed on marriage (Bashford & Levine, 2010). One can conceptualise the period as introducing different rules, procedures, and processes for those constructed as racially inferior, and therefore the period marking the normalisation of racialised prac­ tices. The constructed association between lower races and biological and cul­ tural inferiority was taken further through the work of Lombroso, when he attempted (but failed) to associate race with criminality through finding the criminal gene (Lombroso, 1876 cited in Fischer et al., 2020). These ideologies marked the existence of epistemic arrogance, whereby the validity of con­ structed ideologies wasn’t determined by whether they were proven facts, but rather, their validity and thus acceptance as the truth was determined by the identity and thus epistemic status of those making such claims. Eugenics was increasingly used to inform public policies during the preWorld War I period and the interwar period (Bashford, 2013), with terms such as ‘survival of the fittest’ becoming accepted as evidence of the genetic super­ iority of white races (Rattansi, 2020). The period marked the institutionalisa­ tion of epistemic injustice. As Bashford (2013) notes, there was an increase in policies which reflected racist discourses that constructed some groups as intel­ lectually inferior, and thus as lacking agency to justify their unequal treatment in policies. This relationship between inferior construction, policies to reflect constructed inferiority, and the resultant unequal treatment became normalised practice. It became the norm for western constructions to be privileged and implemented into public policies, which not only ensured the denial of recog­ nition, rights, and humanity for some groups in terms of constructed discourse, but also the denial of their recognition, rights, and humanity in institutional practice. Modernity was therefore associated with white privilege and such

4 Tracing the origins of institutional racism

privilege was based on the absolute abandonment of the recognition, rights, and humanity of others and thus the victim perspective. The Holocaust symbolised the dangerous relationship between the ideology of race and practices based on race through signifying how eugenics was used to justify the use of extreme state violence and genocide. Eugenics led to pow­ erful discourses that were used to formulate laws, such as the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 which criminalised interracial marriage in many parts of the United States (Stollznow, 2020). The creation of these ideologies, their maintenance via institutional rules and procedures, and silencing their impacts were all based on denying the voices of groups and creating a relationship whereby it became common and acceptable to create institutional policies to oppress other groups. The institutionalisation of race led to institutional racism being embedded in all aspects of law and controlling things such as interracial blood transfusions (Guglielmo, 2015). However, the institutionalisation of race not only institutionalised the lesser unequal treatment of non-white groups, but this also ensured the better treat­ ment and thus privilege of whites. The removal of recognition via discourses of race and eugenics meant that societal discourses were refined to the truth and knowledge of those at the top of the hierarchy. Given the invisibility of lower groups and the non-existence of equality, the institutionalisation of white pri­ vilege was normalised which led to the invisibility of both the creation and maintenance of institutional racism. The power of these discourses and ideolo­ gies in transcending visibility (as the discussion on post colonialism demon­ strates) represents the extent to which inequality became part of dominant knowledge and truth. This created the reality whereby discourses and claims to knowledge also became colonised, with their worthiness not being based on validity but upon the identity of the individual.

Colonialism Colonialism marked the use of brutal practices over a 500-year period to con­ trol and exploit populations for economic gain (Smith, 2021; Young, 2015). Colonialism involved the existence of transient power between socially con­ structed discourses and institutional rules, and procedures, with both reinfor­ cing the creation and existence of illusionary truths and knowledge. As Foucault (1980) contends, discourses within the colonial project produced and shaped rules, systems, and procedures. It could therefore be argued that just as these practices led to the physical control of territories, as Foucault (1980) contends, they also led to the entire domination of the foundation on which knowledge is produced. As Loomba (1998: 57) argues, ‘colonialism reshaped existing structures of human knowledge. No branch of learning was left untouched’… ‘like the functioning of ideology itself, simultaneously a mis­ representation of reality and its reordering’. Colonialism therefore had a dan­ gerous and powerful impact on knowledge. It instilled a system of knowledge

Tracing the origins of institutional racism 5

that was based on privileging some identities and constructing as normal the denial of recognition, rights, and humanity of other groups. Thus, the rules, procedures and policies that emerged during this period weren’t based on prin­ ciples of equality, they were based on institutionalising the ideology of race. As Cannella and Viruru (2004) state, British imperialism would signify those deemed civilised and those deemed uncivilised. As this book demonstrates, institutions never emerged as prioritising equality, their modern birth was based on furthering British interests and thus prioritising British recognition, rights, and humanity at the expense of all other groups. Cannella and Viruru (2004) highlight the relationship between British imperialism and objective labelling, whereby such labelling was also signified as the truth. This reduced the possibility of overcoming and countering such dis­ courses. In this social construction, identity instantly informed one’s right to recognition, rights, and humanity, with white privilege working to ensure that oppressed groups were silenced through their identity alone. Colonialism thus marked the emergence of epistemic imperialism by controlling the processes through which knowledge and truth came to exist and ensuring that identity determined knowledge and truth. Colonialism therefore had economic, cultural, and intellectual consequences. As Smith (2021) argues, dehumanisation was used to justify colonialism along with moral claims of civilising dehumanised subjects. The creation and use of words such as civilised led to whole popula­ tions being labelled as inferior. Colonialism carefully and cleverly constructed an ideology that was so powerful (partially because there was little possibility of disputing it) that academic movements such as post colonialism and critical race theory have had to be created to advocate the recognition, rights, and humanity of colonised groups (as highlighted in the next chapter). Racism was institutionalised, with colonisers forcing people off their traditional lands and imposing their language, culture, and religion on indigenous people to enforce their own culture as the dominant one (Stollznow, 2020). Systems of classifica­ tion were used to inform the relationship, rules, and procedures which came to govern interactions between indigenous societies and imperialist powers (Smith, 2021). These rules and systems of governance became forms of control and mechanisms through which colonial powers could maintain their oppression of indigenous societies. According to Mohanram (1999), by 1800 55% of the earth’s land surface had been claimed by the imperial powers of western and southern Europe.

Slavery The construction of race as scientific truth was used to legitimise slavery. The imperialist duty was constructed as exploiting countries for their raw materials, manpower, and resources and exporting civilisation to these countries (Young, 2015). Slavery became the dominant system of labour and was institutionalised via the transatlantic slave trade and codes. In 1705, the Virginia Assembly created

6 Tracing the origins of institutional racism

the slave code as a system for the institutionalisation of racial categories, hier­ archies, and classifications to justify slavery (Rugemer, 2013). By the 18th century, commercial enterprise was guided by imperial politics which were operationalised into an increased number of institutions and policies and by the late 18th century, there was an African population of around 10,000 in port cities including London, Bristol, and Liverpool (Fryer, 1984). The institutionalisation of race for economic reasons led to black women being forced to reproduce to create more slaves to create more wealth (Roberts, 2017). Slavery generated huge wealth for British traders and this wealth led Britain to become a dominant political and military power (Rattansi, 2020). To facilitate slavery policies were created to enable the buying, selling, and transfer of slaves and thus the period marked the creation and introduction of policies and procedures to maintain and exacerbate white privilege, power, and wealth. According to Gilroy (2002), where state institutions create and impose racial categories, the struggle against racism will also be a struggle against the state. By the 1880s, imperialism was the dominant foreign policy of Britain (Young, 2015). The state was the core instigator, and the monopolisation of discourses and truth can be witnessed from the following quote by Baron Cranworth who claimed that he and his fellow settlers brought progress and modernity to the peoples of the East African highlands. ‘We give justice where injustice ruled. We give law and order where the only law was the law of strength. We give Christianity, or a chance of it, where Paganism ruled’ (Cranworth, 1912 cited Parsons, 2010: 1). The discourses around race, slavery and colonialism con­ tinued to create illusions to legitimatise brutal systems of inequality. These constructions of colonialised groups were purposeful in legitimising European powers as saviours in facilitating the existence of civilisation, justice, and peace in the territories they conquered. The institutionalisation of race at the level of the state meant that for race and the policies which maintained racial inequality to be challenged the state itself had to be challenged.

Racist policies The British state continued to utilise the ideology of race to justify the control and oppression of colonial populations. According to Cannadine (2002), not only did the British empire use policies based on the hierarchical construction of races, which ordered races according to grades of superiority, but the idea of hierarchical structures and thus ordering groups according to pre-specified socially constructed categories was also used in British society. As Sherwood (2001: 10) contends, ‘modernity and scientific rationality became entwined with European progress, with the contours of both being defined by European powers….’ ‘The writers, philosophers, economists, scientists and politicians’…. ‘and the formal education system, all played their role in producing this new national ideology of beneficent imperialism, of English superiority’. This marked the dispersal of the ideology of race throughout British institutions.

Tracing the origins of institutional racism 7

However, this institutionalisation was strengthened by ensuring that future generations would accept white privilege and white frames as ontologically neutral. The control of knowledge and truth was secured through the sociali­ sation of future generations and Britain’s schools promoting English superiority towards groups they defined as inferior (Sherwood, 2001). The intersectionality between imperialist policies and national policies acted to not only justify colonialism, but also to create the foundations whereby British institutions, socialisation, and cultural discourses all incorporated the ideology of race. This domestic institutionalisation was purposeful because as Weiner (2012) states, European nations altered their laws to create the foundations for racial policies. The institutionalisation of imperialist discourses and the creation of imperialist laws led to race riots against black communities in 1919 (Webster, 2011), thereby demonstrating how the creation of such policies and laws dispersed negative views of black communities into society. However, imperialist discourses weren’t just prevalent in policies and laws, but also in state discourses and election campaigns, with the Conservative cabinet considering election slogans such as ‘Keep Britain White’ in 1955 (Deakin, 1975). Following the period of mass migration from the Common­ wealth to Britain in the post‐war period, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 was introduced to restrict the migration of black and Asian citizens from the Commonwealth to prevent what the Conservatives called ‘a coloured inva­ sion of Britain’ (Hampshire, 2005). British perceptions of black and Asian Commonwealth migrants scarcely acknowledged the imperial history that con­ nected them to Britain, with a survey in 1948 finding that only 49% of indivi­ duals questioned could name a colony (Webster, 2005). Therefore, even during this period the continuities between colonialism and domestic policies and laws wasn’t recognised and this contributed to a complete denial of how institutions were constructed to reflect the larger imperialist project. The denial of the past shaped and institutionalised epistemic imperialism. It facilitated epistemic arrogance and the perpetrator perspective being so powerful and dominant that it dismissed history and created the idea of the privileged as victims of a possible invasion. It also embedded techniques of denial and what can be called mechanisms of maintaining white privilege through socialising both in cultural discourses and institutions. These techniques came to form white frames, and the ability to use power and epistemic imperialism to create the illusionary appearance of knowledge and truth to maintain white privilege. Such control over knowledge reinforced political, institutional, and societal inequality and injustice. Such a climate facilitated openly racist policies, such as the racist Tory candidate in 1964 that used the slogan ‘If you want a Nigger for a neighbour vote Labour’ (Gilroy, 2002: 100). In 1971, a clause was introduced where the right to abode in Britain became confined to those with a parent or grandparent born in Britain (Williams, 2015). This clause restricted the number of black commonwealth citi­ zens because it was a requirement they were unable to meet, in contrast with white commonwealth citizens who were more likely to be able to meet this requirement.

8 Tracing the origins of institutional racism

The 1981 British Nationality Act further institutionalised racial inequality through forming ‘the basis for some of the most discriminatory and dehumanising state practices to take place on British soil in the modem era’ (Tyler, 2010: 70). Thus, new legislation and policies further ingrained British imperialist values into British society, with legislation and policies, and socialisation and cultural consensus all maintaining and reinforcing epistemic imperialism.

Adoption of a racialisation perspective Promoting imperialist values through socialisation and ensuring that laws and policies also reflected such values dispersed the ideology of race throughout society. This grounding not only ensured that societal discourses reflected those perpetuated within structures, but also that structures were constructed to include and maintain epistemic imperialism. It could therefore be argued that contemporary analysis and attempts to counter institutional racism require a historical focus which explores how the ideology of race was central to the creation of institutions. Failures in exploring these continuities maintain the illusionary disjuncture between colonialism and contemporary institutions, and therefore how epistemic imperialism continues to operate as a brutal system that produce inequalities. However, this disjuncture also masks the harm of white privilege as forms of power that maintain systems of inequality. To counter institutional racism, it is imperative that the mechanisms that create and maintain institutional racism are dismantled. In obscuring both the creation and maintenance of institutional racism, white privilege and epistemic imperi­ alism work to ensure that knowledge and truth reflect racial hierarchy. In highlighting such claims to knowledge and truth as partial truths and providing a universal epistemology to demonstrate the existence of such parti­ ality, the book advocates a perspective which scrutinises and makes visible illusions as systems of power. Exploring the contemporary existence of pro­ cesses which mirror colonial practices allows the categories, labels, truths, and knowledge inherent in epistemic imperialism to be pushed aside, in favour of analysing entities, including legislation and policies, and socialisation and cul­ tural consensus for racialisation. As previously stated, although colonialism had a horrific impact, it also had ideological consequences in creating processes, such as racialisation which would continue to produce racial inequality cen­ turies later. The process of racialisation doesn’t merely maintain and reinforce the racial hierarchy, but as Omi and Winant (2014) contend, racialisation is the extension of racial meaning to resources, cultural objects, emotions, bodies, and organisations. It is premised on stereotyping identity, and thus reducing the capacity define one’s own identity and existence. Racialisation has also evolved to include signifiers of cultural and religious identity, as the identity from which to construct the hierarchical divisions that attribute negative characteristics to those at the bottom of the hierarchy and positive characteristics to those at the top of the hierarchy. The use of racialisation affords the analytical scrutiny and

Tracing the origins of institutional racism 9

deconstruction necessary to reveal the existence of epistemic imperialism. In offering deconstruction, it allows groups to be observed in terms of categories, and questions to be asked regarding how these groups are formulated. Have groups been socially constructed to possess certain characteristics? If so, what are these? It also facilitates the analysis of truth and knowledge and thus social power alongside the social construction of groups. For example, are some groups socially constructed as representing inferiority and some groups as representing superiority? And ultimately who constructs and decides? What are the discourses presented by the state? Racialisation allows us to deconstruct power relations, whist also allowing the intersectionality between this racism and other groups racism to be articulated. In facilitating the emergence of such intersectionality, it becomes possible to highlight how processes of racialisation exist for multiple groups and thus, the contemporary manifestations of the harmful practices established during colonialism.

The origins of institutional racism The chapter now explores the relationship between knowledge, forms of dom­ ination, and historic and contemporary mechanism of institutional discrimina­ tion. The chapter deconstructs this relationship and demonstrates how the enlightenment contributed to the racialisation of truth and knowledge and therefore, the colonisation of knowledge and truth. In highlighting how epis­ temic imperialism, white privilege, and white frames all rely on the racialisation of truth and knowledge, the discussion demonstrates how any attempts to dis­ mantle the mechanisms which maintain institutional racism must involve the redistribution of this power through the development of a universal epistemol­ ogy. Although race is a social construct, racialisation continues to exist. As Maldonado-Torres (2010) argues, coloniality should be understood as a form of power that continues to exert imperial power and determine how culture, and knowledge production exist. Therefore, although coloniality was a macro ideology, it informed micro forms of power to create a world that prioritised colonial knowledge and truth as the dominant global system of truth and knowledge. As Alcoff (2017: 400) contends, ‘modern European philosophy emerged from a context of epistemic injustice toward non- European societies, and this injustice’ perpetuated ideas about the ‘intellectual superiority of Eur­ opean-American philosophy’. In racialising knowledge and truth, colonialism categorised who could contribute to the truth, thus developing epistemicide as a necessary aspect of conquest. The abandonment of a universal democratic epistemology meant that conquests could take place without the recognition, rights, and humanity of colonised populations being considered. However, the creation of epistemic imperialism at the expense of a demo­ cratic universal epistemology wasn’t seen as a temporary mechanism solely necessary to legitimise colonialism. The need to colonise knowledge and truth were viewed as being required to maintain white superiority beyond

10 Tracing the origins of institutional racism

colonialism. This led to knowledge systems, such as schools and universities, becoming mechanisms through which children would undergo imperialist socialisation (Smith, 2021). Thus, power, domination and oppression were dis­ persed through all spheres of social life to maintain white patriarchal possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2004). Race therefore became a way of regulating society, with disciplinary mechanisms, such as institutions enforcing biological con­ structs of oppression. The dispersal of race meant that western knowledge became structured in dichotomies and polarities, such as good vs. evil, being vs. nothing, presence vs. absence, truth vs, error, identity vs. difference and within these constructions the second term in each pair was conceptualised as being a negative representation of the first and as possessing less (Derrida, 1981). The purposeful dispersal of race into institutions meant that whiteness was not just embedded in institutions, but it was also constructed as being the norm through which all other identities would be measured, compared, and contrasted (Bhopal, 2018). The normalisation of this process and indeed its institutionali­ sation, meant that ideological, cultural, political, and social mechanisms were created which reflected the normalisation and acceptance of dichotomies and hierarchical orderings. However, this normalisation and acceptance, by virtue of marginalising and oppressing a universal epistemology, was legitimised as natural and being void of human manipulation and construction. The silencing of those within the second pairing meant that their recognition, rights, and humanity were invi­ sible, thus facilitating the creation of an illusionary universal epistemology. This illusionary universal epistemology maintained dichotomies as normal and natural constructs, and along with the process of racialisation, systems of clas­ sification were normalised and their implications for damaging a cosmopolitan humanity were concealed. The power of these processes of institutionalisation meant that to challenge and indeed dismantle institutional racism, one would have to first demonstrate the existence of illusionary universal epistemology and second, make visible how the creation of institutions was dependent on dichotomies and hierarchical orderings that contributed to the creation and existence of epistemic imperialism as epistemic universalism. It was therefore the extent of the systematic infusion of these ideologies that would protect their existence through ensuring that institutional racism could never be eradicated by adapting a few regulatory mechanisms. Further, the widespread prevalence of these mechanisms meant that highlighting their breadth and depth could be judged as paranoid and untrue, and where recognition of such claims did exist, the inability to adapt ideologies which reflected the foundations of institutions could be used to legitimise white helplessness. The depth and breadth of these ideologies within institutions has meant that attempts to dismantle institutional racism have had to delve deeper into exploring the difficulties in eliminating institutional racism, whilst simulta­ neously trying to counter new contemporary mechanisms which reinforce these ideologies. New ideological forms of power, such as white frames, which

Tracing the origins of institutional racism 11

incorporate hierarchical orderings and dichotomies have developed as further mechanisms through which to maintain white patriarchal possession and dis­ connect contemporary institutional discriminatory practices from historical forms of domination. This disjuncture has served the purpose of allowing these systems of domination to continue without the ideology inherent in white frames, and their resultant impacts being linked to a history based on brutal forms of domination. It also serves to create the anonymous appearance of such mechanisms of power, thus concealing responsibility and the role of human agency in creating and maintaining such practices. Their illusionary appearance as neutral and the removal of responsibility maintains epistemic ignorance and thus the purposeful intention of displaying a lack of understanding. As Better (2008: 24) states far too many whites shield themselves from the ugly and painful reality of racism through cultural blindness and cultural deafness. Cultural blindness and deafness relates to the unwillingness to acknowledge that racism is not simply the resistance of the few to equality for all, but the refusal to wit­ ness the imbedded inequality within the very social institutions that main­ tain the society. Through using power to construct knowledge and truth, the rigid colonial templates of knowledge and truth afforded through white frames facilitate the construction of racism as a single event phenomenon, where there must be an identifiable actor and an identifiable rule, procedure and / or process which led to the event. Such blindness and deafness render invisible the breadth and depth of institutional discrimination and inequalities and, equally as importantly, the knowledge and truth of those that occupy the second dichotomy and thus, the victim perspective. As Lawrence (1996a: 239) states domination occurs when the ruling class gains the consent of the domi­ nated classes through a system of ideas that reinforces the morality or inevitability of the existing order. This ‘interest theory’ sees ideology as a consciously wielded weapon, an intellectual tool that a group uses to enhance its political power by institutionalizing a particular view of reality. According to Outlaw (2007: 198), the perpetuation of this knowledge facilitated ‘social ordering as forms of authoritative ‘knowledge’…and maintained ‘the elaboration of epistemologies by which to produce and legitimate ignorance’. Education not only institutionalised English ‘superiority towards a hierarchy of others’ (Sherwood, 2001: 11), but it also socialised white ignorance (Outlaw, 2007). The white ignorance that is part of epistemic imperialism and denies the systematic nature of institutional racism, including its creation, maintenance, and impacts is another continuation from the colonial era that requires decon­ struction, and acknowledgement. It could therefore be argued that the

12 Tracing the origins of institutional racism

mechanisms that maintain the racial contract have evolved to include white ignorance and white fragility as mechanisms that prioritise white superiority, knowledge, and truth. As Mills (1997) argues the Racial Contract functions to create an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of cognitive dysfunc­ tions, that function psychologically and socially to produce a world where whites are unable to comprehend and understand the world they have made. According to Sullivan and Tuana (2007: 2), these cognitive dysfunctions also conceal how white people ‘benefit from its racial hierarchies, ontologies, and economies’ to inform the global schemata of white disempowerment and white fragility. As Cannella and Viruru (2004: 13) argue, after physical decolonisation occurred, it was impossible for states to represent their precolonial forms, because ‘colonization transformed and impoverished the structure of econo­ mies, generated privileged knowledges and discourses, and established imperi­ alist institutions. Peoples, cultures, and countries changed’. Thus, epistemic imperialism continued to function to socialise and disperse denials of privilege and wider colonial ideologies into public discourse. These denials via white ignorance not only had implications for understandings of the past and the multi-faceted impacts of colonialism, but also for understandings of the con­ temporary world and the future.

The enlightenment To understand how epistemic imperialism emerged, one must explore the role of the enlightenment in socially constructing an illusionary knowledge and truth as a universal knowledge and truth. The enlightenment is commonly understood as a period of intellectual progress and social change in the 18th century. The period marked a shift away from religious ideologies with scholars, philosophers of sci­ ence, and anthropologists creating theories and models that conceptualised human civilisation as progressing toward a scientific worldview (Sera-Shriar, 2018). The shift from religion to science changed understandings of human capacity, with human motivation and human action now being equated with free will, reason, and rationality (Rattansi, 2020). This reconceptualisation of the individual pro­ moted the belief that human action is the product of self-interest and individual autonomy, and therefore the state could regulate society through the rule of law (Smith, 2021). However, the capacity for individual autonomy, reason, and rationality was racialised. Indigenous people constructed as lacking capacity were subjected to civilisation programmes and in contrast, people constructed as civi­ lised were afforded more legal and political rights (Tsosie, 2017). The racialisation of human capacity ensured that imperialism would be one of the lasting legacies of the enlightenment (Smith, 2021). The operationalisation of imperialist ideologies and colonial discourses meant that new mechanisms were created through which to otherise sections of the population, including women. As Chakrabarty (2008) highlights, one of the by-products of modernism was to disempower women because women’s knowledge, and thus women, was constructed as not having the

Tracing the origins of institutional racism 13

capacity to be rational. The enlightenment reproduced earlier discriminatory ideologies, namely the use of dichotomies from which to privilege the primary identity and discrimination and disempower the second identity. However, such constructions were legitimised through the claim that they represented science, and progress towards civilisation and modernity. It could therefore be argued that it wasn’t only the introduction of discriminatory practices which caused harm, but also their construction and existence as ontologically objective entities. As this chapter demonstrates, the existence of such processes as representing science, as opposed to human interest and human construction, facilitated their construction as ideological neutral. Thus, women and other disempowered groups were constructed as occupying the second less privileged positions because of their limited capacities, with such ideologies represented as the truth. The enlightenment facilitated the construction of epistemic imperialism by embedding white privilege into the core fundamental ideas upon which society progressed, whilst also normalising the creation and existence of such privilege. It therefore not only contributed to discriminatory impacts, but also the creation of processes whereby certain knowledges and discourses continued to be privileged. As Can­ nella and Viruru (2004: 26) explain, ‘categorizations of knowledge emerged from the Enlightenment into so-call disciplines, as if the categorizations were truths that explained chunks of reality that should be discovered and known by uni­ versal man’. The enlightenment had the impact of subjecting knowledge and truth to predetermined ideologies relating to categorisation, hierarchy, ration­ ality, and autonomy. The resultant discourses became self-policing regimes that established and maintained their own categories of truth and through doing so, they also established those truths that would be rejected for violating socially constructed truths and norms (Childs & Williams, 2014). In the Foucauldian (2000) sense, this institutionalisation strengthened socie­ ties’ regimes of truth, and its politics of truth, to determine what discourses are accepted as the truth, how one establishes the truth, and the status of those who are accepted as contributing to the truth. Categories of truth and knowl­ edge were policed throughout society, with policies created to regulate society and institutionalise the silencing of those with opposing truths and knowledge. With the enlightenment being constructed as being synonymous with progress, rationality, and reason, opposing truths and knowledge were treated as further examples of lacking a mind capable of understanding the progress of civilisation and modernity. Within this epistemic construction and its resultant reality, the right to speak became shrouded with predetermined criteria which silenced perceptual and experiential forms of knowledge constructed as being outside the boundaries of acceptability and conformity. The period thus marked the institutionalisation of ‘epistemic imperialism as objective and therefore valuefree’ (Tsosie, 2017: 359).

14 Tracing the origins of institutional racism

The enlightenment classification of knowledge The enlightenment reaffirmed the power of western knowledge, and as Semali and Kincheloe (2002) argue, and the use of western science and episteme to interpret all knowledge. All knowledge became subjected to interpretation through white privilege and white frames, which reaffirmed the West as the centre of legitimate universal knowledge. This process facilitated the existence of knowledge that mirrored the hierarchical structure of race to create the mechanisms through which victims’ truths could be obscured and silenced. As Lawrence (1996b: 341) states, ‘the absence of a collective black voice was cen­ tral to the ethnocentric ideology of the European Renaissance and the Enlight­ enment-an ideology that denied Africans their humanity and thereby justified their enslavement’. This disciplining of knowledge eradicated knowledge con­ structed as false or nonknowledge, thereby homogenising the content of knowl­ edge, and establishing the hierarchical existence of knowledge production and different forms of knowledge (Foucault, 2003). This process was institutionalised through all institutions, including modern universities. The resultant typologies of knowledge (Foucault, 2003) functioned to distort reality and dismiss realities which failed to adhere to western social cognition (Mills, 1997). This mis­ representation of reality and its reordering (Loomba, 1998) according to race became the dominant cultural and institutional ideology. The racialisation of knowledge and truth guaranteed white people freedom and legal entitlement in occupying a privileged position within the system (Bhopal, 2018). Thus, core to any understanding of historic and contemporary institutional racism must be the monopoly of knowledge and truth and thus the vested interests of whites to maintain their privilege. Within this monopoly, white ignorance serves to main­ tain white privilege. According to Foucault (2000) we must accept the rejection of the enlightenment as representing progress and instead view it as the battle between multiple valid forms of knowledge that did not lead to the privileging of the most reasoned form. The rejection of progress being achieved encourages scrutiny of the very ideas and mechanisms that maintain institutional racism. It also enables distortions of reality to be explored and understood from epistemic neutral standpoints. Given the inherent control of knowledge and truth available to whites, these systems of distortion have worked to enable whites to not only dismiss alternative realities and standpoints but also to claim such standpoints, thus claiming white victimisation. As previously stated, it is the breadth and depth of institutional racism that facilitates white fragility and helplessness because highlighting the scope of institutional racism leads to pleas of duress and victimisation through not pos­ sessing the ability to change an entire system(s). The ability to move from a perpetrator position to a victim position is further facilitated through white ignorance regarding the creation of institutional racism. As Sullivan and Tuana (2007: 3) contend, ‘white ignorance also impacts social and individual memory’…. ‘A collective amnesia about the past is the result, which supports

Tracing the origins of institutional racism 15

hostility toward the testimony and credibility of non-white people’. The ability to represent the present as a complete disjuncture from the past also promotes the removal of responsibility and the false reality of a legacy that no longer mirrors colonialism and practices such as slavery. The colonisation of truth and knowledge through epistemic imperialism also has implications for under­ standings of the continued and cumulative impacts of institutional racism. According to Mills (1997), silencing is a peculiar evil that not only removes an opinion, but by doing so, it robs humanity of that opinion and truth. The exchange of such truths is vital for achieving a universal epistemology where colonial mechanisms of denying recognition are corrected. The failure to achieve a universal democratic epistemology contributes to epistemic loss and where there is even the slightest of epistemic loss, the knowledge, truth, and legitimate authority of humanity is damaged. The impact of the enlightenment in institutionalising and socialising typologies of knowledge and truth damage the possibility of achieving a modernity epitomised by its collective breadth of knowledge and truth. Given the implications of these mechanisms for restricting the exchange of truth, one can conceptualise these mechanisms as enforcing a power based on a segregated humanity and in turn, maintaining and reproducing a hierarchical humanity. The institutionalisation of typologies that categorise humans ensured that structures were created according to white frames. These white frames repro­ duced typologies of truth and knowledge within institutions to ensure that institutions maintained and re-produced epistemic imperialism. Thus, as Cook (1996: 95) argues, ‘institutions were themselves the source of evil and thus in need of reform’. However, it was the claim of achieving enlightenment and indeed a period where science and evidence became the core ideologies of society that allowed such evil to exist, whilst also silencing those subjected to its impacts. The continuation of harmful oppressive practices can be gleaned from Kings statement: In his famous Letter from Birmingham City Jail King responded that he had almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom in not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Klu Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice…. (King, 1963 cited Cook, 1996: 95) King highlights the normalisation of epistemic imperialism by stating its exis­ tence amongst those claiming to be moderate. The processes of normalisation, as stated above, flowed from the institutionalisation of epistemic imperialism. In shaping intellectual, educational, social, economic, and political ideologies and policies, the very foundations of society embedded mechanisms of raciali­ sation. Thus, even where minorities administered rules and policies, these would still constitute a form of colonialism because they would use the same dominant ‘structural power relations’ that existed in society (Peller, 1996).

16 Tracing the origins of institutional racism

Although these racialised mechanisms became taken for granted and established norms of organising structures (Bonilla-Silva 1997; Sewell, 1992) and establish­ ing order within institutions, it was the use of enlightenment ideologies which led to these mechanisms adopting an illusionary appearance. The fight to counter institutional racism incorporates the need to not only dismantle and eradicate these structures but also the white frames, white privi­ lege, and epistemic imperialism which condition, control, and restrict the knowledge and truth associated with institutional racism. As Wooten and Couloute (2017) contend, the under theorisation of how race has influenced the formation of hierarchies and processes within institutions can be attributed to the need for institutions, including academia, to maintain the colonisation of knowledge. Within educational institutions, the belief that everyone’s ideas are received equally bears little resemblance to academic practices, with most institutions practicing forms of epistemic oppression that suppress the epistemic agency of some group, while elevating that of others (Collins, 2019). The illu­ sionary appearance of institutions as neutral entities has meant that although institutional racism has gained political and social recognition, the failure to consider how the foundations of institutions maintain and perpetuate epistemic bias has limited efforts to dismantle institutional racism. Moreover, the exis­ tence of epistemic imperialism hasn’t been conceptualised as damaging human­ ity through the loss of democratic truths and knowledge. It could be argued that the epistemic bias in this construction is visible from the vast dominance of the typology of race to dismantle humanity, and through doing so it dismisses both the commonality and the ethical responsibility of all of humanity to ensure equality. As Cook (1996: 86) highlights: we can choose to structure our institutions in hierarchy and dominance and limit our understanding of others and ourselves…or we can choose to alle­ viate the alienation and loneliness that stifle our societal needs and impulses, by restructuring those institutions and practices which distance us from others and cause us to perceive others with trepidation and suspicion. The lack of recognition further facilitates ignorance, and instead of empathy, commonality, and compassion shaping perceptions and actions, the perceptual and experimental knowledge of victims are taken as signifiers of their cognitive and behavioural incapacities. Indeed, truth, knowledge, rules, procedures, and practices maintain institutional order, with any instances of disharmony placed at the feet of victims and thus the colonial practice of blaming victims, in par­ ticular their race, for their own victimisation remains a feature of modernity.

Contemporary structures As the chapter has demonstrated, the relationship between power, knowledge, hierarchy, and oppression that were solidified during the enlightenment

Tracing the origins of institutional racism 17

continue today. These continuities and the institutionalisation of epistemic imperialism has made it impossible to eradicate institutional racism without assessing and scrutinising the role of knowledge itself. The presence of illu­ sionary epistemic universalism ensured that knowledge and truth would con­ tinue to be controlled and regulated making possible the existence of contemporary phenomenon such as white fragility. In this distorted reality, white fragility has emerged as a discourse that continues to mask attention to the cumulative impacts of institutional racism. Through exploring con­ temporary concepts and the relationship between these and historic forms of oppression, it is possible to understand how mechanisms of oppression that were established during colonialism, such as liberalism, rather than being era­ dicated, have continued to be reinvented through new ideologies. According to Browning (2000: 153), ‘capitalism has globally dispersed core values of liberalism, such as individuality, rationality, and freedom’, even though as Delgado and Stefancic (2017: 26) argue, many ‘liberals believe in color blindness and neutral principles of constitutional law’…. ‘They believe in equality, especially equal treatment for all persons, regardless of their different histories or current situations’. In projecting structural and institutional equal­ ity, ‘liberalism sees inequality as a natural product of fair competition’ and thus, and socio-biology (Zamudio et al., 2011: 16). The manufacture of socio­ biology as the dominant ideology constructs liberalism as being void of epis­ temic imperialism and thus, the existence of differential outcomes as being natural. Second, this illusionary appearance silences the ability of those that are negatively impacted to speak out. Liberalism operates to protect the structural inequality it creates through protecting its ideological construction. Thus, this construction purposely constructs the ‘structural causes of inequality (such as capitalism, racism, and patriarchy)’ (Zamudio et al., 2011: 16) as neutral to limit their examination and scrutiny. However, the illusionary appearance of neutrality, as opposed to epistemic imperialism shaping truth, knowledge, rules, procedures, and practices facilities the focus of institutional racism on singular entities, as opposed to considera­ tions of how epistemic imperialism shapes all entities within institutions. As Kapoor (2013: 1034) argues, removing any ‘explicit articulation’…. ‘of racial arrangement’… ‘mutes the possibility of invoking the language to identify the phenomenon’. The removal of language has enormous implications for recog­ nition because in the absence of language, there is silence. Thus, the decon­ struction of ‘race’ must involve addressing ‘the persistence of racial classification and stratification in an era officially committed to racial equity and multiculturalism’ (Winant, 2000: 180), because as Goldberg (1992: 559–560) contends, ‘race both establishes and rationalizes the order of difference as a law of nature’. Therefore, contemporary attempts to dismantle institutional racism must adopt a decolonised standpoint in accepting that the process of coloniali­ sation continues and the present also requires decolonisation. This standpoint necessitates an approach to contemporary mechanisms of power that

18 Tracing the origins of institutional racism

encompass dismantling the ‘legacy of formal colonialism’ (Collins, 2019: 109), and the white norms that have ‘been ingrained into white consciousness’ and continue to ‘legitimise the domination of non-whites’ (Crenshaw, 1996: 115). Such a standpoint could also be conceptualised as adopting a double con­ sciousness which recognises the normalised reality, whilst also holding the ability to explore and understand the distorted illusionary reality. Such an ability includes the need to explore how different concepts form inter-related webs of oppression. Therefore, concepts of ‘equality, freedom, individual rights, and meritocracy are firmly embedded in Western culture and society’ and ‘permeate Western systems of knowledge and values, as well as political, legal, economic, and educational policies’, to maintain systems of inequality (Zamudio et al., 2011: 15). However, the treatment of such concepts cannot be limited to examining their ideology alone, as argued throughout the book, explorations must seek to ground ideologies by examining the crea­ tion, maintenance, and impact of ideologies. Grounding entails recognising how as Ioanide (2015: 18) states, these concepts become common sense truths that are inherited through ‘family, social, and cultural contexts that repeat, deploy, and validate them’. It therefore considers how ideologies are maintained and reinforced to facilitate the oppression of victims, because as Browning (2000: 157) argues: liberal neutrality does not guarantee the equal expression of all stand­ points’ because ‘the viewpoints and ways of life of cultural minorities can be overridden by the dominant individualistic perspective of liberalism and liberal neutrality can serve as an alibi or excuse for a lack of direct action to tackle entrenched but unintended forms of racism and sexism. Similarly, neoliberalism assumes a post racial society where race ceases to exist, and equality enables individuals to be responsible for their actions (Shafer, 2017). Neoliberalism emphasises individualism, enterprise, and responsibility, with individuals being responsible for their physical, emotional, and mental health, and any difficulties they may experience such as poverty, illness and / or victimisation (Shantz, 2010). By completely neglecting structural factors, this ideology further fuels socio-biology as being determined by one’s ability to achieve. By emphasising the inability of the oppressed to achieve social mobi­ lity, capitalism and liberalism create and maintain a perpetrator perspective whereby the system is viewed from the privileged position of those in power. The lack of a victim perspective not only conceals the various impacts of insti­ tutional racism, but also revictimises victims in blaming them for their own victimisation. Socio-biology obscures state responsibility to justify the privatisation of social welfare whereby responsibility for social welfare is shifted to global companies that prioritise profit and individual responsibility (Bhopal, 2018; Davies & Bansel, 2007).

Tracing the origins of institutional racism 19

The transference of power to global corporations further removes the state from having to acknowledge, accept and challenge how race, inequality, and discrimination form structural conditions that limit one’s ability to navigate the social mobility ladder. Privatisation allows any exacerbation of inequalities and discrimination to be attributed to private companies. Thus, as Bhopal (2018: 1) argues, ‘policy making within a neoliberal context works to protect whiteness and disadvantage those from black and minority ethnic groups’. Neo-liberalism therefore projects a post racial society whilst introducing policies which exacerbate inequalities and maintain white privilege. With capitalism further strengthening the ideologies that maintain socio­ biology, the space within which a victim perspective can emerge and exist becomes further restricted. Socio-biology regulates knowledge and truth and in doing so, it affords no recognition of the institutional mechanism that maintains racism or the impacts of these mechanisms. Instead, the socio-bio­ logical perpetrator perspective emphasises the market and competition as inferring a meritocracy void of race, whereby individual progress and success are premised upon individual characteristics as opposed to hierarchies of racial privilege. As Gotanda (1996) states, meritocracy isolates race and racism to project fairness and equal opportunities. This falsehood is further perpetuated through the existence of mechanisms that regulate acceptable knowledge and thus, any attempt to articulate impacts and / or autonomy rests on victims investing in the very structures, concepts, and ideologies which create and maintain inequality. Victims are forced to utilise the lan­ guage of the mechanisms and ideologies which contribute to their victimisa­ tion. As Ladson-Billings (2000) argues, because minorities occupy a liminal space between marginalised culture and the dominant culture, they recognise interest convergence at structural levels and individual levels. The continued colonisation of truth and knowledge to maintain illusionary equality and fairness lead to ‘self-blame and other self-destructive attitudes’ (Crenshaw, 1996: 117). Meritocracy therefore functions as a racialised system to produce a hierarchical system, one which appears devoid of any earlier tendencies for racial hierarchy and yet, produces the same outcomes. It could therefore be argued that race and the processes associated with race continue to permeate throughout society under the guise of liberalism and its associated concept of meritocracy. However, where previously the period of colonialism represented the open display of race as a legitimate and authentic discourse, in con­ temporary society, discourses are created to appear neutral, equal, and fair and as the next chapter demonstrates, such constructions limit and hide the existence and impacts of institutional racism.

20 Tracing the origins of institutional racism

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2 UNDERSTANDINGS OF INSTITUTIONAL RACISM Theories and concepts

The last chapter discussed the influence of colonialism on legislation, policies, socialisation, cultural consensus, truth, and knowledge. As a system of domination and monopolisation, colonialism institutionalised white privilege. As Better (2008) states, whiteness then maintains unearned inherited privilege by merging with institutions to produce and reproduce institutional racism. Given the impact of colonialism in creating a distorted illusionary reality that is maintained through the colonisation of truth and knowledge, this chapter explores theories and con­ cepts that facilitate a universal epistemology through the decolonisation of truth and knowledge. It draws on critical race theory and post colonialism as perspec­ tives that facilitate the naming and exploration of the creation, maintenance, and cumulative impacts of institutional racism. The chapter then explores the institu­ tionalisation of white privilege, with Bailey (1998) defining privilege as the advan­ tage individuals gain from membership to the dominant group, with access to institutional power and resources that don’t exist for marginalised groups. The chapter details how the white frames of white distancing strategy, white fragility, denial of agency and responsibility, white ignorance, white solidarity, and denials of cumulative impacts are all mechanisms through which white privilege, institu­ tional racism, and the racialisation of institutions are sustained. The second half of the chapter explores epistemic imperialism and how epistemic injustice, hermeneutical injustice, epistemic arrogance, epistemic vio­ lence, epistemic ignorance, and epistemic oppression maintain the colonisation of truth and knowledge leading to an epistemology of victims that incorporates cumulative victimisation and violations of epistemic trust. It is argued that through witnessing and experiencing the impacts of white privilege, institu­ tional racism, and the racialisation of institutions, and thus the illusionary status of truth and knowledge, victims are better able to possess a universal DOI: 10.4324/9781003187073-2

24 Understandings of institutional racism

epistemology and how it is the ability to hold such a position that leads to vast harms to epistemic trust.

Critical race theory Critical race theory not only questions the racialisation of contemporary structures such as the law, but it also critically explores the construction of truth and knowledge. It highlights the racialisation of groups and how knowledge, truth, power, autonomy, recognition, rights, and humanity remain tied to the hierarchy of race. In demonstrating the continued existence between construction and lived experience, critical race theory highlights the need ‘to take an oppositional stance by relying on one’s true existential life’ (Calmore, 1996: 321) and thus, victims’ perceptual and experiential reality. By providing a space for ‘one’s true existential life’ (Calmore, 1996: 321), it represents an approach which lays bare the reality of harmful processes such as epistemic arrogance denying victims agency and the right to speak. There­ fore, it demonstrates the space between the voices that emerge through epis­ temic arrogance and those that emerge without the existence of colonisation, to make visible the need for decolonisation, and the continued lack of uni­ versal epistemology and equality. According to CRT, narratives and counterstories depict the ways in which people of colour experience social, political, and institutional systems differently from dominant group counterparts (Del­ gado and Stefancic, 2017). Through highlighting grounded experiential voices and emotional experiences, CRT provides the space in which the cumulative impacts of such processes can be heard. As stated previously, the silencing of such narratives not only contributes to the colonisation of truth and knowl­ edge, but it also maintains the illusionary appearance of equality, thus ren­ dering claims for equality as invalid and not necessary. However, by recognising the systematic and dispersed nature of racialisation, critical race theory cautions against the use of counter-stories as a standalone tenet of CRT, since stories themselves are likely to be misunderstood or mis­ interpreted without being properly unpacked (Burrell-Craft, 2020). For exam­ ple, narratives of victimisation are often interpreted through white privilege which conditions the language and discourses placed on these narratives to facilitate their emergence to reinforce white privilege. To allow narratives to emerge without reinforcing white privilege, critical race theory advocates the need to ‘subvert the logic of multiple rationalities—legal, neoliberal, and scien­ tific among others—and their role in reinforcing racism under the guise of integration, assimilation, colorblindness, and, more recently, post-racialism’ (Baszile, 2015: 240). To facilitate the subverting of these colonising rationalities, CRT highlights the need to make visible the motivations for such rationalities. As explored in this book, this not only allows responsibility to be established, indeed an important mechanism in dismantling such rationalities, but it also establishes how the construction of white rationality, fairness, and civilisation

Understandings of institutional racism 25

are processes through which some groups narratives became counter narratives. Critical race theory highlights the role of interest convergence in forming a motivation to maintain white interests through racial inequality (Bell, 1980). CRT therefore provides an understanding of how the existence of illusionary racial equality continues to situate people of colour as the non-dominant group, and whites as the dominant group (Burrell-Craft, 2020). Interest convergence not only historises contemporary discriminatory practices but it also demon­ strates how the desire to establish white privilege continues to exist. The demonstration of such continuities is not only vital to challenging claims to a post-colonial position but also in attributing responsibility and motivation. Critical race theory also highlights the role of the law in maintaining white privilege. As Möschel (2019) contends, critical race theory advocates an exploration of how the law has constructed whiteness, defined who is white, and in what ways social structures socially and legally protect and enforce whiteness. Thus, a critical tenant of CRT is to understand how ideals such as the ‘the rule of law’ and ‘equal protection’ exist in social structures (Crenshaw, 1996). Whiteness therefore remains the only legally protected category, with equal protection serving to maintain an illusion which protects inequality and through doing so, further reinforces the privileging of whiteness. As the case study chapters demonstrate, contemporary laws and policies continue to obscure the institutional racism, injustice, and inequality victims face. Critical race theory attends to the constructed neutral reality of structures, such as the law, thereby encouraging critical explorations which consider the racialisation of the state and the state as the most important mechanism in sustaining white privilege. According to Bracey (2015), critical race theory contends that the state is not racially neutral because it occupies a white institutional space that means every area of the state is racialised and is shaped by racism. In exploring the centrality of the state in maintaining institutional racism, the book highlights how racialised laws and policies maintain inequality, and white privilege. As the book demonstrates, the state had, and continues to have, a primary role in maintaining institutional racism and therefore any perspective which fails to explore the relationship between the state and institutional racism obscures the creation and existence of institutional racism. Omi and Winant’s (1994) Racial State Theory defines the state as incorpor­ ating: 1) governmental institutions and the personal, organisational, and poli­ tical relationships they include, and 2) the social norms and ideologies that legitimate and constrain government action. According to Omi and Winant (1994: 83), the state is a constellation ‘of institutions, the policies they carry out, the conditions and rules which support and justify them, and the social rela­ tions in which they are imbedded’. These conceptualisations of the state include the power of the state in influencing other institutions and societal relations to maintain white privilege. In encouraging the interrogation of all constellations, CRT facilitates the exposure of policies, which upon appearance may seem neutral but facilitate discrimination and contribute to the existence of a

26 Understandings of institutional racism

racialised hierarchy. According to Omi and Winant (1994: 83), state institutions set ideological and historical norms that ‘define the scope of state activity, establish normal procedures for influencing policy, and set the limits of political legitimacy in general’. These limitations normalise white privilege by racialising all aspects of power, including organisational structure, institutional mandates, policies, and ideology (Bracey, 2015). Critical race theory attends to the con­ textual analysis necessary to form a coherent understanding of counter narra­ tives. It privileges these counter narratives through not only revealing the corrosive actions of all actors, including the state in dispersing, and maintaining institutional discrimination, but also through documenting their cumulative oppressive impact through shaping institutions and ideological norms. Critical race theory subverts racialisation processes which prioritise race at the expense of all other identities. Instead, it recognises that ‘racial identity and this form of oppression (racism) intersects with other subordinated identities (such as gender, class, religion, ability/disability, sexual orientation, etc.) and forms of oppression (for example, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc.)’ to influence vic­ tim’s lived experiences (Burrell-Craft, 2020: 13). It therefore highlights cumula­ tive institutional impacts as part of revealing counter narratives that prioritise victims’ perceptions and lived experience. CRT therefore prioritises the victim perspective and a social justice framework (Collins, 2019). As highlighted above, this framework abandons white privilege, and through doing so it exposes the existence of racialised state activities that generate racial conflict, such as liberalism (Bracey, 2015: Collins, 2019). The social justice framework provides a standard through which deviations of social justice can be explored, as well as the active work done to maintain such devia­ tions and their illusionary appearance. Deconstructing both the discourses and processes which facilitate discriminatory practices is premised on critical race theory advocating change. CRT challenges mainstream beliefs about racial injustice, including the belief that blindness to race will eliminate racism, that racism is a matter for individuals, not structural systems, and that one can fight racism without challenging sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression and injustice (Valdes et al., 2002). The book adopts the strands of critical race theory explored to produce an understanding of institutional racism that chal­ lenges the very construction of whiteness and demonstrates how the breadth and depth of institutional racism impacts victims.

Post colonialism The perspective of post colonialism is used to facilitate the aim of this book to explore the prevalence of colonial practices in contemporary institutional racism. As Venn (2006) highlights, post colonialism involves interrogating how the processes that established colonialism and imperialism continue to exist and operate. Post colonialism also highlights the need to ‘trust our own senses, feelings, and experiences, and to give them authority, even (or especially) in the

Understandings of institutional racism 27

face of dominant accounts of social reality that claim universality’ (Lawrence, 1996a: 338). It therefore recognises the continued influence of Western imperi­ alism and domination of economic, political, ideological, and cultural power (Young, 2001). Post colonialism thus offers a way to examine present dis­ criminatory structures and highlights how previous forms of oppression based on knowledge-power-subjectivity have been reproduced to achieve con­ temporary forms of disempowerment. Critical race theory and post colonialism facilitate deconstruction, thereby allowing the relationship between power, status, and whiteness to be explored. However, their existence highlights the continued necessity for a universal epistemology to highlight the extent to which colonialism tarnished every ideological, political, economic, and cultural entity. Without race, racialisation, and colonialism, and the lasting impacts of these ideologies, critical race theory and post colonialism would not exist. However, although these perspectives can be conceptualised as products of these ideologies, so can the continued emergence of new regulatory mechanisms through which to sustain white privilege.

Whiteness This section explores white privilege and the white frames that maintain white privilege. White frames continue to colonise truth and knowledge to maintain hierarchical divisions and ensure that only those at the top of the hierarchy possess the power to contribute to truth and knowledge. The power and status constructed as being inherent to the category white normalises this category to maintain a perpetrator perspective which treats as normal the perceptual and experiential knowledge of whites, such as white grievance. White grievances not only allow perpetrators to claim victimisation, but through doing so, it further dismisses the active role and autonomy of those that maintain discriminatory practices. Whiteness has emerged as a concept which articulates the further abandonment of responsibility by those that maintain inequality. Harris (1995) argues, whiteness is strong and resilient and adapts to new conditions to facil­ itate the normalisation of institutional privileges, societal norms, and racialised hierarchies. It reasserts a perpetrator perspective and does so through affording the perpetrator a level of rights, acknowledgement and thus power that is carefully and cleverly withdrawn from victims, as is demonstrated later through the discussion of epistemic arrogance. By facilitating the veneer of inequality as being autonomous and lacking human construction and human agency, it maintains structural inequality. The construction of whiteness is essential to understanding institutional racism. The first aspect of whiteness that is relevant to understanding institutional racism and inequality is how unconscious bias works to create a distancing strategy from white privilege. White privilege refers to the social advantages, rights, and benefits that come with being a member of the dominant race (Del­ gado & Stefancic, 2017). These advantages have not only become taken for

28 Understandings of institutional racism

granted expectations, but power, resources, formal and informal structures, and procedures have institutionalised these advantages and systems of privilege (Bhopal, 2018). Thus, whiteness possesses social, economic, and cultural forms of domination that maintain and reinforce the position of privilege (Bhopal, 2018). These boundaries form barriers to, amongst other things, the right to speak and be heard. These boundaries also manifest in the law, with claims of following an illusionary equal legal system being one of the most powerful ways in which a distancing strategy exists. As Bell (1996) states, the law masks the consequences of social selection as natural and inevitable. This claim of natural obscures and conceals actions which create and maintain white privilege and in doing so, they create a distancing strategy whereby those that benefit from white privilege can claim that they have had no role in the creation and existence of procedures which contribute to these inequalities. It therefore maintains the epistemology of white ignorance to legitimise and justify violence and dis­ crimination, as opposed to attempting to counter these forms of oppression (Ioanide, 2015). Distancing strategies allow perpetrators to claim no responsi­ bility and where moral responsibility does not exist, white ignorance can. The second facet of whiteness that warrants understanding is white fragility. White fragility involves white people perceiving discussions about racism as a personal attack. This resistance to talking about, acknowledging, and challenging racism has been called white fragility and is characterised by emotions of anger, fear, denial, guilt, argumentation, silence, and the use of other defensive moves by white people when they are challenged about their racism (DiAngelo, 2019). White fragility works to maintain pre-existing racialised mechanisms which judge some groups as valid and worthy of recognition, at the expense of other groups. The resultant impacts on trust, injustice, and recognition are vast. They reduce one’s perception of their own right to be considered worthy, because in the con­ text of white fragility, they are met with a form of resistance embedded and reinforced through socialisation, institutions, rules, procedures, etc. Any exploration and challenging of institutional racism must address white fragility, because white fragility strips away the recognition and humanity that should be afforded to victims and re-focuses and distributes this power to per­ petrators. The refocusing of emotional recognition from denying victims emo­ tions, to recognising the perpetrators emotions serves as an evident example of this shift in power and indeed, the racialisation of power. These processes of silencing and the denial of agency through recognition mirror the processes used in colonialism to produce binaries of recognition, rights, and humanity. How­ ever, the lack of awareness of such processes, let alone action to correct such processes, demonstrates how white fragility facilitates the manipulation of a victim perspective, whereby those that suffer inequality aren’t recognised as victims and those that maintain such inequality are concealed from benefiting from such inequality and, in some cases, recognised as the victims. Such a template denies the victimisation of those that suffer inequality, and the nega­ tive emotions that constitute such victimisation. White fragility recognises the

Understandings of institutional racism 29

vulnerability, anger, and fear associated with white fragility (Tate & Page, 2018). White grievance has emerged as the concept to describe claims for redress for (reverse) discrimination (Gray, 2019). The claim of white grievance draws on white fragility to minimise the vast harm of racism. Rather than focusing on the victimisation of those that suffer inequality and disempower­ ment, attention is shifted to the victimisation of those that maintain inequality and benefit from such inequalities. By claiming white grievance, a perpetrator perspective is enforced and one which again, dismisses the responsibility and role of those that are responsible for racism. According to Tate and Page (2018), white fragility is based on unconscious racism that is created through normalised forms of unconscious bias. However, this denies the possibility of introspection and dismisses the deconstruction that both critical race theory and postcolonialism highlight as being required to challenge the hegemonic discourses which maintain inequality. It also dismisses how other oppressive structures, such as patriarchy have been challenged through changing expectations regarding introspection. As previously stated, the social consensus regarding expected levels of introspection have served as a deterrent in highlighting that ignorance or the past normalisation of such atti­ tudes is no longer socially accepted. The distancing strategy (Yancy, 2015) of white fragility and the white ignorance that maintains white privilege require levels of societal introspection and self-introspection that clearly signal societal ethnic equality. It is therefore imperative that the ontological bias and injustice prevalent in white fragility is named for what it is and claims which validate any part of this process are no longer accepted as being viable. Dismantling this strategy means recognising how the attribution of agency in terms of victimisation and responsibility serve to maintain an illusionary reality which maintains inequality. It also means recognising the extent of whiteness and how it operates to allow perpetrators to deny responsibility and continue stripping power away from victims to maintain their own privilege. The ability of such power, as opposed to contributing to white fragility, should be con­ ceptualised in terms of its impact on those that are the recipients of such racialised power. Recent research highlights the role of privilege and power in suggesting that whites’ perceptions of privilege decrease when motivated (by a self-image threat) to maintain a positive self-image and increase when the motive to maintain a positive self-image is satisfied and thus, the passivity, ignorance, and resistance to white privilege can be attributed to maintaining a positive self-image (Unzueta & Lowery, 2008). However, this involves self­ prioritising actions that mirror those during colonialism based on facilitating the superiority of whiteness, regardless of the harms caused to other groups. The third facet is challenging agency and responsibility, by highlighting the inherent injustice in any actions that maintain privilege and inequality over another group. It is the inherent benefit for whites in all spheres of life which facilitates their grievances, because as Bonilla-Silva (2003: 11) claims, ‘although some whites fight white supremacy and do not endorse white common sense,

30 Understandings of institutional racism

most subscribe to substantial portions of it in a casual, uncritical fashion that helps sustain the prevailing racial order’. The ability to decide to challenge white supremacy highlights choice, and thus the choice to be bystanders or actively work to challenge white supremacy and deny other harmful discourses which perpetuate harm. As Doane (2003: 11) states, ‘even contradictory—forms of ‘whiteness’ may coexist’ and therefore whites can choose to challenge some forms, whilst choosing to maintain others. The protection of some forms of white privilege and the challenging of others can be grasped through an exploration of the intersectionality between class and whiteness. At the end of the 1980s, the white working class were labelled as not wanting to work, law­ less and fearful, and living off the dole (Bonnett, 2000). Some groups can chal­ lenge some forms of white supremacy whilst continuing to gain from the ‘persistence of racial attitudes, the activities (or just as often, the inactivity) of institutions serve to reinforce the new colorblind racism’ (Zamudio & Rios, 2006: 484). An analysis of class facilitates an understanding of the ‘distancing strategy’ because it is the middle classes and those from the higher ends of the social hierarchy that benefit from white privilege. Thus, the ability to either claim white fragility or attribute responsibility to those from lower classes as being the source of racism and oppression represents the extent to which power exists, and the ability to accept or deny responsibility. The fourth facet is the existence of white templates from which to interpret the social world and whiteness. These templates serve to interpret reality, rules, processes, procedures, agency, perceptions, experiences, etc. in such a way as to maintain whiteness. The power to shape what is acceptable and worthy of recognition and what is not can be gleaned from how ‘white ignorance’ shapes and socialises all of society to maintain white privilege. According to Mills (2007: 22) ‘the ‘white’ in ‘white ignorance’ does not mean it has to be confined to white people… . [Ignorance] will often be shared by nonwhites to a greater or lesser extent because of the power relations and patterns of ideological hegemony involved’. Ideological hegemony is stable with pre-existing regulatory templates working to accept knowledge and truths which adhere to hegemonic discourses and dismiss those which deviate from ideological hegemony. This hegemony, with its privileging and de-privileging, exists as a harmful form of power that is continuously reborn through processes of socialisation, with education, as previously stated being at its core. It highlights to those that are de-privileged the extent to which hegemonic consensus works to deny them recognition, rights, and humanity. Within this context, victims exist simply by possessing a certain identity. Expanding on this template, Feagin (2014) notes how white racial frames operate a neoliberal world view that defends white privilege and advantageous structures and conditions as meritorious to place white virtue in direct opposi­ tion to the inferiority of racialised groups. It draws upon social constructs such as meritocracy to create the appearance of equality and therefore socio-biolo­ gical ideologies which locate disadvantage in the individual, as opposed to

Understandings of institutional racism 31

social structures. In doing so, it falsely posits that status is due to individual progress and thus obtainable to all, completing neglecting the role of socio­ economic factors and utilising a colour-blind approach which negates the vast existence of institutional racism. This system of supposed meritocracy is in essence a system of social ordering, with ‘whiteness’ and ‘eurocentrism’—ideological ‘forms of consciousness’—constituting a pervasive worldview generated and maintained over several hundred years of European domination, and embedded in the social structure (Mills, 2017: 105). By highlighting the existence of meritocracy disadvantaged groups’ claims for a reallocation of resources are cast as invalid, and as another request for preferential special treatment (Doane, 2003). This colour­ blind ideology reinforces the meritocratic opportunity structure as neutral and open, and institutions as fair, impartial, and objective in their functioning (Doane, 2003). The colour-blind ideology is premised on upholding a system which privi­ leges whiteness. As Ioanide (2015: 12) states: these epistemologies encourage everyone to know how to ignore knowl­ edge, information, and testimonies about the histories of advantage and disadvantage predicated on racial, gender, sexual, national, citizenship, and religious classification. They produce the failure to see how the fates of different people are ultimately linked. The epistemologies of white ignorance create the templates and boundaries of what is acknowledged and how it is interpreted, and through doing so they continue the colonisation of knowledge. The prioritisation of some groups wasn’t based on accepting the notion of a common humanity and a universal epistemology, rather it was based on accepting and promoting the idea of a common white identity and white soli­ darity. The fifth facet of whiteness is white solidarity which creates unity at the expense of defining those that do not belong. Although whiteness informs how one exists in the world, their life, and understanding of the world (Dyer 1997), it also includes white solidarity—a silent agreement amongst whites to maintain white privilege and not to contribute to white fragility (DiAngelo 2019). This agreement works to protect privilege through failing to recognise how white privilege maintains structural inequality and institutional racism. Thus, as Coates (2011: 12) contends, ‘whites need to explore the various meanings of whiteness’. Unconscious bias works to redirect suffering away from the actual victims and minimise the impact of racism on their lives. It thus reinforces vic­ timisation, with Bell (1996: 306) highlighting the constant suffering victims endure in stating, ‘we call ourselves ‘African Americans’, but despite centuries of struggle, none of us-no matter our prestige or position-is more than a few steps away from a racially motivated exclusion, restriction, or affront’, As stated earlier, the failure to recognise how processes that maintain white privilege permeate throughout society and institutions allow the responsibility for inequality and racism to be falsely labelled as existing in isolated areas of

32 Understandings of institutional racism

society, thereby reducing acknowledgement of the depth and breadth of insti­ tutional racism. Interestingly in a review of research on implicit racial bias, Eberhardt (2020) writes that when whites come into contact and are exposed to black targets, it affects whites’ physiological responses in various ways: includ­ ing how their skin sweats, how their heart pumps, how their cortical voltage shift, how their facial muscles response and twitch, and how their eyes blink. Similarly, studies have shown that whites exhibit more negative affect respon­ ses, such as increased brow activity and decreased cheek activity, when they imagine working with a black partner, as opposed to a white partner (Eber­ hardt, 2005). This research suggests that racial bias can also be present uncon­ sciously and thus the extent to which ethnicity and ethnic difference can provoke negative responses.

Intersectionality When exploring institutional racism, an intersectional methodology is required because it enables human actions and emotions to be explored alongside insti­ tutions and the larger structures of socialisation that shape human actions and emotions. It therefore facilitates an analysis whereby the social inequalities that are a result of ‘racism, sexism, colonialism, capitalism, and similar systems of power’ are interconnected to lived experience (Collins, 2019: 27). The recogni­ tion of such intersectionality between structures and lived experience necessi­ tates an exploration of how colonialism, slavery, and imperialism continue to shape the world. Indeed, the prioritisation of lived experience means that as long as structural ideologies impact lived experience, they remain worthy of recognition and exploration, regardless of their illusionary appearance. Tracing this intersectionality also facilitates the explored of racisms that oppress other groups. The grounding of these processes and forms in racism in the case stu­ dies chapters of the book compensates for what Satgar (2019) contends is the lack of ability of intersectional approaches in using structural grounding to explain oppressions. Such a historcised intersectional case study perspective not only demonstrates the dispersal of racism to wider social structures (such as the state response to Covid 19), but also the dispersal of the processes used to oppress black and other minority groups (such as Muslims). It could therefore be argued that an intersectional perspective dismantles the illusionary layers that are a product of the colonisation of truth and knowledge to demonstrate the existence of harmful ideologies from the perspective of the victim. It thus subverts colonising rationalities and their capacity to regulate truth and knowledge to facilitate a universal epistemology where truth and knowledge attribute equal recognition. Crenshaw (1991) coined the term intersectionality to denote an approach to understanding how inequalities intersect to shape life experiences. It involves exploring how different forms of power combine to impact the various structures which impact people’s lives (Weldon, 2019). It therefore attends to the breadth and depth of how institutional racism exists, is

Understandings of institutional racism 33

maintained and impacts lives, thus making visible the cumulative impacts of structural inequalities. As Brah and Phoenix (2004: 76) state, intersectionality refers to ‘the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axes of differentiation—economic, political cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential—intersect in historically specific contexts’. Through exploring intersectional categories, the book takes marginalised intersectional identities as an analytic starting point ‘in order to reveal the diversity and complexity of lived experience within such groups (McCall, 2005). The intersectional methodology discussed advocates deconstructing cate­ gories of power through exposing the relationship between ‘social processes of categorization, and the workings of exclusion and hierarchy that mark bound­ ary-drawing and boundary maintenance’ (McCall, 2005: 1776). Although there has been a lack of systematic engagement with ontology (Hancock, 2016), this book engages in ontological scrutiny to not only question the role and power of categories, but also how their formation and creation sustains larger systems of power, domination, and oppression. In doing so, it resists the ability of her­ meneutical bias to regulate which forms of inequality receive recognition and attention, whilst concealing and masking other forms of corrosive inequalities. Through considering multiple forms of inequality and thus the matrix of dom­ ination, the book explores colonial epistemologies which not only categorise and deny perceptual and experiential claims of institutional racism, but also function to allow others to lay claim to such perceptual and experiential forms of knowledge through epistemic arrogance. The continued colonisation of epistemologies, as demonstrated in other chapters, highlights how the battle to dismantle institutional racism is not simply refined to adapting institutional rules, procedures, laws, etc. but it must also involve first, the naming of mechanisms through which truth and knowledge continue to be regulated and colonised, and second, actions orientated at dismantling these mechanisms. It could thus be argued that it is the sheer success of colonial powers in institu­ tionalising white privilege into societal institutional and educational systems that facilitated the depth and breadth of institutional racism to such an extent that contemporary efforts to eliminate institutional racism must involve the dismantling of all constellations. The invisibility and lack of literature on epis­ temicide and institutional racism demonstrates the extent to which the coloni­ sation of truth and knowledge, as constellation entities that also require action remain void of recognition and naming. As this section explores, this strand of literature provides valuable insights into how truth and knowledge remain colonised to provide the ideological foundations from which discriminatory institutional policies can coexist. These ideological regulatory mechanisms not only conceal the creation of institutional racism, but also the mechanisms that sustain its existence and its cumulative impacts. According to Collins (2019: 129), terms such as ‘epistemic oppression and epistemic injustice provide a more nuanced understanding of how epistemology constitutes a structuring dimension of social injustice beyond the actual ideas of

34 Understandings of institutional racism

racism, heteropatriarchy, and colonialism as ideological systems’. Epistemicide defines the relationship between the status one’s identity conveys and how this impacts one’s ability to contribute to the truth. It therefore recognises the illu­ sionary appearance of truth and knowledge, as opposed to maintaining its invi­ sibility. The necessity to facilitate recognition exists because without recognition there can be no action. Grosfoguel (2013) highlights how epistemicide was necessary for past conquests in creating a clear binary between the coloniser and colonised. It thus subjected truth and knowledge to the colonial dichotomy, a process that continues to separate all truth and knowledge into those accepted as superior truths and those rejected as inferior truth. The continuity of this process and its implications for truth and knowledge not only determine what is the truth but do so through reducing the recognition and worthiness of other forms of truth. In maintaining only those that sustain white privilege, epistemicide works to maintain a perpetrator perspective where the white frames of white distancing strategy, white fragility, denial of agency and responsibility, white ignorance, white solidarity, and denials of cumulative impacts can thrive and co-exist. It is only through making visible the illusions that maintain white privilege that white privilege can be explored and countered to enable movement from a perpetrator perspective to a victim perspective.

Epistemic imperialism A closer exploration of epistemicide reveals the ways in which identity, knowl­ edge and truth intersect to maintain institutional inequality. Epistemic imperial­ ism denotes how ‘epistemic values of efficiency, instrumental value, and domination of nature come to stand in for what is valid and true, privileging science and technology as objective and therefore value-free’ (Tsosie, 2017: 359). However, these enlightenment processes represent a form of imperialism that as Mills (1997) highlights, lead to the silencing of opinions. This silencing and thus the non-recognition results in epistemic loss (Congdon, 2017). It is the construc­ tion of epistemic values as objective and based on science and modernity which facilitates their existence and thus, their domination. Challenging institutional racism therefore involves questioning taken for granted ideologies and structures, which may at first appear objective, but only because processes of socialisation facilitate their illusionary objective appearance. Such a task involves searching for new language, since the processes and entities that require coverage remain invi­ sible with the nonexistence of words to describe their existence, further com­ pounding their invisibility. As Collins (2019: 130) states, ‘doing critical theorizing in these settings is difficult, especially if this work is critical of epistemic power itself’ and rests upon these systems of knowledge. However, as previously stated, adopting a victim perspective means challen­ ging and scrutinising such knowledge because of the privilege and harm it sus­ tains. Questioning the construction of knowledge means observing how the binary construction of knowledge serves to privilege some and oppress others.

Understandings of institutional racism 35

However, because such binaries are the rules and systems that govern society, critically questioning their construction, existence, and reproduction can be perceived as non-conformity and the failure to follow established respected rules, procedures, and systems of hierarchical knowledge. It could therefore be argued that the western constructions of knowledge and the processes which determine acceptable knowledge maintain a perpetrator perspective through silencing critical perspectives. The existence of colonial white privilege in dis­ courses, knowledge, truth, and institutions therefore marginalise victim per­ spectives to such an extent that their experiences and perceptions can be dominated by those that possess a constructed superior identity, as evident in the concept of epistemic arrogance discussed below. Through considering the wider constellation of institutional racism it is pos­ sible to explore how only those rules, procedures, and systems accepted by those with status and power as potentially leading to discriminatory outcomes are accepted as being worthy of scrutiny. Institutional racism therefore incor­ porates a complex system of domination, and it is the existence of such a complex powerful system, with its inherent power to silence, that makes chal­ lenging institutional racism so difficult. Put simply, only those mechanisms selected as worthy of recognition by whites become subjected to actions to counter their existence. It could be argued that within this system, the white frames of white distancing strategy, white fragility, denial of agency and responsibility, white ignorance, white solidarity, and denials of cumulative impacts are all mechanisms used to ensure that the most powerful mechanisms that maintain institutional racism are not recognised, in order to maintain white privilege and interest convergence. According to Haney-López (2011), there is also a hierarchy of white dominance that exists as a colour-blind ideology which claims to be anti-racist but continues to prevent action orien­ tated at preventing and countering racism. The existence of a colour-blind ideology creates a false reality where there appears to be action towards elim­ inating discriminatory structures. However, these attempts are premised on knowledge, structures, and institutions being non-discriminatory and the dis­ crimination being the result of a few policies. Within this nexus between understanding the origins of racist practices and how these are maintained, epistemic imperialism is a feature which further creates the past as neutral and not worthy of attention and scrutiny, thus normalising ‘an epistemology that was created precisely to exclude other groups’ (Tsosie, 2017: 361).

Epistemology of ignorance It is therefore not surprising to see the term ignorance included in literature on white frames and epistemicide. According to Mills (1997), the racial contract creates an epistemology of ignorance for whites that makes it difficult for them to see and understand their role in the reproduction of racial inequality. Although the colonisation of truth and knowledge maintains white privilege,

36 Understandings of institutional racism

individuals still possess the autonomy to critically engage with discourses. As previously stated, it is imperative that the responsibility placed on individuals to counter gender inequality and patriarchy is also present in countering other forms of inequality. Thus, it is a choice to use ignorance to maintain forms of power which contribute to inequality, such as the binary between acceptable forms of knowledge and unacceptable forms of knowledge. As Mills (1997) observes, an epistemology of ignorance requires labour at both ends and thus not only construction of ignorance but also acceptance and / or rejection of ignorance.

Epistemology of victims According to Mills (1997), a second expression of ignorance occurs when oppressed groups become ignorant of their own multiplicity in an epistemology of victims. However, this cannot be equated with attributing responsibility for victimisation with victims because as the previous discussion demonstrated, even speaking against victimisation is fraught with silencing mechanisms of power, with actions which deviate from the racial contract being conceptualised as signifiers of non-conformity. In this way, trying to challenge institutional racism risks further victimisation with victims being negatively labelled to strengthen and reinforce mechanisms of oppression.

Epistemic oppression, epistemic injustice, and hermeneutical injustice According to Collins (2019: 129), terms such as ‘epistemic oppression and epistemic injustice provide a more nuanced understanding of how episte­ mology constitutes a structuring dimension of social injustice’. According to Collins (2019: 129) ‘epistemic oppression and epistemic injustice name the structural dimensions of epistemic power’ that allow interpretivist commu­ nities to facilitate the colonisation of knowledge production. As Pohlhaus (2017: 13) states: the idea of ‘epistemic injustice’ draws together three branches of philosophy – political philosophy, ethics, and epistemology—to consider how epistemic practices and institutions may be deployed and structured in ways that are simultaneously infelicitous toward certain epistemic values (such as truth, aptness, and understanding) and unjust with regard to particular knowers. Terms such as epistemic oppression and epistemic injustice offer a language through which it is possible to label and name the processes of truth and knowledge production that are vital to the existence of institutional racism and wider systems of inequality and social injustice. The terms facilitate an under­ standing of how a whole system / constellation operates to maintain racial

Understandings of institutional racism 37

hierarchy and the vast systems of knowledge, socialisation, structures, and processes in place which render mute the possibility of critique and action to challenge these systems. Thus, they make visible the true extent of work required to dismantle institutional racism by making visible the illusionary existence of mechanisms which contribute to inequality and social injustice. Through illuminating the relationship between white privilege, knowledge pro­ duction, epistemic power, structural oppression and injustice, epistemic injus­ tice highlights the entities that need to be challenged for institutional racism to be eradicated. However, epistemic oppression and epistemic injustice also identify the role of human agency and how what comes to form knowledge and truth is a product of certain communities’ ability to contribute to the truth. Contributory injustices occur when knowers engage in hermeneutical ignorance through using epistemic resources that minimise knowers’ (non-interpretative communities) ability to contribute to the truth and knowledge (Pohlhaus, 2017). By highlighting how interpretative communities assist in knowledge production, epistemic oppression and epistemic injustice highlight the existence of the non-interpretative commu­ nity’s binary, and thus the bias construction of knowledge and truth. According to Pohlhaus (2017), epistemic injustices operate by suppressing a knower’s testimony, and / or distorting a knower’s testimony by drawing on existing epistemic practices and institutions that are structured to facilitate the invisibility and distortion of these groups’ testimony. Without an understanding of how epistemic injustice operates to silence some and magnify others, chal­ lenging discriminatory structures has been premised upon merely documenting impacts without recognising how processes, structures and rules distort and silence such impacts. As Pohlhaus (2017: 15) states, epistemic injustice hierarchizes without warrant what is epistemically significant or worthy of epistemic attention (i.e. the world as experienced by this particular set of knowers and not another) and who counts as an ideal epistemic agent (i.e. those who experience the world in this particular way, not another). The concept of an epistemic agent infers possible differences within humanities ability to contribute to knowledge thereby rendering equality as non-existent. For example, the liberal state provides an illusionary community through the distribution of rights, which appear to make every citizen ‘equal before the law’ (Cook, 1996: 88). However, such mechanisms of power maintain white privilege by contributing to the illusion that victim’s testimonies are heard. It is the existence of such illusions which further compound victims’ claims of not being heard, thus forming another mechanism through which power is exercised over victims. Epistemic practices and institutions therefore maintain oppression that is cultural, ideological, legal, and political. Affording victims the recognition, rights, and humanity they deserve therefore means stepping outside the cultural, ideological, legal, and political mechanisms

38 Understandings of institutional racism

that maintain oppression. However, having to adopt such a standpoint—outside culture, knowledge, truth, and socialisation—is likely to add to the breadth and depth to victimisation. Acknowledging and recognising the necessity to occupy such a marginal position means accepting the extent to which injustice still occurs, and for victims how the very foundations of society still operate to control, dom­ inate, silence, and shackle their existence. Therefore, although the shattering of illusions is necessary to challenge harmful structures, it is a process that involves the pain, suffering, and hurt that comes with having one’s beliefs completely shat­ tered. Victims can also experience what has been called hermeneutical injustice— the injustice of having an area of one’s social experience distorted from collective understanding because the group in question suffers from epistemic margin­ alisation (Tsosie, 2017). This marginalisation based on not ‘having the same epis­ temic authority as the dominant group’ defines the parameters of what becomes known as acceptable impacts, and through doing so, it can silence the true extent of victimisation (Tsosie, 2017: 361).

Epistemic trust Understanding the role of epistemic injustice in contributing to epistemic mar­ ginalisation allows strategies to be formed because as Medina (2012) states, it is only through such recognition that a transformative resistance strategy can be formulated. According to Frost-Arnold (2014), for a sense of epistemic justice to be perceived there must be (1) self-trust—where members of oppressed groups have a sense of trust within themselves, (2) trust in others—fellow community members must trust them and (3) trust in practices—there must be trust in institutions, practices, and the social structures that produce critical discourses. As Code (1991) contends, disempowering the structures that maintain cognitive authority can make it difficult for disempowered groups to trust and according to Grasswick (2017), this inability to trust in communal epistemic institutions leads to an epistemic trust injustice. It could therefore be argued that epistemic injus­ tice leads to a diminished sense of self-trust, trust in others, and trust in practices. It thus impacts victims’ sense of security in the world, starting with a lowered sense of trust in their own capacity and ability to achieve change and extending to an inability to place trust outside oneself. As this book demonstrates, the fracturing of trust and injustice has enormous consequences for mental health and should be conceptualised as facilitating trauma because this lack of trust diminishes the safety and security that justice and trust provide. Where trust does exist, the knower can be safe and secure. Where distrust exists, all mechanisms associated with recognition, rights, and humanity became fraught with insecurity, with such insecurity fracturing the illusionary status of socialisation and cultural consensus incorporating justice and equality. For certainty to exist there must be trust in others and the wider mechanisms. Without trust, insecurity replaces cer­ tainty and victims can’t be certain that their perpetual and experiential knowl­ edge will be met with acceptance. Institutional racism and its wider constellation

Understandings of institutional racism 39

work to produce multiple layers of victimisation where the primary experience of institutional racism is met with further layers of epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression which deepen the wounds of victimisation.

Epistemic arrogance Although ‘standpoint epistemology asserts the right to be an equal epistemic agent in interpreting one’s own realities within interpretive communities’ (Col­ lins, 2019: 119), epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression remove equality at the expense of privilege. According to Medina (2012), the ability of epistemic injustices to depict groups as intellectually inferior, and lacking agency con­ tributes to victims lacking the trust and capacity to give testimony. A dimin­ ished sense of self-trust, trust in others, and trust in practices can negatively impact the desire and ability to speak and give testimony. As Medina (2012) states, epistemic arrogance is structural and systemic. Epistemic arrogance silences victims by maintaining the mechanisms whereby a perpetrator per­ spective can take the place of a victim perspective, even in narratives articulat­ ing the victimisation of institutional racism. As Medina (2012) contends, epistemic arrogance works to categorise one as knowing, simply because of aspects pertaining to their identity and status. By subjecting victims’ perceptual and experiential forms of knowledge to an interpretivist epistemology, the knowledge is manipulated to form a perpetrator perspective. It stifles the right and choice to extend what is inside and perceived and experienced to the world by dominating the ability to speak and the possibility of being heard. The classification of knowledge according to interpretivist status also leads to false claims over knowledge. As Alcoff (1991) argues, speaking for others rests on power and a desire to speak for another. It allows those with a higher status to override the claims to knowledge made by those of lower status. Fricker (2007) contends these systems of testimonial injustice damage the epistemic system of truth by producing obstacles to truth, either by preventing the hearer from hearing particular truths, or indirectly by creating blockages and obstacles in the circulation of critical ideas and truth. The epistemic system can therefore only be rectified once such blockages are acknowledged, and the current epis­ temic system is recognised as being based on partial truths and knowledge.

Epistemic violence The vast impacts of epistemic systems on trust mirror those involved in any form of harm, with Lawrence (1996b: 245) highlighting the relationship between being labelled as inferior and stigmatised, and ‘suffering psychological injury and a loss of self-respect and human dignity’. As Fricker (2007) states, to be wronged in one’s capacity as a knower is to be wronged in one’s capacity to contribute human value. The relationship between recognition and rights is thus central to one’s humanity, with anything less than complete recognition

40 Understandings of institutional racism

and rights damaging one’s humanity. Fricker (2007: 49) highlights, ‘Descartes maintained that a state of absolute confidence in one’s belief-a state of cer­ tainty-is requisite for knowledge’…. ‘Where this persistent intellectual under­ mining causes him to lose confidence in his beliefs and/or his justification for them, he literally loses knowledge’. There is also the loss of trust, which leads to a loss of security, leading to all thoughts, encounters, perceptions, and experiences being plagued with insecurity. The undermining of one’s intellect, their knowledge, their truth, and their status comes to shape the processes which occupy one’s mind and by extension, their existence. These impacts constitute epistemic violence, a complex force of silencing and domination which creates vast impacts of victimisation (Spivak, 1988). It is the complexity and overwhelming power of the system to cause harm which led Mills (1997: 119) to advocate that we should ‘learn to trust [our] own cognitive powers, to develop [our] own concepts, insights, modes of explanation, overarching theories, and to oppose the epistemic hegemony of conceptual frameworks designed in part to thwart and suppress the explora­ tion of such matters’. Recognising contemporary epistemic hegemony also involves challenging the colonised version of history to truly abandon the continuation of colonial practices which obscure the injustice of white privi­ lege (Bailey, 1998: 86). What Mills (1997) and Bailey (1998) highlight is imperative to epistemic resistance is claiming situated standpoints, ‘especially group-based standpoints, and theorizing from those social locations can be a form of empowerment for subordinated groups’. (Collins, 2019: 139) How­ ever, according to Henning (2015) resistance can also involve withdrawing from epistemic interactions that could be deemed exploitative. Standpoint epistemology highlights the right to be an ‘equal epistemic agent in interpret­ ing one’s own realities within interpretive communities’ (Stoetzler & YuvalDavis, 2002: 315). A standpoint epistemology leads to the reaffirmation of agency, recognition, rights, and humanity and through doing so, it interrupts power relations. However, the form such resistance takes in contributing to a standpoint epistemology must reflect the choice of the victim. Any failure to recognise such choice risks further exacerbating epistemic injustice and oppression through homogenising and placing further templates of domina­ tion which silence and restrict choice. The recognition of diversity within unity fractures monolithic constructions of identity to afford true recognition, rights and humanity advocated on a victim perspective to achieve equality without reinforcing oppression and injustice.

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Eberhardt, J. L. (2005). Imaging race. American Psychologist, 60 (2), pp. 181–190. Eberhardt, J. L. (2020). Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do. New York: Penguin. Feagin, J. R. (2014). Racist America: Roots, Current realities, and Future Reparations (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frost‐Arnold, K. (2014). Imposters, tricksters, and trustworthiness as an epistemic virtue. Hypatia, 29 (4), pp. 790–807. Grasswick, H. (2017). Epistemic Injustice in Science, in Kidd, I. J., Medina, J., & Pohl­ haus, G., The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Routledge: London, pp. 313–323. Gray, H. (2019). Race after Race, in Mukherjee, R., Banet-Weiser, S. & Gray, H. (Eds), Racism Postrace. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 23–36. Grosfoguel, R. (2013). The structure of knowledge in westernised universities: Epistemic racism/sexism and the four genocides/epistemicides, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 1 (1), pp. 73–90. Hancock, A.M. (2016). Intersectionality: An Intellectual History. Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press. Haney-López, I. (2011). Colorblind White Dominance. In Coates, R. D. Covert Racism: Theories, Institutions, and Experiences. Haymarket: Haymarket Books, pp.85–110. Harris, C. I. (1995). Whiteness as property, in Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., & Peller, P & Thomas, T. (Eds), Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed a Move­ ment. New York: New York Press, pp. 276–291. Henning, T. (2015). Valid disengagements: the case for epistemic insensitivity. Exploring Collaborative Contestations and Diversifying Philosophy Conference, May, pp. 28–30. Ioanide, P. (2015). The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lawrence, C. R. (1996a). The ID, the Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning With Unconscious Racism, in Crenshaw, K.et al., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York: New Press, pp. 235–256. Lawrence, C. R. (1996b). The Word and the River: Pedagogy as Scholarship as Struggle. In Crenshaw, K.et al., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York: New Press, pp. 336–356. López, I. H. (2011). Colorblind white dominance. In Coates, R. D., Covert Racism:

Theories, Institutions, and Experiences. Haymarket: Haymarket Books, pp. 85–109.

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Culture and Society, 30 (3), pp. 1771–1800. Medina, J. (2012). The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mills, C. W. (1997). The Racial Contract. New York: Cornell University Press. Mills, C. W. (2007). White Ignorance. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (edited by (Sullivan, S. & Tuana, N.). Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 11–38. Mills, C. W. (2017). Ideology. In Kidd, I. J., Medina, J., & Pohlhaus, G., The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Routledge: London, pp. 100–112. Möschel, M. (2019). Critical race theory. In Christodoulidis, E., Dukes, R. & Goldoni, M. (Eds), Research Handbook on Critical Legal Theory. London: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 63–78. Omi, M. & Winant, H. (1994). Racial Formation in the United States. London: Routledge.

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Pohlhaus, G., Jr. (2017). Varieties of epistemic injustice. In Kidd, I. J., Medina, J., & Pohlhaus, G., The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Routledge: London, pp. pp.13–26. Satgar, V. (2019). Racism after apartheid: Challenges for Marxism and anti-racism. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Nelson, C. & Grossberg, L., Marx­ ism and the Interpretation of Culture. London: Macmillan, pp. 271–313. Stoetzler, M. & Yuval-Davis, N. (2002). Standpoint theory, situated knowledge and the situated imagination. Feminist Theory, 3 (3), pp. 315–333. Tate, S.A. and Page, D. (2018). Whiteliness and institutional racism: Hiding behind (un) conscious bias. Ethics and Education, 13 (1), pp. 141–155. Tsosie, R. (2017). Indigenous Peoples, Anthropology, and the Legacy of Epistemic Injustice. In Kidd, I. J., Medina, J., & Pohlhaus, G., The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Routledge: London, pp. 56–369. Unzueta, M. M. & Lowery, B. S. (2008). Defining racism safely: The role of self-image maintenance on white Americans’ conceptions of racism. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44 (6), pp. 1491–1497. Valdes, F., Culp, J. M. & Harris, A. P. (2002). Battles waged, won, and lost: Critical race theory at the turn of the millennium. In Valdes, F., Culp, J. M. & Harris, A. P., Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory. Philadelphia: Temple Uni­ versity Press,, pp.1–6. Venn, C. (2006). The Postcolonial Challenge: Towards Alternative Worlds. London: Sage Publications. Weldon, S. L. (2019). Power, exclusion and empowerment: Feminist innovation in poli­ tical science. Women’s Studies International Forum, 72, pp. 127–136. Yancy, G. (2015). White Self-criticality beyond Anti-racism: How Does It Feel to Be a White Problem. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Young, R. J. C. (2001). Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Zamudio, M. M. & Rios, F. (2006). From traditional to liberal racism: Living racism in the everyday. Sociological Perspectives, 49 (4), pp. 483–501.

3 THE MAINTENANCE OF INSTITUTIONAL RACISM Reconceptualising structures

This chapter provides a conceptual analysis of institutional racism. The last chapter detailed the concepts and theories which can be used to explain insti­ tutional racism, and demonstrated the extent to which epistemic imperialism continues to shape understandings of institutional racism. It highlighted the extent to which discourses about societal inequality and social justice continue to perpetuate an illusionary universal epistemology. If a universal epistemology had been created, one through which truth and knowledge had indeed been decolonised, and social injustice and inequality eradicated, then there would be no reality through which the concepts and theories discussed in the previous chapter could exist. Therefore, the chapter made visible the existence of epis­ temic imperialism by highlighting the space between this and a universal epis­ temology where the impacts of colonialism truly cease to exist. This chapter presents an analysis of institutional racism which explores how mechanisms, discourses, and other vessels of power serve to sustain this space. As the chapter demonstrates, the ability to dismantle institutional racism rests on the capacity to not only recognise epistemic imperialism, but by doing so, to reduce the mechanisms which allow it to exist at the expense of a universal epistemology. In seeking to explore ways in which these mechanisms can be dismantled, the chapter rightly includes an analysis that explores the inter­ sectionality of knowledge, truth, and structures, and thus how the dismantling of mechanisms rests on the ability to disrupt the truth and knowledge upon which their existence is based. The chapter explores how the presence of hier­ archies within structures silence knowledge from lower hierarchies, thereby conditioning knowledge according to status, and how the denial of the cumu­ lative perceptions and experiences of institutional racism create and maintain institutional racism. This discussion demonstrates how knowledge intersects DOI: 10.4324/9781003187073-3

The maintenance of institutional racism 45

with structures to produce knowledge that emulates racialisation by utilising preassigned racial categories that determine the validity of knowledge. The chapter then moves on to discuss the implication of this process for silencing forms of knowledge that emerge from the lower hierarchies dismissed by structures. In doing so, it directly challenges how discursive discourses, structures, and their material restrictions have structured our ways of thinking and acting (Wight, 2003). This silencing incorporates two vital dimensions which maintain the illusionary status of structures as neutral entities. The first dimension that contributes to this illusionary false reality, and indeed maintains the image of structures as neutral, is how the conditioning of knowledge according to status leads to epistemic arrogance. The classification of knowl­ edge according to status leads to false claims over knowledge. It allows those with a higher racialised status to override the claims to truth and knowledge made by those of lower status. Epistemic arrogance intersects with the second dimension of restricting the space within which emotions can emerge. By denying emotions, cumulative impacts remain hidden. By elucidating the inter­ sectionality between structures, truth, knowledge, hierarchies, status, and emo­ tions, the chapter provides vital insights into how structures not only maintain the claim of neutrality, but in doing so, obscure the emotions of those that are subjected to institutional racism and inequality.

Move towards structural racism According to Barbee (1993), through focusing on the structural aspect of insti­ tutional racism it is possible to understand racism as a system of structural inequalities. It therefore facilitates the deconstruction of institutional racism, allowing the various entities which constitute institutional racism such as dis­ courses, processes, rules, and laws to be named and explored. As this chapter demonstrates, a reconceptualisation of institutional racism is required to facil­ itate an understanding of how institutional racism was created. As Barbee (1993) states, any exploration and understanding of race and racism must look to the historical processes to articulate how history became fused with cultural and ideological practices to generate racialised systems that created racial inequality between racial groups. It is only then possible to establish responsi­ bility and dismantle the mechanisms which sustain an epistemology of ignor­ ance, and the illusion of institutional racism as an autonomous entity. Second, a reconceptualisation is required to facilitate the use of language that accurately describes how epistemic imperialism, and hermeneutical injustice continue to shape truth and knowledge to maintain white privilege. Third, a reconceptua­ lisation is required to allow the cumulative and detrimental impacts of institu­ tional discrimination to emerge, thus recognising the intersectionality between institutional racism, epistemic violence, and violations of epistemic trust. Finally, to enable the acceptance that until the systems that maintain inequality, epistemic oppression, epistemic injustice, and epistemic violence are eradicated,

46 The maintenance of institutional racism

we have not achieved a position where it can be claimed that knowledge, truth, and power represent a universal epistemology. In moving towards such a reconceptualisation of institutional racism and as Barbee (1993) suggests, focusing on institutional racism as a system of structural inequalities, a methodological approach is required which facilitates such an ana­ lysis. Therefore, an approach is required which allows the elements which con­ stitute such a system to be recognised. According to Bonilla-Silva (2015a), this system of structural inequalities incorporates a network of social relations at the ideological, social, political, and economic levels that determine the life chances and opportunities available to various races. As well as incorporating an analysis of these levels, the approach must also clearly demonstrate the relationship between the macro structural level and micro individual level. Trepagnier (2011, 2017) has criticised literature on institutional racism for failing to bridge the micromacro gap in explaining how the action of individuals contributes to and produces societal patterns and systems of racial inequality. In bridging this gap, Trepagnier (2011, 2017) has noted how methodological relationism incorporates the inter­ sectionality between structures and individuals necessary to understand this space. According to Giddens (1979), neither structure nor agency occur in isolation because structuration is a process that occurs between social structure and indivi­ dual actors; it is therefore the mutual dependence and intersectionality of both structure and agency. Unmasking the relationship between structure and agency, between the macro and the micro is imperative to dismantling the harms perpe­ tuated by structures through conditioning human thoughts, beliefs, and actions. Griffith et al. (2007) articulate the influence of structures on individuals, and thus the movement from structures to individuals through proposing three levels. According to Griffith et al. (2007: 290): at the individual level, racism operates through staff members’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. At the intraorganizational level, institutional racism operates through an organization’s internal climate, policies, and procedures. These include the relationships among staff, which are rooted in formal and informal hierarchies and power relationships. At the extraorganizational level, institutional racism explains how organizations influence communities, public policies, and institutions. Also, institutional racism describes how organiza­ tions are affected by larger institutions (i.e., regulatory, economic, political, professional) and are shaped by the sociopolitical and economic contexts that frame an organization’s policies, procedures, and functioning. Such an analysis not only affords recognition to elements of the system, thus enabling actions orientated at eradicating such elements, but also how these elements contribute to cumulative harms. It therefore becomes possible to pro­ vide a non-bias, non-racialised epistemology of victims where each intersecting racialised strand is recognised as producing harms through restricting recogni­ tion, rights, and humanity to victims.

The maintenance of institutional racism 47

Conceptualisation of structures One could therefore borrow the term, the new institutionalism which according to Nee (1998: 1) seeks to explain institutions rather than simply assume their existence. The lack of engagement with explaining institutions has paralysed the removal of institutional racism by failing to provide an understanding of how racialised structure have come to exist and can therefore be challenged. In explaining institutions, March and Olsen (1989: 22) suggest that a thick approach which deconstructs institutions to consider the ‘routines, procedures, conventions, roles, strategies, organizational forms, and technologies’ that col­ lectively form institutions. Thus, the thick approach advocated involves naming and identifying the entities within institutions that maintain institutional racism. The lack of naming these entities not only makes it difficult to challenge institutional racism, but the lack of identification also further institutionalises racism by contributing to the epistemology of ignorance. This lack of identifi­ cation can be conceptualised as contributing to the racial contract, because as Mills (1997) contends, an epistemology of ignorance maintains the racial con­ tract by making it difficult for whites to understand their participation in the reproduction of racial inequality. The invisibility of these mechanisms also maintains a hierarchy of colour-blind white dominance. One can combine these two positions in understanding why institutions such as the Metropolitan police service (MET) have failed to combat institutional racism. The MET, like most institutions, have introduced policies which are orientated at encouraging diversity and claim to be colour blind. However, if the policies, rules, and mechanisms that maintain institutional racism still exist, then discriminatory practices will continue regardless of the creation of new rules and procedures. As Ahmed (2012) contends, institutions sustain their racism by eliminating those whom they identify as racists, and this obscures and masks the racism embedded in all aspects of the institution. The extraorganisational level and epistemic imperialism have contributed to the existence of institutional racism. Epistemic imperialism has worked to imbed racialised hierarchies to such an extent that institutional racism exists within every structural institution. The power of this ideology, as previously mentioned, is premised not only on how it became accepted as truth, but also how it was dispersed throughout society. By virtue of this relationship, challenging institutional racism also means challenging the external envir­ onment and systems of socialisation and cultural consensus. As Wight (2003: 718) states: thinking about institutional racism through the agent–structure problem highlights the fact that policies aimed at eradicating it must address a socio-cultural field wider than that of the Metropolitan Police. These would include all aspects of British society, including the justice system, the educational system, the welfare system and the employment system.

48 The maintenance of institutional racism

The magnitude of such a position can be grasped by considering that if society is based on white privilege, with institutions being signifiers of such privilege, then any attempt to remove such privilege from institutions involves challenging the normative structures of white privilege that govern society. Thus, institutions are not only a reflection of wider societal values, but they have a symbiotic relation­ ship where they also maintain and reinforce these societal values.

Denials of responsibility and ignorance Although the recognition of epistemic ignorance, as a collective societal form of ignorance, enables inclusion of the wider ideological biases which colonise knowledge, discourses, and ideology, collective ignorance can also be used to deny individual responsibility. In assessing the intraorganisational relationship between individuals and structures, recognising choice and autonomy are of vital importance. Viewing racial advantage as a form of ‘white supremacy absolves the mainstream population of its racism through implying that those that believe in white supremacy and white advantage are in a minority’ (Better, 2008: 20). As Hochschild (1996) states, the fact that whites tend to think of racism in individual terms may explain why many whites believe that racism is no longer a serious problem and that racial minorities have the same (if not more) opportunities as whites in the present day. However, the greater the depth and breadth of white ignorance, the greater the depth and breadth of epistemic oppression, epistemic injustice, hermeneutical injustice, epistemic arrogance, and epistemic violence. Ignorance gained through the power of epistemic arrogance to name and define institutional racism contributes to what Ray (2019) calls the hierarchies and segregation that reproduce racial stratifica­ tion. The stability of structures and social change are dependent on human action (Bourdieu, 1998; Sewell, 1992). Therefore, challenging the autonomous existence of racism is a must in dismantling the structures which perpetuate racism as an autonomous entity and maintain white ignorance. However, epistemic imperialism has not only concealed vast forms of harm, but it has also allowed white fragility to promote whites as epistemological victims. According to Levine-Rasky (2016), the psychoanalytic concepts of nar­ cissism, splitting, projection, and trauma are relevant to understanding what happens when white privilege is threatened. However, although these demon­ strate the prevalence of strong psychological processes in maintaining white privilege, it is also possible to counter such processes by adopting the position of an active bystander in challenging inequality. Adopting the position of an active bystander involves challenges ideological cultural discourses that combine with discourses of liberalism to interpret society through a colour-blind approach to mask white privilege and racism. As the previous chapter demon­ strated, the colonial era involved the dispersal of white culture to every insti­ tution. Culture became synonymous with structural institutions and in doing so, institutions were built to sustain white frames. Such frames have worked

The maintenance of institutional racism 49

through mechanisms such as hermeneutical injustice to create ideological epistemologies which through epistemological bias shape, twist, distort, and manipulate every reality to fit predetermined white cultural frames. The power vested in these white frames in based on the same forms of denying agency, recognition, rights, and humanity that were present during practices such as slavery. These processes have embedded (un)conscious bias into society to ensure that whites ‘continue to benefit from the world which they have created and maintained’ (Mills, 1997: 40). Naming procedures and establishing con­ tinuities from the past diminishes the possibility of unconscious bias and in doing so, it offers the possibility of establishing new inclusive universal cultural frames.

Structural stratification As previously stated, stratification is premised on one group having power over another, thus creating epistemic oppression, epistemic injustice, hermeneutical injustice, epistemic arrogance, and epistemic violence. The origins of this stra­ tification are hierarchical and led to the social construction of different groups separated by power and status. These colonial systems continue to form con­ temporary modes of domination, control, and silence. However, unlike coloni­ alism, when their existence wasn’t denied, in contemporary society they shape every sphere whilst proclaiming invisibility. As Mills (1997) states, the racial contract has promoted a different racial entitlement to whites that is expressed as a norm which shapes institutions, their practices, and their culture. Similarly, Better (2008) argues, that the existence of racial separation, and racial inequal­ ity over the period of hundreds of years has contributed to the normalcy of these practices. Confronting institutional racism thus means challenging norms and acknowledging how western societal and institutional constructs, rules, and procedures are based on an epistemic imperialism that is rooted in colonialism and the enlightenment. According to Said (1994), it is necessary to examine western imperialism and the epistemological constructs which made such imperialism possible. Although post colonialism has explored the continued impact of colonialism, the relationship between colonialism and institutional racism has lacked attention, scrutiny, and political recognition. In offering an understanding of this relationship, the book seeks to document clear continuities, whilst also placing institutional racism within the sphere of injustice. Although the exercise of silencing and not attributing rights are accepted as constituting injustice, the reluctance to name institutional racism as a form of injustice denies the existence of processes and impacts which mirror other forms of injustice. Institutional racism, like other forms of epistemic injustice, silence and deny the autonomy on which the criminal justice system is based. They operate by denying and / or suppressing a knower’s testimony (Dotson, 2011). The importance of testimony can be grasped from how sus­ pected criminals have the right to testimony and its existence as an absolute right, with various national and international laws codifying this right (Ahmed,

50 The maintenance of institutional racism

2020). Second, epistemic injustices cause ‘epistemic dysfunction, for example by distorting understanding or stymieing inquiry’ (Pohlhaus, 2017: 13). The right to contribute to knowledge and truth is again an absolute right, and such is the importance of this right, that the world is based on an illusionary con­ sensus that such a right cannot and must not be stratified according to iden­ tity. However, as Pohlhaus (2017: 14) contends, these injustices continue to be maintained through school curricula and academic disciplines that are ‘struc­ tured in ways that systematically ignore, distort, and/or discredit particular intellectual traditions’. Epistemic injustices silence testimony and where testi­ mony does emerge, it is subjected to racialised white frames. Thus, epistemic injustice affords recognition to testimonies based on pre-existent categories and this leads to multiple forms of oppression and silencing with ideology and practice enforcing injustice. It therefore silences at the level of recognition and practice, with both recognition and practice mirroring the way race and slav­ ery were used to create a strategy whereby the discourse of race maintained the ideology of race, and the practices of slavery and colonialism administered this ideology. Epistemic injustice offers a vocabulary which no longer favours the neutral status of structures and processes which lead to institutional racism, but by using words such as injustice it reaffirms the role of epistemic imperialism in shaping the world. It also highlights the continued existence of hierarchy and domination because for injustice to exist, one group must be denied recognition, rights, and humanity because injustice is a relative concept (Ahmed, 2015, 2019).

Hierarchical invisibility To counter, reduce, and eliminate institutional racism, it is therefore important to know how policies interact with institutional racism. Policies structure our daily lives and experiences to form and reflect the authoritative and dominant allocation of values (Easton, 1953). Policies are value laden entities and as such, have an enormous authoritative capacity to influence institutional cultures and societal cultures. According to Zamudio and Rios (2006), at various levels individuals and categories function to dehumanise the other and thereby main­ tain existing hegemonic white privilege. Although the Macpherson report high­ lighted the role of procedures and policies in maintaining institutional racism, the lack of insight into how institutional racism is maintained has stagnated and paralysed efforts to eliminate institutional racism. Such invisibility has also contributed to white ignorance and white fragility because it allows those that benefit from white privilege to claim that they are victims of institutional racism in being blamed and held accountable for institutional practices that they are powerless to change. Thus, in the mutual dependence of structure and agency (Giddens, 1979), white frames use the breadth and depth of institutional racism to facilitate white fragility, whereby the systematic existence of racism leads to white helplessness and claims of victimisation. Dismantling

The maintenance of institutional racism 51

institutional racism therefore means challenging the construction of powerlessness and helplessness claimed by the dominant privileged group by making visible structures which may appear neutral but perpetuate inequality. However, these structures exist as a system that also incorporates ideological constructions, which have overtime been socialised to facilitate the institutionalisation of white privilege in discourse and practice. Gramsci (1971) notes how dominant groups actively work at staying domi­ nant. According to Gramsci (1971), this involves the construction of a ruling dominant group which then seeks to project legitimacy for their domination and creates the means, such as institutions, through which to enforce such domination and authority. The processual elements of this relationship mirror those of race and colonialism, with Gramsci (1971) demonstrating the relation­ ship between domination, ideology, and practice and, therefore, how eliminat­ ing institutional racism involves challenging the discourses which maintain superiority and domination. However, as the continued impacts of colonialism demonstrate, reversing this relationship is not only dependent upon dismantling institutions, but also truth and knowledge since these also continue to exist as colonised entities. Once established, policies influence the relationship between culture and truth, because as Weaver-Hightower (2008) argues, policies control what is thinkable, who counts as an expert, and what counts as fact. Socially constructed knowledge systems and words such as expert have disciplined populations by exerting power and control in institutions and societies (Scott, 2001). It could therefore be argued that even where attempts are made to change discourses, existing policies follow the processual logic of previous policies in facilitating categorisation (as expert, non-expert), and the allocation of recognition, rights, and humanity based on the categorisation of such status. Exploring the relationship between ideology and policy (practice) exposes the ideological construction of expert and how this construction facilitates its exis­ tence as a category of domination. As Ahmed (2012: 75) argues, such concepts appear ‘ontological neutral and as being constructed on ‘hard’ evidence whose ‘truth’ is detached from an emotional orientation to the world’. However, their illusionary appearance is maintained through their ability to perpetuate colonial forms of silencing through being labelled as a non-expert, and thus the con­ tinued attribution of recognition, rights, and humanity based on identity. Although such categories allow colonial dichotomies to flourish, with those at the top of the hierarchy designated as being intellectually superior, their intel­ lect is contoured according to the boundaries of white privilege. Their white privilege has continued to silence other forms of truth and knowledge resulting in an epistemic loss. Such a loss not only silences equally valid forms of truth and knowledge, but in doing so it means that all decisions are the outcome of colonised truths and knowledge, as opposed to universal truths and knowledge. This processual template hinders all progress towards a universal epistemology because it could be argued that such an enlightened position and indeed objec­ tive truth can only ever be reached once all evidence has been considered. As the

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previous chapter stated, even highlighting the existence of such processual flaws is subjected to disciplinary regulatory mechanisms.

The normalisation of illusions The process of securing such an illusionary appearance of truth, and indeed processual flaws occurs through socialisation when children are taught to mimic existing truths and practices as legitimate (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). As Outlaw (2007: 200) contends, ‘education became a principal means’ through which to legitimise ‘ignorance-sustaining knowledge’…. These schools became the principal institution through which the terms and agenda of social ordering were mediated to successive generations with determined efforts to preserve the racial hierarchy by educating all who passed through them to the ‘proper’ significance and places of the races. (Outlaw, 2007: 201) Similarly, Feagin (2013: 36) states: these institutions are constantly created, recreated, and maintained by the processes of institutionalization, such as by legal processes, and by the reproducing and conforming actions at the microlevel by the many indivi­ duals in the numerous social networks within these institutions. The intersectionality between structure and agency and their mutual relation­ ship reinforces racialised systems of domination. However, these ‘ignorance-sustaining knowledge’ (Outlaw, 2007: 200) pro­ cesses also function to legitimise a discourse of racial hierarchy and in doing so, create a societal discourse which has consensus. Therefore, the mimicking of truth not only establishes boundaries of what and whom should be excluded, but in doing so, it establishes who should be included, with Omi and Winant (2014) therefore contending that racialisation is also a process that binds people and the institutions of society. These processes of socialisation and the reinforcement of racialised processes through institutions mute active construction and socialise individuals into accepting racialised hierarchies as autonomous creations. Indeed, their legitimacy is secured through their portrayal as fact, truth, and knowledge. Institutions and society are Foucauldian ‘sites of disciplinary power and dis­ ciplinary ‘micropractices’’ (Mumby, 2001: 607). These institutionalised systems of power were created to, and continue to, disperse racialised discourses and prac­ tices (Knadler, 2009). These processes of socialisation, whereby children are taught, and continuously retaught, through constant institutional and societal socialisation to accept racialised power ensures that the consensus for maintain­ ing power is ‘diffused and dispersed’ and constitutes what Foucault (1980: 131) describes as a ‘productive network which runs through the whole social body’.

The maintenance of institutional racism 53

Along with educational institutions, governments play a vital role by posses­ sing the ability to embed race into public policies and laws (Omi & Winant, 2014). However, the ability to racialise policies and laws and socialise racial hierarchy, thus facilitating its existence throughout all society means that ‘there is no longer a perpetrator’ and ‘a clearly identifiable discriminator’ (Crenshaw, 1996: 107). The breadth of dispersal and lack of a clearly identifiable source of racialisation works to disempower victims and empower the existence of help­ lessness and powerless within white fragility and its attempt to identify sources. As Ray (2019) highlights, racialised practices subordinate racial groups, repres­ sing their ability to create and express humanity and magnify the power and agency of the dominant racial group. However, they do so through normalising judgements, which according to Foucault (1977), function to control activities, behaviour, or talk. Normalising judgments therefore functions to maintain the boundaries between accepted and deviant talk (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982). Conceptualised in this way, it is possible to see the levels of domination that operate to silence and obscure the creation, maintenance, and impact of insti­ tutional discrimination and how even speaking about these ideologies and practices can be used as further judgements of non-conformity, thus legitimising and reinforcing the need to control and dominate.

Objectification and denying agency It could therefore be argued that constructions of the truth and practices continue to silence and deny agency to victims, who are then are perpetually colonised in their capacity to speak and contribute to truth and knowledge. Within these contemporary processes of colonisation, dichotomous reasoning, hierarchical ordering, analytic thought, and objectification, the abstraction of experience from knowledge, extreme rationalism, and a rejection of spiritual or sacred forces (desacralisation) grew out of a Eurocentric European culture (Nunn, 1997). A consideration of category formation provides an avenue through which to understand the purposeful construction of categories. Classificatory schemas divided the human population into fixed categories that were separated by bio­ logical differences. In this racialised social systems approach (Bonilla-Silva 2015b), race became an organising principle of society that continues to persist on its own due to its deep entrenchment in social structures and institutions. Therefore, those that benefit from white privilege need not actively work to limit racialised groups’ truth and knowledge because status, normalised ideologies, and structures all work to maintain their continued silence.

Silencing Structures don’t just control and dominate but they also curtail agency, emotions, narratives, and lived experiences to reduce the space through which victims can reveal their victimisation. This silencing maintains an ethnocentric reality that is

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confined to the truth and knowledge of institutionalised practices that are shaped, informed, and controlled by white privilege. However, for victims, their percep­ tions and experiences not only bear witness to the illusionary neutrality of insti­ tutional practices, but also to the racialised nature of these practices and their inherent violence of essentialisation. The violence that is the result of essentali­ sation involves the use of ahistorical categories and labels that have been created to classify the other to legitimise the use of physical and psychological violence against them (Guhin & Wyrtzen, 2013). Thus, the attribution of labels and categories form the foundation from which violence is perpetuated and thus experienced. The curtailment of victim’s recognition, rights, and humanity mirror the same processes that were used during slavery and colonialism. Fanon (2008: 89–91) describes the denial of recognition as a traumatic intrusion in which ‘inside and outside’ come into conflict. The colonised subject ‘appeal[s] to the Other so that his liberating gaze […] would put [him] back in the world’ but is instead addressed as a raced object’. Fanon’s ‘colonized man is the victim of material domination that produces a correlating psychic occupation; the colonizer is present to him not only as an external ruler, but as a pathological presence inside his own skin’ (Fanon, 2008: 126). This denial of recognition not only constructs the reality within which recognition and impacts are silenced, but these also cause psychic occupation. Victims that suffer these impacts are shackled in their ability to gain recognition through not having the opportunity of translating their psychic agency, and as previously stated, this is further exacerbated by the lack of language (given that language and constructs remain controlled by white privilege) developed through which such cumulative suffering can be articulated. It could therefore be argued that whereas the privileged are socialised to legitimise their privilege, victims are socialised to witness and experience their construction and how such a construction is dispersed throughout society, with such witnessing rein­ forcing how their emotions, thoughts, cognitive abilities, and in essence their mind, is colonised. This psychic occupation is multifaceted and all-encompass­ ing, and it is the impact on emotions, thoughts, cognitive abilities, and in essence the mind which leads to such severe multi-faceted layers of victimisa­ tion. These cumulative multi-faceted impacts demonstrate how institutional practices can have deep psychological impacts that not only shape victims’ outward view of the world, but also their introspection and how they perceive and engage with themselves. In the most reductionist sense, this inter­ sectionality can translate into the victim having a choice that either incorporates acceptance of epistemic bias and therefore their position as deserving less recognition, rights, and humanity and all the trauma and pain such acceptance involves, or seeking to change such bias attributions, recognising the trauma and pain such a process may involve and the possibility of achieving minimal change. The normalisation of these processes through white frames erases the violence they create for victims and how such violence and suffering are no less significant than any other forms of state violence.

The maintenance of institutional racism 55

Epistemic status According to Dotson (2011), epistemic violence operates through practices of silencing. To dismantle the normalisation which allows such epistemic violence and victimisation to exist, the processes which maintain silencing need to be erased. Silencing not only denies the full impact of such violence, but it also creates structures through which those defined as having status are able to take the place of victims in articulating impacts by sharing their truth and knowl­ edge. The existence of processes which deny the recognition, rights, and humanity of those placed at the lower ends of the hierarchy, whilst elevating the recognition, rights, and humanity of those at the top, mirror the processes of stigmatisation that were introduced during the colonial period to institutio­ nalise the ideology of race. As Lawrence (1996a: 244) states: stigmatization is the process by which the dominant group in society dif­ ferentiates itself from others by setting them apart, treating them as less than fully human, denying them acceptance by the organized community, and excluding them from participating in that community as equals. Stigmatisation has developed into ‘a social system of laws, practices, and cultural mores that looks down upon these groups, treating them as different from, and inferior to, the norm’ (Lawrence, 1996a: 244). Socially constructed categories and hierarchies work through maintaining socially constructed dominant epistemolo­ gies that ‘value decontextualized, abstract, objective and ostensibly universal knowledge’ (Collins, 2017: 122). The elevation of abstract knowledge over direct grounded perceptual and experiential knowledge not only silences those that suffer the impacts of stigmatisation, but it also affords the dominant group with status the right to speak of the impacts, thus forming another layer through which violence and suffering are erased. These processes are part of the racial contract, which according to Mills (1997) leads to two epistemic classes, one group that are defined as knowers, and the other group that are socially constructed and defined as subknowers. By creating two epistemic classes, the racial contract establishes generic knowers as progressing towards knowing the world, and it deems those it labels as ‘non-white as incapable of intellectual achievement and progress’ (Mills, 1997: 44– 46). The projection of colonial dichotomies to epistemology creates inequality and in doing so, it enables one group to have the justice of contributing to epistemology and another group to suffer the injustice of not being able to contribute. According to Pohlhaus (2017: 20): contributory injustices occur when knowers utilize epistemic resources that are inapt for understanding the potential contributions of particular knowers to our collective knowledge pool and thereby engage in a form of willful hermeneutical ignorance that refuses to employ more apt epistemic resources for receiving and appropriately responding to those contributions.

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It could therefore be argued that the processes for determining knowers is also secured through the creation and existence of discourses, ideologies, and ulti­ mately words and language which silence victims. For example, the void of words and language through which to articulate experiences of institutional racism can silence suffering, as can the discourses associated with institutional racism, because until these incorporate the cumulative mental health impact mentioned above, a victim cannot have confidence that their voice will be accepted. As the case study chapters demonstrate, the UK has engaged in wilful hermeneutical ignorance by using language and discourses to adapt under­ standings of institutional racism into their own epistemic truth and knowledge. The prioritisation of the abstract over the grounded leads to contributory injustices and a hermeneutical gap—a ‘gap in collective interpretative resources’ through putting ‘someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences’ (Fricker, 2007: 1). This gap in resources con­ tributes to epistemic imperialism and it is through rendering impossible a uni­ versal epistemology that the recognition, rights, and humanity of those at the top of the hierarchy is maintained. The loss of a democratic epistemology results in those that suffer epistemic loss failing to have their voices heard and without such a voice, inequality, victimisation etc cease to be given importance and accepted as reality. Contributory injustice therefore directly impacts social justice, with the mechanisms that maintain institutional racism not just sus­ taining harm and suffering but also sustaining justice as an illusion. Within this intersectionality between construction, hermeneutical ignor­ ance, and epistemic injustice, attempts by victims to demonstrate the existence of contributory injustice and a hermeneutical gap are instantly labelled as illegitimate, and as examples of such groups not having the ability to under­ stand the mechanisms through which intellectual progress will be achieved. The curtailment of narratives not only denies agency, but it also denies the most basic human ability—the right to speak through a voice that conveys our thoughts, values and ultimately our self. As Fricker (2007) states, in all forms of injustice, the subject is wronged in their capacity as a knower. The rela­ tionship between epistemic marginalisation and hermeneutical injustice can be gleaned from how white fragility and white victimisation are elevated as worthy of recognition and understanding because they originate from the narratives of the dominant group. Speaking for others is an extension of power and as Fricker (2007: 43) argues, it is in this mastery of power that ‘prejudice presents an obstacle to truth, either directly by causing the hearer to miss out on a particular truth, or indirectly by creating blockages in the cir­ culation of critical ideas’. Epistemicide facilitates the existence of templates which determine the relationship between identity, knowledge, and truth, and although as Fricker (2007) contends, testimonial injustice damages the epis­ temic system, the illusionary appearance of epistemic democracy conceals its lack of recognition, rights, and humanity for some groups. It is the continua­ tion of the past and the need to maintain systems of privilege that as Tsosie

The maintenance of institutional racism 57

(2017: 361) states, makes ‘the dominant society’…. ‘discount the experience of the indigenous group’ and normalise an ‘epistemology that was created pre­ cisely to exclude other groups’. These processes maintain the power of domi­ nant groups, with members of the dominant class continuing to ‘benefit from the wrongs of the past and the presumptions of inferiority imposed upon vic­ tims’ (Matsuda, 1996: 71). According to Collins (2019: 139), for subordinated groups, ‘claiming situated standpoints, especially group-based standpoints, and theorizing from those social locations can be a form of empowerment’ and epistemic resistance. However, status, hierarchies, and the construction of truth itself act as barriers to interpretative resources, not only restricting the possibility of social experi­ ences to be voiced and heard by those that have direct experience, but also by allowing those without those experiences to speak through their abstract and decontextualised knowledge. The elevation of epistemic authority over experi­ ence facilitates epistemic arrogance. Epistemic vices such as epistemic arrogance are systematic and structural because they are deeply embedded in the social norms and perceptive understanding and functioning of individuals (Medina, 2012). As Medina (2012) goes on to state, it produces situations whereby one is assumed to possess knowledge and know simply because they look and/or behave in a certain way. Epistemic arrogance is a multi-faceted entity that is part of a deeply embedded system that provides layers of silencing, and mechanisms through which only the voices of those that occupy the superior binary position are ever heard.

Epistemic arrogance However, given the relationship between socialisation, white privilege, and arrogance, it has also been argued that epistemic arrogance is also cultural. According to Filemyr (1995), if white people faced the cultural arrogance and injustice embedded in the socioeconomic system, they might then shed tears, and experience the guilt of maintaining privilege. Filemyr (1995) highlights how arrogance ensures that white people do not experience the many layers of vic­ timisation that cultural arrogance and epistemic imperialism cause. White people are not just socialised to be protected from the harms, but they are also protected from having the responsibility to engage, thus concealing their capa­ city and responsibility to engage in actions to produce social justice. As Tre­ pagnier (2011: 357) contends, given the role of socialisation and cultural arrogance, individuals are likely to act as passive bystanders that ‘do nothing in the face of injustice or discrimination’. The epistemology of ignorance reveals how the purposeful existence of ignorance through choosing to unknow racism creates white solipsism and normalisation as default positions (Mills, 2007). Such investments have facili­ tated the existence of whiteness with what Garner (2007) calls an uncomfor­ table mixture of arrogance and fear. This arrogance and denial centres around

58 The maintenance of institutional racism

the construction of intellect over emotion. The enlightenment meant ‘the formal production, identification, and organization of what will be called ‘knowledge’ is inevitably political’ (Cook, 1996: 88). The enlightenment construction of knowledge institutionalised knowledge as an intellectual entity and it could be argued that such a construction was purposeful because, as previously stated, it allowed the ideology of inferior intellect to be classified according to race. However, as is now explored, the move towards an objective scientific knowl­ edge also deprioritised emotional intelligence, thus defining truth and knowl­ edge according to one’s epistemic status.

The construction of emotions According to Mills (2007), epistemic classes demonstrate how the recognition of emotions is differentiated according to privileged and non-privileged groups. According to Calmore (1996: 320), how our voice differs from the dominant voice is important. The suppression of voices is a direct legacy of colonialism which denied groups recognition and the emotionality of their humanity. Although ‘emotions shape the ways that people experience their worlds and interactions’ and ‘give people’s psychic realities and ideological convictions (how- ever fic­ tional or unfounded) their sense of realness’ (Ioanide, 2015: 2), the Darwinian model of emotions suggests that emotions are not only beneath us but behind the human, as a sign of an earlier and more primitive time (Ahmed 2012, 2014). This led to the mental/emotional binary cognitive paradigm in Western thought that de-privileged emotions as a form of knowledge (Levine-Rasky, 2016). The con­ struction of knowledge and emotions determined what is ‘epistemically sig­ nificant or worthy of epistemic attention (i.e. the world as experienced by this particular set of knowers and not another) and who counts as an ideal epistemic agent (i.e. those who experience the world in this particular way, not another)’ (Pohlhaus, 2017: 15). Epistemological significance followed racial hierarchies to further establish control and domination, thus removing the possibility that in some areas, lived experience might be a more accurate representation of knowl­ edge. As Abu-Lughod and Lutz (1990) argue, power appears to be an integral part of discourses about emotions because power functions to determine what can and cannot be said about self and emotion, what is accepted as the truth about them, and the right of only some to speak of emotions. This then rein­ forces status determining epistemic power and the construction that otherised groups do not carry affective or emotional value (Ioanide, 2015). Institutional rules, procedures, and processes dismiss emotions through racialised forms of power that constitute epistemicide, thereby reducing any space which affords recognition to their negative impact. Emotions are economies; they have ‘mechanisms of circulation, accumulation, expression, and exchange that give them social currency, cultural legibility, and political power’ (Ioanide, 2015: 2). It is this intersectionality between emotions, culture, and politics which functions to maintain cultural imperialism and white ignorance.

The maintenance of institutional racism 59

The restriction of emotions-based narratives reduces the possibility for progress because it is in this space of recognition that emotions like empathy can be trans­ ferred to facilitate understanding, thereby transcending white ignorance, and leading to motivations to challenge epistemic injustices. According to Goleman (2020), empathy is a form of emotional intelligence because it incorporates the ability to understand other peoples’ emotions and reactions. Similarly, Du Bois (2008) describes the processes of looking at ourselves through our own eyes and the eyes of others, and it is in the process of recognising one’s ‘belonging and not belonging’ that we develop empathy. The recognition of another’s emotions starts with recognising them as an equal, and the recognition that they might be the best and most authoritative narrator of their own perceptions and lived experiences. Discourses around emotions not only maintain the epistemology of ignorance, but through doing so they silence and further exacerbate epistemic oppression and epistemic injustice and reduce the possibility of social activism through epistemic resistance. According to Doetsch-Kidder (2012), activism can emerge as a response to pain when it is combined with love. Rattansi (1995: 280) recognises this when he stresses that there exists ‘the need to recognize the limitations of overly ‘rationalist’ (Enlightenment) strategies which neglect the strength of emotions, fantasy, and pleasure in sustaining racism’. Emotions are of vital importance in encouraging empathy and those that maintain institutional barriers to become active bystan­ ders. The lack empathy (further induced through the epistemological status of emotions) contributes to what Mills (1997) calls an inverted world, where those who created injustice and benefit from injustice remain ignorant. Any attempt at achieving equality must strive to include emotions as part of a single voice that ‘does not subvert or subordinate either of ourselves, one which instead demands that others recognize in our contradictory persona a paradigm for multidimensionality, for connecting understandings of our reality’ (Lawrence, 1996b: 344). Such a voice can only exist through recognising and deconstructing the intersectionality between knowledge, emotions, and white privilege. According to Levine-Rasky (2016), whiteness exists within institutions and culture to limit attention to emotionality, even though whiteness is sus­ tained through emotional labour and emotional work. As previously stated, fear and panic have been used to construct racialised discourses, with the failure to establish how processes created during colonialism continue to contribute to epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression further distorting responsibility and the possibility for change. These processes render invisible the ‘tactics of epistemic violence operating within interpretive communities to police the cherished ideas of any given group’ (Collins, 2019: 133), and contribute to the conceptualisation of emotions as being ‘independent of structural, political, and social inequalities’ (Avraamidou, 2020: 338). This construction of emotions not only demonstrates how one’s epistemic status allows one to utilise emotions as part of their epistemic knowledge, but how through not allowing victims the same epistemic status and thus the right to speak of their emotions, the cumu­ lative impacts of these strategies of domination remain concealed.

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Denial of systematic and traumatic impacts These forms of silencing have led Lawrence (1996a: 245) to argue that stigma­ tization inflicts ‘psychological injury by assaulting a person’s self-respect and human dignity, and they brand the individuals with a sign that signals her inferior status to others and designates her as an outcast’. The denial of such humanity, whether through silencing one’s ability to contribute to truth or the denial of psychological impacts, further obscures the humanity and agency of victims. For example, where the ability to contribute to the truth is denied, but the opportunity to speak of the impacts of such denials are heard, the victim can speak through their humanity and transfer narratives pertaining to all the cumulative impacts and the pervasive intrusion of these onto oneself. These denials and their silencing, ‘forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: ‘Who am I in reality?’’ (Fanon, 2004: 182). Epistemicide dissects reality into a binary which forces into one’s mind a blunt mechanism which demonstrates their occupation as lacking epistemic power, in deep contrast to their selfdefined conceptualisation of their place in the world. This contrasting tension provides a huge strain on knowing oneself and determining whether our rela­ tionship with the world is a product of an independent self-defined autonomy, or the structural forms of power which shape perceptions, experiences, and any exchange with the world. Thus, the structure agency mutuality works to disempower and reduce internally derived self-worth, self-capacity, and selfknowledge. These tensions therefore have a vast impact on the subjective com­ ponents of one’s identity. As Fricker (2007) notes, the undermining of intellect negatively impacts ones’ confidence, leading to a loss of knowledge. The deep psychological cumulative impacts incorporate experiences of how epistemic power, which determines the right to speak, can lead to insecurity. Thus, rather than possessing the security that one’s knowledge will be received, every decision to speak is accompanied by experiences of insecurity knowing that what has been shared may never be heard, and judged as epistemologically worthy. The insecurity that epistemic injustices, marginalisation, and exclusions breed fracture epistemic trust. Where epistemic trust has been fractured, beliefs in right and wrong, in justice and epistemic democracy have no security. Where there is no security, there is no safety, and every spoken word and action becomes infused with the possibility that they may bring the psychological injury that accompanies epistemic injustice and oppression. As Hookway (2010) contends, participating in epistemic practices are necessary for developing one’s capacities as an epistemic agent. Where there is exclusion, this impedes one’s epistemic growth (Medina, 2012). Where an individual lacks epistemic trust, their sense of security and safety in the world is fractured and these contribute to what Matsuda, (1996: 65) calls, the ‘duality of consciousness that incorpo­ rates both mainstream consciousness and victim consciousness’. The victim consciousness is so powerful that it becomes the primary frame through which victimised groups see the world. The socialisation and constant enforcement of

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this frame through societal and institutional rules and ideologies means that victims are constantly forced to see how injustice, bias, oppression, and dom­ ination work to serve dominant groups. Victims therefore see the perpetrator perspective, and as Freeman (1996: 30) argues, ‘this view upholds society and opportunities as being equal and where deprivations do occur, these are war­ ranted and based on justified reasons and ‘merit’’. The creation of new cate­ gories and labels serve to further embed the perpetrator perspective and the ‘duality of consciousness’ to reinforce a consciousness where mechanisms of inequality continue to fracture trust. It is the space between these forms of consciousness that literally fracture the psyche and where these can’t be recon­ ciled, they split the psyche through forming indigestible trauma. By attending to the cumulative impact and thus the breadth and depth of victimisation, literature on trauma adopts a victim standpoint. As Freeman (1996: 29) summarises, ‘from the victim perspective, racial discrimination describes those conditions of actual social existence as a member of a perpetual underclass’. Experiences of this underclass include the objective conditions of life (lack of jobs, lack of money, lack of housing) and the consciousness associated with those objective conditions (lack of choice and lack of human individuality in being forever perceived as a member of a group rather than an individual). Whereas in contrast, ‘the perpetrator perspective sees racial discrimination not as conditions but as actions, or series of actions, inflicted on the victim by the perpetrator’ (Freeman, 1996: 29). As Freeman (1996) highlights, any articulation which slightly veers towards a perpetrator perspective will serve to further reinforce institutional racism through contributing to its ideological construc­ tion. Such a perspective curtails emotions and lived experience at the expense of other forms of knowledge to maintain white privilege.

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Omi, M. & Winant, H. (2014). Racial Formation in the United States. London: Routledge. Outlaw, L.T., Jr. (2007). Social Ordering and the Systematic Production of Ignorance. In Sullivan, S. & Tuana, N. (Eds), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 197–212. Pohlhaus, G., Jr. (2017). Varieties of epistemic injustice. In Kidd, I. J., Medina, J., & Pohlhaus, G., The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Routledge: London, pp. 13–26. Rattansi, A. (1995). Just framing: Ethnicities and racisms in a ‘postmodern’ framework, in Nicholson, L. & Seidman, S., Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 250–286. Ray, V. (2019). A theory of racialized organizations. American Sociological Review, 84 (1), pp. 26–53. Said, E. W. (1994). Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage. Scott, J. (2001). Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sewell, W.H., Jr. (1992). A theory of structure: Duality, agency, and transformation. American Journal of Sociology, 98 (1), pp. 1–29. Trepagnier, B. (2011). Silent racism. In Coates, R.D., Covert Racism: Theories, Institu­ tions, and Experiences. Haymarket: Haymarket Books, pp. 353–364. Trepagnier, B. (2017). Silent Racism: How Well-meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide. Taylor & Francis: London. Tsosie, R. (2017). Indigenous Peoples, Anthropology, and the Legacy of Epistemic Injustice. In Kidd, I. J., Medina, J., & Pohlhaus, G., The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Routledge: London, pp. 356–369. Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2008). An ecology metaphor for educational policy analysis: A call to complexity. Educational Researcher, 37 (3), pp. 153–167. Wight, C. (2003). The agent-structure problem and institutional racism. Political Studies, 51 (4), pp. 706–721. Zamudio, M. M. & Rios, F. (2006). From traditional to liberal racism: Living racism in the everyday. Sociological Perspectives, 49 (4), pp. 483–501.

4 UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACTS OF INSTITUTIONAL RACISM Presenting the framework

This chapter explores how epistemicide, hermeneutical injustice, and epistemic imperialism colonise truth and knowledge to conceal the cumulative impacts of institutional racism. It uses the concepts of epistemology of ignorance and epistemic arrogance to explore how this bias distributes knowledge according to one’s constructed epistemic status, thereby deprivileging perceptual and experiential knowledge of institutional racism. By highlighting these mechan­ isms, the chapter explores how they contribute to the epistemology of victims, who not only endure the epistemic violence of institutional racism, but also from deeply ingrained and dispersed institutional inequalities which fracture epistemic trust and restrict victims’ right to be heard. The chapter then moves on to explore how the deconstruction of epistemic injustice can be used to allow the agency of lower status groups to be elevated, thereby cutting across status and hierarchy to provide a space where institu­ tional discrimination can be articulated. The chapter highlights how this approach allows readers to grasp the cumulative psychological impacts of institutional discrimination. In exploring the full cumulative impacts, the chap­ ter demonstrates the extent to which literature on institutional racism has per­ petuated the restrictive dimensions which silence narratives and impacts, and the value in moving beyond these restrictive barriers to provide true agency and representations of institutional discrimination.

Poststructuralist resistance In seeking to demonstrate the relationship between the construction of institutional racism and its cumulative impacts, this chapter advocates a psycho-structural framework through which it is possible to explore how the construction of ideological truth and knowledge also produces DOI: 10.4324/9781003187073-4

66 Understanding the impacts of institutional racism

psychological impacts. Ideology provides structure to discourses thereby facilitating the prioritisation of those discourses that affirm the interests of particular groups, with race serving as ideological vessel of power through the creation of racialised rules, procedures, and laws. The lack of historisa­ tion of institutional racism has stagnated progress because it has obscured how the colonialism still produces various rules, systems, and procedures which continue to shape the conceptual territory on which knowledge is created and shaped (Foucault, 1980). These continuities clearly highlight that given the construction of institutions as racialised entities, until institutions are completely decolonised, a process that must involve all procedures, racialised practices and thus impacts will continue. Therefore, instead of institutions perceiving themselves as being cut off from the past, discourses need to be orientated towards recognising how systemic racism is about the creation and maintenance of white privilege, sociopolitical power, and eco­ nomic wealth (Feagin, 2014). Institutions must consider how their rules, policies, and procedures form part of the colonial project and question how their taken for granted policies contribute to epistemic imperialism to maintain and reinforce white privilege.

Whiteness According to Coates (2011), the questioning of policies involves interrogating and critiquing policies which are taught both subconsciously and unconsciously within social institutions and groups, which although they appear natural, normal, and legitimate, maintain boundaries between groups. It is the con­ struction of ideological legitimacy and normality within white frames which conceals the very mechanisms that maintain institutional racism and white pri­ vilege. Whiteness has been structured to maintain privilege by utilising the hierarchy of race. Whiteness is identity, discourse, ideology, structure, and institution. Conceptualising whiteness as institutional facilitates not just the recognition of privilege within institutions and thus, the normative existence of white privilege, but also how equality can only be achieved through dismantling the institutional mechanisms which maintain white privilege. Simply acknowl­ edging and/or describing racism has failed to transform and liberate oppression (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).

Social justice and victimisation Implicit in CRT is a commitment to social justice which, as previously stated, involves a commitment to neutralising the layers and strands of institutional racism to dismantle their ability to produce cumulative impacts. Such a stand­ point doesn’t reaffirm hermeneutical injustice and epistemic imperialism as norms, rather it recognises how epistemological arrogance, epistemological oppression, and epistemological injustice produce victimisation by denoting a

Understanding the impacts of institutional racism 67

victims as having lower epistemic status. Victimisation thus exists and starts at the level of discourse. This ‘duality of consciousness’ reflects how both ‘main­ stream consciousness and victim consciousness’ (Matsuda, 1996: 65) inflict harm by simply existing, and it is the space between these two forms of con­ sciousness that lead to deep psychological impacts. It starts with a child ques­ tioning their lesser epistemic status and having to reconcile how their socially constructed status not only permeates throughout societal and institutional discourses and practice, but how these exist to maintain white privilege, which in contrast maintains white children’s full epistemic status. Such a duality exists through taught categories, and they have devasting impacts because as De Alva et al. (1997: 485) state, ‘categories are constructed, scars and bruises are felt with human bodies, some of which end up in coffins’. To expose these categories, without reinforcing their construction as abstract structured entities (Prins, 2006; Staunaes, 2003), this book grounds their existence in institutions which form distinct chapters. Failures to ground institutional racism and / or use language which challenges the mechanisms that create and maintain institutional racism contributes to epistemic arrogance. The need for a reflexive turn, whereby academic writing scrutinises epistemicide with structural forms of inequality, would facilitate not only the dismantling of the obvious mechanisms which maintain inequality, but also their ideological foundations. This reflexivity, rather than obscuring understandings of institutional racism, forms an avenue through which to embark on gaining understanding of the power of academic representation by moving beyond the structures which shackle analysis of institutional racism. Therefore, the goal and commitment must be to attempt to portray life as it is experienced in its subjective aspects, thereby affording the reader a lens through which they can view lives that maybe socially restricted (Lazarus, 2011). Such an approach recognises the experiential knowl­ edge of all people and their communities. In allowing such narratives the possibility of drawing upon trauma, where this may be required, expensive interpretative frameworks are used. As Clark (2016: 175) states, through the language of trauma it is possible to name and address the ‘real harm and violence done through colonial systems, at both the structural’, and what Fanon (1961) called the psychoaffective level. The con­ temporary need to still find the correct language and define categories according to the contours imposed by victims reflects the continuities of colonialism over knowledge and truth. The denial of the psychoaffeective level has served to validate claims of institutional racism being isolated and events-based, as opposed to systemic and dispersed. The dispersal of institutional racism to all societal spheres has not only determined the breadth and depth of institutional racism, but in doing so it has created multiple cumulative impacts that can negatively impact the daily lives of victims. Such is the severity, intensity, and frequency of these impacts that they have the capacity to impact every encoun­ ter. Thus, for the victim, every encounter can represent insecurity and vulner­ ability where those of lesser epistemic status face the uncertainty of knowing if

68 Understanding the impacts of institutional racism

the encounter will conform to their consciousness that is a product of a uni­ versal epistemology, and how things ought to be, or if the encounter will con­ stitute epistemic injustice and thus conform to their other consciousness. It could therefore be argued that epistemic status leads to the otherisation of consciousness for those constructed as not having the epistemic status to con­ tribute to truth and knowledge. Even when using trauma, understandings and uses need to be adjusted to allow for cumulative impacts. Craps (2013) highlights how the event-based model of trauma conceptualises trauma as emerging from a single catastrophic event thereby neglecting the trauma suffered by minority groups. The tradi­ tional model of trauma otherises through neglecting the breadth and depth of inequalities and how each represents an opportunity to induce deep psycholo­ gical impacts, including trauma. According to Taylor (1994) both nonrecogni­ tion and misrecognition inflict harm because they are forms of oppression that imprison someone in a false and distorted narrative that reduces their mode of being. For this reason, Herrero and Baelo-Allué (2011: xiv) suggest combining ‘the psychological and the cultural, in an interdisciplinary approach that draws on psychoanalysis, sociology, philosophy, and history in the study of the aes­ thetic representation of trauma’. Such an approach, as the previous chapters have highlighted, can provide space for true recognition through correcting the colonial forms of epistemicide which continue the racialisation of truth and knowledge.

Beyond institutional racism and towards epistemic injustice In attending to what Sandoval (2013) calls the methodology of the oppressed, the chapter seeks to document the cumulative impacts of institutional dis­ crimination. Although Collins (2019: 238) notes how ‘violence is clearly an important dimension of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and heteropatriarchy as distinctive forms of political domination’, there has been little public and offi­ cial recognition of the cumulative impact of this violence on the ‘psychoaffec­ tive’ level. Epistemic interpretivism filters knowledge to maintain knowledge as a form of white privilege and as previously stated, it is the ideological con­ struction of knowledge which is used to inform societal consensus and the rules, procedures and policies which shape institutions. Epistemic interpretivism therefore directly contributes to epistemic injustice. Although ‘ ‘epistemic injustice’ draws together three branches of philosophy—political philosophy, ethics, and epistemology’, the concept of ethics can contribute to the reflexive turn (Pohlhaus, 2017: 13). Ethics provides the foundations to assess recognition, rights, and humanity by guiding attention to the cosmopolitan realm of humanity, which rather than highlighting constructed differences, focuses attention to commonality (Ahmed, 2019). Any progress towards challenging institutional racism which has failed to consider the role of ethics instantly diverges into a perspective which is anti-cosmopolitan and thus, anti-humanity.

Understanding the impacts of institutional racism 69

Cosmopolitanism denotes the need for equal human rights and equal moral worth, highlighting how the reduction of these negatively impact one’s sub­ jectivity and their belonging to their various identities, including their subjective belonging to humanity (Ahmed, 2019). Literature on epistemic injustice high­ lights how epistemic values, such as ‘truth, aptness, and understanding’ can be unjust with regard to particular knowers (Pohlhaus, 2017: 13). It therefore dis­ misses the construction of institutional racism as being event-based and isolated through offering the possibility of understanding how one’s epistemic status determines their ‘truth, aptness, and understanding’ and thus how those with­ out epistemic status, they suffer the constant otherisation of their ‘truth, apt­ ness, and understanding’ (Pohlhaus, 2017: 13).

Post-colonial trauma studies Such a constant otherisation of nothing less than consciousness as Fricker (2007) notes, undermines intellect to negatively impacts ones’ confidence, leading to a loss of knowledge. It therefore forms a pathological presence in the mind of the oppression with such psychic occupation reinforcing the otherisation of their consciousness (Fanon, 2008). This all-encompassing occupation impacts emo­ tions, thoughts, cognitive abilities, etc. with further perceptual and experiential knowledge, adding depth to the occupation of such trauma. It could thus be argued that although there are a vast number of event-based incidents that cause trauma, institutional racism forms a unique phenomenon by representing thoughts, behaviours, and actions that form continuous events. It is therefore a form of harm that is not only severe in its capacity to cause psychological injury, but also in its capacity to cause continuous and perpetual injuries. Mengel and Borzaga (2012: ix) have argued that trauma studies requires decolonisation to acknowledge ‘the systemic denial and exclusion’ of the rela­ tionship between ‘trauma, colonialism, and racism’. Although ‘the field of trauma studies emerged in the early 1990s as an attempt to construct an ethical response to forms of human suffering and their cultural and artistic repre­ sentation’ (Andermahr, 2016: 1), it has largely failed to include the systematic suffering of institutional racism. Given the role of oppressive structures, it is not surprising that descriptions of suffering and understandings of suffering have had to also undergo processes of demystification and decolonisation to situate them within an ethical standpoint. In elucidating these processes of decolonia­ lisation, Craps (2013) argues, trauma theory has failed to include and thus recognise the sufferings of non-Western others. This lack of recognition has firstly incorporated epistemic ignorance regarding the extent of trauma, and thus the deep psychological impacts of institutional racism. The failure to con­ ceptualise this suffering as trauma has minimised the extent of psychological injury. Secondly, it has denied the extent to which institutional racism exists throughout society and is dispersed and by virtue, the breadth of suffering. Denials of the depth and the breadth have obscured the pervasive nature of

70 Understanding the impacts of institutional racism

institutional racism and its impacts. Therefore, any descriptions of institutional discrimination which fail to place institutional discrimination within the more recent theories of insidious trauma (Root, 1992) and postcolonial syndrome (Duran et al., 1998) theories, which facilitate acknowledgement of the breadth and depth of institutional discrimination, risk reaffirming epistemic imperialism.

Knowing and epistemologies The oppression of the right to speak, as previous chapters have demonstrated, is an intrinsic component of institutional racism, with rules, policies, and pro­ cedures all working to normalise epistemic status. Creating a universal episte­ mology can cut through epistemic ignorance and epistemic arrogance to provide an understanding of the depth and breadth of impacts that result from epis­ temic oppression and epistemic injustice to provide a valid epistemology of victims. As Peller (1996: 142) highlights, ‘knowledge was itself the ability of the powerful to impose their own views, to differentiate between knowledge and moth, reason and emotion, and objectivity and subjectivity’… ‘knowledge was necessarily a social construct’. The social construct of acceptable forms of knowledge has silenced and continues to silence those voices that bear experi­ ential witness. The core argument for an ‘alternative experiential epistemology’, highlights the need to ‘take into account non-hegemonic viewpoints, providing a substitute for the abstract and decontextualised way in which epistemological exchanges’ are constructed (Medina, 2013: 47). Although as Medina (2013: 47) argues, the ‘main cognitive asset of the oppressed is their aptitude for meta­ lucidity—their capacity to see the limitations of dominant ways of seeing’ it is within this meta-lucidity and the space between the dominant way of seeing things, and the limitations of this, that victimisation can also be experienced. Although such a capacity could be regarded as enlightened, since such a view­ point incorporates all knowledge, it is the epistemic status of the speaker which determines the value of this knowledge. As such, the articulation of this knowledge renders open the possibility of oppression and thus victimisation. According to Medina (2013: 47), ‘to recognise one’s unique voice is not to be a victim-monger seeking sympathy in return for a sacrifice of pride. Rather, it is to recognise that such identification is one of the only hopes of transformative resistance strategy’. Such a curtailment and restriction can be both group spe­ cific, through silencing those that belong to a particular group and individual specific, thus silencing the breadth and depth of an individual’s knowledge. Both inter and intra forms of epistemological domination dismiss how the breadth and depth of experience constitute a unique voice, thus interrupting the process through which they can become part of a transformative experience / structure. A universal epistemology would not only be richer if it embraced diversity and reflected the spectrum of humanity, but in doing so, it could also lay claim to legitimately being the truth. Thus, where alternative epistemologies are not heard, be it even as the result of autonomous appearing rules and

Understanding the impacts of institutional racism 71

procedures, this should be conceptualised as going against humanity and cur­ tailing progress towards a universal epistemology. The need for victims to demonstrate the limitations of epistemic status highlights how the construction of knowledge itself is problematic and thus how victims need to actively work in demonstrating the illegitimacy of the ideas and processes that maintain inequality.

The re-affirmation of agency via recognition The role of epistemic status in determining ones right to be heard highlights how it leads to a form of epistemic injustice that denies agency. According to Medina (2013) epistemic injustices disadvantage and mistreat minorities by constructing them as intellectually inferior and therefore as less credible than members of other groups. These social and epistemic injustices can negatively impact an individual’s belief in their capacity to give good testimony (Medina, 2013). Medina (2013) highlights how epistemic injustice conditions individuals own understanding of their capacity and ability to give testimony. Therefore, agency and capacity can be reaffirmed through the recognition of perceptual and experiential epistemologies as valid epistemologies. Thus, instead of pre­ determined categories forming the basis for one’s epistemological inclusion, standpoints with their perceptual and experiential insights are recognised as being valid epistemologies. According to Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis (2002: 315), ‘standpoint epistemology asserts the right to be an equal epistemic agent in interpreting one’s own realities within interpretive communities’. A standpoint epistemology leads to the reaffirmation of agency and recognition and through doing so, it interrupts power relations, because as Ray (2019) claims, racist ideologies form explicit defences of an underlying racial structure giving actors different forms of agency and thus any attempt to fracture and dismantle racial structures must start with the equal distribution of agency. It is only through the equal distribution of agency facilitated through a standpoint epistemology that it is possible to make visible insidious trauma, and thus the traumatogenic impacts of oppression that may not be violent and threaten the body but do have the capacity to violently injure the soul and spirit (Root, 1992). As highlighted below, institutional racism impacts one’s understanding of the world, and their sense of trust and security in that world. The long-term capa­ city of injury to the soul and spirit can be gleaned from the fact that, as LaCapra (2001) states, victims need to verbalise and articulate what happened so that they are able to work through their trauma. This therefore highlights how silencing and curtailing one’s right to share perceptual and experiential truth and knowledge can cause further trauma, thereby adding severity to the initial experience itself. However, without recognition and an openness to removing the barriers to a standpoint epistemology, the victim holds such truth and knowledge alone, whilst also recognising how the sharing of the standpoint epistemology could add further layers of epistemic oppression. It could thus be

72 Understanding the impacts of institutional racism

argued that institutional racism not only represents the ability of a singular event to contribute to victimisation, but the colonisation of truth and knowl­ edge contribute to cultural epistemic oppression with the victim having no space in which to articulate and speak. Such a conceptualisation affords recog­ nition to the victim perspective by recognising the impacts as they evolve from the standpoint of the victim, and thus how the ability to share and / or not to share such experiences can also add layers of trauma to exacerbate victimisa­ tion. Although primary experiences of victimisation can be harmful, being completely alone in the sharing and the aftermath of such experiences can diminish any belief in justice. Affording recognition must involve recognising the authenticity and validity of a victim perspective and the need to remove barriers so that such a perspective can be heard. One form of solidarity can be the use of ethical witnessing to elevate the epistemic status of a victim perspective. Anzaldúa demonstrates how the ‘epis­ temologies and emotional economies of ethical witnessing generate forms of consciousness and praxis that both contend with the impositions of gendered racism and generate practices of healing’ (2007: 34). Similarly, Agamben’s work on witnessing traces the etymology of the word to the Latin supersedes meaning ‘a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it’ (1999: 17). This definition highlights power and the power that is the product of one’s sensory experi­ ences. It holds such narratives as superior to those of other imposed categories, such as expert. Bearing witness to institutional racism challenges existing con­ structions of institutional racism as being singular and periodic. It opens the space in which the epistemology of institutional racism is defined according to its actual existence and not its construction through the interpretivist epis­ temologies of white frames and white privilege. The value of such a shift is that it provides the possibility of movement closer to a universal epistemology through incorporating all epistemologies.

Victim-centred approach Within this new space of resistance, attention should be given to allowing nar­ ratives to emerge according to the language used by victims. This involves recognising how economic and political issues shape institutions and under­ standings of trauma and what is therefore required is a historisation of trauma to avoid imposing restrictions (Mengel & Borzaga, 2012). The attention to history, power, and structures provides a space whereby the relationship between ‘trauma, colonialism, and racism’ can be addressed in trauma studies (Mengel & Borzaga, 2012: ix). By deconstructing, decolonising, and recon­ structing the space within which the impact of these processes can emerge, it becomes possible to establish a more equal epistemological truth. It also allows cumulative impacts to emerge that are no longer shaped, exploited, and inter­ preted through transient forms of contemporary colonial power. However, the

Understanding the impacts of institutional racism 73

recognition of impacts also involves addressing the placement of emotions as being inferior entities. As previously stated, the construction of emotions silen­ ces the cumulative impacts of institutional racism. The inclusion of emotions as a central component of a victim standpoint epistemology facilitates recognition of how victimisation is shaped by individuals and wider society. For example, after an initial experience of victimisation, it is entirely plausible that the victim experi­ ences shame, leading the victim to be afraid of being rejected by the people s/he loves and the community s/he belongs to (Burrows, 2006; Herman, 2015). According to Herrero (2016: 102), ‘the victim’s immediate reaction to this loss of face is that of covering and concealment’. Such covering and concealment is the result of processes of socialisation where the victim knows that they possess the wrong identity, and thus the wrong epistemological status to speak and to be heard. According to Herrero (2016: 102), the ‘re-enactments of the trauma inex­ orably bring about terribly painful, and humiliating, memories that the victim is ashamed to relive again’…. ‘this is why the existence of an ‘empathic and suppor­ tive witness with whom the individual can feel confident enough to talk is of the utmost importance’. The engagement with emotions via a victim centred approach epistemology reveals further structural barriers which are omitted in under­ standings of institutional racism and yet act as powerful forms of domination. For victims, loss, concealment, humiliation, and pain are further layers of domination. It is the fear of re-enactment and reliving only to have their standpoint epistemol­ ogy interpreted as invalid which makes the task of speaking fraught with insecurity and self-doubt. Alternatively, it is the role of white privilege which means that whites don’t have to maintain their invisibility for fear of experiencing more pain through epistemic oppression. Thus, although an empathic witness is of importance, it is important that the witness creates a place of safety where the victim can speak of their experiences, by adopting a victim-centred epistemological approach. The immense power of the privileged compared to the de-privileged facilitates little compassion, understanding and empathy. It therefore requires the active critical embrace by those in power of their position, their privilege, and how these can without intention, lead to epistemic practices that devalue and traumatise those without privilege. The recognition of trauma is an important facet because it represents the need to bear witness to the humanity of the victim during the vic­ timisation process and not restrict their experience according to any entity that may constitute oppression. It is imperative that oppressive mechanisms are chal­ lenged because as Herman (2015) states, the organised, detailed, orientated in time and place verbal narratives of trauma contribute to healing and recovery. In Herman’s view, trauma narratives are therapeutic, and provide psychic integra­ tion to facilitate the resolution of trauma (Herman, 2015). Although narratives offer the possibility of healing, according to Craps (2013) these must recognise how such structural violence exists every day to facilitate an intense traumatic impact. Although recognition, and validation are essential for healing, Dalley (2016: 25) notes, healing comes when the ‘traumatized victim

74 Understanding the impacts of institutional racism

finds validation through recognition, and a narrative that not only makes sense of her experience but turns it into the basis for interpersonal solidarity’. Whereas Craps (2013) notes, there is a failure to recognise the daily existence of structural violence, as Dalley (2016) highlights, validation and interpersonal solidarity may not exist. For example, within this context the victim may recognise that discrimination will only cease when all the conditions that maintain its existence are eliminated, with the therapist contending that amending the behaviour of the perpetrator will eliminate racism. It could therefore be argued that not only does interpersonal solidarity cease to exist, but the victim is asked to partake in epistemic arrogance regarding the multi­ layered nature of oppression and its cumulative impacts. Although such ther­ apeutic remedies appear to offer psychic integration, the failure to recognise the daily existence of structural violence could constitute another layer of oppres­ sion through which white frames are used to oppress victims by forcing upon victims—understandings, knowledge, processes, rules, and procedures which obscure the existence of institutional racism and its cumulative impacts. The use of these very mechanisms can also bring shame by being used as taken for granted common rules, which when the victim fails to conform, can lead to the victim being made to experience shame. Given the socialisation of mechanisms that maintain epistemic imperialism, it could be argued that not only do insti­ tutions perpetuate oppression, but so do the institutions that were created to heal trauma.

Impact of racism on mental health, emotions, and trauma Institutional racism leads to multifaceted impacts, and it is only through recognising each layer of oppression that it is then possible to create a space where the full cumulative impacts of these layers can emerge and be heard. Thus, where the victim fails to find recognition of trauma because white frames continue to distort their lived experience and narratives, they are epistemologi­ cally otherised and rather than therapy helping to make their trauma digestible, therapeutic encounters further marginalise their epistemic existence. The need for recognition, solidary and healing, as opposed to marginalisation, otherisa­ tion and victimisation depend on the ability of the therapist to use their epis­ temic interpretivism. However, adopting such a position involves acknowledging the relationship between ‘trauma, colonialism, and racism’ (Mengel & Borzaga, 2012: ix) and the traumatogenic effects of oppression. The failure to fully attend to the cumulative and constant impacts of institutional racism has constituted another layer of oppression through ensuring that the power and status of epistemic status control the space through which accep­ table impacts can be voiced and shared. For example, the use of white frames to ensure that only singular event-based impacts are recognised or indeed, the lack of epistemic space attributed to allowing the psychological trauma of institu­ tional racism to emerge. Within this constructed space, domination, and

Understanding the impacts of institutional racism 75

suffering increase one’s recognition of their own marginal status and how their identity shapes isolation and psychosocial invisibility (Gordon, 1997; Lincoln, 1996; West, 1996), with such experiences highlighting the restriction of one’s humanity and their position as lacking respect (Franklin, 1999; Jean & Feagin, 1999). Therefore, the epistemic constructions of one’s identity work to create invisibility, even though the victim perceives a heightened sense of their own identity. These processes can be conceptualised as extreme forms of control through signifying how external forces dictate and shackle recognition, rights, and humanity. However, such forces are systematic with Franklin (1999) high­ lighting how in both interpersonal or institutional context, an invisibility syn­ drome exists whereby repeated encounters of prejudice and racism are common. Fanon (2008: 195) observes ‘that what the master of a colonial setting wants from the slave is not recognition but work’—meaning the imperial dialectic is not one of reciprocity but of domination and the elimination of the humanity of the colonised. This imperial dialect continues to reflect the grounding of epis­ temic status within institutional rules, procedures, and policies to maintain the invisibility of groups. It could be argued that just as colonialism worked to silence slaves to promote the commodification of slave as part of the slave trade, contemporary institutional practices continue to silence for the purpose of maintaining the efficiency of institutions. Thus, their aim isn’t to ensure equality, re-distribute epistemic status, or even facilitate a universal epistemol­ ogy, but rather it is to maintain existing power relations and the suppression of the workforce to maximise outputs. Therefore, just as the construction of race was used to legitimise the denial of recognition, rights, and humanity in the colonial era, contemporary mechanisms continue to maintain these forms of power. These continuities and the failure to reach epistemic equality mean that as Fanon (2008) states, the coloniser is present to colonised man not only as an external ruler, but as an internal pathological presence. According to Fanon, this traumatic intrusion means ‘the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man’, and the identity returned to him by the gaze of the white man is that of a kind of non-being, a split subjectivity which is at once nothing in itself (Fanon, 2008: 90). This denial of recognition causes the collapse of the ‘internalized imaginary’ self, and its replacement with a ‘historical-racial schema’ that the subject can only identify at the expense of self-harm (Fanon, 2008: 90–91). The psychic pathological occupation conveys the damage of the external onto the internal. This occupation is a constant and therefore challenges any account of institutional racism that follows an events-based model. Instead, it recognises the fluidity of oppressive discourses and how these impede into the psyche of the victim at every moment. Such an understanding poses questions regarding the risk of institutions to mental health. In recognising all the impacts for what they are, their boundaries and intrusive impact, it reconfigures institu­ tional racism into a form of epistemic violence that causes continuous harm. The mere presence of rules which categorise, differentiate, and harm are mechanisms that constitute harm through their very existence, because after all,

76 Understanding the impacts of institutional racism

this very existence continues to perpetuate and infer onto the victim, their lesser status, their forced silence, and their non-recognition as a human. Their exis­ tence alone breeds insecurity and threatens safety because they can, at any moment, reduce one to a non-being and shackle them to the invisibility of their humanity. Fanon (2008) highlights the distress of this perpetual inter­ sectionality in naming it as a form of self-harm and thus highlighting that although the master seeks to maintain power, the constant reinforcement of mechanisms of oppression and domination create a tumour by continuing to induce vulnerability and cause harm and injury to victims. Thus, institutional racism causes a psychic occupation which leads to the development of double conscious, in which the white man’s gaze forms one conscious, and the impacts of such harm, another gaze. It is the space between these where selfharm perpetuates, for such a harm incorporates the ideological promise of a universal epistemology and the complete fracturing of such a universal epis­ temic trust. And although such space incorporates vulnerability and insecur­ ity, as stated earlier these are silenced to leave the victim alone with their otherness, their marginalisation, their suppression, and their victimisation. A more accurate conceptualisation of the impacts of institutional racism would facilitate recognition of this space and thus a victim-based standpoint episte­ mology. For example, according to Dalley (2016), recognising vulnerability allows movement from pain to recognition and solidarity. Given the central role of recognition, movement towards solidarity must involve victim centred perspectives. As the next section explores, embracing such a standpoint involves recognising how the lack of recognition induces further trauma, recognising the constant impact of institutional racism, and the breadth of its physiological and psychological impacts. Racism exists at multiple levels, including interpersonal, social, political, institutional, and cultural (Bailey et al., 2017; David et al., 2019). Its multi­ faceted existence means that it can and does impact victims through all these spheres, thus resulting in institutional racism being a constant phenomenon. As Andermahr (2016: 2) contends, ‘racially based forms of trauma historically rooted in the global systems of slavery and colonialism pose a significant chal­ lenge to the Eurocentric model of trauma as a single overwhelming event’. Research demonstrates that episodes of ethnicity-related maltreatment occur on a weekly basis for some groups, with ethnicity-related maltreatment including ‘social exclusion, workplace discrimination, stigmatization, and physical threat and harassment’ (Brondolo et al., 2009: 64–65). Thus, according to Brondolo et al. (2009: 65), eliminating racism and the ‘effects of racism on health will require interventions at all levels: from the individual to the family, community, and nation’. However, the impact of such multilevel discrimination has a huge impact on health with research revealing how concerns of being rejected because of race, known as rejection sensitivity to race (RS-race) leads to anxiety and causes victims to experience heightened physiological arousal (MendozaDenton et al., 2002). Research also demonstrates how academic success is

Understanding the impacts of institutional racism 77

promoted when students ‘expect that they will not be rejected because of their background and racial identity’ (Mendoza-Denton et al., 2002: 349). Perceptions of rejection therefore lead to heightened physiological arousal, and moreover impact victims’ ability to achieve success. This is hardly surprising given how institutional racism produces insidious impacts that permeate to influence one’s beliefs regarding their own epistemic knowledge, the value of this knowledge, and their ability to contribute knowledge. Degruy-Leary (2017) coined the term post-traumatic slave syndrome to sig­ nify the multigenerational trauma that exists from centuries of slavery and the continued existence and experience of oppression and institutionalised racism. As Krieger (2016) states, the cyclical effects of discrimination lead to embodied inequality, which creates poor health outcomes that are passed down from generation to generation. The conceptualisation of racism as cyclical reaffirms the need of a standpoint epistemology from which a universal epistemology of institutional racism can emerge. Given that institutions continue to reflect epis­ temic status, their existence perpetuates posttraumatic slave syndrome. How­ ever, the lack of recognition afforded to these continuities is as much about denying responsibility, as it is about legitimising current oppressive practices to maintain control. As Craps (2013: 53) argues, if trauma studies are to ‘have any hope of redeeming its promise of ethical effectiveness’, the traumatic histories of subordinate groups should be situated against the histories of socially dominant groups. Such a standpoint would represent a universal epistemology and thus an ethical epistemology. It is only through such an ethical epistemology that as Wax (2009) contends, the victim can occupy the position their full humanity deserves, with all barriers removed to enable their existence as a whole human being. A more accurate victimology would therefore correctly conceptualise all mechanisms which maintain oppression as violations of humanity, indeed as demonstrating how silencing, oppression, domination, and suppression produce deep trauma that is not only reinforced through flashbacks, but through con­ stant experiences that impact multiple generations. The ability to understand such an impact and have empathy should extend to anyone that has experienced anxiety and hyper arousal and thus any form of inequality, injustice, and dis­ crimination. As stated above, such is the level of trauma that perceptions of encounters also produce deep psychological and physiological impacts. They thus form the very lens through which the victim encounters all of the world. However, as this book argues, restrictions in such understandings are selfimposed because reflexivity and self-insight can exist when one chooses to use empathy and compassion as the basis for human understanding and interaction. Institutional racism also results in significant negative psychological effects that can directly and / or indirectly lead to other experiences of inequality (Spalter-Roth et al,, 2005; McDonald & Harvey Wingfield, 2008). Given that inequalities exist in all sectors, the transient experience of inequality as based on identity makes it a multifaceted form of victimisation(s). The severity of the impacts has vast health implications, with research demonstrating how

78 Understanding the impacts of institutional racism

discrimination is a health hazard because it increases and thus contributes to hypertension, obesity, diabetes, depression, asthma, and infections (Burris et al., 2002). Racism has also been linked to perceived health, which is itself a pre­ dictor of all-cause mortality (Brondolo et al., 2009). It is therefore hardly sur­ prising that institutional racism has enormous mental health impacts. Each experience, whilst including psychological and physiological impacts at the time of the incident, leaves the victim having ‘to deal with what comes after, with loss and mourning, and with the knowledge of what destruction and death leave in their wake’ (Seran, 2016: 86). Here death can be taken to refer to the space between how an instance of victimisation should be understood and received, and how instance of victimisation are received. One could also conceptualise this as the victim possessing a universal epistemology to only find that such an episte­ mology is an illusionary epistemology. Research on secondary victimisation clearly demonstrates how institutional reactions to victimisation can lead to more harmful and traumatic impacts than the actual instance of primary victimisation (Correia et al., 2001). Although the illusionary construction of institutional racism not only excludes secondary victimisation as a point of focus based on perceptual and experiential epistemic standpoints, and therefore minimises understandings of victimisation, but the existence of secondary victimisation also challenges the events-based trauma model of racism in highlighting how instances leave residual impacts. Insidious trauma is therefore a more accurate term given that it includes the traumatogenic effects of oppression and these continue to cause violence against the mind, soul, and spiritual psyche. However, such is the magnitude of impact that as Steele (2011) states, ste­ reotype threat is an awareness that one belongs to a group that is culturally stigmatised, and this knowledge creates stress, and produces cognitive impacts, such as disrupting the ability to think clearly. Similarly, Krieger (2000) high­ lights how not only experiencing, but also anticipating racial discrimination creates fear and anger, with fear increasing energy supplies, inducing sensory vigilance, and increasing blood pressure to create hypertension. Given the emotional and cognitive psychological impacts, and the physiological impacts, it not surprising that there are also behavioural changes, with research demon­ strating that among blacks, perceived discrimination decreases self-control to increase the likelihood of engaging in unhealthy and risky behaviours (Gibbons et al., 2010). Given how institutional racism shreds one’s humanity, autonomy, and psyche, it is entirely understandable how such powerlessness, and help­ lessness can impact behaviour actions. Therefore, racism is a complex stressor (Brondolo et al., 2009), with Carter (2007) defining race-based traumatic stress injury as an emotional and psychological trauma caused by discrimination and racism that elicits responses comparable to those associated with posttraumatic stress injury. Further, as Brondolo et al. (2009: 66) state, ‘they must also manage the emotional consequences, including painful feelings of anger, ner­ vousness, sadness, and hopelessness, and their physiological correlates’. How­ ever, as the previous chapter demonstrated, the epistemic status attributed to

Understanding the impacts of institutional racism 79

emotions directly contributes to reducing the space within which such emo­ tional impacts can emerge. The emphasis on constructed categories of intelli­ gence, as opposed to emotional intelligence, require victims to forego their epistemic standpoint which accurately reflects their perceptual and experiential emotional epistemic standpoint in favour of contributing an epistemology which reflects the language and discourses advocated by those with epistemic status. The victim is therefore in a constant state of induced stress through not only suffering victimisation, but then having to navigate the constant suffering of either colonising their own epistemic standpoint so that it can be interpreted or revealing their authentic epistemic standpoint only to have it subject to epistemic interpretation by those defined as having epistemic status. As Clark (2016: 171) states, ‘health programs and interventions that are based on Wes­ tern values systems and/or regulated through State interventions’ continue to colonise, with research demonstrating increased rates of ‘indigenous child and youth incarceration, mental health diagnosis, and child welfare intervention’. As already stated, trauma also requires decolonisation and therefore there are multiple layers at which epistemic interpretivism can form further layers of colonisation, as opposed to understanding and solidarity, which as previously highlighted are an important facet for one’s therapeutic and traumatic recovery. It could therefore be argued that after the primary experience of victimisation, the victim goes through the insecurity and fear of being subjected to further experiences of colonisation, with research by Gibbons et al. (2010) highlighting how the anticipation of such an experience causes harm. The many layers of oppression, at discourse and institutions create long term impacts that cannot be conceptualised as anything other than traumatic. As Freud (1955) contends, the psychical trauma, and the memory of trauma exist as foreign bodies that invade the system and continue to impact the system. The continuation of such injury results in the constant working of the system to lessen such impacts and such residual impacts, as just stated, produce negative health impacts that mirror those of any physical disease and illness. Put simply, institutional racism mirrors the ability of diseases such as cancer in producing harms; like cancer it requires additional transformations so that we are better able to deal with its negative and corrosive impacts. Although with cancer the ability to transform foreign bodies that destroy the self are bound to the limitations of medicine, with institutional racism the ability to lessen impacts are restricted because of our lack of ability to empa­ thise and understand. The prioritisation of constructed intelligence, over emo­ tional intelligence has removed the requirement and / or the ability to hold multiple standpoints as signifying progress. At every level human agency is denied through white frames which control what emerges and continue to control the mind and body of those colonised. The magnitude of such coloni­ sation of knowledge and truth can be seen from how so little continues to be known and accepted about institutional racism, even though it produces long terms physiological and psychological impacts that mirror the trauma

80 Understanding the impacts of institutional racism

associated with severe illness and other forms of victimisation. Discourses and institutions control knowledge and continue to facilitate epistemic injustice throughout society, whilst silencing any agency, voices and narratives which pose an alternative view. As the case study chapters demonstrate, the shackling of institutional racism not only remains in its creation whereby epistemic status is used to afford illusionary ideological epistemologies, but how these extend to white washing the processes that maintain institutional racism and the vast impacts of institutional racism. As Martínez-Falquina (2016: 128) contends, the post-colonial context still gives rise to vast traumatic conditions which rather than being acknowledged and countered are often ignored and denied.

Impact on trust and security in the world The challenging and ability to not only colonise but also demonise the agency and humanity of victims can be seen from how during the civil rights era, psy­ chiatrists labelled civil rights activists as schizophrenic, violent, hostile, and paranoid (Roberts, 2012; Metzl, 2010). Survivors of racist violence and racist hatred experience trauma, after which they also experience a forced psychic assault on their mind and / or something silent, but insidious in rendering them helpless and unable to think about their experience (Keval, 2018). As stated earlier, language and discourses have continued to maintain epistemic imperi­ alism. This has exacerbated experiences of victimisation, by feeding into the idea that challenges to inequality and discrimination are irrational and unjust. Thus, although one might have an overt racial experience, epistemic imperial­ ism works to maintain insidious racial inequality and discrimination through­ out society by framing reactions and the interpretivist epistemology through which such experiences are received. White privilege works to obscure the pre­ sence of insidious trauma, with its normalised construction further disempowering claims for equality and creating a reality where claims are labelled as paranoid. According to Freud (1955: 29) trauma exists when ‘excitations from the outside’ break and invade our protective shield of our ego to provoke a large scale disturbance that impacts our organism’s energy, requiring the production of defensive measures. One could thus conceptualise trauma as being a constant since the sites of inequality and discrimination are dispersed and work to deny victims recognition, rights, and humanity through every mechanism of power that exists. These anticipations not only cause violent ruptures in our self, but they also negatively impact one’s trust and sense of safety leading to uncertainty in relation to the self and others (Keval, 2018). The need to recognise that anticipations, as well as experiences cause injury lies in the necessity to provide an understanding which includes the vast impact of racism on anxiety through creating a world where the victim lacks the security of knowing that they will be received with recognition, rights, and humanity. We live in a world where this basic trust and security remains colonised.

Understanding the impacts of institutional racism 81

According to Frost-Arnold (2014), for a sense of epistemic justice to be per­ ceived there must be (1) self- trust—where members of oppressed groups have a sense of trust within themselves, (2) trust in others—fellow community mem­ bers must trust them and (3) trust in practices—there must be trust in institu­ tions, practices and the social structures that produce critical discourses. The breach of trust that leads to a population’s inability to trust in communal epistemic institutions constitutes an epistemic trust injustice (Grasswick, 2017). Trust and security should exist through principles such as justice and equality. Given that equality has not been achieved, this has a direct bearing on under­ standings of justice and the trust and security then placed in such concepts. In the process of these becoming ideals, as opposed to lived experience, pain is experienced (Ahmed, 2015, 2020). Institutional discrimination damages epis­ temic trust in self, others, and practices. As such it not only has implications for our understanding of others and ourselves, but also our understanding of whe­ ther our world continues to operate according to the processes of colonialism. The use of ethics and justice not only provide frameworks from which to explore impacts, but also through which recognition and legitimacy can be carved into portrayals of these impacts.

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5 NATIONAL CURRICULUM

This chapter explores education as a vital mechanism through which white privilege is socialised. The chapter details how debates around the teaching of white privilege and critical race theory are not value free judgements, with each decision representing a decision to either progress towards epistemic uni­ versalism by dispersing equality into consciousness, or alternatively to facilitate the existence of epistemic arrogance and epistemic ignorance as mechanisms of epistemic imperialism and epistemic oppression. Education represents the power of the state to control the national curriculum. In discussing the role between policy and discourse, the chapter highlights the ideologies behind the Education Act (2002) and the Counter Terrorism and Security Act (2015). It also details state responses to the Rampton Report (1981), the Swann Report (1985), and the Macpherson Report (1999). These collectively demonstrate responses that are primarily concerned with promoting British values that don’t incorporate multiculturalism and equality. Through education, the state can regulate what is accepted as the truth, even if it is an illusionary truth, and how such truths are regulated through socialisation. As the chapter demonstrates, the knowledge and truth dispersed through education rests upon inequality, whereby some groups are taught to legitimise self-interest and the normal­ isation of white frames, and other groups are taught that they are the recipients of such oppressive structures. Far from demonstrating the legacies of colonial­ ism and the transient flow of domination from colonialism to capitalism and meritocracy, these processes of socialisation legitimise the destruction of a uni­ versal epistemology where truth, knowledge, recognition, rights, and humanity exist for all. Thus, whilst the privileged are informed of their dominant status, the de-privileged are placed on the journey of developing their double con­ sciousness. As they immerse further into society, they learn that the ability to feel, to connect via empathy and compassion, do not bear the hallmarks of DOI: 10.4324/9781003187073-5

86 National curriculum

what the world recognises as developed, superior, and enlightened, even though it could be argued that in possessing these very abilities one is able to strive closer to acknowledging all truths and knowledge. They learn that instead concepts have been created to allow those that have no perceptual and experi­ ential standpoint to speak and represent their truth and knowledge. Victims learn about their socially constructed position, with attempts to counter such constructions and their practical manifestations being met with resistance and in some cases, the introduction of deviance as a label for such actions. Educa­ tion thus becomes a mechanism whereby victims learn of the colonising mechanisms through which they must endure life. As this book demonstrates, such resistance to one’s attempts to achieve equal recognition, rights, and humanity reflects one part of the double consciousness, the part that incorporates ideals, values, and universal values. However, with percep­ tual and experiential knowledge develops another consciousness which over time leads to the development of a duality between the two forms of consciousness. The existence of these forms of consciousness demonstrates the fracturing of universal ideals and thus the abstract illusionary existence of these for victims. As this chapter demonstrates, education has been used to disperse white privilege and therefore any attempt to eradicate institutional racism must also involve dis­ mantling the educational mechanisms that maintain institutional racism.

Importance of education Given the role of education in socialising the racial hierarchy and maintaining white privilege, it is unsurprising that black communities have prioritised edu­ cation as a site for progressing equality and achieving social mobility. As Graham and Robinson (2004) note, education is a means through which to resist Eurocentric knowledge where white privilege and their systems of dom­ ination can be challenged. Schools are racialised places that maintain beliefs and expectations that form part of the school process (Graham & Robinson, 2004). The knowledge they socialise and disperse intersects with existing forms of oppression that are maintained through societal power (Sefa Dei, 1999; StantonSalazar, 2011), and as this chapter demonstrates, these multiple layers of oppression not only regulate beliefs, but by doing so, form mechanisms of oppression that negatively impact social mobility and the ability of children to achieve their potential.

Diversity within education Children from minoritised communities, in particular ‘Black, Black African (which often includes many refugees and asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa), Pakistani, Bangladeshi and White working-class students, tend to receive the least benefit from formal education’ (Warren 2007: 375). In 1996 Gillborn and Gipps (1996) carried out an overview of the literature on the

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academic achievement of minority ethnic group students and reported that stu­ dents of Pakistani and Bangladeshi, as well as of African-Caribbean origin were under-performing in relation to their white peers. In contrast, Indian students, perform better in relation to all their peers, thereby demonstrating the inter­ sectionality of class and ethnicity in the academic performance of Asian stu­ dents (Cole, 2004). Where GCSE performance is concerned, ‘a total of 47% of black Caribbean pupils achieved at least 5 A*–C GCSEs (or equivalent) grades including English and maths, 9.6 percentage points below the national average’ (Bhopal, 2018: 67). As Warren (2007: 375) states, the Strand Report was sig­ nificant in that it provided proof that minoritised students, particularly Black Caribbean students, were routinely entered for lower-level examinations, thus preventing them from achieving the prized A*–C grades at age 16. As Warren (2007) A*-C grades are vital in facilitating successful routes into further educa­ tion and therefore, employment. Where permanent exclusion is concerned and therefore the use of punitive measures, figures in ‘2003 show that 0.91% of black Caribbean, black African and black other students were excluded, compared with 0.13% of white stu­ dents’ (Cole, 2004: 48). Research has also demonstrated the prevalence of tea­ chers disciplining black boys to avoid perceived threat to school authority and facilitate classroom management (Connolly, 2002). Similarly, research by Wright (1992) demonstrated that although teachers were generally committed to equality of opportunity, there was widespread discrimination in the classroom. Gillborn and Mirza (2000) state the conditions experienced by black children serve to reinforce and institutionalise racial inequalities, and as Blyth and Milner (1994) argue, this categorisation serves to maintain and legitimise the stigmatisation of groups constructed as inferior. This categorisation signals to victims their status, whilst also highlighting this constructed status to privileged groups. It therefore sets in motion the fracturing of children into racialised groups. The intersectionality between education, achievement, and success continues beyond education (Graham & Robinson, 2004). The ‘Times Educa­ tional Supplement reported in 1998 that Black boys were 15 times more likely to be excluded from school’ (Graham & Robinson, 2004: 655). Black children are also overrepresented in the public care system and black people are more likely to be subject to compulsory admissions to psychiatric units (Davies et al., 1996; Lindsey & Paul, 1989; Tilbury & Thoburn, 2009). Although black men make up less than 3% of the population, they make up 12% of the UK prison popu­ lation (Kentish, 2017). The over representation of black men in regulatory institutions is thus a continuing phenomenon which starts with education and continues into their adult life. Research has also documented overt as well as unintentional racism of teachers against students of Asian origin (Wright, 1992; Blair et al., 1998), and how they are also subjected to racial harassment by their peers (Kelly & Cohn, 1988). Research has also documented how intersectional identities can have a cumula­ tive impact, with research by Mirza (2008) demonstrating that black girls, if given

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support, would have achieved their high ambitions but were often held back by the lack of, or the inadequate or inappropriate, career advice which they received, advice based on assumptions about their gender, class, and race. Therefore, although as the chapter demonstrates, education policies negatively impact children, so do attitudes and beliefs in both facilitating the existence of white frames and white privilege. However, together these cumulative mechanisms also reduce the possibility of resistance, by reducing the space within which resistance can emerge. For example, if policies continued to discriminate but institutional attitudes and beliefs changed, this provides the possibility for change. However, both policies, and attitudes and beliefs are likely to subject those that fail to abide to constructed categories to regulatory mechanisms, thereby demonstrating how education continues to function as a punitive system designed to maintain racialised constructs.

Euro centric educational policies and culture The prevalence of such racialised attitudes and beliefs can be gleaned from a review of research conducted by Coll et al. (1996), that demonstrated how research on children from minority cultures focuses overwhelmingly on what are theorised to be developmental ‘deficits’ and thus the uncritical acceptance of White middle-class values, behavioural patterns, and performance as ‘norms’ against which all other groups are measured and compared. The reaffirmation of white as the norm maintains its power, control, and existence. It therefore reasserts colonial binaries. However, it also reaffirms the invisibility of non­ white values and through doing so, it perpetuates and continues the failures to develop a language which reflects non-white interests, beliefs, and identities. This perpetuation means that prior to even considering policies, rules and laws, language continues to isolate and silence and thus, we continue to live in a world where the simple exchange of language continues to otherise victims and subject them to the oppression of a language that perpetuates their lack of recognition, rights, and humanity. Exploring the history of education facilitates an understanding of how and why contemporary education institutions continue to produce racial inequalities that perpetuate and socialise racial hierarchies. According to Goldberg (2006, 2009), the post-Empire construction of Britain incorporated a racial denial which involved the construction of Britain and British identity as something separate and distinct to imperialist projects, even though as Maclure (1968) contends, the Victorian age embedded nationalism and imperialism into schooling to maintain constructed ideologies of racialised hierarchy and intel­ lectual superiority within education. The role assigned to mass schooling in maintaining the empire was expressed by Lord Rosebury, leader of the Liberal Imperialists: ‘An Empire such as ours requires as its first condition an imperial race, a race vigorous and industrious and intrepid, in the rookeries and slums which still survive, an imperial race cannot be reared’ (Cole, 2004: 40). Far

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from dismantling the ideology of race and removing it from state discourse, this speech advocated the relationship between civilisation and races via genes. It thus promoted the ideology of race as based upon genetic predispositions. This association was taken further in not only being seen as denoting civilisation but also as maintaining intellectual superiority. Epistemicide and shackling victims’ knowledge and truth through epistemic arrogance and epistemic ignorance to maintain epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression was institutionalised to sustain national interests and national domination. The relationship between policies, laws, and rules as a means of maintaining white privilege and white frames necessary to sustain white national interests was established. Policies, laws, and rules within institutions were never created to promote universal epistemology or indeed, universal national interests; they were created to sustain white national interests and through doing so, institutions became the primary vehicle through which white interests would be sustained. Educational institutions occupied a primary and vital role through not only socialising the racial hierarchy and white super­ iority, but also through socialising victims’ inferiority by teaching them of their inferior epistemic status and enacting educational rules to perform and thus condition such inferiority. As this chapter demonstrates, governments continue to influence education to maintain the racialisation of educational institutions. According to Cole (2004), the negative construction of ethnic minorities led to white parents fearing that there were too many immigrant children in the schools and these children would retard their children. The nature of the fear represented how certain identities were still associated with biological innate differences and these constructions were not only conceptualised as defining one’s intellect and capacity, but also as having the ability to transfer such bio­ logical traits onto others. However, these processes of racialisation were further compounded through the creation of policies which suggested the existence of such fears as legitimate and true. In an effort to ensure that ethnic minority children could not lower the standards of schools, and even though assimilist policies created further social divisions, policies were introduced to assimilate minorities into British culture (Shain, 2013; Tomlinson, 2008; Vasta, 2007). Therefore, it could be argued that the ideology of white man’s burden to civilise still existed through the creation of mechanisms to control and dominate min­ ority cultures. Thus, schools became microcosms of larger society whereby ‘sin­ bins’ were used against black children, and the introduction of these measures as necessary legitimised the constructed of their intellect and behaviours as requiring adaption through mechanisms of control and domination (Coard, 1971). As Kwoba et al. (2018) argue, schools resemble colonial outposts, rather than providing spaces where minorities can learn. Following the processes of decolonisation from outward territories, epistemic imperialism was purposely embedded into core societal institutions. However, as this chapter demonstrates, although such institutionalisation could have been dismantled via the introduction of rules, procedures, and law

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that were premised upon a universal epistemology, successive governments fur­ ther embedded white frames such as denial of responsibility, white ignorance, and white fragility to maintain the racialisation of educational institutions. One of the core ways through which this was achieved is through white ignorance and denial of the cumulative impacts of institutional racism on victims. In 1981 the Committee of Inquiry into the Education of Children from Ethnic Minority Groups (chaired by Anthony Rampton) issued an interim report on the achievement of ‘West Indian’ children. The data highlighted a stark differ­ ence in achievement, with 3% of ‘West Indian’ students reaching the desired level compared with 16% of ‘all other leavers’, leading the Rampton committee to conclude that their statistics provided clear evidence that West Indian chil­ dren were failing in the education system (The Rampton Report, 1981). Although the report made recommendations to tackle racism, which included ethnic monitoring and challenging the low expectations teachers had of Black students, the Conservative government chose to ‘dismiss Rampton from his post’ and disregard the report in all major respects (Richardson, 2012: 66). The lack of action from the government demonstrated the acceptance of racism within education and thus the normalisation of white privilege and inequality as a product of education. As Gillborn (2005) contends, education policy directly influences racist inequities and oppressive structures. The subsequent report by the committee, headed by Lord Swann, showed a pronounced inequality of achievement between ‘West Indian’ students (6% gained five or more higher-graded results) and peers in the ‘all other leavers’ group (19%) (Swann, 1985: 110–118 cited Gillborn et al., 2017: 853). Although the Swann Report (1985) advocated ‘Education for all’ (Bhopal, 2018: 65), vast differences continued in attainment thereby negatively impacting social mobility and autonomy. The lack of attainment contributed directly to the inability of victims to change their pre-determined position, a position that continued to reflect the overwhelming power and dominance of race on one’s life. The second negative impact was on autonomy with racist policies that maintained structural inequities (Gillborn, 2005) facilitating the traumatic creation of a double consciousness. The failures in accepting how education was an oppres­ sive regime that reinforced inequality, epistemic injustice and introduced chil­ dren to the existence of epistemic arrogance, meant that instead of institutions following governmental policies that facilitated equality, they continued to implement policies that added further layers of epistemic arrogance and epis­ temic ignorance that reinforced epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression. Over a decade later, the Macpherson Report (1999) concluded that schools fear negative publicity if they adopt antiracist policies and to eradicate racism in society the government should embed anti-racist policies in the National Curriculum. As Warren (2007: 374) states, the Macpherson report placed a duty on all public bodies to be ‘pro-active in challenging racial discrimination and promoting race equality, with the Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED), required to monitor school and LEA compliance with the new legislation’.

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However, in 2003 Home Secretary, David Blunkett, suggested that ‘institutional racism’ was a slogan that let individual managers ‘off the hook’ in tackling racism (Travis, 2003). He said ‘I think the slogan created a year or two ago about institutional racism missed the point. It’s not the structures created in the past but the processes to change structures in the future and it is individuals at all levels who do that’ (Travis, 2003). This statement reaffirmed Scarman’s position that racism was the result of a few ‘bad apples’. The denial of insti­ tutional racism represented the white washing of Britain’s colonial legacy and continued existence, and it was therefore institutional gaslighting. Although institutional gaslighting sought to deny institutional racism, as Cole (2004: 35) argues, ‘racialisation best explains the economic and political factors, which underlay institutional racism in schooling in Britain, both historically and at the beginning of the twenty-first century’. In 2011, the Equality Act introduced a public sector equality duty (PSED). Bhopal (2018: 66) states public bodies such as schools were required to: ‘eliminate discrimination and other conduct that is prohibited by the Act; advance equality of opportunity; and foster good relations between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not’. Although inequality remained in educa­ tional institutions, it received little attention in the 2004, Department for Educa­ tion ‘five-year strategy’. Even though the published report set out strategies to meet all desired targets within education, was over minority ethnic pupils were only mentioned once and the words racism, prejudice and discrimination did not appear in the report (Gillborn, 2005; 2006). The existence of assimilationist poli­ cies not only rearticulated the burden for achieving equality into the hands of minorities, but in doing so, suggested that where equality has not been achieved, it was due to minorities’ failure to assimilate. This burden falsely blamed ethnic minorities for their own victimisation and re-produced the discourse of educa­ tional institutions not being institutionally racist. This epistemic interpretivism was further reflected in policies in 2013, with statutory guidelines introduced for the teaching of citizenship in schools for pupils at key stages 3 and 4 (ages 11–16). According to these guidelines, citi­ zenship education should focus on teaching children about democracy, govern­ ment and how laws are made and upheld (Burton et al., 2015; Kisby, 2017). The citizenship education was therefore not about correcting institutional mechan­ isms, but about dispersing the illusionary appearance of laws, policies, proce­ dures, and institutions as equal and democratic. Worryingly, such illusionary mechanisms not only lead to epistemic imperialism through obscuring the truth and colonising some groups truth, but they also contribute to double con­ sciousness through violations of epistemic trust. Violations of epistemic trust, especially those within educational settings where identity leads to epistemicide, signal to children their deprivileged position and in doing so, they harm their agency, their ability to speak, and their sense of trust and security in the world. For example, how can a child believe their truth will be received and heard when within educational institutions they are constantly reinforced to witness

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their lack of epistemic status? As research by Ahmed (2015, 2019, 2020) demonstrates positive polices cannot negate the harm caused by negative policies and policies which exist to demonstrate relative deprivation have a much more harmful impact on the psychological dimensions of citizenship and thus, indivi­ duals’ sense of belonging, attachment, and security. These polices therefore demonstrate how not only was epistemic imperialism maintained through policies but how such policies failed to explore the impacts upon victims through con­ sidering the psychological dimension of citizenship. The impetus on imposing citizenship as a policy which demands actions, behaviour, and beliefs without assessing the dimensions that trace this reciprocal relation back via assessing citizens attitudes was further strengthened through the Educational Act 2001. In 2014, the requirement to teach British values was reaffirmed via the Edu­ cation Act 2002. The Act created a statutory duty for schools to promote fun­ damental British values (Arduin, 2015). The teaching of British values was articulated as being part of students’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development (McGhee & Zhang, 2017). However, the teaching of British values involved the dispersion of the illusionary existence of Britain whereby its his­ tory of social, economic, and political exploitation was denied. The articulation of democracy, rule of law, individual liberty, and respect and tolerance were part of a colonial logic that is based on the projection of illusionary discourses (Kwoba et al., 2018; Holmwood & O’Toole, 2018). The otherisation and demonisation of cultural values was evident from the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair in Birmingham, when Muslims were accused of teaching children fundamental radical Muslim values with the Education Select Committee finding no evidence of extremism or radicalisation in any of the schools involved (Arthur, 2018; Holmwood & O’Toole, 2018). David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the UK (2010–2016) reaffirmed the need for schools to teach British values (Crawford, 2017). Within this political context of regulating societal discourses according to epistemic imperialism, the counter terrorism policy of Prevent was used as a tool through which to enforce epistemic oppression, with the Counter Terrorism and Security Act (2015) stating, that it was essential that staff identify children who may be vulnerable to radicalisation (O’Donnell, 2016; Edwards, 2021). However, as Crozier (2015) argues, the focus on terrorism created moral panic that exacerbated Islamophobia. As a result of these policies, over 900 children were identified as being ‘at risk of radicalisation’ from April 2012 to April 2015. This included 84 children under the age of 12 and one as young as three (Miah, 2017a, 2017b). Therefore, policies were introduced that dispersed and strengthened colonial binaries and ideologies within schools. For example, rather than recognising how epistemic injustices were produced and reproduced in education thereby facilitating marginalisation and isolation, mino­ rities were constructed as being the entity required to change. Governments there­ fore reinforced epistemic arrogance through negating how the abstract existence of democracy, rule of law and mutual respect and tolerance facilitated radicalisation

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(Ahmed 2015, 2019). These developments normalised the continuation of racism within educational policies and legislation.

Denial of history According to Leonardo (2009) policies have further embedded whiteness. These policies have not only contributed to inequality, but also to whiteness forming the dominant educational culture, and by extension the otherisation of all other cultures. The failure within schools to teach a universal epistemology and one which critiques colonialism as the anti-thesis of constructed British values means that as Bhopal (2018) contends, many teachers lack knowledge of the history and contribution of black and minority ethnic communities to the UK. This epistemic ignorance is further strengthened through the racialisation of history which contributes to epistemic arrogance and the acceptance of the stratification of epistemic status. As Doharty (2015) contends, the history cur­ riculum prioritises white history at the expense of a black history, rather than teaching both and this reinforces their belonging as being outside the periphery of British history. The normalisation of white culture and white history as deserving epistemic status is taught within schools and represents the extent to which epistemcide is socialised through education. These institutional mechan­ isms maintain and reproduce the racialisation of recognition, rights, and humanity, and as previously stated, this ideological construction of reality per­ petuates white privilege. For example, a YouGov poll revealed that 43% of the British population believe that the British Empire was a good thing and 44% of the British population believe that Britain’s history of colonialism is something to be proud of (YouGov, 2014). These numbers demonstrate the complete neglect of the consequences of colonialism for countries through elevating ana­ lysis of colonialism solely from the perspective of British interests and impacts. As Kwoba et al. (2018: 295) contend, ‘the overwhelming pride that nearly half of the British population feel regarding Britain’s role in the genocide of millions of African and Asian’ people demonstrates…. ‘that Britain has successfully maintained a delusional image of itself and its role in history’ and ‘that a vast majority of British people have little regard for non-white lives’.

Standardised testing Policies relating to academic achievement also remain ethnocentric. As Better (2008: 71) contends: standardized testing continues to put poor and minority children in jeopardy and this is because most tests have been created by whites and were stan­ dardized on whites. Due to segregation, poor whites and racial/ethnic groups develop a different lifestyle, which incorporates a different vocabulary and reference points.

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It could therefore be argued that not only has knowledge continued to be con­ trolled, but new measures have been created to legitimise epistemic arrogance, whereby the subjection of minorities to ethnocentric forms of measurement continue to be used to validate their de-privileged epistemic status. This process mirrors those used during the enlightenment, whereby the methods and mea­ sures used received little attention and scrutiny because status determined one’s ability and right to provide epistemological contributions. It has therefore been argued that even now, in the United States, African Americans are provided only a ‘sharecropper education’. A sharecropper education is an education of lowest expectations, where children learn no more than is necessary to complete the task (Moses, 2012; Moses & Cobb, 2002). A sharecropper education repre­ sents the unison of identity, as predetermining intelligence, and occupation and thus, the relationship that was established during slavery to ensure the com­ modification of groups. Education therefore continues to enforce racial hier­ archy to subject minorities to their pre-constructed position. The teaching of racial hierarchy and epistemic status not only has implica­ tions for education, but it also influences socialisation. Evidence demonstrates that children are more likely to be bullied because of their race, ethnicity, or religion (Green et al., 2010; Scherr & Larson, 2009). There is also over­ whelming research to evidence that being bullied has significant impacts on children’s school experiences, and their educational achievement, confidence, and self-esteem (Craven & Marsh, 2008; Tsaousis, 2016). Children who experience bullying are likely to have mental health problems in later life, with severe symptoms, including self-harm, violent behaviour, and psychotic symp­ toms (Arseneault et al., 2010). Bullying therefore has severe negative impacts and these cumulative impacts have detrimental long-term impacts that lead to the development of double consciousness. These impacts therefore develop to exist as an autonomous entity that slowly erodes one’s capacity to believe that they are equal in recognition, rights, and humanity. Such experiences feed into the epistemology of victims to form a perpetual tension whereby victims and members of this epistemological group face constant perceptual and experiential realities where they must either decide to accept their constructed position, but at the cost of supressing their inner belief of equality. Or stay true to themselves but knowing that with such autonomy comes the possibility of suffering further injustice. These experiences of repression, and epistemological denial of agency form unity amongst groups that experience them, and this unity represents their unique ability to exercise double consciousness and look beyond the white pri­ vilege and white frames that validate the existence of a false epistemic democ­ racy. As McHugh (2017: 273) states, ‘oppression creates pertinent conditions and social heritages, systems of education/ experience, that link similarly affec­ ted people into epistemological communities’. As with slavery and colonialism, group unity remains a product of white privilege, with whiteness defining the repression, oppression and injustice that forms such unity. However, these experiences also maintain a complete disjuncture between minority and white

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perceptual and experiential realities and in doing so, whiteness dictates the lives of some groups and the distinct boundaries between groups.

Epistemic injustice and epistemic arrogance in education Although educational policies prioritise the teaching of some histories over other histories, they also institutionalise the concealment of some voices and their agency. Even where these voices are heard, they must fit pre-existing white frames and the failure to do so leads to such voices being excluded. Carel and Györffy (2014) argue that children are prone to suffer certain forms of epistemic injustice. Therefore, educational policies, mechanisms of assessment and culture all work to create epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice gives learners less epistemic credit because of an aspect of their identity (McHugh, 2017). It could therefore be argued that just as with colonialism, cultural discourses serve as ideological dis­ courses through constructing binary dichotomies to legitimise inequality, and injustice. Thus, whereas white children learn about how to use their privilege, and white frames to maintain structural and societal inequality, victims are socialised to learn how these mechanisms form normalised inequalities. Even though the Macpherson report stated how ‘educational processes and structures perpetuate institutional racism because of the failure to recognize and address its existence and causes by policy, example and leadership’ (Mac­ pherson 1999: 28), subsequent educational policies have further instilled epis­ temic injustice into education. Given the void of systematic changes to change educational institutions, false empathy and tokenism have prevailed. Tokenism and false empathy allow situations to be manipulated through epistemic arro­ gance. This arrogance is worse than non-action because it allows whites to claim that they are engaging in action, when in fact such claims are illusions. The attempt by victims to demonstrate such illusions carry further judgements relating to limits in their interpretative epistemology. This reaffirms victims, their ability, and their perceptual and experiential epistemology as problematic. Therefore, the epistemic status of whites facilitates their ability to create illu­ sions as truths and where these are not accepted, they are able to label such opposing epistemologies as lacking agency at best, and deviant at worst. Thus, although policies continue to breed inequality and injustice, it is the role of epistemic status in facilitating the portray of action as the epistemic truth which focuses attention not on the impacts of inequality or injustice, but on the efforts of whites. It is possible to note how the control of truth and knowledge remain racialised from the existence of white fragility, since this focuses attention and sympathy to the plight of white efforts, at the expense of stripping recognition of the cumulative impacts for victims.

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Self-silencing and duress The silencing of victims within education continues throughout their life course. This silencing constitutes perpetual duress, whereby institutional mechanisms and ideological discourses serve to enforce and reinforce the mechanisms that force victims into certain actions. For example, the action of being forced not to speak through knowing that any voice they speak will be silenced or subjected to interpretivist epistemic shackles. According to Essed (1991), the mechanisms that maintain inequality through silencing, devaluing, and demonising come to form ‘everyday racism’ that reaffirms knowledge, power and the world as belonging to whites. In deconstructing the process of silencing, Gordon (2006) highlights how silencing can come to form part of the unconscious process of self-preservation. Oppressive forces silence group to limit critical voices (Graham & Robinson, 2004). A research study carried out in five London secondary schools in 2000 revealed that when Black children enter the educa­ tional system at five years old, they are on par with their white peers in terms of achievement, but by the end of their schooling, they are disappointed, with some children also experiencing resentment (Robinson, 2001). This demon­ strates the impact of schooling on children’s beliefs and how these processes of schooling operate to stifle, reduce, and completely eradicate equal educa­ tional attainment. As stated above, this not only shapes educational attain­ ment but continues to negatively impact employment and social mobility. Without educational policies changing, the ‘voice’ of minorities will continue to be silenced, as opposed to heard through processes of socialisation which afford recognition. Recognition of voices are the expressions that convey the knowledge we possess in a way that is empowering to us (Calmore, 1991). The margin­ alisation of minorities, their voices and experiences from epistemic socialisation can be seen from state responses to the teaching of critical race theory (Craw­ ford, 2019). In 2020 the Women and Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, said teachers who presented the idea of white privilege as a fact to their students were breaking the law and described critical race theory as an ideology that sees whiteness as oppression and blackness as victimhood (Swerling, 2022; Weale, 2020). In response, the University College London Institute of Education said, ‘at a time when racism is on the rise, in Britain and globally, teachers and pupils can benefit from the tools and resources developed by critical race the­ orists to understand how racism operates across society, including in education’ (Weale, 2020). The insistence that CRT has no place in the classroom (Swer­ ling, 2022) demonstrates the marginalisation of democratic epistemology. It prioritises the elevation of white privilege and white frames as being the only true authentic epistemic standpoints worthy of recognition and through doing so, it further institutionalises these oppressive frames within education and socialisation. However, it not only ensures the continued socialisation of white privilege but through doing so, it maintains the racialisation of education. This

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not only informs minorities of their lack of epistemic status within education, but as already stated, it creates and perpetuated the gap between epistemic standpoints, indeed creating racialised epistemic status and through doing so, it manufactures a space between these epistemic positions. Within this space, epistemic arrogance, epistemic ignorance, and epistemic imperialism operate to maintain epistemic oppression and epistemic injustice. Where epistemic status is shared, so too is empathy, compassion, and possible double consciousness. CRT is a perspective which opens the possibility for oppressive mechanisms, such as white privilege to be dismantled and in their place, the standpoint epistemology be learned to reduce oppression through shared understanding. After all, any attempt at gaining empathy must start with teaching groups about white privilege so they are able to understand its presence, its main­ tenance, and impacts. The curtailment of such opportunities to build under­ standing represents continual government responses, which far from reduce inequality, further embed institutional racism within education.

Higher education However, the silencing of these voices continues within higher education. As Ahmet, (2020: 678) highlights, ‘colonial histories are inscribed on the campuses and architecture of many of Britain’s oldest and most celebrated universities’. Similarly, Shilliam (2015: 33), contends, ‘universities continue to be built on a clear cultural hierarchy, delineated along racial lines: Universities remain over­ whelmingly administratively, normatively, habitually and intellectually ‘White.’ Their doors have been opened, but the architecture remains the same’. The ‘apartheid of knowledge’ continues to devalue the scholarship of faculty of colour (Bernal et al., 2002). This apartheid of knowledge demonstrates the continuation of enlightenment constructs of knowledge which prioritise objec­ tivity, whilst obscuring how objective knowledge is based on white subjective privilege. Crenshaw (1996) argues that integration, assimilation, and colour­ blindness have become the official norms of racial enlightenment. The racial enlightenment represents the continued control of truth and knowledge. It also incorporates how white privilege and white frames work to maintain the racialisation of the enlightenment. Thus, not only do institutions and discourses maintain injustice and inequality but claims of progress remain synonymous with white privilege, and as this chapter demonstrates, educational polices have continued to control and colonialise knowledge to reinforce the role of educa­ tion in maintaining white privilege.

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Ahmed, S. (2019). British Muslims perceptions of social cohesion: from multiculturalism to community cohesion and the ‘war on terror’. Crime, Law & Social Change, 71, pp. 581–595. Ahmed, S. (2020). The ‘War on Terror’, State Crime & Radicalization: A Constitutive Theory of Radicalization. London: Palgrave. Ahmet, A. (2020). Who is worthy of a place on these walls? Postgraduate students, UK universities, and institutional racism. Area, 52 (4), pp. 678–686. Arduin, S. (2015). A review of the values that underpin the structure of an education system and its approach to disability and inclusion. Oxford Review of Education, 41 (1), pp. 105–121. Arseneault, L., Bowes, L. & Shakoor, S. (2010). Bullying victimization in youths and mental health problems: ‘Much ado about nothing’? Psychological Medicine, 40 (5), pp. 717–729. Arthur, J. (2018). Extremism and neo-liberal education policy: A contextual critique of the Trojan horse affair in Birmingham schools. In Gearon, L. Education, Security, and Intelligence Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 49–66. Bernal, D. D. & Villalpando, O. (2002). An apartheid of knowledge in academia: The struggle over the ‘legitimate’ knowledge of faculty of color, Equity & excellence in education, 35 (2), pp. 169–180. Better, S. (2008). Institutional Racism: A Primer on Theory and Strategies for Social Change. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Bhopal, K. (2018). White Privilege: The Myth of a Post-Racial Society. Bristol: Policy Press. Blair, M., Bourne, J., Coffin, C., Creese, A. & Kenner, C. (1998). Making the Difference: Teaching and Learning Strategies in Successful Multi-Ethnic Schools. London: Department for Education and Employment. Blyth, E. & Milner, J. (1994). Exclusion from school and victim‐blaming. Oxford Review of Education, 20 (3), pp. 293–306. Burton, D., May, S. & John, L. (2015). Citizenship education in secondary schools in England. E-Journal of the British Education Studies Association, 7 (1), pp. 76–91. Calmore, J. O. (1991). Critical race theory, Archie Shepp, and fire music: Securing an authentic intellectual life in a multicultural world. Southern California Law Review, 65, pp. 2129–2231. Carel, H. & Györffy, G. (2014). Seen but not heard: children and epistemic injustice. The Lancet, 384 (9950), pp. 1256–1257. Coard, B. (1971). How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System: The Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain. Kingston: McDermott Publishing. Cole, M. (2004). ‘Brutal and stinking’ and ‘difficult to handle’: the historical and contemporary manifestations of racialisation, institutional racism, and schooling in Britain. Race Ethnicity and Education, 7 (1), pp. 35–56. Coll, C. G., Crnic, K., Lamberty, G., Wasik, B. H., Jenkins, R., Garcia, H. V. & McAdoo, H. P. (1996). An integrative model for the study of developmental compe­ tencies in minority children. Child development, 67 (5), pp. 1891–1914. Connolly, P. (2002). Racism, Gender Identities and Young Children: Social Relations in a Multi-ethnic, Inner City Primary School. London: Routledge. Craven, R. G. & Marsh, H. W. (2008). The centrality of the self-concept construct for psychological wellbeing and unlocking human potential: Implications for child and educational psychologists. Educational and Child Psychology, 25 (2), pp. 104–118. Crawford, C. E. (2017). Promoting ‘fundamental British values’ in schools: a critical race perspective. Curriculum Perspectives, 37, pp.197–204.

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Crawford, C. E. (2019). The one-in-ten: quantitative Critical Race Theory and the educa­ tion of the ‘new (white) oppressed’. Journal of Education Policy, 34 (3), pp. 423–444. Crenshaw, K. W. (1988). Toward a race-conscious pedagogy in legal education. National Black Law Journal, 11, pp. 1–14. Crenshaw, K. W. (1996). Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legit­ imation in Anti-discrimination Law. In Crenshaw, K.et al., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York: New Press, pp. 103–126. Crozier, G. (2015). Section IV: School Cultures and Educational Practices. London: The Runnymede Trust. Davies, S., Thornicroft, G., Leese, M., Higgingbotham, A. & Phelan, M. (1996). Ethnic differences in risk of compulsory psychiatric admission among representative cases of psychosis in London. British Medical Journal, 312 (7030), pp. 533–537. Doharty, N. (2015). Hard time pressure inna Babylon’: Why Black history in schools is failing to meet the needs of BME students at Key Stage 3. In Alexander, C., WeekesBernard, D. & Arday, J., The Runnymede School Report: Race, Education, and Inequality in Contemporary Britain. London: The Runneymede Trust, pp.51–55. Edwards, P. (2021). Surveillance, safeguarding and beyond: the prevent duty and resilient citizenship. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 14 (1), pp. 47–66. Essed, P. (1991). Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory (Vol. 2). London: Sage. Gillborn, D. & Gipps, C. (1996). Recent Research on the Achievements of Ethnic Min­ ority Pupils. Report for the Office for Standards in Education. London: HMSO. Gillborn, D. & Mirza, H. S. (2000). Educational Inequality: Mapping race, class and gender: A Synthesis of Research Evidence. London: Office for Standards in Education. Gillborn, D. (2005). Education policy as an act of white supremacy: Whiteness, critical race theory and education reform. Journal of Education Policy, 20 (4), pp. 485–505. Gillborn, D. (2006). Critical race theory beyond North America: Toward a trans-Atlan­ tic dialogue on racism and antiracism in educational theory and praxis. In Dixson, A. D. & Rousseau, C. K. (Eds), Critical Race Theory in Education: All God’s Children got a Song, New York: Routledge, pp. 241–265. Gillborn, D., Demack, S., Rollock, N. & Warmington, P. (2017). Moving the goalposts: Education policy and 25 years of the Black/White achievement gap. British Educa­ tional Research Journal, 43 (5), pp. 848–874. Goldberg, D. T (2006). Racial Europeanization. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29 (2), pp. 331–364. Goldberg, D. T. (2009). The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Oxford and Malden: John Wiley & Sons. Gordon, G. B. (2006). Transforming lives: Towards bicultural competence. In Reason, P. & Bradbury, H. (Eds), Handbook of Action Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, pp. 243–252. Graham, M. & Robinson, G. (2004). ‘The silent catastrophe’ institutional racism in the British educational system and the underachievement of Black boys. Journal of Black Studies, 34 (5), pp. 653–671. Green, R., Collingwood, A. & Ross, A. (2010). Characteristics of Bullying Victims in Schools. London: Department for Education. Holmwood, J. and O’Toole, T. (2018). Countering Extremism in British Schools?: The Truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair. Bristol: Policy Press. Kelly, E. & Cohn, T. (1988). Racism in Schools—New Research Evidence. Stoke-onTrent: Trentham Books Limited.

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Kentish, B. (2017). Revealed: How ‘racial bias’ at the heart of criminal justice system means black people in UK more likely to be in prison than those in US. The Inde­ pendent, 8 September. Kisby, B. (2017). ‘Politics is ethics done in public’: Exploring Linkages and disjunctions between Citizenship Education and Character Education in England. Journal of Edu­ cation & Social Sciences, 16 (3), pp. 7–20. Kwoba, B., Chantiluke, R. & Nkopo, A. (Eds) (2018). Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Leonardo, Z. (2009). Race, Whiteness, and Education. London: Routledge. Lindsey, K. P. & Paul, G. L. (1989). Involuntary commitments to public mental institu­ tions: issues involving the overrepresentation of blacks and assessment of relevant functioning. Psychological Bulletin, 106(2), pp. 171–183. Maclure, J. S. (1968). Educational Documents: England and Wales, 1816–1967. London: Methuen Young Books. Macpherson, W. (1999). The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, CM 4262-I. London: Stationery Office. McGhee, D. & Zhang, S. (2017). Nurturing resilient future citizens through value con­ sistency vs. the retreat from multiculturalism and securitisation in the promotion of British values in schools in the UK, Citizenship Studies, 21 (8), pp. 937–950. McHugh, N. A. (2017). Epistemic communities and institutions, in Kidd, I. J., Medina, J., & Pohlhaus, G., The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Routledge: London, pp. 70–278. Miah, S. (2017a). The Prevent policy and the values discourse: Muslims and racial gov­ ernmentality. In Muslim Students, Education and Neoliberalism: Schooling a ‘Suspect Community’, London: Palgrave, pp.131–144. Miah, S. (2017b). Muslims, Schooling and Security: Trojan Horse, Prevent and Racial Politics. London: Palgrave. Mirza, H. S. (2008). Race, Gender and Educational Desire: Why Black Women Succeed and Fail. London: Routledge. Moses, R. (2012). Leaning forward: A forward constitutional lean. The Algebra Project. http://www.algebra.org/articles/2012_ BobMoses-AlgebraProject_letter.pdf. Moses, R. P. & Cobb, C. E. (2002). Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights (No. 19868). Boston: Beacon Press. O’Donnell, A. (2016). Securitisation, counterterrorism and the silencing of dissent: The educational implications of Prevent. British Journal of Educational Studies, 64 (1), pp. 53–76. Richardson, R. (2012). African Caribbean students, achievement in UK schools. Ency­ clopedia of Diversity in Education, 1. LA: Sage. Robinson, G. (2001). The Needs and Aspirations of Young Black men Aged 12–16 Years Old in Southwark. London: Southwark. Scherr, T. & Larson, J. (2009). Bullying dynamics associated with race, ethnicity, and immigration status. In Jimerson, S. R., Swearer, S. M. & Espelage, D. L., Handbook of Bullying in Schools: An International Perspective. New York: Routledge, pp. 223–234. Sefa Dei, G. J. (1999). The denial of difference: Refraining anti‐racist praxis. Race Eth­ nicity and Education, 2 (1), pp. 17–38. Shain, F. (2013). Race, nation and education: An overview of British attempts to ‘manage diversity’ since the 1950s. Education Inquiry, 4(1), pp. 63–85. Shilliam, R. (2015). Black academia: The doors have been opened but the architecture remains the same. In Alexander, C. & Arday, J., Aiming Higher: Race, Inequality and Diversity in the Academy. London: Runnymede Trust, pp. 32–35.

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Stanton-Salazar, R. D. (2011). A social capital framework for the study of institutional agents and their role in the empowerment of low-status students and youth. Youth & Society, 43 (3), pp.1066–1109. Swerling, G. (2022). Teaching of race ideology in schools is ‘absolutely terrifying’, warns minister, The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/03/17/ethnic-m inority-success-stories-must-acknowledged-says-minister/. The Rampton Report. (1981). Committee of Inquiry into the Education of Children from Ethnic Minority Groups and Rampton, A., 1981. West Indian children in our schools: Interim report of the committee of inquiry into the education of children from ethnic minority groups. London: HM Stationery Office. Tilbury, C. & Thoburn, J. (2009). Using racial disproportionality and disparity indica­ tors to measure child welfare outcomes. Children and Youth Services Review, 31 (10), pp. 1101–1106. Tomlinson, S. (2008). EBOOK: Race and Education: Policy and Politics in Britain. McGraw-Hill Education (UK). Travis, A. (2003). Blunkett: Racist tag is aiding racists, The Guardian. https://www. theguardian.com/politics/2003/jan/15/race.equality1. Tsaousis, I. (2016). The relationship of self-esteem to bullying perpetration and peer victimization among schoolchildren and adolescents: A meta-analytic review. Aggres­ sion and Violent Behavior, 31, pp. 186–199. Vasta, E. (2007). From ethnic minorities to ethnic majority policy: Multiculturalism and the shift to assimilationism in the Netherlands. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30 (5), pp. 713–740. Warren, S. (2007). Migration, race and education: evidence‐based policy or institutional racism? Race Ethnicity and Education, 10 (4), pp. 367–385. Weale, S. (2020). Education experts counter government attack on critical race theory. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/nov/13/education-experts-coun ter-government-attack-on-critical-race-theory. Wright, C. (1992). Early education: multiracial primary school classrooms. In Gill, D., Mayor, B., & Blair, M., Racism and Education: Structures and Strategies. London: Sage, pp. 5–41. Wright, C. (2018). Race Relations in the Primary School. London: Routledge. YouGov (2014). The British Empire in Something to be Proud of. https://yougov.co.uk/ topics/politics/articles-reports/2014/07/26/britain-proud-its-empire.

6 THE ‘WAR ON TERROR’

This chapter explores how state actions during the ‘war on terror’ contributed to the institutionalisation of Islamophobia, a form of racism that focuses on Muslims religious identity. The chapter is vital in terms of providing an understanding of how the processes which constitute racialisation and racism not only impact black communities but have evolved to impact other mino­ rities. It details how the governmental policies of CONTEST and Prevent facilitated the institutionalisation of Islamophobia. It also highlights how the constructed threat led to the dispersal of mechanisms through which to crim­ inalise Muslims, including placing legal duties within the institutions of educa­ tion, healthcare, and charity sector. The chapter therefore highlights how new events have been used to construct new identities and new minorities as the victims of institutional racism.

Construction of Muslims The Salman Rushdie affair was unique in thrusting the Muslim community into the public domain. Prior to the Salman Rushdie affair, British Muslims had largely been constructed and perceived through their Asian ethnic identity. The publication of the controversial book led to the author receiving death threats and the media constructing all Muslims as being fundamentalists and fanatics (Kahani-Hopkins & Hopkins, 2002). However, the events of September 11th accelerated the racialisation of Muslim identity to facilitate the discourses and mechanisms through which Islamophobia could be institutionalised. As Brayson (2019) contends, the events of September 11th were produced through the epis­ temic lens of the colonial condition. Epistemicide, white privilege, and white frames reaffirmed the colonial divide to construct the west as superior, rational, humane, and developed, and the Middle East as ‘inferior, irrational, inhumane, DOI: 10.4324/9781003187073-6

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and undeveloped’ (Stollznow, 2020: 147). This binary otherised and criminalised religious minorities (Meer & Noorani, 2008). Muslims were portrayed as vio­ lent, and war-mongering terrorists, and Islamic countries were constructed as being opposed to modernity (Stollznow, 2020). These constructions dismissed diversity by homogenising Muslims and thereby contributed to the racialisation of Muslims. As previously stated, the homogenisation and construction of minorities as being against western progression, modernity, and civilisation has a long history and runs parallel with how minorities have been constructed against apparent systems of progress such as the enlightenment. Thus, colonial processes were used to construct Muslims as a threat to the values of freedom, human rights, and democracy of the western world with epistemic arrogance used to conceal the role of western states in violating these principles and vio­ lating international human rights law and international humanitarian law (Ahmed, 2020).

Legitimisation and racialisation As previously stated, the racialisation of a group involves the ideological con­ struction of that group, which is then used to legitimise the policies, rules and laws that contribute to their perceptual and experiential inequality and injus­ tice. In essence, it is the purposeful creation of a group as different which is used to legitimise their differential treatment. These steps of construction, legitimisation, socialisation, and institutionalisation, follow a logic and process that has been embedded into the western world to maintain white privilege (Ahmed, 2014). As Posocco (2016) contends, the colonial narrative incorporates a socio-epistemic construction and maintenance of knowledge that continues to maintain epistemic imperialism. Thus, the manufacture of epistemic injustice following new social phenomenon such as 9/11 and Covid 19 follow established routes through which knowledge and truth are manipulated to maintain pre­ existing racial hierarchical constructions. Therefore, colonial processes, far from being in the past, continue to structure, influence, and embed racialised power in the present and the future (Brayson, 2019). These processes have remained to maintain white privilege and as this book demonstrates, their cumulative impacts have remained just as powerful in impacting every area of life and producing deep psychological impacts.

Pathological constructions, racialisation, and Islamophobia One of the most dangerous permeations of knowledge production which con­ tinues from colonialism is the use of race to racialise a group, thereby desig­ nating the group with innate irremovable characteristics. Although as Sayyid (2014) states, Muslims lack a biological trait, and thus their identity is not a racial identity, it is the process through which biological traits are conferred on to Muslims that makes racialisation possible. Such a construction demonstrates

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the power to construct and infer traits as biological, and through doing so, it denies groups the ability to define themselves. They are therefore stripped of their capacity and right to define their own identity and share an epistemic truth and knowledge that demonstrates the inaccuracies of epistemicide. Therefore, although racialisation continues, so does the control and regulation of truth and knowledge and these result in an epistemic arrogance whereby non-Muslims exercise their ability to define Muslims by possessing epistemic status. The power to maintain illusions provides the ability to manipulate and con­ ceal truth and knowledge that demonstrate a standpoint epistemology capable of promoting equality. Denials of the racialised processes which contribute to Islamophobia and the cumulative impacts of Islamophobia mirror traditional racism and demonstrate the continued manipulation of knowledge to produce epistemic arrogance and oppression. As Alexander (2017: 14) contends, the ‘‘de­ raceing’ of Islamophobia dismisses the continued racist demonisation of Mus­ lims, whereby they were constructed as ‘coloured’, then ‘black’, then ‘Asian’, then ‘Pakistani’ and ‘Bangladeshi’ and then as ‘Muslims’’. The modern con­ struction of race incorporates religion and culture (Garner & Selod, 2015), and thus the use of religion, as a signifier of difference from which to racialise Muslims. As the previous chapter on education demonstrated, denials of the past perpetuate the existence of racialised discourses within education and processes of socialisation. The Runnymede Trust (1997:1) report defined Islamophobia as ‘a fear or dislike of all or most Muslims’ and supplementing this with a typology of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ views’. The inclusion of closed views demonstrates how perceived belonging leads to fixed beliefs regarding the individual. As Sayyid (2014: 11) contends: Islamophobia is a concept that emerges precisely to do the work that cate­ gories like racism were not doing. It names something that needs to be named. Its continual circulation in public debate testifies to ways in which it hints at something that needs to be addressed. In naming something, it highlights the distinct construction of Muslims through their religious Islamic identity and how the racialisation of this identity makes it different from racism that doesn’t utilise religious identity as the signifier of difference. The focus on religious identity can be gleaned from the fact that the Punish a Muslim Day campaign that began in 2018 incites people to commit hate crimes against Muslims (Stollznow, 2020).

Institutionalised islamophobia The discourse used to legitimise the introduction of mechanisms that breed legal inequality was terrorism and the broader threat of the ‘war on terror’ (Ahmed, 2014). According to Busher et al. (2019), the existence of governmental

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Islamophobia led to the implementation of rigorous counter-terrorism legisla­ tion. The UK government identified terrorism as one of the highest priority risks to the nation, leading to the creation of Prevent, as part of the larger counter terrorism CONTEST strategy (Younis & Jadhav, 2020). Although Prevent is intended to deal with all terrorist threats, the guidance places particular emphasis on the dangerous ideology of Islamist extremists (Ahmed, 2014). Prevent seeks to avert and thus prevent individuals from becoming terrorists in the future (Younis & Jadhav, 2020). It is the emphasis of the policy on ‘challenging ideas and precriminal activities as an effective means of preventing people being drawn into terrorism’ that leads to ‘implementation based on Islamophobic stereotypes and discrimination’ (Cohen & Tufail, 2017: 42). As Ahmed (2020) states, although Prevent is based on protecting British values, including the rule of law, and individual liberty, it uses measures and policies that violate these very principles. It therefore demonstrates how epis­ temic arrogance continues to shape knowledge and truth. According to Thomas (2016), Prevent showed no intent to meaningfully engage with and provide education, instead it prioritised community cohesion and state surveillance. The discourse around Prevent was used to not only create discourses of assimilation, constructing Muslim identity as a threat to integration, but it was used to institutionalise Islamophobia (Ahmed, 2014). This process of institutionalisa­ tion follows that of the British empire whereby the construction of the racia­ lised identity according to biological traits that signify risk and threat are used to create institutional mechanisms to control the group to minimise their risk and threat (Ahmed, 2014). Thus, the discourse of denying recognition and enforcing institutional inequality continues in contemporary Britain. According to Cohen and Tufail (2017: 44), ‘understanding Prevent as a racist, Islamo­ phobic policy allows for an analysis not only of its misguided aims, but of the real harms and deleterious consequences experienced by Muslim communities in the UK’. It therefore facilitates the emergence of a victim perspective. How­ ever, as Sayyid (2014) argues, the absence of Islamophobia in (anti)race legisla­ tion falls to accept that Muslims are also victims of racist crimes. As such it denies recognition of their victimisation and reaffirms the perpetrator perspec­ tive as the only one deserving recognition (Ahmed, 2020). Research has demonstrated how counter terrorism legislation has led British Muslims to perceive injustice, marginalisation, and victimisation (Ahmed, 2015). Research has also demonstrated how these institutional mechanisms have impacted Muslims’ various identities, and attachment and belonging to these identities. In some cases, the pain and suffering experienced through the rejec­ tion of this identity has led some British Muslims to advocate assimilation at the expense of their Muslim identity, as a means of trying to eradicate such pain and suffering (Post et al., 2003; Gould & Klor, 2016; Ahmed, 2015). Interestingly, the growth in Islamophobia has demonstrated how perceptions and experiences of relative deprivation in relation to legal, political, and social rights have had a larger negative cumulative impact than forms of deprivation

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based on Asian identity (Ahmed, 2015, 2019). This research by Ahmed (2015, 2019) has highlighted that the greater the extent to which a group is demonised and otherised with state legislation, policies, and discourses facilitating such intra-Asian demonisation, the greater the negative impact. Thus, it is because counter terrorism legislation has led to measures that deny fundamental legal rights, a denial that no other groups experience, that it has had such a detri­ mental impact on British Muslims. Research on the ‘war on terror’ demon­ strates how individuals have beliefs in equality and justice and where these are violated, these not only contribute to double consciousness through exposure to a perceptual and experiential consciousness which demonstrates their illu­ sionary existence, but also show how the carving of such duality is accom­ panied by pain, helplessness, and vulnerability (Ahmed, 2015; Correia et al., 2001; Lemu, 2016). As Ahmed (2020) argues, where the mechanisms that are meant to provide security and safety through law no longer exist, belief in a just world, and a world that offers security and protection, can be shattered. Research by Speckhard and Akhmedova (2005) highlighted the role of these processes in facilitating radicalisation and how trauma was an important cata­ lyst in the radicalisation process. Thus, as Ahmed (2020) contends, the rela­ tionship between institutional mechanisms of control and injustice within the ‘war on terror’ contribute to radicalisation, thus creating the cyclical nature of the ‘war on terror’.

Dispersal of institutional islamophobia The magnitude of epistemic arrogance in denying the relationship between counter terrorism measures and radicalisation was further institutionalised through the dispersal of mechanisms within other institutions through which to control, regulate, and criminalise Muslims. As is now explored, the historic dispersal of race within legal institutions and educational institutions was also evident with Islamophobia. All institutions, including schools and care services, were placed under a duty to identify and refer people at risk of being drawn into terrorism (Heath-Kelly & Strausz, 2019; Thomas, 2016). Institutions were therefore required by law to create procedures that scrutinised Muslim identity and subject expression of this identity to legal mechanisms designed to crim­ inalise those deemed a threat to security (Kundnani, 2015). The ‘war on terror’ led to an extreme example of assimilation. Although this book has demonstrated the introduction of policies to encourage assimilation, the constructed threat of terrorism was used to legitimise legal mechanisms of assimilation. These legal measures reflected the ability of the police and other agencies to use their epistemic status to judge whether an individual was a threat. They therefore prioritised suspicion and epistemic arrogance as repre­ senting an epistemic truth and knowledge that could be used to criminalise an individual and subject them to punishment. The elevation of suspicion meeting the required burden of proof, as opposed to an individual having committed a

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criminal act, represented an acceleration in the power to use epistemic arro­ gance. Within this setting, not only were minorities’ epistemic truth and knowledge dismissed by not being afforded a trial in which they could voice their defence, but an interpretivist epistemology could be used to criminalise Muslims. This is clearly evident from the case of Mozzam Begg who was sub­ jected to imprisonment on the basis of false interpretivist epistemic ideologies (Kassimeris, 2008). Thus, not only did the ‘war on terror’ limit the epistemic agency afforded to a group by removing their right to a fair trial, or the right to know what charges existed and thus, form and make available an epistemic truth that demonstrates the illusionary status of accusation, but it allowed an imagined epistemic reality to criminalise Muslims (Ahmed, 2015, 2019, 2020; Zedner, 2007). Therefore, epistemic arrogance was embedded into institutions to facil­ itate an extreme form of inequality, whereby rules, procedures, and laws dic­ tated the right of institutions to criminalise based on their interpretivist epistemology, regardless of whether this reflected a valid epistemological truth. As stated above, such a privileged position, legitimised through various policies and laws, represented the increased power of institutions to use their inter­ pretivist epistemology to criminalise groups, and in doing so, it also created deeply traumatic impacts. The space between the power invested in institutions and the power of Muslims to demonstrate their innocence via their standpoint epistemology was further widened, thereby increasing epistemic injustice, epis­ temic oppression, and epistemic victimisation. These injustices and inequalities facilitated double consciousness, and the trauma, injustices and oppression found to positively influence radicalisation (Ahmed, 2020; Speckhard & Akh­ medova, 2005). The second aspect that compounded such oppression and injustice was the presence of this increased epistemic status amongst all societal institutions. This facilitated the ability of all organisations to engage in epistemic oppres­ sion thereby directly facilitating and heightening Muslims’ perceptual and experiential injustice and oppression. Islamophobia didn’t remain confined to the margins of the far right, rather the government created the mechanisms to encourage the racialisation of Muslims within all institutions. The duty placed on health care services meant that the ‘UK is the only country in the Global North to implement counter-radicalisation as a duty upon public bodies such as the National Health Service’ (Younis & Jadhav, 2020: 610). The presence of such forms of exceptionalism not only gave legitimacy to the discourse of Islamophobia but did so by constructing the Muslim threat as requiring such measures. Institutions only had to demonstrate their compliance with the Prevent policy but schools, colleges, and universities were expected to ‘identify children who are vulnerable to radicalisation’ (Busher et al., 2019: 441). These policies institutionalised the governmental agenda of ensuring that ‘there should be no ‘ungoverned spaces’ in which extremism is allowed to flourish

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without firm challenge and, where appropriate, by legal intervention’ (HM Government, 2011: 9). The introduction of these measures raised concerns by unions, religious organisations, academics, and the United Nations (Younis & Jadhav, 2020). The policies encouraged informants to trust their gut feeling and use this as a ‘viable way to measure an individual’s potential radicalisation’ (Dresser, 2019: 615), thereby facilitating the processes through which epistemic arrogance and epistemic interpretivism could lead to incorrect epistemic truths and knowledge. The introduction of these measures, whereby institutions were encouraged by law to use suspicion through their epistemic status, demonstrated how the focus wasn’t on establishing universal epistemologies that represented valid episte­ mological truths and knowledge. The aim of these measures was to control, oppress, and criminalise regardless of whether the processes led to a valid epistemology. In doing so, these measures demonstrated how white privilege and white frames continue not to be dismantled in the quest to reach a uni­ versal epistemology that reflects equality and justice, but rather these measures demonstrate how white privilege and white frames are reinforced to further colonise knowledge and truth. As one participant stated during Ahmed’s (2015, 2019) research, before the introduction of counter terrorism, the worst thing that could happen was that you might be stopped and searched, but without evidence the police would let you go, but now you could be detained and deported based on suspicion, without evidence and a fair trial.

Education As previously stated, colonialism led to the socialisation of white privilege through education. This not only maintained white privilege, but it ensured that future generations would be socialised to accept epistemic injustice and episte­ micide without considering and indeed recognising their role in maintaining injustice. Therefore, epistemic ignorance was built into education to facilitate the socialisation of such processual thoughts whereby accepting privilege with­ out questioning equality, privilege, injustice, etc. became the norm. In much the same way, Prevent and the newly constructed discourse around Muslims was also institutionalised through education (Sutton, 2015). The criminalising nature of Prevent can be gleaned from the fact that some teachers feel more confident about their role in Prevent when it is made part of safeguarding, a duty they already understand and designed to protect rather than criminalise students (Busher et al., 2019). Other observers of Prevent dispute the ‘legitimacy of using safeguarding—intended to protect vulnerable children and adults—for purposes of counter-terrorism’ (Cohen & Tufail, 2017: 42). The need to main­ tain Prevent away from safeguarding clearly demonstrates that the emphasis is not on protection, thus leading to criminalising responses opposed to safe­ guarding responses. Within this approach, Muslim students are being policed within schools (Thomas, 2016).

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The categorisation of Muslim students as a threat and risk contributes to the marginalisation of Muslim students and leads to social divisions between Muslim students and their non Muslim peers (Thomas, 2016). This is rein­ forced with Islamophobia also becoming ingrained within universities. ‘Prevent officers are known to have actively worked to persuade venues to cancel legit­ imate events on the topic of Prevent and Islamophobia, sought to place student Islamic societies on university campuses under surveillance and requested details of event attendees’ (Cohen & Tufail, 2017: 42). Thus, as Mahmud and Islam (2023: 1) argue, ‘HE continues to frame itself as a post-racial, secular, progressive, and inclusive space’, and yet it is plagued with ‘violent incidences of racism, classism, sexism and ableism’. The emphasis on Islamic societies clearly demonstrates how the secular space of HE does not seek to regulate all religions, rather it singles out Islamic affiliation as warranting securitisation. Research by Stevenson (2018), based on interviews with 100 Muslim university students in the UK identified four themes in their exclusion and disadvantage: 1) they are often ‘invisible’ and thus neglected; 2) they are visible in the context of heightened threat and risk associated with terrorism; 3) they are often victims of racism and Islamophobia; 4) and they perceive a decreased sense of belonging to their universities. The governmental thesis regarding governing all spaces doesn’t seek to promote inclusion through freedom and protection, rather it seeks to force epistemic oppression through advocating assimilation as the remedy for the constructed risk and threat of Muslims within educational institutions. This not only has implications for the treatment of British Mus­ lims, but it reasserts the legitimacy of epistemic imperialism within educational institutions through shaping future generations and continuing to socialise white privilege.

National Health Service Although educational institutions have a pivotal role, given their ability to socialise discourses, health institutions are also important given their role in providing care, and providing care for the most vulnerable. However, even though they have such an important role, little is known about how race frames operate in healthcare settings, or indeed how the racialisation of Muslim patients impacts healthcare access and interventions (Laird et al., 2007). Since 2015, the government has officially designated health care a pre-criminal space (Goldberg et al., 2017). NHS staff are required to have mandatory counter­ radicalisation training to identify and report individuals suspected of being vulnerable to radicalisation, regardless of this violating patient-provider trust (Heath-Kelly, 2017). Where a referral is made, patient details are sent to the police and stored in a special police database for seven years, even where the referral is closed (NHS England, 2017). Prevent’s counter-radicalisation frame­ work is based on the Extremism Risk Guidance 22+ (ERG22+), which aca­ demics argue lacks transparency and is based on deficient scientific rigour

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(Scarcella et al., 2016). Even though there is no evidence to associate an indivi­ dual’s potential for political violence with health status, the government justifies counter-terrorism’s integration into the NHS based on the number of patients who pass through the institution (HM Government, 2011). This therefore demonstrates how the ‘war on terror’ isn’t based on pre-disposing legitimate dangers and risks, rather it is based on affording as much regulatory mechan­ isms as possible based on illusionary discourses, regardless of these lacking any validation. The earlier discussions relating to how modernity defined emotions as being signs of uncivilised and inferior development are also relevant and significant to how Prevent continues the same construction of emotions. ‘Prevent trainers are specifically instructed to associate all emotional and behavioural signs with vulnerability, as outlined explicitly in the Prevent trainer script’ (HM Government 2016: 14). ‘Prevent has embedded its coun­ ter-radicalisation framework within the standard Comprehensive Risk Assessment tool (CRA)’ which includes a list of psychologising risk factors, including anger, susceptibility/influence and mental health thereby demon­ strating ‘the government’s objective to psychologise the threat of terrorism’ (Younis & Jadhav, 2020: 615). As Ahmed’s (2015, 2016, 2019) research concluded, within this pre-crime space, Muslims are left completely power­ less since failures to comply with the oppressive mechanisms that are deemed necessary within Prevent, lead to further judgments regarding one’s apparent radicalisation and can lead to punitive measures. The double con­ sciousness within Prevent thus contributes to the epistemology of victimisa­ tion by informing victims of their unequal status and then expecting victims to conform to the measures based on such constructions. It also has negative implications for the provision of health care through changing this space into a space that is no longer safe. Therefore, as Younis and Jadhav (2020: 622) contend, as long as Prevent remains a statutory duty, the race frame upon which it operates will worsen Muslim healthcare access and treatment—and training staff to ‘not be racist’ will prove insufficient.

Charity sector The policing of institutions has also been dispersed to the charity sector, with Patel (2017: 23) arguing that since partnering with the ‘UK government’s ‘Pre­ vent’ agenda—or war on terror—to control ungoverned spaces for extremism, the Commission has assumed a policing role’. ‘The Commission’s practices have had a disproportionate impact on Muslim charities, where thirty-eight per cent of all disclosed statutory investigations conducted are on Muslim charities despite representing only 1.21 per cent of the sector’ (Patel, 2017: 23). Figures from March 2015 show a Muslim charity is seven times more likely to be investigated than other religious charities (Patel, 2017). The dispersal of Prevent has therefore had multi-institutional impacts, meaning that Muslims are likely

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to suffer cumulative impacts, with each layer reinforcing injustice, oppression, and victimisation. The ‘war on terror’ and radicalisation are an example of how multi-layered cumulative trauma not only produces double consciousness, but how the greater the space between belief and ideals, and perceptions and experiences, the greater the cumulative traumatic impact. Within this space, not only are ideals broken, such as those pertaining to beinginnocent until proven guilty and those that form the bedrock of the criminal justice system, but victims bear witness to the space between these ideals and their perceptual and experiential epistemology (Ahmed, 2020). This space fractures beliefs, and such fracturing can be aligned with the trauma experienced because of the difficulty in accepting the illusionary status of beliefs (Smith, 2004). However, the ‘war on terror’ also presents the ability of epistemic status to be used to facilitate epistemic arrogance and epistemic ignor­ ance. These demonstrate how knowledge and truth have not only been subjected to epistemicide in the past, but how new social phenomena continue to be sub­ jected to colonial practices through not only the invention of new institutional rules and regulations, but also illusionary truths that continue to colonise truth and knowledge according to white frames and white privilege.

The racialisation of terrorism The racialisation of terrorism can also be gleaned from government responses to Islamist terrorism and far right extremism. The Shawcross review into Pre­ vent concluded that the Prevent programme had concentrated too much on the far right and not enough on Islamist extremism (Townsend, 2023). According to Prevent’s own statistics, from April 2021 to March 2022—for the second consecutive year—referrals of extreme right-wing radicalisation (20%) were higher than Islamist referrals (16%) (Townsend, 2023). The disjuncture between real cases and the conclusions drawn from the Shawcross review led Neil Basu to argue that the government-backed report appeared to be inspired by right wing ideology and was insulting to professionals fighting to tackle extremism (Townsend, 2023). The Shawcross review demonstrates the existence of epistemic arrogance at the highest level given that all his recommendation were accepted by the government (Townsend, 2023), even though as Ilyas Nagdee, Amnesty International UK’s Racial Justice Director, states, the review was ‘riddled with biased thinking, errors, and plain anti-Muslim prejudice’… with ‘William Shawcross’ having a ‘history of bigoted comments on Muslims and Islam’ which ‘should have precluded his involvement in this ill-starred review in the first place’ (Amnesty International, 2023). The most recent data reveals that Incel ideologies, those espousing extremist misogyny, account for more than half of all referrals to Prevent (Townsend, 2022) and senior counter­ terrorism officers regard Incels as an emerging risk making up 1% of all refer­ rals to the anti-extremism scheme in the year to March 2022–77 (Quinn, 2023). Given the threat of extremist misogyny as an ideology that is based on

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instigating violence, the Shawcross review concluded that misogynist extremism is not a counter-terrorism matter (Quinn, 2023; Townsend, 2022, 2023). The government response to different forms of extremist doesn’t represent a pro­ portionate response, but rather one based on facilitating the racialisation of terrorism. The manufacture and dispersal of such epistemic arrogance and ignorance can be conceptualised as purposeful and intentional, given the vast statistics and thus facts that represent such positions as epistemic illusions. Thus, as the chapter demonstrates, far from advocating and encouraging democratic democracy and the dismantling of colonial mechanisms of institu­ tional oppression, the government continues to further embed procedures, rules and institutional mechanises that facilitate racial and religious inequality, regardless of the epistemic validity on which such mechanisms exist.

References Ahmed, S. (2014). Constitutive criminology and the ‘war on terror’. Critical Criminol­ ogy, 22 (3), pp. 357–371. Ahmed, S. (2015). The ‘emotionalization of the ‘war on terror’’: Counter-terrorism, fear, risk, insecurity and helplessness. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 15 (5), pp. 545–560. Ahmed, S. (2019). British Muslims perceptions of social cohesion: from multiculturalism to community cohesion and the ‘war on terror’. Crime, Law and Social Change, 71 (5), pp. 581–595. Ahmed, S. (2020). The ‘War on Terror’, State Crime & Radicalization: A Constitutive Theory of Radicalization. London: Palgrave. Alexander, C. (2017). Raceing Islamophobia. In Elahi, F. & Khan, O., Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us All. London: Runneymede Trust, pp. 13–17. https://www. runnymedetrust. org/uploads/Islamophobia%20Report%202018%20FINAL.pdf. Amnesty International. (2023). UK: Shawcross review of Prevent is ‘deeply prejudiced and has no legitimacy’. Amnesty International. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-re leases/uk-shawcross-review-prevent-deeply-prejudiced-and-has-no-legitimacy. Brayson, K. (2019). Of bodies and burkinis: Institutional Islamophobia, Islamic dress, and the colonial condition. Journal of Law and Society, 46 (1), pp. 55–82. Busher, J., Choudhury, T. & Thomas, P. (2019). The enactment of the counter-terrorism “Prevent duty” in British schools and colleges: Beyond reluctant accommodation or straightforward policy acceptance. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 12 (3), pp. 440–462. Cohen, B. & Tufail, W. (2017). Prevent and the normalization of Islamophobia. In Elahi F. & Khan O. Islamophobia: Still a Challenge For Us All. London: Runnymede Trust. Correia, I., Vala, J. & Aguiar, P. (2001). The effects of belief in a just world and victim’s innocence on secondary victimization, judgements of justice and deservingness. Social Justice Research, 14 (3), pp. 327–342. Dresser, P. (2019). ‘Trust your instincts–act!’ PREVENT police officers’ perspectives of counter-radicalisation reporting thresholds. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 12 (4), pp. 605–628. Garner, S. & Selod, S. (2015). The racialization of Muslims: Empirical studies of Islamo­ phobia. Critical Sociology, 41 (1), pp. 9–19. Goldberg, D., Jadhav, S. & Younis, T. (2017). Prevent: what is pre-criminal space? BJPsych Bulletin, 41 (4), pp. 208–211.

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Gould, E. D. and Klor, E. F. (2016). The long‐run effect of 9/11: Terrorism, backlash, and the assimilation of Muslim immigrants in the West. The Economic Journal, 126 (597), pp. 2064–2114. Heath-Kelly, C. (2017). Algorithmic autoimmunity in the NHS: Radicalisation and the clinic, Security Dialogue, 48 (1), pp. 29–45. Heath-Kelly, C. and Strausz, E. (2019). The banality of counterterrorism ‘after, after 9/11’? Perspectives on the Prevent duty from the UK health care sector. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 12 (1), pp. 89–109. HM Government. (2011). Prevent strategy. Stationery Office: London. HM Government. (2016). HealthWRAP (2nd ed.), Facilitator’s Full Script. http://data.pa rliament.uk/DepositedPapers/Files/DEP2015-0804/Long_HealthWRAP_facilitators_scrip t_final_v3.pdf. Kassimeris, G. (2008). Torture and terrorism: an interview with Moazzam Begg. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1 (3), pp. 405–418. Kahani-Hopkins, V. & Hopkins, N. (2002). Representing British Muslims: the strategic dimension to identity construction. Ethnic and racial studies, 25 (2), pp. 288–309. Kundnani, A. (2015). A Decade Lost: Rethinking Radicalisation and Extremism. London: Claystone. Laird, L. D., Amer, M. M., Barnett, E. D. & Barnes, L. L. (2007). Muslim patients and health disparities in the UK and the US. Archives of disease in childhood, 92 (10), pp. 922–926. Lemu, M. N. (2016). Notes on Religion and Countering Violent Extremism. In Abadi, H. (Ed.), Countering Daesh Propaganda: Action-Oriented Research for Practical Policy Outcomes. Atlanta, GA: The Carter Center, pp. 43–50. Mahmud, A. & Islam, M., (2023) Intersectional oppression: A reflexive dialogue between Muslim academics and their experiences of Islamophobia and exclusion in UK Higher Education. Sociology Compass, 17 (2), p. e13041. Meer, N. & Modood, T. (2019). lslamophobia as the racialisation of Muslims. In Zempi, I. & Awan, I. (Eds). The Routledge International Handbook of lslamophobia (1st ed.) London: Routledge, pp. 18–31. Meer, N. & Noorani, T. (2008) A Sociological Comparison of Anti-Semitism and AntiMuslim Sentiment in Britain. The Sociological Review, 56, pp. 195–219. Patel, I. (2017). Emergence of institutional islamophobia: The case of the Charity Com­ mission of England and Wales. ReOrient, 3 (1), pp. 23–49. Posocco, S. (2016). (Decolonizing) The ear of the other: subjectivity, ethics and politics in question. In Bakshi, S., Jivraj, S. & Posocco, S. (Eds), Decolonizing Sexualities: Trans­ national Perspectives, Critical Interventions. Oxford: Counterpress, pp. 249–263. Post, J., Sprinzak, E. & Denny, L. (2003). The terrorists in their own words: Interviews with 35 incarcerated Middle Eastern terrorists. Terrorism and Political Violence, 15 (1), pp. 171–184. Quinn, B. (2023). ‘Rapid rise’ in Andrew Tate-related cases referred to Prevent by schools. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/12/rapid-ri se-in-andrew-tate-related-cases-referred-to-prevent-by-schools. Sayyid, S. (2014). A measure of Islamophobia. Islamophobia Studies Journal, 2 (1), pp. 10–25. Scarcella, A., Page, R. & Furtado, V. (2016). Terrorism, radicalisation, extremism, authoritarianism and fundamentalism: A systematic review of the quality and psy­ chometric properties of assessments. PloS one, 11 (12), p. e0166947. Smith, S. (2004). Exploring the interaction of trauma and spirituality. Traumatology, 10 (4), pp. 231–243.

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Speckhard, A., & Akhmedova, K. (2005). Talking to terrorists. The Journal of Psychohis­ tory, 33 (2), pp. 125–156. Stevenson, J. (2018). Muslim students in UK higher education: Issues of inequality and inequity. https://www.azizfoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Bridge­ Higher-Education-report-2.pdf. Stollznow, K. (2020). On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present. Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press. Sutton, R. (2015) Preventing Prevent? Challenges to Counter-Radicalisation Policy On Campus. London: The Henry Jackson Society. The Runnymede Trust. (1997). Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. London: Runny­ mede Trust. Thomas, P. (2016). Youth, terrorism and education: Britain’s Prevent programme, International Journal of Lifelong Education, 35(2), pp. 171–187. Townsend, M. (2022). Experts fear rising global ‘incel’ culture could provoke terrorism. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/oct/30/global-incel-culture­ terrorism-misogyny-violent-action-forums. Townsend, M. (2023). UK counter-terrorism report author accused of basing conclusions on ‘handful of cases’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/ 12/uk-counter-terrorism-report-william-shawcross-accused-by-critics#:~:text=William %20Shawcross%20was%20appointed%20to,was%20met%20with%20widespread% 20condemnation. Younis, T. & Jadhav, S. (2020). Islamophobia in the National Health Service: an eth­ nography of institutional racism in PREVENT’s counter‐radicalisation policy. Sociol­ ogy of Health & Illness, 42 (3), pp. 610–626. Zedner, L. (2007). Pre-crime and post-criminology? Theoretical criminology, 11 (2), pp. 261–281.

7 POLICING

This chapter explores racism within policing. The impact of race on policing and the use of police discretion has been well documented (Bowling, 1999; Mastrofski, 2004; Miller, 2014). However, although the need for community policing has received extensive coverage, the relationship between colonial atti­ tudes, institutional racism, and everyday policing remains (Holmes & Smith, 2008; Mastrofski & Willis, 2010; Rowe, 2017). As this chapter demonstrates, institutional racism continues to impact policing. The police have a privileged role in using coercive force to maintain social control and as Lowenstein (2000: 27) contends, ‘as society’s guardians of the law, need to be as even-handed, fair and as just as anyone can be’. The police enforce legal control by defining and racialising groups and thus being one of the primary institutions through which epistemic oppression and epistemic injustice exist. As the chapter demonstrates, rather than forms of discrimination ceasing to exist, over recent years there has been an increase in inequality and discriminatory policing. It highlights how consecutive governments have continued to accept those reviews that amplify the threat of minorities whilst rejecting the full recommendations made by those that call for equality and for the government to accept that institutional racism, sexism, misogyny, and Islamophobia remain in the police.

The institutionalisation of race The criminalisation of racialised groups because of imputed and/or ascribed characteristic formed part of western consciousness (Cusumano, 2015). As pre­ viously stated, this consciousness created illusionary mechanisms of scientific progress which formed categories through which epistemic status could mirror the hierarchy of race. In the 1920s racial and cultural differences were used as signifiers of difference to legitimise those at the bottom of the hierarchy, with DOI: 10.4324/9781003187073-7

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the racialisation of crime, disease, and prostitution legitimising such construc­ tions (Burton, 2005; Razack et al., 2010). However, such constructions weren’t only associated with perceived characteristics, but also with demoralising and eroding British society. The categorisation of these identities as signifying lesser morality, progress and civilisation drew on earlier illegitimate discourses that were used to justify the brutality of slavery. The power to produce such dis­ courses meant that immigrants became the subject matter and little attention was paid to the ‘racist societies in which those communities found themselves’ (Keith, 1993: 10). Therefore, the imbalance of power remained with these illu­ sionary discourses not only penetrating institutions, indeed informing policies, and laws, but their power was evident through their breadth in informing shaping multiple institutions. As Sherwood (2001) contends, immigration into Britain was based around a complex web of ideas about colonial status. Hous­ ing policies marginalised immigrants into inner city housing areas which were deprived and known to be high crime areas (Benyon & Solomos, 1987). These locations were symbolised as dangerous places that were subjected to over policing. The use of over policing demonstrated how constructed discourses, far from remaining ideas, informed policies and therefore the physical regulation of groups. The placing of minorities within deprived high crime areas and the symbolic policing of less privileged groups constituted secondary marginalisation (Cohen, 1999). However, regardless of the existence of multi-institutional racism, between 1959 and 1962, the Royal Commission failed to examine the over policing of black minorities, which only served to further institutionalise the colonial practices that were used in domestic colonies (Oliver, 1987). According to Miles (1987: 35), the racialisation of policing and its connection with the British empire served the dual purpose of maintaining the ‘hierarchy of inter­ dependence between the English and the colonial races, and the differences in productive relations and material wealth between England and much of the rest of the world at this time’. Therefore, within the UK, policies and laws were created that reflected and reproduced the racialisation that dominated colonial territories. As Gilroy (2002: 45) highlights, ‘the partiality clause in the British immigration law of 1968’…. codified ‘the ‘cultural biology of race’ into statute law as part of a strategy for the exclusion of black settlers’. These colonial discourses were further dispersed throughout society through political speeches which reflected dominant political discourses. In 1968, Enoch Powell gave his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in which he classified black settlers as being a preventable evil (Esteves & Porion, 2019). He went on to emphasise that blacks were a threat to the British legal institution, particu­ larly young blacks, who he identified as a political problem and dangerous to the nation as they were incompatible with English life (Hirsch, 2020). This incompatibility was extended to questioning the morality of black settlers in being able to maintain social order, morality, and family (Esteves & Porion, 2019; Hirsch, 2020). This construction, much like the discourses created to

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legitimise slavery, not only constructed victims as being criminally inclined but also as being incapable of maintaining western constructions of respectability, civilisation, and modernity. Of interest is how this construction, far from highlighting the diversity that exists within any group, further racialised black settlers in constructing their genes as pre-disposing their behaviours. Powell reasserted positivist Lombrosian classifications whereby immigrants were ste­ reotyped as being innately criminal, unable to socialize and being of a ‘savage’ nature (Lombroso, 1876, cited in Bowling & Phillips, 2002). Such classifications categorised black settlers as criminals and immoral by virtue of their genetic pathology. This stigmatisation maintained the focus on immigrants as being the problem. The protection of British values and institutions from immigrants was used to justify laws, policies, and rules that maintained the oppression of vic­ tims. The enforcement of such stigmatising attitudes extended to policing, and the recruitment of black policemen. In 1966, there were only three black police officers out of an estimated black population of one million (Home Office, 1997). Lambert and Jenkinson (1970) documented on how state agencies expected black people to assimilate into a society that was openly hostile to their presence, with Gaskell and Smith (1985: 261–263) noting how ‘what almost amounts to a ‘folk history’ of unpleasant, perhaps frightening, experi­ ences with the police has worked its way into shared experiences of black youngsters’. Gaskell and Smith (1985) found that 60% of whites held the view that the police were good or very good compared with 30% of blacks. In 1979, the Institute of Race Relations raised the issue of police use of dis­ cretion in stop and search as a central concern after analysing evidence that demonstrated the overuse of stop and search against black men (Institute of Race Relations, 1979). The Institute concluded that, ‘all this evidence suggests that arrest and police powers are now being used to keep the black community in its place: physically, by penalizing blacks found out of their ‘ghettoes’, and psychologically, by penalizing those who attempt to demand their rights or protect another’ (Institute of Race Relations, 1979: 44). The placement of black people within an area was used to contain blacks in certain areas to facilitate the over policing of those areas (Gilroy, 2002). Black communities were sub­ jected to racial harassment, ‘oppressive police control, mass stop and search operations, the use of riot squads using semi-military equipment, excessive surveillance, unnecessary armed raids, the police use of racially abusive lan­ guage, particularly in the centers of Britain’s African, Caribbean, and Asian communities’ (Bowling & Phillips, 2002: 593). In the four days prior to the Brixton riots in 1981, ‘943 people were stopped and searched’ (Gilroy, 2002: 132). The use of stop and search represents the unique power of the police because as Delsol and Shiner (2015) argue, stop and search is a form of adversarial contact between the police and the public that represents the coercive power of the police and the state to act upon suspicion. To legitimise the excessive policing of black youths, the police constructed black youths as muggers and drug barons (Box, 2002). The over policing and

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excessive use of policing powers led to riots in Brixton, and disturbances in areas including Southall, Toxteth, and Moss Side in 1981. Following the riots, the government issued an inquiry and Lord Scarman’s report was published in 1981. The report explored various issues negatively impacting Blacks, including unemployment, racial disadvantage, and disproportionate policing. In respond­ ing to these cumulative disadvantages, Scarman chose not to attribute the over policing of blacks to institutional racism. Instead, he maintained the focus on blacks, as a group to be studied, regulated, and corrected (Scarman, 1981). According to Scarman many young people ‘had become indignant and resentful against the police, suspicious of everything they did’ (Scarman, 1981: 4.1). In exploring the root of disproportionate policing, Scarman argued that while the direction and policies of the police are not racist, some officers are occasionally guilty of racially prejudiced behaviour, and their actions cause incalculable harm. This behaviour goes far towards the creation of the image of a hostile police force, which was the myth which led the young people into these disorders. (Scarman, 1981: 4.64) Scarman therefore demonstrated epistemic arrogance by using his epistemic status to override the perceptual and experiential reality for victims, a reality validated through figures demonstrating the disproportionate use of power against black youth. Scarman also used white frames in failing to attribute responsibility to those officers that were guilty of racial prejudice by exercising the disproportionate use of power. This not only obscured and concealed the extent of racial inequality and discrimination, but it reduced the legitimacy of victims’ narratives. The use of epistemic oppression via epistemic status reduced the space within which victims’ narratives could emerge. As Scarman clearly stated, police hostility was a myth, the existence of epistemic injustice wasn’t a product of disproportionate policing, but rather a product of false beliefs. Such a conceptualisation not only denied institutional racism, but further legitimised its existence by blaming victims for their own mistreatment and false episte­ mological reality. It therefore represented the vast power differential between those that had epistemic status and those that did not. In relation to institutional racism, Scarman stated: it was alleged by some of those who made representations to me that Britain is an institutionally racist society. If by that is meant that it is a society which knowingly, as a matter of policy, discriminates against black people, I reject this allegation. (Scarman, 1981: 2.22) The use of the word ‘knowingly’ dismissed how institutions were formed to mirror colonial territories and how colonising discourses were instrumental in

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how some institutions, such as the police, related to minorities. Scarman’s position contributed to the existence of colonial amnesia by excluding from epistemic recognition the existence of policies, attitudes, and laws which con­ tinued to perpetuate colonial forms of oppression. As with slavery, such a conceptualisation served the purpose of constructing the processes which con­ tinued from colonialism as acceptable and using the creation of illusionary neutrality to demonise negative reactions to such injustices and inequalities. To further demonstrate the attribution of responsibility on to victims, Scarman suggested that the recruitment of black officers would eradicate percep­ tions of police hostility. Such recommendations further facilitated institutional racism, because as Gilroy (2002) states, racism exists by repressing, denying, and controlling the present and the past. Scarman failed to accept that recruit­ ing black officers wouldn’t change the existence of racialised practices within the police. The containment of blacks was further perpetuated through the media ‘conceptualizing rioting as a form of pathological contagion, commonly associated with black communities’ (Keith, 1993: 4). Scarman’s response, rather than examining policing to consider inequality and injustice from a position of democratic universal epistemology, further institutionalised and dispersed institutional racism through creating discourses to legitimise such oppressive policing. The power to construct through attributing recognition, rights, and humanity meant that although institutional racism continued to be officially denied, research continued to demonstrate its existence. Research in 1983 demonstrated the police use of physically distinct features to classify people into biological racial categories which were constructed as dictating behaviours (Holdaway, 1996). Stradling and Harper (1988) found that recruit supervisors were unlikely to provide guidance on using discretion, with half stating that they were unable to monitor the discretionary enforcement practices of their officers. Research demonstrated the existence of policing methods that were based on pre-held notions of colonialism, with officers con­ tinuing to use pre-conceived colonial ideas to categorise and criminalise groups (Holdaway, 1996) The police abuse of power wasn’t refined to stop and search. Inquest (1999: 20–21) identified 37 black deaths between 1991 and 1996 in police custody, with 12 of those deaths occurring in 1995. As the Institute of Race Relations state, no officer has been punished for any of these deaths (Institute of Race Relations, 1999).

Canteen culture, white privilege, and institutional racism Although Scarman rejected institutionalism racism in favour of the few rotten apples’ thesis, according to McConville et al. (1993), the rotten apple thesis was insufficient because the problem was within the structure, not just with a few police officers. The intersectionality between autonomy and responsibility and institutional racism is one whereby individual action influences and shapes institutions and over time the external realities of institutions come to be seen

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as being independent from human interaction and influence (Lyth, 1989). Thus, the autonomous existence of institutions, such as the police, not only maintains and perpetuates white privilege but also sustains the racialisation of policing. It could therefore be argued that within policing neutralisation, techniques serve to diminish responsibility and guilt, because as Cohen contends, these techni­ ques are ‘shared, social, collective and organised’, as well as ‘individual, perso­ nal, psychological and private’ (Cohen 2001: 9). The separation of individual autonomy and thus responsibility and police work can be seen from the work of Bornstein (2015) who examined policies of administrative systems and cog­ nitive racial bias. According to Bornstein (2015: 52) ‘whereas cognitive racial bias highlights conscious and unconscious associations, negative and positive, about things and people in the world’. ‘Institutional racism characterizes a system in which policies that do not necessarily refer to race nevertheless reproduce and sometimes intensify racial disparities and hierarchies’ (Bornstein, 2015: 53). However, as previously stated, where policies were introduced and reflected the continued domestic colonial control of minorities, their existence maintains and perpetuates the inequalities and discrimination produced through the discourse of race. These continuities necessitate an approach which explores the origins of race and racialised processes. The lack of intersectionality between these necessary components reflects the processes and mechanisms through which colonialism was institutionalised. This continuity means that accounts of institutional racism are pushed into either exploring contemporary mechanisms or the birth of race. The complexity of situating the birth of race, tracing its contemporary existence via its origins and continuities is not only a vast task, but one that involves having to write from a democratic epistemic standpoint that facilitates the exposure and naming of white privilege, epistemic imperialism, and con­ tinued racialisation of epistemic status. The magnitude of such a process is defined by its depth in penetrating cultures, socialisation, and every western construct which applauds their own development, modernity, and progress. It is further defined through its breadth, whereby colonial processes contaminated every sphere of life to maintain the dichotomic epistemic status of the spoken and the unspoken, the written and the unwritten, and those that are visible and those that remain invisible. Thus, the colonisation of institutions, knowledge and truth means that white frames perpetuate the illusionary discourses that obscure the processes and mechanisms that maintain institutional racism. This can be gleaned from the policing response to the death of George Floyd in the US in 2020. In the UK, the policing response to black lives matter was to create the Race Action Plan, which set ‘out the need to create an anti-racist police service’ and to improve policing (College of Policing, 2023). However, according to Fair Trials’ Legal Director Bruno Min, the failure to acknowledge institutional racism meant that the Action Plan failed to recognise how over­ criminalisation and excessive police powers were key drivers of endemic racism in the criminal justice system (Fair Trials, 2022). It could therefore be argued

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that the policing response in denying the existence of institutional racism, cre­ ated illusionary remedies, such as promoting diversity as an adequate institu­ tional response. These responses not only conceal the systematic issues which maintain institutional racism, but they represent epistemic arrogance. As Basu (2022) contends, the plan’s Achilles heel is its inability to galvanise all chief constables to accept that we remain institutionally racist and to apologise for that and our post-Windrush history. The difficulties in challenging such institutional responses is in the depth and breadth of institutional racism. The government, rather than encouraging institu­ tional accountability and change within the police, also denied the existence of institutional racism within the police. According to Webber (2022: 70) such a response seeks to shift the focus of equalities policies to white working-class com­ munities and accuses those who insist that structural racism exists of perpetuating a ‘victimhood culture’. The continued colonisation of knowledge can be further wit­ nessed from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. The commission recommended the abolition of the terms Black, Asian and minority ethnic (Bame) and Black and minority ethnic (bME) in government-funded research, the use of the term ‘disproportionality’ instead of ‘racism’ and the perpetuation of the ideology that inequalities are not caused by racism and are the product of inherent inequal­ ities, in terms of culture, criminality and/or biology (Sewell et al., 2021). Such a conceptualisation not only continues to blame minorities for the injustices and inequalities they perceive and experience, thus colonising their epistemic standpoint, but it also signals the false existence of meritocracy thereby constructing inequal­ ities and injustice as representative of minorities ethnic, religious, cultural, and biological weaknesses. One such example is the response in 2007 to youth violence in London, when Tony Blair stated that ‘knife and gun murders in London were not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture’ (Blair, 2007).

New policies and legislation The desire to remove the term racism demonstrates governmental epistemic arrogance and epistemic ignorance because it signifies the denial of the existence of racialised categories, inequalities, and discrimination, whilst simultaneously continuing the racialisation of crimes, such as knife crime. In doing so, it demonstrates the vast ingrained colonisation of knowledge and truth and how such colonisation not only denies the mechanisms which created and main­ tained institutionalism racism, but the construction of new mechanisms to continue the perpetuation of racialisation. For example, the decision to no longer use the word racism represents the emergence of new ways to regulate and colonise knowledge. The irony of such a position is that it reasserts race as a category through which to differentiate recognition, rights, and status, whilst also reducing the ability of victims to cite the perceptual and experiential epis­ temological standpoint that exists through such processes. It thus seeks to use

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race as a category of difference to produce epistemic oppression whilst also denying the existence of race through victims’ standpoint epistemology. The need to erase the ability of victims to use race to conceptualise their experiences and perceptions represents epistemic arrogance. It seeks to reduce the visibility of colonial practices thereby seeking to construct a clear dis­ juncture from historic forms of colonialism and imperialism and contemporary discourses and mechanism which either borrow techniques from this period or re-invent the ideas created during this period. As previously stated, such dis­ junctures validate contemporary claims of meritocracy determining success and facilitate narratives whereby the victim can be blamed for their own perceptions and experiences of inequality and racism. Therefore, as critical race theorists argue, contemporary policies and laws continue to be created to perpetuate and institutionalise racial inequality. However, the pre-existence of white frames, whereby any relationship between such policies and race is dismissed, allow alternative explanatory discourses to emerge which facilitate the maintenance of white privilege. It could therefore be argued that contemporary societies con­ tinue to be saturated with white privilege through colonial mechanisms which created the systems through which epistemic status was tied to whites. It is therefore possible to see how and why Delgado and Stefancic (2017: 9) contend that change will only happen when the government has reached the point of interest convergence and a point where those in power no longer benefit from white privilege. The government continues to implement measures that reaffirm inequality. According to Webber (2022), the Police Crime Sentencing and Court Bill 2022 deviates from policing by consent to promote a more colonial form of policing that protects the powerful against the powerless. It is therefore a measure which exacerbates inequality to increase the power of those that already possess epistemic status and further reduce the epistemic status of those already denied epistemic status. The introduction of such measures has real life consequences, just as the policies introduced in the 1960s led to the over criminalisation, reg­ ulation, and containment of blacks. Stop and searches rose by a quarter to nearly 700,000 in the year to March 2021, with the equivalent of one in five BME 15−19-year-olds searched (Dodd, 2021). In 2021, police drew or dis­ charged tasers on black people at a rate six times higher than white people (Fair Trials, 2022). Additional data highlights that the proportion of BAME deaths in custody where restraint is a feature is over two times greater than it is in other deaths in custody, the proportion of BAME deaths in custody where use of force is a feature is over two times greater than it is in other deaths in custody, and the proportion of BAME deaths in custody where mental health-related issues are a feature is nearly two times greater than it is in other deaths in custody (Fair Trials, 2022). These figures demonstrate how the police abuse of power exists within stop and search and other areas where the police exercise discretion (Fair Trials, 2022).

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However, governmental responses have mirrored those of the Royal Commis­ sion in 1962. There remains an unwillingness to address inequality, regardless of research and reviews which clearly demonstrate institutional racism. The inde­ pendent review of deaths and serious incidents in police custody by Dame Elish Angiolini QC in 2017 highlighted the role of institutional racism in the dis­ proportionate number of deaths of people from black, Asian and minority ethnic groups following restraint and concluded that the deaths of people from BAME communities, in particular young black men, resonate with the black commu­ nity’s experience of systemic racism and called for action to tackle discrimination (Inquest, 2017). Similarly, in 2018, the outgoing chair of what is now called the Office of Police Complaints (IOPC), Dame Anne Owers argued that the rela­ tionship between ethnicity and use of force needs to be examined (Inquest, 2018). The depth and breadth of institutional racism has also been highlighted by the United Nations. In 2018, a group of United Nations experts commented on structural racism being rooted at the heart of British society (United Nations, 2018). This was followed by the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, publishing a report in 2021 which called on states, including the UK, to reverse the culture of denial towards systemic racism, par­ ticularly in the context of policing and deaths in custody (Inquest, 2021). There have also been high profile cases, such as the police use of strip and search for a child. In response to the police strip searching a child, Ilyas Nagdee, Amnesty International UK’s Racial Justice Director, said the use of strip searches against children is a serious violation of their dig­ nity and human rights. This appalling incident, with its clear echoes of the Child Q case, is another manifestation of the institutional racism and mis­ ogyny that is so deep rooted in policing in this country. (Amnesty International, 2022) However, epistemic arrogance via the denial of structural racism was demon­ strated both by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner at the time, Cressida Dick and Home Secretary Priti Patel. According to Webber (2022) justifications which included the argument that black people commit more crimes perpe­ tuated institutional racism and other forms of discriminations. As previously stated, procedures that create and maintain inequality can lead to multiple inequalities and the discrimination of other minority identities—those con­ structed as the inferior binary opposite. Following the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by serving Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens, a YouGov poll found that 47% of women and 40% of men had less trust in the police and 76% of women and 71% of all adults polled think the culture of policing has to change to better respond to violence against women and girls (End violence against women, 2021). The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) published the findings of its investigation into incidents occurring at Charing Cross police station from 2016 to 2018, where officers shared racist,

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sexist, misogynistic, and Islamophobic messages. The investigation revealed that the nature of the problems at Charing Cross were cultural and systemic and included concerning behavioural themes about the attitudes and behaviour of police officers that ran investigations, bullying and aggressive behaviour, ‘banter’ used to excuse oppressive and offensive behaviours, discrimination, toxic masculinity, and misogyny and sexual harassment. (IOPC, 2022: 5) It also revealed how police culture facilitates an environment of institutional misogyny and racism through demeaning language about raping colleagues and partners, and using physical violence against women (IOPC, 2022). Surprisingly, race is also a feature where police misconduct is concerned with ethnicity data published by the Home Office (2020) revealing that of the 9,000 officers who were being investigated, 1,300 were from minority ethnic groups and accounted for 14.5% of misconduct investigations. About 20% of BAME officers were called to a misconduct meeting or gross misconduct hearing, even though fewer than 7% of police officers in England and Wales are from minority ethnic groups (Home Office, 2020). It could therefore be argued that race is not only a significance factors in the police use of power but also in the overuse of punitive measures against those within the police. In 2023 Baroness Casey concluded that the Metropolitan police were institu­ tionally racist, sexist, and homophobic—and in need of radical reform (Dodd, 2023a). In response to the report, the NPCC produced a mission which included a violence against women and girls action plan to nationally coordinate processes to check all officers and staff against the Police National Database, to strengthen vetting and misconduct investigations, and to address race disparities affecting black people (NPCC, 2023). However, all these piecemeal measures were intro­ duced while the key claim of the MET being institutionally racist was denied by Mark Rowley. Rowley accepted the findings of the Casey report and said that bias was systemic but refused the label of ‘institutional’ calming that the term was politicised and ambiguous (Dodd, 2023b). In response, Baroness Casey stated: when people say something’s become politicised, it’s often a get out of jail card for the word difficult. I’ve heard it so many times, I’m sorry, you’re dealing with a dinosaur, I’ve been around a long time. And sometimes it is right that we step into what is difficult. (Dodd, 2023b) However, based on an extensive review of the MET, although Baroness Casey highlighted the need to deeply assess the culture within the MET, Home Secretary, Suella Braverman backed the rejection of institutional racism, mis­ ogyny, and homophobia (Dearden, 2023). The application of epistemic

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arrogance in denying the evidence-based review and its conclusions was further compounded through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and the Public Order Bill, which as Lott-Lavigna (2023) contends continue the expan­ sion of police powers through legislation. However, as Quinlan (2023) contends, senior police officers including Sir Steven House, and Neil Basu has argued that the police has a toxic culture and it is not just the work of a few ‘bad apples’ like David Carrick or Wayne Couzens. The response of the most senior officer within the MET and the Home Secretary not only demonstrated the power of epistemic status in removing epistemic standpoints and their truth and knowledge, but how these can be replaced based on identity and thus epistemic status. The response denied the existence of institutional racism and through doing so, actions plan to tackle institutional racism would cease to exist. As Baroness Casey stated, ‘when people say something’s become politicised, it’s often a get out of jail card for the word difficult’ (Dodd, 2023b). Tackling institutional racism meant challenging perceptions, knowledge, and truth and investigating these and pro­ cedures from a democratic epistemic position. Such internal scrutiny could only exist through the acceptance that democratic epistemology does not. However, in shaping the response to deny institutional racism, a more dangerous reg­ ulatory mechanism was introduced. There was the reality that even where independent mechanisms of investigation based on the pursuit of equality do exist, such as the Casey Report, these can be subjected to epistemic arrogance and epistemic imperialism. Therefore, epistemic trust in the police was not only fractured but so was the belief in additional mechanisms that are meant to pursue justice and equality. Thus, where these mechanisms fail to provide the redress that they are meant to provide, the violation of beliefs through their subjection to epistemic arrogance can lead to further layers of injustice. The manipulation of the Casey report demonstrated the illusionary existence of such measures thereby shattering their existence as mechanisms of possible justice and equality. In doing so, beliefs in such mechanisms becomes tainted, and shattered, with discrimination, inequality, and injustice further heightened.

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Blair, T. (2007). Blair blames spate of murders on black culture. The Guardian. https:// www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/apr/12/ukcrime.race. Bornstein, A. (2015). Institutional Racism, Numbers Management, and Zero‐Tolerance Policing in New York City. North American Dialogue, 18 (2), pp. 51–62. Bowling, B. & Phillips, C. (2002). Racism, Crime, and Justice. London: Pearson Education. Bowling, B. (1999). Violent Racism: Victimization, Policing, and Social Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Box, S. (2002). Power, Crime, and Mystification. London: Routledge. Burton, A. (Ed.) (2005). Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (Vol. 2). London: Routledge. Cohen, C. J. (1999). The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cohen, S. (2001). States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press. College of Policing. (2023). Police Race Action Plan. https://www.college.police.uk/supp ort-forces/diversity-and-inclusion/action-plan. Cusumano, E. (2015). The scope of military privatisation: Military role conceptions and contractor support in the United States and the United Kingdom. International Rela­ tions, 29 (2), pp. 219–241. Dearden, L. (2023). Suella Braverman backs Met Police chief as she rejects ‘institutional racism’ label. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ suella-braverman-met-police-institutional-racism-b2305115.html. Delgado, R. & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction. New York: New York University Press. Delsol, R. & Shiner, M. (Eds) (2015). Stop and Search: The Anatomy of a Police Power. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dodd, V. (2018). IPCC concerns about rise in minority ethnic deaths following police restraint. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/07/ipcc-con cerned-about-rise-in-ethnic-minority-deaths-following-police-restraint. Dodd, V. (2021). Use of stop and search rises 24% in England and Wales in a year. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/nov/18/stop-and-search-rose­ by-24-in-england-and-wales-during-lockdowns. Dodd, V. (2023a). Louise Casey’s report on the Met police: the fall of a British, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/21/louise-caseys-report-on­ the-met-police-the-fall-of-a-british-institution. Dodd, V. (2023b). Louise Casey accuses Met police chief of ‘hollow’ reasoning on failings, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/22/louise-casey-accu ses-met-police-chief-of-hollow-reasoning-on-failings. End Violence Against Women. (2021). Almost half of women have less trust in police fol­ lowing Sarah Everard murder. End Violence against Women. https://www.endviolenceaga instwomen.org.uk/almost-half-of-women-have-less-trust-in-police-following-sarah-everard -murder/. Esteves, O. & Porion, S. (Eds) (2019). The Lives and Afterlives of Enoch Powell: The Undying Political Animal. London: Routledge. Fair Trials. (2022) UK: Police Race Action Plan should acknowledge institutional racism, Fairtrials. https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/news/uk-police-race-action-plan/. Gaskell, G. & Smith, P. (1985). How young blacks see the police. New Society, 73 (1182), pp. 261–263. Gilroy, P. (2002). There Ain’t No Black in The Union Jack. London: Routledge.

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Hirsch, S. (2020). In the shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality and Resistance. Man­ chester: Manchester University Press. Holdaway, S. (1996). The Racialisation of British Policing. London: Red Globe Press. Holmes, M. D. & Smith, B. W. (2008). Race and Police Brutality: Roots of an Urban Dilemma. New York: State University of New York Press. Home Office. (1997). Winning the Race: Policing Plural Communities: HMIC Thematic Inspection Report on Police Community and Race Relations 1996/7. London: Home Office. Home Office. (2020). National Statistics, Police Workforce, England and Wales: 31 March 2020. London: The Stationery Office. Inquest. (1999). Briefing: The Death in Prison of Alton Manning 1995. London: Inquest. Inquest. (2017). Landmark review on deaths in police custody published today is an opportu­ nity to save lives. Inquest. https://www.inquest.org.uk/angiolini-review-published-today. Inquest. (2018). Inquest responds to IOPC annual statistics which show highest number of police related deaths in over a decade. Inquest. https://www.inquest.org.uk/iopc-sta ts-2018. Inquest. (2021). NEWS: UN put spotlight on UK in major report calling for transfor­ mative change to uproot racism in policing. Inquest. https://www.inquest.org.uk/ news-un-racism-report. Institute of Race Relations. (1979). Police Against Black People. London: IRR. Institute of Race Relations. (1991). Deadly Silence: Black Deaths in Custody. London: IRR. IOPC. (2022). Operation Hotton. Independent Office for Police Conduct. https://www. policeconduct.gov.uk/publications/operation-hotton-learning-report-january-2022. Mastrofski, S. D. (2004). Controlling street-level police discretion. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 593 (1), pp. 100–118. Keith, M. (1993). Race, Riots and Policing: Lore and Disorder in a Multi-racist Society. London: Taylor & Francis. Lambert, J. R. & Jenkinson, R. F. (1970). Crime, Police, and Race Relations: A Study in Birmingham. London: Oxford University Press. Lott-Lavigna, R. (2023). Rishi Sunak supports expanding police powers despite damning Casey Report. Open Democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/rishi-sunak-p olice-powers-casey-report-public-order-bill-metropolitan-force/. Lowenstein, L. F. (2000). Institutional Racism. Police, August, pp. 23–27. Lyth, I. M. (1989). The Dynamics of the Social (Vol. 2). Wickham Market: Free Asso­ ciation Books. Mastrofski, S.D. & Willis, J. J. (2010). Police organization continuity and change: Into the twenty-first century. Crime and Justice, 39 (1), pp. 55–144. McConville, M., Sanders, A. & Leng, R. (1993). The Case for the Prosecution: Police Suspects and the Construction of Criminality. London: Routledge. Miles, R. (1987). Recent Marxist theories of nationalism and the issue of racism. British Journal of Sociology, 38 (1), pp. 24–43. Miller, E.J. (2014). Challenging police discretion. Howard Law Journal, 58, p. 521. NPCC. (2023). Casey Report reinforces the urgency of our mission. NPCC. https://news. npcc.police.uk/releases/casey-report-reinforces-the-urgency-of-our-mission. Oliver, I. T. (1987). Police, Government and Accountability. London: Palgrave. Phoenix, A., Lutz, H. & Yuval-Davis, N. (1995). Introduction: Nationalism, Racism and Gender-European Crossfires. London: Pluto Press.

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Quinlan, T. L. (2023). The Casey report into the Met reveals ingrained ‘warrior culture’ in the police force. University of Birmingham. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/ 2023/casey-report-warrior-culture-in-the-police-service. Razack, S., Thobani, S. & Smith, M. (Eds) (2010). States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century. Toronto: Between the Lines. Rowe, M., (2017). The Racialisation of Disorder in Twentieth Century Britain. London: Routledge. Scarman, Lord J. (1981). The Brixton Disorders, 10–12th April (1981). London: HMSO. Sewell, T., Aderin-Pocock, M., Chughtai, A, et. al., (2021). The report of the Commis­ sion on Race and Ethnic Disparities 2021. https://www.gov.uk/government/publica tions/the-report-of-the-commissionon-race-and-ethnic-disparities. Sherwood, M. (2001). Race, empire and education: teaching racism. Race & Class, 42 (3), pp. 1–28. Stradling, S. & Harper, K. (1988) The Tutor Constable attachment, the management of encounters and the development of discretionary judgement. In Southgate P. (Ed.), New Directions on Police Training. London: HM Stationery Office, pp. 199–219. Tuitt, P. (2012). Race, Law, Resistance. London: Routledge. United Nations. (2018). UN human rights experts says deaths in custody reinforce concerns about ‘structural racism’ in UK. United Nations. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-relea ses/2018/04/un-human-rights-experts-says-deaths-custody-reinforce-concerns-about?Lang ID=E&NewsID=22997. Webber, F. (2022). Impunity entrenched: the erosion of human rights in the UK. Race & Class, 63 (4), pp. 56–80. Webster, C. (2007). Understanding Race and Crime. London: McGraw-Hill Education.

8 COVID 19

This chapter explores the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic on ethnic minority groups. Although racism exists within all UK institutions (EHRC, 2020), the Covid 19 pandemic demonstrated the ability of a new phenomenon to perpe­ tuate and further extend existing structural inequality. The pandemic demon­ strates how an emerging global crisis, rather than deviating from past colonial processes and structures, created and reinforced inequalities to produce severe health and morbidity related impacts. As the chapter elucidates, far from reaching a post-colonial society, the con­ tinued presence of white privilege and white frames highlights how new phe­ nomenon are interpreted, produced and responded to through modes of epistemic imperialism. As is argued, the ability of white privilege, white frames, and epis­ temic imperialism to permeate understandings and responses to new phenomenon highlights how knowledge, truth, and institutional mechanisms continue to embed colonial forms of racialised power within every sphere of society. How­ ever, the chapter also details the continued governmental response of controlling knowledge and truth to produce evidence, regardless of the extent to which such evidence treats all groups with equal recognition, rights, and humanity.

Racism as multifaceted Although the Covid 19 pandemic was a new global health crisis, it emerged in a postcolonial world that has failed to fully accept and acknowledge the con­ sequences of colonialism, let alone reverse the impacts of colonialism. The ideology of race continues to produce categories of superiority and inferiority which are used to socialise and legitimise the lack of recognition, rights and humanity attributed to groups constructed as biologically inferior. The destructive ability of race lies in its ability to negatively impact resources, DOI: 10.4324/9781003187073-8

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opportunities, and equal social, political, and legal rights within all institutions. The relationship between race, inequality, and injustice is so deeply embedded and dispersed, that as with Covid 19, it shapes and contours new phenomenon according to predefined categories of inferiority and their resultant lack of rights and humanity. When discussing the evolution of race and racism within the UK, as the previous chapters demonstrated, institutions and the state have failed to dis­ mantle the structural and societal mechanisms that maintain institutional racism. Arguably, in some cases such as the ‘war on terror’ and education, the discourses that force assimilation at the expense of minority recognition and existing victimisation have been extended by the state. The absence of such action has not only maintained institutional racism, but it has facilitated the existence of race, culture, and religion being signifiers of difference and infer­ iority (Meer, 2015; Taras, 2015). It has also maintained social injustice and discrimination in all areas of society including education, housing, employment, health care, criminal justice (Bailey et al., 2017; Caldwell & Bledsoe, 2019). Given the existence of these societal and institutional templates, it is inevitable that new phenomenon such as Covid 19 would exacerbate inequalities. How­ ever, as the chapter demonstrates even though the state continues to engage in epistemic arrogance through minimising, denying, and concealing the relation­ ship between Covid 19 and inequalities, there is an acute awareness amongst minorities that discrimination ‘can adversely affect health and is therefore similar to other psychosocial stressors’ (Razai et al., 2021: 2). It therefore becomes possible to understand how Covid 19 has also impacted physiological and mental health to shape one’s understanding of the world around them and their relationship with this world.

Assessment of new phenomenon Colonial categories were used to classify Covid 19, with White (2020) stating how throughout history, infectious diseases have been associated with othering. Covid 19 followed the state colonial use of binaries to reassert its power and ability to exercise epistemic imperialism. In creating the epistemic and institu­ tional context to interpret, understand, and respond to Covid 19, the state ensured that Covid 19 would reinforce and amplify societal and global inequalities (Hankivsky & Kapilashrami, 2020). The racialisation of Covid 19 demonstrated the contemporary presence and influence of race. As M’Charek et al. (2014) contend, race does not have an absent presence in Europe and thus, any contention that racism ceases to exist maintains colonial processes that whitewash minorities as not deserving recognition of the inequalities and the barbaric practices they continue to perceive and experience. The presence of race within Europe led to the pandemic reinforcing fractures within commu­ nities, with the racialisation of fear affecting marginalised groups (Devakumar et al., 2020). However, although processes of racialisation led to social and

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political inequality (as detailed below), white privilege and white frames main­ tained epistemic imperialism, epistemic ignorance, and epistemic arrogance to deny such inequalities. As Bonilla-Silva (2006) argues, structural racism pro­ duces institutionalised and individualised practices to create racism without racists and thus the invisibility of racism.

Cumulative impacts from recognition to rights Covid 19 produced a plethora of impacts, including the rise of racism and vio­ lence against Chinese people (Chung & Li, 2020). A poll conducted in 2020 revealed that ‘76 per cent of ethnic Chinese have experienced a direct racial slur (at least once), making Chinese people the most common victims of racism in the UK’ (CGTN, 2020). The impact of Covid 19 on racism was also evident on the institutional level with Jones (2000) stating how institutional racism directly produces differential access to goods, opportunities, and services. The existence of institutional racism across British institutions meant that Covid 19 mani­ fested in an environment where racism continued to have firmly embedded roots throughout society. In explaining this intersectionality, Bailey et al. (2017) highlights how institutional racism in one institution / sector such as education, and / or the criminal justice system, reinforces it in other sectors, such as employment, housing, etc. to form an interconnected system that creates and maintains ethnic inequities. This intersectionality not only meant that the ideological institutional mechanisms existed to further embrace racialised dis­ courses, but that the pre-existing over-representation of minorities in ‘lower socioeconomic groups’, and their ‘limited health-care access, or work in pre­ carious jobs’ predisposed the ability of Covid 19 to exacerbate inequalities in all these areas (Devakumar et al., 2020: 1194).

Employment, housing, and healthcare discrimination In the area of employment, because many ethnic minorities were (are) ‘more likely to be employed as essential workers or less able to work from home’ they faced a greater risk of contracting Covid 19 whilst commuting (Woodhead et al, 2022: 1556). Housing also further exacerbated the risk of contracting Covid 19, with research documenting that ethnic minority groups are more likely to live in multiple generation households for possible cultural, religious, and/or affordability reasons which negatively impacts social distancing (Beider & Netto, 2012; Woodhead et al., 2022). In terms of geographical location, research has documented that ‘9% of white British people live in the most deprived 10% of neighbourhoods compared with 31% of Pakistani, 28% of Bangladeshi, 20% of black African, and 18% of black Caribbean people’ (Razai, et al. 2021: 2). These deprived neighbourhoods are characterised with high rates of poverty and a lack of investment in services resulting in poor access to and quality in education and healthcare, which negatively impacts long term health and

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upward social mobility (Becares et al., 2022). It thus follows that minorities faced an increased risk of contracting Covid 19 due to employment and multi­ generational living but had the least access to healthcare (as discussed below). However, the increased rate of transmission due to housing and employment meant that ethnic minorities were more likely to have to seek medical care. As with other institutions, prior to Covid 19, racial discrimination within healthcare was found to lead to interpersonal racism and poor treatment by healthcare providers (Yearby & Mohapatra, 2020). The existence of structural racism which manifests as interpersonal racism and poor treatment is even more concerning given that there are higher rates of hypertension in black populations, diabetes in south Asians, black women are five times more likely to die during pregnancy than white women and black people have a greater risk of detention under the Mental Health Act than white people (Go et al., 2014; Knight et al., 2021; MBBRACE, 2019; Unnikrishnan et al., 2018). As Becares et al. (2022) contend, the interpersonal racism and poor treatment provided by healthcare providers has negatively impacted health, with existing literature demonstrating the detrimental association of these experiences on health. These experiences not only ‘create barriers that restrict access to healthcare, but they also negatively influence the need to seek healthcare by ethnic minority groups’ (Razai et al., 2021). Rates of Covid 19 vaccine uptake have not been equal across ethnic groups in the UK (Nguyen et al., 2022; Robertson et al., 2021) with vaccine hesitancy demonstrating the continued impact of historical trauma and the resultant intra/ intergenerational transmission of trauma and disadvantage (Atkinson et al., 2010; Widom et al., 2015). This historical trauma and mistrust in medical institutions arises from the legacy of abuse in research, experiences of unfair treatment in healthcare, and pernicious media misinformation (Becares et al., 2022). It also incorporates governmental responses to events that have detrimentally impacted minoritised ethnic communities in the UK, such as the Grenfell Tower catastrophe and the Windrush scandal (Becares et al., 2022; Perera, 2019). Studies also demonstrate that participants who reported increased hesitancy are also more likely to report mistrust in government officials, scientists, and health care profes­ sionals (Becares et al., 2022). In terms of institutional level factors, research by Becares et al. (2022) demonstrated that socioeconomic position, which includes area-level deprivation, and overcrowding in housing explained 42% of the inequity in vaccine hesitancy for Pakistani or Bangladeshi people, and community-level factors such as community cohesion, racism, and political efficacy were the most important factors for Indian (35%) and black groups (15%) of the inequity. The influence of these various factors on vaccine hesitancy had a direct impact on the risk of infection and severity of infection for these groups.

Increased risk of infection and death Ethnic minority groups experienced disproportionately higher rates of Covid 19 infection (Woodhead et al., 2022), with individuals of ‘black ethnicity having

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the highest diagnosis rates and white British people having the lowest rates’ (Razai et al., 2021: 1). Data up to May 2020 showed that 25% of patients requiring intensive care support were of black or Asian background (ICNARC, 2020), with ethnic minority groups more likely to need intensive care and inva­ sive ventilation than white patients, despite similar disease severity on admission, similar duration of symptoms, and being younger with fewer comorbidities (Harrison et al., 2020). The standardisation of other variables and differential outcome, regardless of such standardisation, has highlighted the vast impact of institutional racism on healthcare quality. As Becares et al. (2022) contend, poorer prognosis from infection is due to institutional-level factors, with differ­ ential healthcare quality and poor treatment being due to racism. Black, Asian, and ethnic minority groups also experience the chronic health conditions associated with poorer Covid 19 related outcomes (Williamson et al., 2020), with a Public Health England report finding that racism and discrimination may have contributed to the increased risk of exposure to and death from Covid 19 among ethnic minority groups (Public Health England, 2020a). Similarly, data from the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) highlights that: Black males and females were 4.2 and 4.3 times more likely to die from COVID-19-than people of White ethnicity; it also noted that people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani, Indian, and Mixed ethnicities had statistically significant raised risk compared to the White group. (Murji and Picker, 2021: 5313) Even more shocking is that when factors such as age, sex, income, education, and area deprivation were considered and standardised, the mortality risk from Covid 19 ethnic minority groups was twice that of white British patients (Public Health England, 2020b). Where ethnicity and gender were concerned, ‘mortality was almost three times higher than expected among black women, 2.4 times higher in Asian women, and 1.6 times in white women’ (Patel, et al., 2020: 1). Differences have also been highlighted in Covid 19 cases among key workers, with data demonstrating that although black and Asian staff represent 21% of the NHS workforce, they accounted for 63% of deaths among health workers (Cook et al., 2020).

Governmental response During the crisis, a government Public Health England (PHE) inquiry into Covid 19 related BAME deaths and risks was commissioned (Public Health England, 2020a). Studies exploring genetic vulnerabilities which positively con­ tributed to the risk of infection included the role of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor regulation in increasing the risk of infection, and the significant influence of ‘sociological and structural conditions that are conducive to generating, sustaining and escalating inequalities’ (Kapilashrami & Bhui,

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2020: 405). Factors including unemployment, residing in deprived areas and overcrowded housing, having front line employment, suffering poorer mental health, and having higher care needs all contributed to higher minority Covid 19 related deaths (Kapilashrami & Bhui, 2020). However, although, as this chapter has demonstrated ethnic minorities were overrepresented in all Covid 19 illness related categories, ethnicity only formed a small subsection of the Public Health England report. Although PHE received evidence from over 1,000 organisations and individuals, it failed to include their evidence in the final report (Croxford, 2020). Moore (2020) highlights that although evidence from these organisations was included in earlier versions of the report, once the report was received by Matt Hancock, this evidence was removed. As Murji and Picker (2021: 5314) contend: the government tended to refuse to name race as such, with ministers often talking about ‘all communities’ (and as Covid-19 overlapped with the pro­ tests around Black Lives Matter this echoed the counter-claim to BLM that ‘all lives matter’). As was previously stated, the report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities recommended the term ‘disproportionality’ instead of ‘racism’ (Sewell et al., 2021). The report, as well as the removal of relevant evidence, demonstrated epistemic arrogance and the desire to maintain epistemic imperialism and thus epistemic injustice. The denial of such evidence led to partial truths and knowledge defined by race and in producing the racialisa­ tion of knowledge, it held true the appearance of an illusionary reality and concealed a standpoint epistemology. It is therefore possible to contend that although ethnic minorities are not shackled in a visible way, their ability to be heard remains colonised. This colonisation involved the illusionary portrayal of a dedication to equality through the report highlighting that racism remains ‘a real force in the UK’ (Sewell et al., 2021). However, just as the govern­ mental response in other areas signified, the response re-victimised minorities through blaming them for their own victimisation. The report concludes that ‘communities can take steps to improve their own health outcomes and should be helped to do so’ (Gopal & Rao, 2021: 1). The report failed to highlight the how structural and socioeconomic inequalities erode the quality of life and social mobility of minorities and any action to eradicate such corrosive structures (Gopal & Rao, 2021). The role between epistemic imperialism and action was highlighted through the term ‘evidence’, with Kemi Badenoch, the UK’s equalities minister, stating that action would not be taken without evidence highlighting the need for such action (Mohdin, 2020). This process demonstrates how just as during the enlightenment and eugenics, biased methods were used to create self-fulfilling knowledge and truths, these processes continues today. Thus, rather than con­ sidering all evidence to produce a democratic universal epistemology, truth and

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knowledge remain colonised and tied to identity to reproduce epistemic status. Evidence of ethnic inequality and its lethal effects (Marmot et al., 2020) there­ fore remain invisible. Despite successive reports and inquiries into ethnic dis­ parities, the recommendations of these inquiries have not been implemented (Cabinet Office, 2017; Horvat et al., 2014; Truong et al., 2014; UK Government, 2017a, 2017b). The lack of action maintained the post-racial period of ‘UK race politics’ where although race is a public issue, it is ‘also being concealed or hidden at the same time’ (Murji & Picker, 2021: 5314). The emergence of Covid 19 as a new global pandemic represented the opportunity for the government to assess the extent of racialisation and institutional racism through exploring how a phenomenon was subjected to patterns of racialisation. As Patel et al. (2020) argue, the government’s lack of attention to ethnic disparities was a missed opportunity to address ethnic disparities. However, this missed opportunity was not the result of unintended motivations and actions, rather it was the outcome of motivations and actions to produce pre-determined conclusions that maintain race as an object to be controlled through regulatory socialisation and institutional processes, whilst concealing the very effects of such regulatory systems of inequality. It could therefore be argued that although non-state actors are frequently subjected to extreme regulatory and criminalising frame­ work based on their motivation to change political discourse and actions through perpetuating violence, in areas such as education, policing, health, etc, the state continues to create discourses to influence policies that produce cumulative forms of physical and psychological violence.

Invisibility as compounding impact Such violence is exacerbated through its invisibility with the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report (Sewell et al., 2021) concluding that there is no evidence of structural racism. Indeed, the use of the word evidence demonstrates how markers of scientific process continue to be manipulated so that where ethnic minorities do produce a standpoint epistemology to counter the evidence, they are labelled as being against or not understanding markers of civilisation and modernity, such as evidence. Therefore, not only do knowledge and truth continue to be subjected to epistemic imperialism, but so do processes which are racialised in such a way that standpoint epistemologies are subjected to interpretive epistemologies that demonstrate the illegitimacy of such perceptual and experiential standpoint epistemologies. Thus, validity and legitimacy have yet to become processes that have escaped the shackles of epistemic imperialism. Structural violence continues to exist in political, social, legislative, and eco­ nomic systems to produce inequalities in all areas including criminal justice, housing, employment, education, and health care and through doing so it reproduces inequalities in Covid related outcomes (Nazroo & Becares, 2020). The breadth and depth of racialised violence to impact all institutions and

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continue to dictate the processes which determine knowledge and truth means that as Bonilla-Silva (2012) contends, white power continues to pass through the bodies of ethnic minorities that are continually subjected to practices that maintain white privilege. It could therefore be argued that Covid 19 represents how new and emerging phenomenon, far from representing opportunities for the government to promote equality and a universal democratic epistemology, provide further opportunities for the government to create discourses, rules, processes, policies, and laws that reinforce racialised systems of inequality. Thus, as Gao and Sai (2021) argue, gov­ ernment authorities are constantly reinforcing the racialised climate of injustice. According to Galtung (1969: 168) structural violence is ‘the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is, and that which impedes the decrease of this dis­ tance’. Such reinforcement perpetuates structural violence through further distancing the possibility of equality and what could have been from the reality of what is and thus the existence of inequality. New emergent risks, such as the ‘war on terror’ and Covid 19 have been used to reaffirm racism into institutional and produce new inequalities and injustices. This inter­ sectionality between governmental discourses and policies and legislation demonstrates that far from moving towards equality and the eradication of institutional racism, the government will continue to exploit new phenom­ enon to further ingrain and disperse institutional racism.

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9 CONCLUSION

This chapter explores the processes required to facilitate a reflexivity that allows individuals to recognise and counter the mechanisms that perpetuate and sustain institutional racism. As detailed, this standpoint necessitates an approach to contemporary mechanisms of power that encompass dismantling the legacies of formal colonialism, and the white norms that have been ingrained into consciousness and serve to legitimise the domination of non­ whites (Collins, 2019; Crenshaw, 2010). The aim of this book is to encourage self-reflexivity through challenging the constructions that maintain racialised inequalities. In encouraging such aware­ ness, the previous chapters have attempted to articulate the multifaceted and cumulative impacts of institutional racism on all aspects of health. The book has drawn on the concept of ‘double consciousness’ (Du Bois, 1903; Fanon, 1967) as a means of providing the reader with an understanding of how insti­ tutional racism impacts victims. In proposing a victim perspective, the book has explored the impact of sustained institutional discrimination and racism on identity and the ability of the structural level to create dual identities and mental conflict for victims. Bringing such intersectionalities to the forefront of attention not only represents a step towards equality through affording victims the same voice, recognition, rights, and humanity given to perpetrators, but it also contributes towards achieving a democratic epistemology, and thus a world that benefits from all knowledge and truth and thrives in the ability of all to speak through all aspects of their consciousness. As the book demonstrates, anything less than such a position contributes to humanity missing out on valuable knowledge and thus not achieving its true capacity for reflecting the spectrum of knowledge that enables truth and knowledge to exist as a binding force for humanity. In the quest for such a universal epistemology, the ethical and moral duty of attending to all and bearing witness to all progresses the DOI: 10.4324/9781003187073-9

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possibility of progressing a humanity based on compassion and empathy and thus receiving the other through hospitality. A universal epistemology would not only be richer by embracing diversity and reflecting the spectrum of humanity, but in doing so, it could lay claim to legitimately being the truth. However, the continuities of colonialism in all aspects of life sustain knowledge and truth as fracturing entities that create epistemic arrogance and more gen­ erally epistemicide. The ability to share and articulate all aspects of conscious­ ness depend on trust and the security of being received with equal moral worth. In deconstructing the perpetrator perspective, this book has explored how the lack of engagement between discourse and practices within academic, social, political, and broader intellectual contexts have reflected the continued power of epistemicide, white frames and white privilege to shape knowledge and truth. As the book demonstrates, not only do structures maintain the unequal dis­ tribution of recognition, rights, and humanity but in doing so, they restrict the existence of victims’ perceptual and experiential knowledge. They continue to colonise language through ensuring that language remains incapable of evolving and developing to a position where words and language can be used to correctly articulate victims’ perspectives. As the book has demonstrated, children in school learn the boundaries of acceptable perceptual and experiential knowl­ edge and this not only forges knowledge of those discourses that will be received, but it also breeds insecurity through informing children of those dis­ courses that will not be received. Thus, for one to speak openly and share their perceptual and experiential knowledge there must be the security of knowing that the speaking of such consciousness will not act to further reaffirm the split between acceptable consciousness, that which has been shaped by white privi­ lege and white frames, and the consciousness which must remain hidden because it fails to conform to the illusionary status of knowledge and truth. In attempting to progress understandings of institutional racism that incor­ porate the victim perspective and the perpetrator perspective so that we can understand both the impacts of institutional racism and the mechanisms that sustain institutional racism, the book has questioned how we continue to con­ struct knowledge so that it represents a universal epistemology. How do we inspect our positionalities in the hope of adopting, embracing, and recognising other positionalities? How do we develop our capacity and engagement with the world, through the primacy of our capacity, thoughts, intellect, perceptions, and experiences? Through exploring these questions, the book has attempted to further understandings of how we progress towards an equal democratic epis­ temology and the reflexivity required to dismantle the illusions that maintain the legitimacy, logic, and morality of epistemic imperialism. Without challen­ ging language, discourses, and institutional mechanisms, these entities will continue to cause marginalised groups pain, with research demonstrating how being socially rejected, experiencing stereotypes, and suffering discrimination triggers the same neural circuits that process physical injury and translate it into the experience we call pain (Eisenberger, 2012; Kross et al., 2012; Zaman et al.,

142 Conclusion

2015). This chapter explores how the themes in the book can be integrated to form a cohesive understanding of institutional racism which the reader is able to take forward in developing their own reflexivity so that they are better able to recognise, counter and eliminate the mechanisms that sustain institutional racism. The reflexivity advocated in this book also contributes to a conscious­ ness that seeks to understand the spectrum of knowledge and truth inherent to the epistemology of victims. In the development of such reflexivity, as Mills (1999: 119) notes, we must ‘learn to trust [our] own cognitive powers, to develop [our] own concepts, insights, modes of explanation, overarching the­ ories, and to oppose the epistemic hegemony of conceptual frameworks designed in part to thwart and suppress the exploration of such matters’.

Recognition The institutionalisation of race at the level of the state has meant that for institu­ tional racism to be eradicated, the state use of power to create and maintain epis­ temic imperialism has to be challenged. State created institutional racism continues to produce multiple layers of victimisation where the primary experience of insti­ tutional racism is met with further layers of epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression which deepen the wounds of victimisation. The racialised state con­ tinues to perpetuate discourses and practices which reaffirm the perpetrator per­ spective, at the expense of a victim perspective. The denials of institutional racism maintains the racialisation of knowledge to conceal victimisation and blame vic­ tims for their own victimisation. As previously stated, the intersectionality between discourse and practice was highlighted through the term ‘evidence’, with Kemi Badenoch, the UK’s equalities minister stating that action would not be taken without evidence highlighting the need for such action (Mohdin, 2020). Thus, rather than considering all evidence to produce a universal epistemology, truth and knowledge remain colonised and tied to identity to reproduce epistemic status. Evidence of ethnic inequality and its lethal effects (Marmot et al., 2020) therefore remain invisible. This process demonstrates how just as during the enlightenment and eugenics, bias methods were used to create self-fulfilling knowledge and truths, these processes continue today. It could therefore be argued that although non-state actors are frequently subjected to extreme regulatory and criminalising framework based on their motivation to change political discourse, actions, and policies through perpetuating violence, in areas such as education, policing, health etc, the state continues to create discourses to influence policies to produce cumulative forms of physical and psychological violence. However, whereas the actions of nonstate actors receive ample attention, state violence is exacerbated through its invisibility with reports such as the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report in 2021 highlighting the state denial of harm. The use of words such as evidence demonstrates how markers of scientific process continue to be manipulated so that where ethnic minorities do produce a standpoint

Conclusion 143

epistemology to counter epistemicide, they are labelled as being against or not understanding markers of civilisation and modernity, such as evidence. The first aspect necessary to counter institutional racism is recognition because the lack of recognition and acceptance of any aspect of institutional racism can limit action. Recognition involves acknowledging the breadth of institutional racism and thus its existence in multiple institutions and its depth, and thus how it negatively impacts social mobility, health, and the quality of life to cause traumatic physiological and psychological harms. The impacts on health and sociomobility demonstrate that rather than institutional racism being rare and singular, it is multiple and everywhere. The saturation of race correlates with its ability to cause harm and contribute to perpetual harm in fracturing identities and consciousness. Institutional racism must be recognised as creating an internal pathological presence (Fanon, 2008). Such a presence doesn’t cease to exist after an initial experience with Fanon’s purposeful use of the word pathological sig­ nifying how our external world can leave wounds that have lasting internal impacts. Research has demonstrated this intersectionality in finding that external negative stereotypes lead to internalised racism and multiple health outcomes, including psychological distress and obesity in black populations (Williams & Mohammed, 2009). The traumatic intrusion of racism not only results in a split subjectivity through incorporating both the subjectivity of epistemic imperialism and the subjectivity which recognises the illusionary status of such an epistemol­ ogy, but through doing so, it harms mental health. As Winters (2020) states, racism leads to the weathering hypothesis, a process in which the cumulative stress of experiencing racism contributes to Black people getting sick at younger ages and experiencing more severe illnesses which ultimately accelerates their aging process. Similarly, as Geronimus (1992) contends, exposure to racial / ethnic discrimination predisposes psychosocial, physical, and chemical stressors that erode health and accelerate biological ageing. Therefore, rather than limiting our understanding of the harms caused by institutions, questions should be asked regarding the ability of institutions and the impact of rules which categorise and differentiate to cause significant harm to mental health. Fanon (2008) highlights the distress inherent in such harm through naming it as a form of self-harm and thus highlighting that although the master seeks to maintain power, the constant reinforcement of mechanisms of oppression and domination create a tumour to induce vulnerability and cause harm and injury to victim. It is the space between these forms of consciousness where harm and thus the tumour perpetuates one consciousness which incorporates the ideological promise of a universal episte­ mology and the other consciousness which holds the complete fracturing of such a universal epistemic trust. And although such a space incorporates vulnerability and insecurity, these emotions and harms can be further perpetuated where vic­ tims are silenced and left alone with their otherness, their marginalisation, their suppression, and their victimisation to add mass to their tumour. A further aspect of recognition is the acceptance of the scope and severity of institutional racism with critical exploration of the continuities between

144 Conclusion

colonialism and the contemporary processes which maintain institutional racism. Although Fanon (2008) highlighted how, within the colonial setting the relationship between the slave and master was not one of recognition and reci­ procity, such a dialect continues to shape contemporary institutional practices. The book has challenged existing ethnocentric constructions and literature on institutional racism through contrasting ethnocentric understandings of institu­ tional racism with victim centred perspectives to reveal how white privilege, white frames and epistemic imperialism continue to obscure the existence and impacts of institutional racism. The book has demonstrated how white privi­ lege, white frames, and epistemic imperialism maintain epistemic arrogance and how this functions to silence victims to maintain their non-recognition. The relationship between these colonising processes and achieving a democratic epistemology are central to demonstrating the illusionary status of discourses which claim equality, fairness, and justice. As previous chapters demonstrate, epistemic arrogance facilitates the manipulation of truth and knowledge to claim equality through silencing opposing discourses. Recognising and reducing the contemporary epistemic hegemony that sustains institutional racism involves ‘challenging the colonizer’s versions of history’ to recognise the con­ tinuation of colonial practices which obscure the injustice of white privilege (Bailey, 1998: 86). Thus, a central component in countering institutional racism is recognising the intersectionality between the everyday mechanisms that silence and facilitate epistemic arrogance and how these directly contribute to reducing the possibility of a universal epistemology and thus directly contradict western claims of civilisation, enlightenment, and progress. Such limitations can be grounded with the legitimacy of a victim perspective evidenced to demon­ strate such epistemologies as fact. Although colonialism continues to permeate and mould the world through constructing and institutionalising constructed illusions, the failure to accept and recognise how these can be dismantled contributes to a false narrative that maintains white frames and white privilege such as white ignorance and white fragility. Within this interplay between resistance and acceptance, reflexivity must also grapple with how language, discourses, and actions which slightly veers towards a perpetrator perspective can reinforce institutional racism through contributing to its ideological construction. Thus, the third component of recognition necessary to counter institutional racism is recognising the ability to achieve change. The ability to change these mechanisms can also involve movements towards providing the space where a victim epistemology can be articulated. For example, recognising vulnerability allows the transition from pain to recognition to solidarity (Dalley, 2016; Gana, 2014). Embracing such a standpoint involves recognising how the lack of recognition induces further trauma, and how recognising the constant impacts of institutional racism, and its physiological and psychological impacts can reduce trauma. The chapter now considers the elements that could collectively be integrated to form a reflexive turn, one which represents a departure from the continuation of

Conclusion 145

knowledges and truth that are denied through epistemic imperialism. It there­ fore suggests how a reflexive turn can be constructed through raising awareness of the issues that although denied through epistemic imperialism, require thought, exposure, and action to achieve a democratic epistemology.

The reflexive turn: history, language, and institutionalisation The reflexive turn must incorporate a historical perspective which includes the use of race and eugenics to produce a racial hierarchy which was used to legit­ imise the denial of recognition, rights, and humanity for minorities. As pre­ viously stated, this had numerous economic, intellectual, and cultural consequences. As Foucault (1980: 3) contends, colonialism led to the entire domination of the ‘conceptual territory on which knowledge is produced and shaped’. The concepts and knowledge which were used to legitimise the con­ structed inferiority of blacks were institutionalised leading to barbaric practices such as the Virginia Assembly slave code in 1705, which was created to justify slavery (Rugemer, 2013). Epistemic imperialism and institutional racism were therefore part of the same system of domination created to colonise the present and the future. This led to knowledge systems, such as schools and universities becoming mechan­ isms through which children could undergo imperialist socialisation (Smith, 1999). Race therefore became a way of regulating society. Thus, rather than white privilege and white frames being constructed as contemporary mechan­ isms of oppression, attention should be given to how truth, knowledge, and epistemology remain racialised. Contemporary limitations of knowledge and truth exist through racialisation to maintain the illusionary appearance of a universal complete truth. As is argued in the book, the continuity of epistemic loss represents nothing less than the death of epistemologies that would elevate human consciousness and unity through facilitating a universal epistemology that incorporates emotional intelligence, empathy, and compassion. The colonisation of language can only be contracted through language that challenges epistemicide. Although the lack of a clearly identifiable source of racialisation works to disempower victims and empower the existence of help­ lessness and powerless within white fragility, framing existing language, culture, and institutions in the framework of justice helps to expose those mechanisms that contribute to injustice. The language used in this book has been purposely selected to put emotions back into discussions relating to the treatment and hos­ pitality given to populations. In considering such hospitality, the ability of lan­ guage, as a mechanism to translate openness, safety, and security highlights how it can form either another layer of epistemic imperialism or offer the possibility for change and signify an approach where marginalised truths and knowledge are offered the possibility of entering dominant epistemologies. LaCapra (2001: 65–66) states, victims need ‘to articulate/verbalize what hap­ pened’ so that they are able to ‘work through his/her trauma’. LaCapra (2001)

146 Conclusion

highlights how the limiting of recognition, through curtailing one’s right to share perceptual and experiential truth and knowledge can cause further trauma, thereby adding severity to the initial experience itself. The restrictive barriers of language can be gleaned from the fact that victims are forced to adopt and use language that reflects epistemic imperialism. The need to impose restrictive language on oneself, indeed recognising the space between our own consciousness and that which exists outside of us, causes pain and suffering because within this reality one is forced to recognise their marginalisation, through the inability of others to recognise them, their victimisation, and all the harms they suffer. Victims are forced to utilise the language of the mechanisms and ideologies which contribute to their victimisation. The lack of mechanisms to afford hospitality based on language contribute to victimisation and until such consequences are recognised, victims continue to suffer perpetual victimi­ sation. Victims hold such truth and knowledge alone, whilst also recognising how the sharing of the standpoint epistemology could add further layers of epistemic oppression. Therefore, affording recognition must involve recognising the authenticity and validity of a victim perspective as an equally valid per­ spective and possibility a more valid perspective where institutional racism is concerned, and how any barriers to such perspectives by reducing victims’ ability to access equality, and resources constitute injustice. To enable all epistemologies to emerge it is essential that there is no epis­ temic violence because as Dotson (2011) states, epistemic violence operates through practices of silencing. Silencing not only denies epistemologies but it can also contribute to epistemic arrogance. It is therefore important to consider if words such as expert continue to silence because as Ahmed (2012: 75) argues, such concepts appear ‘ontological neutral’ but are ‘detached from an emotional orientation to the world’. Epistemic imperialism and epistemic arrogance can also lead to the use of punitive measures with data showing the overrepresentation of Black people being sectioned by police and placed in psychia­ tric wards (UK Government 2018). As Clark (2016: 171) highlights, health programmes and state interventions colonise through ‘incarceration, mental health diagnosis, and child welfare intervention’. The Bennett inquiry listed evidence which showed that Africans and Afro-Caribbeans were over-repre­ sented in the mental health services, received a more coercive spectrum of care, were more likely to be regarded as dangerous, and were more likely to be overmedicated (NSCSHA, 2004). Muslim patients and staff also experience increasing discrimination in UK healthcare settings (Samari et al., 2018). Necessary questions should be: is the language being used affording the victim the tools through which they can speak and articulate their perceptions, experiences, and humanity? Are constructed labels being used to limit the epis­ temologies that emerge? The ability of epistemic violence is further com­ pounded through mechanisms which restrict the emergence of a democratic epistemology through prioritising an interpretivist epistemology based on one’s epistemic status. The racialisation of these processes silences and adds violence

Conclusion 147

to those that already experience victimisation and are vulnerable. The difficulty in recognising language lies in questioning language and labels which have been socialised and normalised. As the book has demonstrated, these processes have ensured their appearance as normalised and thus, legitimate. Although racia­ lised practices subordinate racial groups, repressing their ability to create and express humanity and magnify the power and agency of the dominant racial group (Ray, 2019), they do so by normalising judgements. Therefore, the need to challenge such constructions rests on the ability to not only historise their existence and continuities from colonialism, but to also question the normal­ isation of language from the impact of such language on victims. Everyday responses to victimisation can reinforce the stigmatisation associated with victimisation or it can bring hope through offering understanding and soli­ darity, which as the book has highlighted are important facets of one’s ther­ apeutic and traumatic recovery. There are a multitude of issues which impede one’s right to understanding, recognition and treatment. Equally as important they can contribute to something dangerous, the illusionary appearance of mental health support. Such illusionary support is conceptualised as dangerous because it restricts the rights of the victim to claim beneficial support and instead a pro­ jected template that experts believe is best is used, regardless of the beneficial impacts for the victim. These mechanisms contribute to therapeutic encounters contributing to victimisation rather than constituting mechanisms of healing. Although Craps (2013) highlights the need for trauma studies to situate the his­ tories of subordinate groups against the histories of socially dominant groups, such equality can only be achieved through creating the mechanisms whereby trauma studies and society normalise the association of institutional racism with trauma. The need to counter the politicisation and racialisation of mental health (Younis & Jadhav, 2020), incorporates the need to move towards a more accu­ rate victimology. Such a victimology should correctly conceptualise all mechan­ isms which maintain oppression as violations of humanity, thereby including how silencing, oppression, domination, and suppression produce deep trauma that is constantly reinforced through flashbacks. As highlighted throughout the book, such is level of trauma that anticipations of possible racist encounters also pro­ duce deep psychological and physiological impacts. The trauma thus forms the very lens through which the victim encounters the world. Such understanding involves challenging the event-based conceptualisation of trauma and instead recognising that whilst each experience includes psycholo­ gical and physiological impacts at the time of the incident, the victim must also ‘deal with what comes after, with loss and mourning, and with the knowledge of what destruction and death leave in their wake’ (Seran, 2016: 86). The need to create less harmful institutional responses is of the upmost importance. As the book has demonstrated institutional responses not only shape a victim’s immediate aftermath, but also the extent to which the victimisation permeates the entirety of their life. In addition to providing victims with the safety and security that their experiences will be received with the hospitality, institutional

148 Conclusion

racism should be conceptualised as leading to insidious trauma, thus affording recognition to the traumatogenic effects of oppression on the mind, soul, and spiritual psyche. The contours and boundaries of harm and injury should include emotional, psychological, and behavioural impacts. Denials of the such impacts and perpetual ongoing impacts, run the serious risk of continuing the impact of trauma (Martínez-Falquina, 2016). As Keval (2016: 54) contends, ‘survivors of racist hatred, violence, and, indeed, trauma in general have experienced either a psychic assault on their mind through sheer force, or something more silent and insidious which often renders them helpless and unable to think about the experience’. White privilege works to obscure the presence of insidious trauma, with its normalised construction further disempowering understandings of victimisation and thereby the necessity through which such violence needs to be eliminated. It is only through the boundaries of these narratives being controlled by victims that they can then form a true representation of the entirety of their agency, namely the recognition of the right to feel and their humanity, their right to have their epistemic voice heard, as the rest of humanity. This means that where intersectional perceptual and experiential knowledge is not shared, therapists should remain open to victims extended their known boundaries of victimisation. The necessity to use fluid boundaries is essential because as Freud (1955) notes, trauma breaks through one’s ego to elicit a defensive measure and in doing so, such an attack on the ego and its defence is determined by the victim. Thus, there exists no predefined template which can be applied to determine the impacts of either for all victims, because such an approach would homogenise to remove the primacy of experi­ ence as perceived and experienced by the victim. As the book has demonstrated, institutional racism impacts every part of the victim and thus, given that institutional racism exists within most societal institutions, one must ask when traumatic invasions end and indeed if it does? For victims, the constant anticipations of institutional racism cause ‘violent rupture in the continuity of self and experience inevitably affects the person’s basic trust and sense of safety, throwing profound doubt on the reliability of both their internal and external objects’ (Keval, 2016: 54). Thus, not only do trust and security remained colonised, existing according to one’s racial identity but so do understandings of institutional racism that fail to include violations of trust and security as normalised reactions to institutional racism. Violations of trust must be recognised in their ability to contribute to epistemic injustice, with self-trust, trust in others and trust in practices being vital components of one’s sense of trust and security in the world. Epistemic trust injustice (Grass­ wick, 2017) further exacerbates pain through bringing into the consciousness how trust and security exist as ideals (Ahmed, 2015). The reflexive turn also requires an understanding of the mechanisms that maintain discrimination and inequality. Such an understanding moves the abil­ ity to understand and counter institutional racism on from an abstract level to one which is grounded in the real-life mechanisms, procedures and normalised

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practices that sustain racialised patterns. The continued colonisation of epis­ temologies highlights how the battle to dismantle institutional racism is not simply refined to adapting institutional rules, procedures, laws, etc. but it must also involve first, the naming of mechanisms through which truth and knowl­ edge continue to be regulated and colonised and second, actions orientated at dismantling these mechanisms. It could thus be argued that it is the sheer suc­ cess of colonial powers in institutionalising white privilege into societal, insti­ tutional, and educational systems that facilitated the depth and breadth of institutional racism to such an extent that contemporary efforts to eliminate institutional racism must involve the dismantling of all constellations. The invisibility of literature on epistemicide and institutional racism demonstrates the extent to which the colonisation of truth and knowledge, as constellation entities that also require action remain void of recognition and naming. In maintaining only those discourses that sustain white privilege, epistemicide works to maintain a perpetrator perspective where the white frames of white distancing strategy, white fragility, denial of agency and responsibility, white ignorance, white solidarity, and denials of cumulative impacts can thrive and co-exist. Therefore, recognising and understanding the existence of white frames is essential to removing institutional racism.

Developing an understanding of white frames Although as Feagin (2006) contends, white culture is shaped by white racial frames, these pre-existing frames tend to remain invisible. They exist as taken for granted common societal ideas and ways of thinking and in maintaining the relationship between whiteness, power, and status, they sustain a form of white privilege that reaffirms epistemic imperialism. Such epistemic imperialism can be recognised from the acknowledgement and existence of white grievance, white helplessness, and victimisation, even though the full cumulative impacts of racial discrimination continue to be shackled. These mechanisms of main­ taining white privilege and limiting the acknowledgement of impacts are tran­ sient and as systems of knowledge and truth, they impact institutions. The relationship between the structural inequalities and normalised systems that maintain these inequalities is a product of interest convergence. This interest convergence is widespread and subtle. It is within this subtleness that indivi­ duals engage in actions that maintain inequality without forethought and thus acknowledgement of how such actions are linked to producing inequality. Therefore, countering inequality lies in the ability to expand understandings of how such subtle normalised actions contribute to harm. As previously stated, the social consensus regarding expected levels of introspection and reflexivity can function as a deterrent in highlighting that ignorance or the past normalisation of some attitudes is no longer socially accepted. However, such introspection and reflexivity is difficult given how white privilege, and white fragility maintain white ignorance. This ignorance

150 Conclusion

is both societal and psychological. At the societal level white ignorance is normalised thereby sustaining it as a common response to inequality and injustice. In highlighting this relationship, Bhopal (2018: 19) contends, the racialisation of knowledge and truth ‘guaranteed white people a legal entitle­ ment to freedom in which they remained protected and had a vested interest in protecting their own position within the system’. Even where introspection and reflexivity exist, structural discourses and institutions such as liberalism and the law maintain white privilege. Liberalism not only maintains the ideology of neutrality but through doing so, claims of dismantling such neu­ trality via highlighting its innate bias are constructed as privileging minority interests at the expense of white interests and therefore as not producing equality, but an inequality that reverses the racial hierarchy. This false con­ struction makes action aimed at producing equality difficult. This maintains a perpetrator perspective whereby the system is viewed from the privileged position of those in power. It could thus be argued that the structural dis­ courses of liberalism and capitalism that coexist with race continue the epis­ temology of ignorance and thus the normalisation of an epistemology that was created to exclude other groups (Tsosie, 2017). The politicisation of knowledge not only contributes to epistemic imperialism and the loss of a democratic epistemology, but it also maintains cultural arro­ gance. Cultural arrogance reasserts a perpetrator perspective and does so by affording the perpetrator a level of rights, acknowledgement, and thus power that is carefully and cleverly withdrawn from victims. However, the recognition of such withdrawal rests on the ability to accept and hold a universal episte­ mology as the legitimate epistemology and therefore conceptualise practices such as epistemic arrogance as removing the right to speak and be heard for marginalised groups. Cultural arrogance which reaffirms the problematisation of the distribution of epistemic status to victims not only allows perpetrators to claim victimisation, but in doing so it further dismisses the active role and autonomy of those that maintain discriminatory practices. Although the relationship between knowledge, truth, and inequality is one that permeates throughout society and further still exists in the public con­ sciousness as a system of equality, challenging the expansive breadth and depth of this construction is possible. One such mechanism is the use of a standpoint epistemology. Such an epistemology prioritises perceptual and experiential knowledge and by doing so, it exposes the social construction and limitations of other forms of knowledge. A standpoint epistemology leads to the reaffirmation of agency, recognition, rights, and humanity and by doing so, it interrupts power relations. However, providing the reality whereby such standpoints can emerge involves the hearer being receptive to perceptual and experiential knowledge’s that incorporate the normalised reality and the distorted reality that are a product of double consciousness. Thus, any commitment to equality must also challenge the ontological status of modernity itself. However, within this challenge if empathy, compassion, and the ability to consider multiple

Conclusion 151

truths and diverse knowledge are markers of progress, then minorities possess these to a greater extent, thereby highlighting how double consciousness repre­ sents a progressive and enlightened epistemology. They are able to adopt posi­ tions which mean that they have lost nothing, there is no epistemic loss, they see and witness multiple realities and their adjacent standpoints. The ability to hold no epistemic loss doesn’t maintain one form of epistemic truth, usually a form entwined with epistemic imperialism, rather it represents the ability to hold multiple forms as coexisting non-hierarchical entities. In doing so, one possesses the ability to truly understand even the most opposite of epistemolo­ gical standpoints and in doing so, the breadth of knowledge and truth is informed by the multiplicities of a compassionate epistemology. In developing such an epistemology, one must consider how to reach such a standpoint, where they can receive diverse epistemologies.

The epistemology of victims Actions that limit standpoint epistemologies should be conceptualised as con­ tributory injustices, because as Dotson (2011: 31–32) contends: contributory injustices occur when knowers utilize epistemic resources that are inapt for understanding the potential contributions of particular knowers to our collective knowledge pool and thereby engage in a form of willful hermeneutical ignorance that refuses to employ more apt epistemic resources for receiving and appropriately responding to those contributions. It could therefore be argued that epistemic status leads to the otherisation of consciousness for those constructed as not having the epistemic status to con­ tribute to truth and knowledge. Attending to the centrality of perceptual and experiential knowledge means questioning the elevation of abstract knowledge over direct grounded perceptual and experiential knowledge and acknowledging how such processes not only silence those that suffer stigmatisation, but afford the dominant group, those with status the right to speak of such stigmatisation, thus forming another layer through which violence and suffering are erased. Where words and language don’t exist as vehicles through which victims can articulate their experience, their suffering ebbs away to create a double consciousness. Thus, although as Mills (1997) states, there are two epistemic classes, one of persons who are defined as knowers and the other of sub-persons that are defined as sub-know­ ers, it is the duty of the knowers to ensure that pre-existing white frames are not used as templates in which those defined as sub-knowers must fit their perceptual and experiential knowledge. Instead, space and time should be afforded to developing new and more accurately epistemologies. Within this the sharing and re-living of victimisation must be given space where it is recognised that actions which could be perceived as negatively judging such victimisation

152 Conclusion

will restrict the emergence of such narratives. In sharing their narrative, the victim does nothing less than create the reality in which epistemic ignorance and cultural arrogance could be used, be it knowingly or unknowingly, to revictimise them. The relationship between accepted epistemologies and inter­ pretative epistemologies can be gleaned from how the impacts of institutional racism remained refined and minimised. However, terms such as inter­ sectionality offer ways of considering the diversity of lived epistemologies and as Weldon (2019) highlights, how different forms of power combine to impact the various structures which impact people’s lives. It therefore attends to the breadth and depth of how institutional racism exists, and how it is maintained and impacts victim’s lives. Affording victims the recognition, rights, and humanity they deserve requires stepping outside the cultural, ideological, legal, and political mechanisms that maintain oppression. Therefore, the shattering of illusions is necessary to chal­ lenge harmful structures, and it is a process that involves recognition of the ideological construction of the discourses and structures that shape the world. The book advocates providing space for narratives so that these can be heard in their entirety. ‘If an agent can deflate the credibility of a speaker, structural fac­ tors can prevent a person from being a speaker in a thick sense by ‘shutting them out’, before silencing can even begin’ (Carel and Kidd, 2017: 339). This entirety involves providing space for both the depth and breadth of cumulative impacts. Although instances of discrimination usually define harm as occurring immedi­ ately after the incident, the mis recognition of narratives also constitute harm. As Fanon (2008) contends, the denial of recognition is a form of traumatic intrusion because it involves the coloniser asserting power and understanding upon the victim to form a pathological presence. Within this psychic occupa­ tion, victims are denied their psychic agency, and as previously stated, this is further exacerbated by the lack of language (given that language and constructs remain controlled by white privilege) developed through which such cumulative suffering can be articulated. This psychic occupation is all encompassing, and it is the impact on emotions, thoughts, cognitive abilities and in essence the mind which leads to severe multi-faceted layers of victimisation. These cumulative multi-faceted impacts demonstrate how institutional practices can have deep psychological impacts that not only shape victims’ outward view of the world, but also their introspection and how they perceive and engage with themselves. The deep psychological cumulative impacts incorporate experiences of how epistemic power, which determines the right to speak can lead to insecurity. Thus, rather than possessing the security that one’s knowledge will be received, every decision to speak is accompanied by experiences of insecurity knowing that what has been shared, may never be heard because it is judged as episte­ mologically unworthy. The insecurity that epistemic injustices, marginalisation, and exclusions breed fracture epistemic trust and where epistemic trust has been fractured, beliefs in right and wrong, and in justice and epistemic democracy have no security. Where there is no security, there is no safety, and every

Conclusion 153

spoken word and action become infused with the possibility that they may bring the psychological injury that accompanies epistemic injustice and oppres­ sion. In the most reductionist sense, this intersectionality can translate into the victim having a choice that either incorporates acceptance of epistemic bias and therefore one’s position as deserving less recognition, rights, and humanity and all the trauma and pain such acceptance involves, or seeking to change such bias attributions, recognising the added layers of trauma and pain such a pro­ cess may involve. The inability to speak of cumulative impacts and trust that these will be received and interpreted correctly is restricted through victims’ perpetual and experiential knowledge of how epistemic status reduces their visibility. Thus, given discourses around victimisation fail to include cumulative impacts, one learns of how the sharing of such truth and knowledge remains restricted. This, far from encouraging sharing, informs the victim of the limited knowledge that exists and therefore how their knowledge expands beyond the parameters of such accepted knowledge. Insecurity, risk, and uncertainty thus shape the shar­ ing of experiences and are common responses to a world where institutional racism causes direct trauma and yet such associations remain invisible. Thus, as Grasswick (2017) contends, this inability to trust in communal epis­ temic institutions leads to an epistemic trust injustice. It could therefore be argued that epistemic injustice leads to a diminished sense of self-trust, trust in others, and trust in practices. It thus impacts victims’ sense of security in the world, starting with a lowered sense of trust in their own capacity and ability to achieve change and extending to an inability to place trust outside oneself. Where trust does exist, the knower can be safe and secure. Where distrust exists, all mechanisms associated with recognition, rights, and humanity become fraught with insecurity, with such insecurity fracturing the illusionary status of sociali­ sation and cultural consensus incorporating justice and equality. According to Fricker (2007: 44) ‘to be wronged in one’s capacity as a knower is to be wronged in a capacity essential to human value’. The relationship between recognition and rights is thus central to one’s humanity, with anything less than complete recog­ nition and rights damaging one’s humanity. The undermining of one’s intellect, their knowledge, their truth, and their status comes to shape the processes which occupy one’s mind and by extension, their existence. These impacts constitute epistemic violence, silencing and domination (Spivak, 1988). Within the intersectionality between actions and impacts, placing institu­ tional discrimination and the wider systems of acknowledgment within the sphere of violence reduces the space between the perpetrator perspective and the victim perspective. It also highlights to those that maintain systems of hierarchy the consequences of their actions, leading to greater reflexivity and engagement between actions and impacts. Victimisation thus exists and starts at the level of discourse and through reflexivity, introspection, and safety, the duality of con­ sciousness can be shared.

154 Conclusion

Herrero and Baelo-Allué (2011: xiv) have suggested combining ‘the psycho­ logical and the cultural, in an interdisciplinary approach that draws on psy­ choanalysis, sociology, philosophy, and history in the study of the aesthetic representation of trauma’. Such an approach not only involves acknowledging the intersectionality between the continued existence of race saturated societies and epistemological harm, but how through reflexivity and introspection the oppressive impact of race can be minimised. Although it may not be possible for individuals to challenge how race permeates the structural level, their actions on the interpersonal level can subvert such impacts. Such actions also open the possibility of preparing the space within which institutional racism is acknowledged as causing continuous harm. The re-interpretation of institu­ tional racism as a form of harm that is not only severe in its capacity to cause psychological injury, but also in its capacity to cause continuous and perpetual injuries can alter the dangers associated with such harm. It also allows terms such as insidious trauma (Root, 1992) to enter mainstream discourses as repre­ sentations of how the continued impacts of colonialism continue to restrict discourses associated with trauma. Although social activism can begin on the interpersonal level, the level designated as the expert level occupies a privileged position in not only being able to dismantle the processes that cause harm but also in contributing to harm and trauma. The pressing need for trauma studies to be decolonised, as suggested by Mengel and Borzaga (2012: ix) is so that it can better understand the systematic suffering of institutional racism. As previously stated, any descriptions of institutional discrimination which fail to place institutional dis­ crimination within the more recent theories of insidious trauma (Root, 1992) and postcolonial syndrome (Duran et al., 1998), risk reaffirming epistemic imperialism. The inability of experts to understand these forms of victimisation can be overestimated due to victims’ expectations that such experts can and should be able to interpret such victimisation. Thus, the very fact that the structure that is meant to be versed in a standpoint epistemology and one which is based on understanding deep intrusive psychological injury, fails to do so can fracture epistemological trust. In can also widen the gap between dual con­ sciousness in making victims aware of the extent to which the traumatic impacts on their inner consciousness remain colonised. The prioritisation of emotions is central to the reconfiguration of epistemic agents and the idea that all ‘carry affective or emotional value’ (Ioanide, 2015: 15). A society that functions on what Ioanide (2015) calls the economy of emotions counters the procedures and mechanisms that impede progress to an enlightened society which incorporates all epistemologies and is therefore closer to revealing all truth and knowledge. It also draws closer to an epistemology that incorporates empathy as a form of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 2020). Empathy replaces epistemic status to ensure that no restrictions exist that limit the hearing and acceptance of any perceptions, knowledge, and truth. The restriction of any form of knowledge and emotions not only exacerbates

Conclusion 155

epistemic oppression and epistemic injustice, but in doing so the status attrib­ uted to epistemic agents remains false and continues to mirror the illusionary status of progress, science, and enlightenment. Indeed, it is argued that through witnessing the impacts of white privilege, institutional racism, and the raciali­ sation of institutions and thus the illusionary status of truth and knowledge, victims are better able to hold a universal epistemology, where there is no epistemic loss. Stigmatisation causes societal injury by harming the very truths and knowl­ edge upon which human thoughts, actions, and beliefs rests. Further such soci­ etal injury infringes the ability of groups of individuals, defined by an aspect of their identity, to achieve anything other than what their constructed epistemic status allows them to achieve. Such impacts not only breed through intergenerational trauma but also through shaping every aspect of one’s life, including their ability to be an epistemic agent prior to their birth. In identity continuing to predetermine the boundaries of one’s life, it could be argued that the intersectionality between discourses of identity, such as race and lived experience continue to exist. We are therefore no closer to achieving a post racial society, rather we have evolved in the ability to disguise shackles of oppression and injustice. Epistemicide dissects reality into a binary which forces into one’s mind a blunt mechanism which demonstrates their occupation as lacking epistemic power, in deep contrast to their self-defined conceptualisation of their place in the world. This contrasting tension provides a huge strain on knowing oneself and determining whether our relationship with the world is a product of an independent self-defined autonomy, or the structural forms of power which shape perceptions, experiences, and any exchange with the world. Thus, the structure agency mutuality works to disempower and reduce internally derived self-worth, self-capacity, and self-knowledge. These tensions therefore have a vast impact on the subjective components of one’s identity. As Fricker (2007) notes, the undermining of intellect negatively impacts one’s confidence, leading to a loss of knowledge. Where there is exclusion, this impedes one’s epistemic growth (Medina, 2013). The socialisation and constant enforcement of this frame through societal and institutional rules and ideologies means that victims are constantly forced to see how injustice, bias, oppression, and domination work to serve dominant groups. It is the space between these forms of con­ sciousness that literally fracture the psyche and where these can’t be reconciled, they split the psyche through forming indigestible trauma. The immense power of the privileged compared to the de-privileged facil­ itates little compassion, understanding and empathy. It therefore requires an active critical embrace by those in power of their position, their privilege and how these can, without intention, lead to epistemic practices that devalue and traumatise those without privilege. The transference of this power onto oppressed groups can help to achieve change. As Doetsch-Kidder (2012) con­ tends, activism can emerge as a response to pain when it is combined with love.

156 Conclusion

Thus, where the victim fails to find recognition of trauma because white frames continue to distort their lived experience and narratives, they are epistemologi­ cally otherised and rather than therapy helping to make their trauma digestible, therapeutic encounters further marginalise their epistemic existence. The need for recognition, solidarity, and healing, as opposed to marginalisation, other­ isation, and victimisation rests upon the ability of the individual to use intro­ spection and reflexivity to facilitate epistemic interpretivism. Ethical witnessing embraces the right of the victim to speak through their vic­ timisation and as such to represent it as they experience and perceive it. The value of such a shift is that it provides the possibility of movement closer to a universal epistemology through incorporating all epistemologies. On an inter­ personal level it signifies the ability to transfer power to facilitate an unbiased truth and one that remains free of human construction and manipulation. It also subverts the processes that limit progress thereby allowing one to exercise their agency to contribute to larger structural changes. Although as Herman (2015) states, trauma narratives provide psychic integration to facilitate the resolution of trauma, the capacity to listen without imposing and thus to truly listen is a basic human right. Listening without judgment transcends into interpersonal solidarity. The failure to fully attend to the cumulative and constant impacts of institutional racism has constituted another layer of oppression through limiting and control­ ling the space in which acceptable impacts can be voiced and shared. It is there­ fore hardly surprising that institutional racism has enormous mental health impacts. Each experience, whilst including psychological and physiological impacts at the time of the incident, leaves the victim having ‘to deal with what comes after, with loss and mourning, and with the knowledge of what destruc­ tion and death leave in their wake’ (Seran, 2016: 86). Here death can be taken to refer to the space between how an instance of victimisation should be understood and received and how it is received. It is in our experiences that trust, justice and security die. One could also conceptualise this as possessing a universal episte­ mology to only find that such an epistemology is an illusionary epistemology. Secondary victimisation also challenges the events-based trauma model of racism in highlighting how instances leave residual impacts. Insidious trauma is therefore a more accurate term given that it includes the continuation of violence against the mind, soul, and spiritual psyche. The use of ethics and morality coincides with re-purposing legitimacy and revealing illusionary legitimacy. Such an approach can be seen from Martin Luther King’s speech in 1955, when he stated, ‘[w]hen the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say there lived a race of people, black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, of people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights’ (King, 1955: cited in Harding, 1987: 473). This speech demonstrated King’s awareness of double consciousness and how the illusionary appearance of construction could change to one whereby blacks could come to be seen as possessing moral courage. Although King gave his inner consciousness agency and self-worth, the traumatic impacts of

Conclusion 157

discrimination and injustice highlighted in this book demonstrate the difficulties associated with such a process. Therefore, where possible (considering the fur­ ther victimisation such a process entails) the limits, illegitimacy, and illusionary status of processes that maintain discrimination should be highlighted. Within this process Craps (2013) highlights the importance of emotions in providing unity between socially differentiated groups. Emotions promote empathy and compassion to promote critique via reflexivity, which is essential given that white privilege and white frames construct society and ordering systems such as meritocracy as natural and free from social construction. The need to demon­ strate the social construction of processes that maintain inequality and oppres­ sion and their impacts to build empathy on which solidarity can be established echoes the processes used by powerful visionaries such as Martin Luther King. Such empathy can also be based on demonstrating the intersectionality between identities. For example, drawing on one’s experiences of racialisation to demonstrate the intersectionality between this and one’s gender, or another identity in which they exist as the de-privileged. In furthering understandings to facilitate the achievement of a democratic epistemology, the limitations of white privilege and white frames as the anti-thesis of progress need to be visible. Steps therefore have to be taken to increase consciousness so that solidarity becomes the aim of most and not the few. Thus, within the drive for democratic enlightenment, where colonisers justified their treatment of groups as their burden, colonisers actually created a reality where they remained stuck in the categories, hierarchies, and false narratives of their construction and in con­ trast, those labelled as in need of civilisation have developed to possess double consciousness and the ability to hold a democratic epistemology that is able to bear witness to the forms of truth and knowledge that exist and also those are illusionary. When we meet others through trust and security, we have the ability to be ourselves, and to bear witness to our own experiences and perceptions. We can stand and see our trauma and hold the security that it is the past. Without such trust and security, colonial processes have yet to occupy the position of the past. The continued existence of colonial processes in the perceptual and experiential knowledge and thus consciousness of victims, through occupying no socially constructed objective position fractures the mind of the victim. The not yet achieved existence of the duality of such a perpetrator objective position and the victim standpoint result in the victim looking outwards to only find the perpetrator perspective. The lack of visibility of their standpoint epistemology means that victims are forced to push such a perspective inwards and through doing so their double consciousness starts to emerge. In contrast, if victims were able to look outwards and witness a democratic epistemology that incor­ porates their consciousness, there would exist no difference in their outward and inward consciousness. Such unity would not only diminish the conditions through which a double consciousness could arise, but through doing so, a victim could also hold the security and trust to occupy a position where they

158 Conclusion

are more able to perceive experiences of victimisation as being in the past. Thus, the lack of security not only reduces trust, but in doing so it forces vic­ tims to accept how the present continues to exist according to a perpetrator perspective and thus, the continued existence of the conditions which give rise to their victimisation. Such continuity reinforces the recognition of such condi­ tions and through doing so, the victim is unable to create the conditions neces­ sary to perceive their victimisation in the past. Laws, policies, truth, and knowledge all work to produce the perpetual con­ ditions of epistemicide and institutional racism and in doing so, they remind victims of the existence of such conditions to reinforce the traumatic intrusion of the conditions that give rise to victimisation and thus reinforce victimisation. The continued existence of colonial process thus means that victims are unable to process victimisation as past experiences because the continuation of condi­ tions act to perpetuate and reinforce the continued threat of victimisation. For those that experience such victimisation, it is only when such conditions cease to exist will they be able to place experiences of victimisation in the past, and it is only when a democratic epistemology exists that they will be able to occupy a position of security and trust in knowing that through such shared conscious­ ness, solidarity can lend victims the security and agency and thus courage to confront the most wounded and victimised parts of themselves / ourselves. However, as demonstrated, the conditions for colonial practices remain reinforced through the state. Such reinforcement perpetuates structural violence by further distancing the possibility of equality and what could have been from the reality of what is and thus the existence of inequality. New emergent risks, such as the ‘war on terror’ and Covid 19 have been used to reaffirm racism into institutional and produce new inequalities and injustices. This intersectionality between governmental discourses and policies and legislation demonstrates that far from moving towards equality and the eradication of institutional racism, the government will continue to exploit new phenomena to further ingrain and disperse institutional racism. However, although institutional racism remains reinforced at the highest level, this does not omit efforts to raise recognition of the creation, maintenance, and impacts of institutional racism. Nor does it reduce the possibility of non-state agencies advocating rights and humanity. As demonstrated in this book, not only do laws and policies remain tied to colo­ nial mechanisms, so do discourses and thus there remains an entire conscious­ ness that is devoid from recognition and acceptance.

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INDEX

academic literature see legal literature administrative law see state policy agency: denial of 53; epistemic universalism, and 72; re-affirmation and recognition of 71–2 anti-racism see racism arrogance see cultural arrogance; epistemic arrogance black minority groups see ethnic minority groups ‘canteen culture,’ police 119–21 capitalism: victim perspective, and 19 capitalism, perpetrator perspective and 19 case studies see National Curriculum; police; ‘war on terror’ children: education see education; normalisation of institutional racism 108; strip searches by police 123 colonialism: Covid 19 pandemic, and 130–1; education and 108; epistemic universalism, and 27; epistemicide and 9, 34, 65, 68, 141; institutional racism, and 1, 4–5; institutional racism and post-colonialism 26–7; knowledge and 33; language and 145; perpetrator perspective 141; post-colonial trauma studies 69–70; truth and 33; victim perspective 35, 72; ‘war on terror,’ and 102; see also post-colonialism; white privilege colonialism and: post-colonial perspective of victim perspective xx

colonisation: knowledge, of 72; truth, of 72 Covid 19 pandemic: colonial attitudes in assessment of 130–1; compounding of invisible impacts of racism 135–6; discrimination in employment, housing, and healthcare 131–2; epistemic universalism, and 134, 136; governmental response to 133–5; impact on ethnic minority groups 129, 131; increased risk of infection and death 132–3; multifaceted racism 129–30; white privilege, and 129 criminal justice see police criminology see penology and criminology; victimology critical race theory (CRT): epistemic universalism, and xix, 24; institutional racism, and 24–6; national curriculum, and xxvi; victim perspective, and xx, 26; see also justice CRT see critical race theory cultural arrogance, perpetrator perspective and 150 death in custody see police democracy: epistemology and 9 discrimination, Covid 19 pandemic and 131–2 diversity: denial of 103, 117; education, in 86–8; intersectional methodology of analysis 33, 152; police and 47, 117, 121; promotion of 47, 121; recognition of 40,

Index 163

141; universal epistemology, and 70, 141; ‘war on terror,’ and 103 education: colonialism and 108; diversity within 86–8; epistemic trust, violations of 91; epistemicide and 108; Euro-centric educational policies and culture 88–93; higher education, continued silencing of victims within 97; identity and 91; importance of 86; Islamophobia and 109; national curriculum see national curriculum; normalisation of institutional racism 108; socialisation and 108; standardised testing 93–5; white privilege, and 108 emotions: construction of 58–9; impact of racism on 74–80 employment discrimination during Covid 19 pandemic 131–2 enlightenment (18th century): classification of knowledge 12–13; epistemic imperialism, and 12–13 epistemic arrogance: institutional racism, and xxiv, 39, 57–8; national curriculum, and xxvi; perpetrator perspective, and 39; victim perspective 39 epistemic ignorance: epistemicide and 89; institutional racism, and xxiv; national curriculum, and xxvi epistemic imperialism: epistemic universalism, and xxiii, 17, 44; epistemicide and 65; institutional racism, and xxiv, 23–4, 34–5, 44; national curriculum, and xxvi; perpetrator perspective, and 35 epistemic injustice: agency and 71–2; epistemicide and xvi; epistemology and 33–4; institutional racism, and 36–8, 68–9; legal literature on xx; psychological injury resulting from xxv epistemic oppression: epistemicide and 89; epistemology and 33–4; institutional racism, and 36–8; national curriculum, and xxvi epistemic status: agency and 71–2; epistemic universalism, and 55; institutional racism, and 55–7; otherisation and xxv; victim perspective, of 72 epistemic trust: institutional racism, and 38–9; violations of 91 epistemic universalism: critical race theory, and 24; Islamophobia and 107; knowledge and 8; truth and 8 epistemic universalism (universal epistemology): abandonment of x, 9, 44,

150; agency and 72; colonialism and 27; Covid 19 pandemic, and 134, 136; creation of 44, 140; critical race theory, and xix; diversity and 70, 141; enlightenment (18th century) and 12, 14; epistemic imperialism, and xxiii, 17, 44; epistemic status, and 55; epistemicide, and 145; hierarchical invisibility as to truth and knowledge, and 51; ignorance and 49; institutional Islamophobia, and 108; institutional racism, and x, xii, xv; institutionalised Islamophobia, and 108; intersectional methodology of analysis xxiii; knowledge and xxi, 70; mental health impacts of racism, and 75; national curriculum, and xxvi, 85, 89, 93; need for 27; police and 119; (lack of) progress towards 46; promotion of xiii, xv, xvii, xxi, xxiii, xxix, 9, 23, 49, 155; social justice, and 44, 67; societal inequality, and 44; state policy, and 134, 136; structural racism, and 46, 142; victimisation, and 67; whiteness and 31 epistemic violence: institutional racism, and 39–40; victim perspective 40; victim perspective, and xxi epistemicide: colonialism and 9, 34, 65, 68, 141; education and 108; epistemic arrogance, and xxiii, 89; epistemic ignorance 89; epistemic imperialism, and 65; epistemic injustice, and xvi, xxv; epistemic oppression, and 89; epistemic universalism, and 145; epistemology as counter to 143; hermeneutical injustice, and 65; identity and xv, 34, 91; ignorance and 35; inaccuracies of 104; institutional inequality, and 34; institutional racism, and xxiv, xxix, 1, 65; knowledge and xv, 33–4, 65, 89, 111, 141, 158; language as counter to 145; literature on xvi, xx, 33, 35, 149; maintenance of conditions of xxvi, xxix, 34, 85–6, 158; national curriculum, and xxvi; perpetrator perspective xxi, 34, 149; power and 58, 60, 141; psychological injury resulting from xxv; racism and 58; reality and 60, 155; relationship between knowledge, truth, and identity xv, 34, 56; structural inequality, and 67; trauma resulting from xxix; truth and xv, 33–4, 65, 89, 111, 141, 158; victimisation, and xxix; ‘war on terror,’ and 102, 104; white privilege, and xxi, 34, 149

164 Index

epistemology: colonialism and 9; counter to epistemicide, as 143; democracy and 9; epistemic injustice, and 33–4; epistemic oppression, and 33–4; knowing and 70–1; victims, of 36, 151–8 epistemology of ignorance: institutional racism, and 35–6 equality: institutional inequality, epistemicide and 34; societal inequality, epistemic universalism and 44; structural inequality, epistemicide and 67; see also human rights; justice equity see equality; justice ethnic minority groups: colonial attitudes in assessment of 130–1; compounding of invisible impacts of racism on 135–6; Covid 19 pandemic, and see Covid 19 pandemic; discrimination in employment, housing, and healthcare against 131–2; multifaceted racism against 129–30 ethnicity see race eugenics: institutional racism, and 3–4 government policy see state policy healthcare see public health hierarchies see structures history: historic processes of institutional racism xxii–xxv; national curriculum, denial of history of colonialism 93; perpetrator perspective and denial of 7; reflexive turn as to history of racism 145–9 housing discrimination during Covid 19 pandemic 131–2 human rights: colonialism and 103; cosmopolitanism and 68–9; death in police custody, and 123; denial of, during ‘war on terror’ xxvii, 103; equality and 69; police denials of systemic racism, and 123; strip searches of children, and 123; see also institutional racism; racism identity: education and 91; epistemicide and xv, 34, 91; knowledge and xv, 34, 56; truth and xv, 34 ignorance: collective ignorance, and denial of personal responsibility 48–9; epistemic universalism, and 49; epistemicide and 35; perpetrator perspective, and 150; white privilege, and 35; see also epistemic ignorance imperialism see epistemic imperialism

indigenous peoples: colonialism and 9; denial of agency to 53; destruction of indigenous knowledge see epistemicide; objectification of 53; victims of racism, as see victims inequality see equality injustice see justice insidious trauma: denial of impacts of 60–1; post-colonial trauma studies 69–70 institutional racism 119–21; agency, denial of 53; aims of current book xii–xviii, 140–1; collective ignorance and denial of responsibility 48–9; colonialism see colonialism; conceptual analysis of 44–5; conceptualisations and theories of 23–4; contemporary realities of xxii–xxv; contemporary structures of 16–19; Covid 19 pandemic see Covid 19 pandemic; critical race theory, and see critical race theory; definitions of viii–xii; development of structural racism 45–6; dismantling of 44–5, 140; education, in see education; enlightenment (18th century) and 12–16; epistemic arrogance, and 39; epistemic imperialism, and xxiv, 23–4, 34–5, 44; epistemic injustice, and 36–8; epistemic oppression, and 36–8; epistemic trust, and 38–9; epistemic universalism, and see epistemic universalism; epistemic violence, and 39–40; epistemicide and xxiv, xxix, 1, 65; epistemology of ignorance, and 35–6; epistemology of victims, and 36; eugenics and 3–4; hierarchical invisibility 50–2; historic processes of xxii–xxv; illusionary appearance of 52–3; impacts of 65; intersectional methodology of analysis 32–4; knowledge and see knowledge; literature on 33, 149; maintenance of conditions of xxix, 44–5, 85–6, 130, 136, 158; national curriculum, and see national curriculum; normalisation of 52–3; origins of 9–12; perpetrator perspective see perpetrator perspective; police, and see police; post-colonialism, and 26–7; processes of dismantling of 140–2; psychological and physical harms from; race and 1–2; racialisation perspective 8–9; racist policies, and 6–8; recognition of 142–5; reflexive turn as to 145–9; slavery and 5–6; structure of current book xviii–xxi; structures of see structures; theoretical framework of

Index 165

current book xviii–xxi; victims of see victims; ‘war on terror,’ and see ‘war on terror’; white privilege see white privilege intersectional methodology of analysis: diversity 33, 152; epistemic universalism xxiii; institutional racism 32–4; perpetrator perspective, and 153; victim perspective xxiii Islamophobia: denial of existence of xxvii; education and 109; epistemic universalism, and 107; institutionalised Islamophobia, ‘war on terror’ and 102, 104–8; perpetrator perspective xxvii, 105; police and xxvii; relationship between pathological constructions, racialisation, and Islamophobia 103–4; spreading of 106–8; ‘war on terror’ and increase of 92 jurisprudence: critical legal studies see critical race theory justice: epistemic injustice see epistemic injustice; epistemic universalism, and 44, 67; hermeneutical injustice, institutional racism and xxiv, 36–8, 65; privilege see white privilege; social justice, victimisation and 66–8; see also equality knowledge: colonialism and 9, 33; colonisation of 72; enlightenment classification of 12–13; epistemic universalism, and xxi, 8, 70; epistemicide and xv, 65, 89, 111, 141, 158; epistemology and 33–4; identity and xv, 34, 56; institutional racism and 12–16; knowing and epistemologies 70–1; maintenance of epistemicide and institutional racism by misuse of xxix, 158; perpetrator perspective, and xxi, 35, 39; racialisation of 9; truth and xv, 34, 56; victim perspective, and 11, 72; see also ignorance; truth language: colonialism and 145; counter to epistemicide, as 145; reflexive turn as to language of racism 145–9 law: maintenance of epistemicide and institutional racism by misuse of xxix, 158 legal literature: epistemic injustice, on xvi, xx; epistemicide, on 33, 35; institutional racism, on 33, 149; intersectional methodology 32–4; lack of 33; lack of

engagement with 33, 149; white privilege, on 35 mental health see psychology national curriculum: anti-racist policies in 90; critical race theory, and xxvi; denial of history of colonialism 93; diversity within education 86–8; duress of self-silence against victims 96–7; epistemic arrogance, and xxvi, 95; epistemic ignorance, and xxvi; epistemic imperialism, and xxvi; epistemic injustice, and 95; epistemic oppression, and xxvi; epistemic universalism, and xxvi, 85, 89, 93; Euro-centric educational policies and culture 88–93; higher education, continued silencing of victims within 97; importance of education 86; maintenance of epistemicide and institutional racism by misuse of xxvi, 85–6; silencing of victims 96–7; standardised testing 93–5; state’s power to control xxvi, 85; white privilege, and xxvi; see also education National Health Service (NHS) see public health neoliberalism, perpetrator perspective and 18 NHS see public health otherness: otherisation, epistemic status and xxv penology and criminology: crime; criminology; police see police; social control perpetrator perspective: capitalism and 19; colonialism and 141; cultural arrogance, and 150; deconstruction of 141; denial of history of racist oppression 7; epistemic arrogance, and 39; epistemic imperialism, and 35; epistemicide xxi, 34, 149; epistemicide and 34, 149; ignorance and 150; institutional racism, and xx, xxi, xxii; intersectional methodology of analysis 153; Islamophobia xxvii, 105; knowledge, manipulation of xxi, 35, 39; maintenance of vii, xv, xxi, 7, 27, 29, 34, 39, 61, 105, 141, 142, 149, 150, 158; neoliberalism and 18; power and xxiii; security and 158; socio-biology and 19; status and xxiii; victim perspective, and xx, 34, 61, 141, 142, 153, 157; white

166 Index

privilege xx, xxi, xxii; whiteness and xxiii, 27, 29 philosophy: enlightenment classification of knowledge 12–13; enlightenment and epistemic imperialism 12–13; poststructuralist resistance to institutional racism 65–6 police: ‘canteen culture’ 119–21; death in police custody 123; denials of systemic racism 123; diversity and 47, 117, 121; epistemic universalism, and 119; human rights, and 123; institutional racism 119–21; institutionalisation of race 115–19; Islamophobia and xxvii; new policies and legislation 121–5; racism and 115; strip searches of children 123; white privilege 119–21 policies see state policy politics xix, 13, 58, 135 post-colonialism see colonialism poststructuralism 65–6 power: epistemicide and 58, 60, 141; perpetrator perspective, and xxiii; state’s power to control national curriculum xxvi privilege see white privilege psychology: denial of systematic and traumatic impacts of racist oppression, victim perspective and 61; emotions, construction of 60–1; psychological impacts of racism 74–80; psychological injury from epistemic injustice xxv; trauma see insidious trauma public health: healthcare discrimination during Covid 19 pandemic 131–2; mental health impacts of racism, and 75; NHS and ‘war on terror’ 109–10; see also Covid 19 pandemic public policy see state policy race: eugenics and 3–4; institutional racism, and 1–2; racialisation perspective 8–9; see also ethnicity racism: anti-racist policies in national curriculum 90; compounding of invisible impacts of 135–6; development of structural racism 45–6; epistemicide and 58; eugenics and 3–4; Islamophobia see Islamophobia; multifaceted racism 129–30; police and see police; psychological impacts of see psychology; racialisation perspective 8–9; scientific racism see eugenics; trauma resulting from see insidious trauma; white racial frames see white

privilege; whiteness; see also critical race theory; institutional racism reality: epistemicide and 60, 155; institutional racism, and xxv–xxiv research see legal literature scholarly literature see legal literature scientific racism see eugenics security: impact of institutional racism on 80–1; perpetrator perspective, and 158 silence: silencing of victims, within structures 53–4 slavery: institutional racism, and 5–6 social justice, victimisation and 66–8 socialisation: education and 108; normalisation of institutional racism 108; white privilege, of 108 socio-biology: victim perspective, and 19 socio-biology, perpetrator perspective and 19 sociology xii, 68, 154 state policy: Covid 19 pandemic see Covid 19 pandemic; discrimination in employment, housing, and healthcare 131–2; epistemic universalism, and 134, 136; maintenance of epistemicide and institutional racism by misuse of xxix, 158; relationship between pathological constructions, racialisation, and Islamophobia 103–4; see also police; public health status: perpetrator perspective, and xxiii; see also epistemic status strip searches of children 123 structural racism see institutional racism structures: conceptualisation of 47–8; contemporary structures of institutional racism 16–19; denial of agency within racist social structures 53; development of structural racism 45–6; hierarchical invisibility 50–2, 51; hierarchical structuring and silencing of knowledge 44–5; poststructuralist resistance to institutional racism 65–6; silencing of victims 53–4; stratification of 49–50; structural inequality, epistemicide and 67 terrorism see ‘war on terror’ theoretical perspectives see critical race theory trauma see insidious trauma trust: impact of institutional racism on 80–1; see also epistemic trust truth: colonialism and 9, 33; colonisation of 72; epistemic universalism, and 8;

Index 167

epistemicide and xv, 65, 89, 111, 141, 158; epistemology and 33–4; identity and xv, 34; illusionary appearance of 52–3; knowledge and xv, 34, 56; maintenance of epistemicide and institutional racism by misuse of xxix, 158; racialisation of 9; victim perspective, and 11, 72; see also knowledge universal epistemology see epistemic universalism victim perspective: abandonment of 4; capitalism and 19; colonialism and 35; colonisation of truth and knowledge, and 72; critical race theory, and xx, 26; denial of systematic and traumatic impacts of racist oppression, and 61; development of xxiii, xxiv; emergence of 105; epistemic arrogance, and 39; epistemic status of 72; epistemic violence xxi, 40; intersectional methodology of analysis xxiii; knowledge and 11, 72; lack of 18; legitimacy of 144; perpetrator perspective, and xx, 34, 61, 141, 142, 153, 157; post-colonial perspective of xx; prioritisation of xv, xx; promotion of 105, 140; recognition of 72, 141, 146; restriction of 19; socio-biology and 19; truth and 11, 72; understanding of viii; use of xv; white privilege, and 35; whiteness and 28 victimology 77, 147 victims: denial of agency to 53; epistemic universalism, and 67; epistemology of 36, 151–8; mental health see psychology; objectification of 53;

silencing of, within structures 53–4; social justice, and 66–8; trauma and see insidious trauma; victim-centred approach to institutional racism 72–4 ‘war on terror’: case study, as i, iv, xxvi; charities and 110–11; colonialism and 102; construction of Muslims, manipulation of 102–3; diversity and 103; education and 108–9; epistemicide and 102, 104; health policy, NHS and 109–10; increase of Islamophobia 92; institutionalised Islamophobia, and 102, 104–6; institutionalised Islamophobia, spreading of 106–8; legitimisation of 103; maintenance of epistemicide and institutional racism by misuse of 130, 136, 158; racialisation and 103; racialisation of terrorism 111–12; relationship between pathological constructions, racialisation, and Islamophobia 103–4 white privilege: education and 108; epistemicide and xxi, 34, 149; ignorance, and 35; institutional racism, and 23, 27–32; literature on 35; national curriculum, and xxvi; perpetrator perspective xx, xxi, xxii; police and 119–21; privilege, definition of 23; socialisation of 108; victim perspective 35; whiteness and 27–32, 66; see also colonialism; racism white racism see racism whiteness: development of understanding of white frames 149–51; epistemic universalism, and 31; perpetrator perspective xxiii, 27, 29; victim perspective 28