Impossible visibilities of Black and Global Majority staff at an ethnically diverse English university

This qualitative study explores how Black and Global Majority faculty at an English university with an ethnically diverse student population perceive race and racism on campus. Informed by a theoretical framework drawing on Critical Race theory (CRT), CRT methodology and critical whiteness studies, this study adopts counter-narrative story telling as a method of analysis. This research foregrounds BGM faculty’s everyday experiences of racism in their professional lives and the “normalization” of racism in this setting. Through the construction of composite counter-stories (CCS) the experiences convey how BGM staff are simultaneously “othered” and “unseen”. This complex duality of hypervisibility and invisibility reveals subtle and insidious undercurrents of racism that frame the participants’ lived realities and ways everyday racism is enacted at institutional and individual levels. Participants experience both being expected to talk knowledgeably about race and how to confront racism in particular venues, while finding the possibility of such discussion circumscribed or silenced in others. Although instances of “overt” racism are rare, these counter-narratives highlight ways institutional racism is perpetuated through white supremacist social and bureaucratic norms.