“It Gave Me a Crash Course in Terms of <i>This Is Warfare</i> ”: Making Sense of Internalized Racism Among Racialized Staff and Students in UK Universities

It is revealing how white supremacy can embrace diversity. The internalized racism experienced by racialized faculty and students in higher education in the UK frequently goes unreported, inducing feelings of paranoia, disappointment, betrayal, anger, and shame. Since the aggressors are from their “own community,” the aggrieved are all too often gaslit into silence. This article explores how racialized academics and students make sense of their experiences of internalized racism. This research is a small-scale qualitative study conducted using semi-structured interviews with nine participants. The participants were geographically dispersed throughout the UK, and situated at the intersections of race, gender, religion, culture, and immigration status and belonged to a mixture of teaching and research-intensive universities in the UK. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, this study shows how participants recognized that their aggressors employed internalized racism to seek proximity to whiteness to sustain their institutional power. I look at various acts of aggression, including public shaming, silencing, creating obstacles in workload allocation, withholding recruitment or promotion, undermining academic expertise and experiences, and discriminating grades.