Spot the Difference, or, a Teachable Moment

All staff got this message this morning.

Excellent. I'm all for it. We have a large proportion of BME students and manual staff especially cleaners and cooks, and a very low proportion of BME academics and managers. Basically, seniority looks white here. 

Simultaneously, we ran this billboard and web campaign:

Oh dear: the old 'white saviour' trope in which kindly white individuals solve the problems of an undifferentiated mass of dependent and grateful black people.

Plus the extra touch of describing Africa as an unexplored new world. This will be news to its inhabitants, one suspects. I feel too for my students, 40%+ of whom are of BME extraction: rendered in this ad not as potential teachers/health workers but as the recipients of white bounty.

Having been alerted to this the university has been quick to pull the campaign off the web and the billboards are coming down today. It still suggests that there's a problem though. My colleagues in English, Media and Cultural Studies have been teaching this stuff for years - I used to do a whole lecture on media coverage of the 1984 Ethiopian famine - but this campaign was written, designed, cleared, printed and published without anyone noticing the implications. I have absolutely no doubt that there's not a shred of conscious racism in what happened, but despite every member of staff having to take online courses in 'unconscious bias', this still appeared. 

While I applaud the university's efforts to put in place structures and plans to create an inclusive culture, I can't help thinking that strategies and publicity campaigns are looking like marketing devices rather than searching self-examination. Academic departments' courses have been revitalised by the decolonisation of curricula: now it's time for the managers who harangue us about such things to systematically reconsider their own practises.