‘The real issue is change': Edinburgh University's first Black philosophy professor on racism and reform

The Guardian

4 days ago

For Tommy J Curry the question about Edinburgh University's institutional racism, or its debts around transatlantic slavery and scientific racism, can be captured by one simple fact: he is the first Black philosophy professor in its 440-year history.
As the Louisiana-born academic who helped lead the university's self-critical inquiry into its extensive links to transatlantic slavery and the construction of racist theories of human biology, that sharply captures the challenge it faces.
Not just that, Curry suspects he is the first Black academic in the UK to lead a university's investigation into its links to enslavement and empire. His goal is to guarantee he is far from the last Black professor.
'I'm a first-generation person. I grew up in poverty, grew up at the end of segregation,' he said. 'Why is that important to not be the first? Well, it's important because everybody has an 'in', and if there's nothing left after your 'in', you just become a symbol for somebody else's story.
'I'll be the subject of another report, but I won't have influence, I wouldn't have ushered in any of the people that look like me that the world said couldn't be.'
The point is not to simply produce a report but to act, he said.
'The real fundamental issue is change. Not a symbolic apology, not a pay cheque. [How] do you create leagues of Black thinkers and clinicians and doctors and engineers and artists that fill the gap of what were lost by what white people engineered for centuries that deprived the world of Black human genius. That's why this report matters so much to me.'
In turn, he added, Scotland could become better equipped to tackle the endemic problems of racial disparity in health outcomes, mortality, employment, housing, education. 'So when you think of it this way, what does reparations mean if it doesn't mean dealing with the consequences that were created by the very institutions you want to write the cheque?'
His singular status in Edinburgh's philosophy department (which lists 12 tenured professors) also, he added, points to one of the most important findings of its investigation: the 'severe underrepresentation' of Black staff, the patchy recruitment of Black and ethnically minoritised students, and continuing staff and student experiences of racism.
The decolonisation review, which was co-chaired by Dr Nicola Frith, an expert in reparations policy, found that less than 1% (150 out of 17,260) of the university's employees were Black – a figure that has been static for some years. A different picture emerges with other ethnic groups. The number of Asians – a category which includes Japanese, Chinese and south Asian people – reached 9% in 2022-23, up from 7% in 2018-19.
Among the university's 49,430 students in 2022-23, 34% of its undergraduates were Asian – driven largely by growing numbers of Chinese students – with just 2% Black. Among postgraduates, 44% were Asian, 5% Black.
The report says the increasing diversity in the university's population 'does not benefit Black staff and students' yet Edinburgh prides itself on being a 'global institution'. That means it should measure progress against the world's demographics too. 'While there is a dominant white racial majority in the UK, and especially in Scotland, the basis of comparison must not presume that small numbers of non-white racial and ethnic minorities in Scotland offer an appropriate baseline for comparison.'
Scottish census data from 2021 puts the country's non-white minority ethnic population at 7.1%, but in Edinburgh that figure is just over 15% – nearly 77,800 people, 2.1% (10,881) of them Black. Across England and Wales, 18.3% of the population are from minority ethnic communities, 2.5% of them Black.
'So I ask this very seriously,' Curry continued. 'In the United States, before the end of Jim Crow segregation [in 1965], there was roughly 1.2% of Black scholars there. So roughly 1% of the people, PhDs, that were teaching faculty.
'Scotland is a free society. It claims it's a society that's free from racism and yet you have about the same percentage of Black people teaching here. So how does a free society that's free of racism produce the same kind of outcomes that a segregated, racist society produced in the United States?'
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That demonstrates a sequence, a chain of action and consequence which the university can now choose to break, he said.
The newly published slavery and decolonisation review urges Edinburgh to fund a new centre for the study of racisms, colonialism and anti-Black violence and to prioritise the recruitment of Black and ethnically minoritised academics, researchers and students – partly funded by new scholarships – and ensure equal access to research funding.
Frith points to the review team's decision to recruit paid Black and minority ethnic scholars and activists who specialise in colonialism, reparations policy and the repatriation of remains. Edinburgh has been a leading centre for reparations research for a decade, she said, since it held an international conference on reparations in 2015.
The university, led by its principal, Peter Mathieson, made what Frith calls the 'really good decision' to set up the review after a 'collective groundswell' from staff and students to respond to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, and Glasgow University's groundbreaking report in 2018 on its slavery debt, as well as a controversy at Edinburgh in 2020 over the renaming of a university building named after the philosopher and alumnus David Hume, author of a 'notorious footnote' in 1753 claiming 'the Negroes' were 'naturally inferior'.
'I don't see that history as something that sits in the past with a closed door,' Frith adds. 'It is something that directly affects all of us today in very different and uneven ways, but it nonetheless does affect the shape of our society, our relations, everything.'
Frith and Curry argue that if the university adopts their group's recommendations, the impact could be profound.
'There are very few things that stand beyond our lifetime,' said Curry. 'A centre, an institute, the creation of Black scholars in the UK around this issue of racism, dehumanisation and colonialism is something that I think will change the intellectual tenor and academic climate of the country. Nothing like it exists.
'So when we're looking at why it's important, it's because if the University of Edinburgh served as the pinnacle of the 17th, 18th and early 19th century for this work, why can't it serve as the same centre to undo it in the 21st century?'