A report last year found 13% of students had experienced racial harassment, with some having the N-word shouted at them, or being told: “You’re pretty, for a black girl.” In response, Sheffield has announced that a team of students will work up to nine hours a week to challenge racism and microaggressions, and to identify and lead constructive conversations around incidents. The university has been rocked – as have many academic institutions – by revelations of the scale of racism being experienced by its students. So one of the best things, it seems to me, about Sheffield University’s decision this week to recruit students as “ race equality champions” is that they will be paid. It’s unpaid labour, of course: work that is unavoidable in regular interactions with people on the other side of that educational divide. This leaves a minority who have either a lived experience of it or have made an effort to self-educate with the gargantuan task of communicating how racism works, and the language in which it manifests. In Britain we seem to be living in a kind of educational apartheid, in which most of us remain profoundly ignorant about racism and its history.
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