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

Rizvi, S ORCID: 0000-0002-8614-1730 (2025) “It Gave Me a Crash Course in Terms of This Is Warfare": Making Sense of Internalized Racism Among Racialized Staff and Students in UK Universities. Equity & Excellence in Education. pp. 1-13. ISSN 1066-5684

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	1303 Specialist Studies in Education; Education; 3903 Education systems
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races L Education > L Education (General) L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education
Divisions:	Education
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
Date of acceptance:	21 November 2025
Date of first compliant Open Access:	27 November 2025
Date Deposited:	27 Nov 2025 10:24
Last Modified:	27 Nov 2025 10:24
DOI or ID number:	10.1080/10665684.2025.2586189
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27630

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