“How did they protect you?” The lived experience of race and gender in the post‐colonial English university

Udeni Salmon

Gender, Work and Organization, 2023, vol. 30, issue 2, 510-528

Abstract: With this article, I seek to contribute to understandings of how racial and gender hierarchies are reproduced through organizational processes. Using an autoethnographic method, I seek to demonstrate the workings of Mill's Racial Contract Theory and Ahmed's concepts of raced and gendered encounters through the implementation of a university diversity initiative: the Race Equality Charter. My findings demonstrate how the “doing” of diversity work results “undoing” the non‐white diversity worker, as their lived experiences catastrophically diverge from the sunny promise of the diversity project. Furthermore, the Race Equality Charter's is revealed that the Charter is a factual, rather than normative type of contract, which enshrines a socio‐political reality in which colonialism continues to shape white over non‐white domination. Scholars and activists have long been naming the secret weapons of white supremacy in order to expose how anti‐racist practice is co‐opted by institutions. In this article, I theorize my lived experience to expose how policy and organizational processes fail to protect me, a non‐white woman early career academic. I conclude that the Race Equality Charter, far from being a tool of social justice, enforces raced and gendered privileges in academic settings.

Date: 2023
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