Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY OCTOBER 2018 Hannah Atkinson, Suzanne Bardgett, Adam Budd, Margot Finn, Christopher Kissane, Sadiah Qureshi, Jonathan Saha, John Siblon and Sujit Sivasundaram © The Royal Historical Society 2018. All rights reserved. University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT 020 7387 7532 Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY OCTOBER 2018 Attendeees at the January 2018 RHS Public History Prize award ceremony, including Dr Sadiah Qureshi (an author of this report) and Kavita Puri (whose Partititon Voices won both the Radio & Podcasts category and the overall prize). 4 | Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change Contents | 5 Contents Executive Summary 7 Foreword 11 Abbreviations 15 Key Terms 16 1. Introduction 21 2 History in Context 29 3. RHS Survey 47 4. Recommendations and Advice 73 5. RHS Roadmap for Change 95 RHS Race, Ethnicity and Equality Group 98 Acknowledgements 100 Appendix I: Further Reading & Online Resources 101 Appendix II: School Focus Group Questions 121 Contents | 5 “The worst is being the only BME member of staff in a department. Whenever I tried to discuss it with my colleagues (all of whom were non-BME), I was told unequivocally that I was imagining it.” RHS SURVEY RESPONDENT, 2018 6 | Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change Executive Summary | 7 Executive Summary Recent research in Black history, histories of migration and ethnicity, and histories of race, imperialism and decolonisation has transformed our knowledge and understanding of the British, European and global past. Against this backdrop of intellectual change, the racial and ethnic profile of students and staff in UK university History departments has remained overwhelmingly White. In UK universities, Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students and staff in History have disproportionately negative experiences of teaching, training and employment. Attainment of BME History students persistently lags behind that of their peers. The taught curriculum for secondary school pupils and university undergraduate and postgraduate students likewise fails to fully incorporate the new, diverse histories produced by UK and international researchers. These problems have distinct origins and trajectories. But they are also intertwined. Individually and cumulatively, they detract from the quality of teaching, learning and research in History in the UK. Addressing and rectifying these systemic problems is essential for the health of the discipline of university-based History. More broadly, change is imperative to enhance public understandings of the past in Britain. This report identifies major obstacles to racial and ethnic diversity and inclusion in UK university History, tracing under- representation from schools through postgraduate training and postdoctoral employment. It documents substantial levels of bias and discrimination experienced by historians in UK universities, and recommends pragmatic steps to enhance the representation and experience of BME students and staff. It identifies the limited intellectual and substantive diversity of UK History curriculums—in secondary schools and at universities—as an impediment to racial and ethnic diversity and inclusion in History departments. It offers practical discipline-specific recommendations for change to university teachers, research Executive Summary | 7 supervisors, and editors, as well as guidance for secondary school and university teachers on accessing additional resources and support. Underrepresentation: BME students and staff are underrepresented in UK History departments according to Advance HE’s Equality Challenge Unit. This underrepresentation is particularly acute for Black students and staff. • Historical & Philosophical Studies (H&PS)1 undergraduate student cohorts are overwhelmingly White, and have lower proportions of BME students (11.3%) than the overall UK undergraduate population (23.9%); • BME representation in H&PS departments diminishes further at postgraduate level, with just 8.6% of H&PS UK postgraduate research students from BME backgrounds, compared to 16.8% of all UK postgraduate research students; • History academic staff are less diverse than H&PS student cohorts, with 93.7% of History staff drawn from White back- grounds, and only 0.5% Black, 2.2% Asian and 1.6% Mixed. Discrimination, Bias and Harassment: History students and History staff typically experience university study or employment primarily through their individual departmental and disciplinary affiliations. Yet the evidence, interpretative literature and guidance on racial and ethnic inequality in universities rarely map discrimination and bias at these granular levels. Drawing from a Royal Historical Society (RHS) survey of 737 historians working in UK Higher Education (HE), the report documents significant and disproportionate levels of discrimination, bias and harassment experienced by BME postgraduate students and staff: 1 In national datasets, History students are aggregated together with students in Archaeology, Heritage Studies, Philosophy and Theology & Religious Studies, rendering discipline-specific evidence difficult to access and interpret. 8 | Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change Executive Summary | 9 • Discrimination or abuse based on race or ethnicity had been witnessed by 18.8% of all respondents to our survey. 29.8% of BME respondents had directly experienced such discrimination or abuse; • Most reported discrimination was from other academic staff, but a significant proportion (20.5%) was from students, and 14.5% was from the public; • Awareness of university policies and national legislation designed to prevent and protect again discrimination and abuse is poor. Over a third of respondents were unaware of the Equality Act 2010; this figure was higher for non-UK, BME and early career respondents; • Most BME respondents (76.5%) who had made use of their university’s equality and inclusion policies were dissatisfied with them. Curriculum and research: The RHS survey of historians, its focus groups and interviews all suggest that the narrow scope of the school and university History curriculum is an obstacle to racial and ethnic diversity in History as a discipline. Programmes of study and research grounded uncritically in White histories and Eurocentric approaches to the past are part—but only part—of the problem. Stereotyping of BME students’ and researchers’ interests, dismissive comments about BME historians’ language competence, funding constraints on research conducted outside the UK and a pervasive unwillingness to grapple with difficult histories all contribute to the underrepresentation of BME students and staff in our discipline. Significant initiatives to address these problems are ongoing in UK History departments, although responses to them are mixed: • Efforts to rethink the curriculum are widespread: 86.3% of respondents reported that their department had sought to widen its curriculum beyond Britain and Europe in recent years; Executive Summary | 9 • 58% of respondents reported recent efforts to incorporate histories of race and ethnicity into History curriculums, but 17.5% reported resistance to such initiatives. Recommendations: Our recommendations for university History staff and students include the need for: • Significant enhancement of equality and inclusion training in History departments to ensure dignity in the workplace, with attention to discipline-specific characteristics of bias and discrimination in History; • Improved data collection on the incidence and causes of BME attainment gaps in the discipline, coupled with proactive collaboration with BME students and staff to enhance the equality of experience and attainment; • Increased understanding and use of Positive Action as a mechanism of change in student and staff recruitment and progression in History, to improve the racial and ethnic diversity of the UK historical community within and beyond universities; • The imperative need to widen taught History curriculums in schools and universities to challenge the racial foundations of the discipline and to reflect the full diversity of human histories. 10 | Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change Foreword | 11 Foreword Margot Finn President, Royal Historical Society Professor of Modern British History, UCL In Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, Reni Eddo- Lodge makes a clarion call for systematic attention to racial and ethnic inequality in twenty-first-century Britain. In doing so, she poses a fundamental question: ‘Who really wants to be alerted to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others?’2 This report grows out of the wider commitment of the Royal Historical Society (RHS) to equality in historical teaching, research and practice, a commitment signalled in 2015 by the publication of our report on gender inequality in UK higher education (HE).3 But it also reflects our increasing recognition that to make any broad commitment to equality both manifest and effective, the RHS needs to ask itself hard questions about our own place in systems of racial and ethnic privilege. We offer this report to the UK historical community inspired by the writings and policy-work of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) scholars and their collaborators, committed