When my younger sister Fizzy tells me about her experiences of racism as a student, they’re both familiar and strange. It’s been six years since I graduated from the University of Cambridge, where I tended to explain racism away. It just seemed a part of life at the archaic institution – which was recently criticised for its lack of diversity by MP David Lammy.
My sister, who studies at Southampton, a newer university, has also experienced racism. She has encountered people who have openly used racist language, and is often asked to speak for Muslims or people of colour.
Fizzy responds to racism differently than I did. She has moved into a house with all non-white housemates in her second year, for example. Meanwhile, I never had a choice to be anything but a minority; I had one black friend at university and he graduated the year after I arrived. Most of my white friends lived in all white houses at university – and we thought little of it.
Prejudice at university was something I didn’t start exploring until long after I’d left. When I was at Cambridge, it was students in white tie who’d make the headlines, getting pissed and smashing things up. Today, it’s students of colour, such as Lola Olufemi and Jason Osamede, who have been targeted for protesting against white privilege, or wanting to “decolonise” an overly white and male curriculum in their posts as minority officers.
Back then I lacked the political awareness to frame my experiences. But my sister, 21 years old and immersed in a world of ongoing political debate on social media, knows exactly what’s happening to her. I can’t work out which is worse. We speak intimately and at length when I visit, to try to understand what it is about university that can make it such an isolating place for people of colour.
Fizzy Noor: So you just pretended racism didn’t exist when you were at uni?
Poppy Noor: Hey, don’t be so harsh on me! I knew something was up – I felt upset, isolated. But racism was normalised. I mean, the most common thing was boys saying: “I don’t like brown girls, it’s just a preference.”
FN: What gets me is, how can you not know that’s racism? That’s textbook racism. Not liking a whole range of women based on the colour of their skin.
PN: It’s confusing – understanding why people who are supposed to like you are saying these horrible things. They’re not flushing your head down the toilet when they say it, they’re doing it while going to parties with you and giving you hugs.
FN: Yeah, that’s still how it happens now. No one feels embarrassed to say it. I reckon racism is more a thing at uni than at home. The first time it happened here, we were in a big group and people started calling me “Paki” for a drinking game. I didn’t know what to do – I messaged you straight away.
PN: That hurt for me to hear about. But when I was growing up, people called me that all the time.
FN: When I was younger people said nasty racist stuff to me but it was so abnormal that people would be stunned. At uni they say, “Oh it’s just a joke, he didn’t mean it in a racist way”.
PN: Some people say something so openly and casually and others don’t intervene. You feel like it’s you who’s in the wrong for questioning it – that makes it harder to call out. Why do people want to be racist at university?
FN: Edginess… that sounds weird and immature but it’s actually a thing.
Fizzy’s friend Masala Isely-Rice (an American student of dual black and white heritage) chips in.
Masala: I think it’s tribalism. It’s harder to accept the multiplicities of different people than to say, “This is what black people are like,” right?
FN: It’s group mentality. Part of being the powerful majority at uni sort of relies on kicking the minority down.
Masala: Well, oppression can seem quite glorified, if you take the oppression part out of it … Succeeding when you’re not supposed to succeed – if you’re at uni and you’re not white you’ve sort of done that.
FN: There are layers - wealth privilege, race privilege. But while you can be poor and white, you’ll never be poor because you are white.
PN: A lot of people don’t understand what racism is. They don’t see that not seeing someone as an equal is what saying “I don’t like brown girls” means. They think you have to literally hate someone, and be intending to be horrible, to be racist. I understand no-one wants to be told off for what they didn’t mean to do, or told they can’t be part of the conversation.
FN: But it’s not that they can’t be part of the conversation. It’s about not centring yourself in the conversation. Just because you’ve read about racism doesn’t make you more qualified to speak about it than me.
PN: Did you see the thing about decolonising the curriculum? Uni is this intellectual institution that’s supposed to be making us smarter. So if you only learn from western philosophers, this is subtly telling you that, white culture is intellectual, rational, almost superior. As if people of colour (POC) haven’t been philosophising too. It almost frames it as if whiteness is logical, all else is too emotional.
FN: Yes. That thing of, “your personal experience doesn’t trump stats”. You feel like you can’t speak anymore unless you’re on Google pulling the stats out. I have friends who believe Nazis should have freedom of speech… they’ll say, they’re not actually killing you, as if you’re being irrational. The most important thing to them is being able to say what they want, but that’s a luxury to me: If someone wants me dead because of the colour of my skin, I’m not safe - and that’s the most important thing.
PN: Yeah, I feel like white supremacy was often intellectualised when I was at uni. I watched Hotel Rwanda with a friend when learning about the genocide. At the end he said, “You’d never find white people running around with machetes in a jungle killing each other like that.” We spoke about the holocaust and of course the fact that people both white and non-white have killed and committed genocide. He said, “That’s different, that was strategic…” It was stupid of him to say, but it goes back to that old, colonial form of racism that views non-white people as hot-headed and biologically different. Like Nazism can be described as something other than violent, other than emotional, but your reaction to it is seen as overly emotional or aggressive.
FN: Recently friends spoke about Islam’s so-called colonisation of the UK. One said, did you know that 28% of people born in the UK aren’t even British.
PN: How can you be born here and not be British?
FN: Well he said “they’re not really British” and when asked if that meant white, he said, “well, yeah”.
PN: How does that make you feel?
FN: Isolated. People will talk about extremism like all Muslims are bad. But if I mention the injustices of white people, they will say it’s a vocal minority. But Isis is genuinely a vocal minority – they’re terrorists.
PN: Are you ever personally targeted?
FN: People quiz me like I’m their test subject. I was eating a full English recently and friends said, “You’re Muslim, you’re not supposed to do that!” I’m sure it wasn’t their intention, but I felt singled out. People don’t say stupid things like, “You’re Christian, you’re not supposed to wear mixed cotton!” White people have religions and people don’t assume they subscribe to it so strictly. But as a Muslim you’re asked why you drink or don’t have a beard. They don’t see that I am just a normal 20-year-old student like them.
PN: Does living in a non-white house make a difference?
FN: Yes. I had to make more of an effort to find a more diverse group of friends. It gets exhausting, hanging around people and they think that because you’re brown you always have to be the ambassador. Yeah I care about race issues, but it’s not my entire being.
PN: There was a recent study showing how segregated UK universities are. Everyone was philosophising over what the reason was – is it personal safety?
FN: When I was at school, all my non-white friends wanted to go to Leicester. They didn’t want to be outnumbered. I sort of see why now. I feel very aware of my brownness when I hang out with my white friends and that can be a chore. Sometimes you feel like you can’t have a normal conversation anymore. Recently we were discussing TV shows and I said I’ve been watching Dear White People. Straight away people were in my face saying “that show is oppressive to white people”. I felt like I didn’t want to have a discussion about race right now.
PN: Is it ever about more than just wanting to relax?
FN: Sometimes it is safety. People say things that are emotionally and mentally hard to deal with. There was a joke in the group of saying “fuck the yellows” – by which they meant people of Chinese origin. I know it’s not their intention, but those jokes just remind me that I’m the minority and not to step out of line.
PN: I find it so crazy that it’s still OK to say this stuff. I have tried to tell people about how it was for me, but because I went to Cambridge people would say, course it was racist there, it’s not like that elsewhere.
Masala: I go to university in Colarado in a supposedly really liberal town. My high school was out-and-out racist but this is sort of worse. People think they’re really open-minded, they’ll say “I don’t see colour” – so you can’t tell them about racism at all.
PN: It is everywhere! I visited friends in Manchester and people said “Paki shop”. In Norwich people would say about friends, “She has a big black boyfriend!” and everybody would laugh.
FN: Was any of it different at Cambridge?
PN: One thing is how I was approached by officials. Being chased through the gates being asked if I went there. I think there’s a thing in this country where we tend to always think of race issues as class issues. At Oxbridge it was partly class: I wore tracksuits and that’s not so common there. But it’s well documented that students of colour are frequently questioned by officials about whether they’re students, when their white counterparts aren’t.
FN: Was it the prestige?
PN: Sometimes I felt like people wanted me to be grateful – they were saying look, people like you don’t normally get to come to places like this. And I completely bought it, man. I thought, “I must have got in because of the quotas!”
FN: Man, that’s hard.
PN: Sometimes I wonder whether it’s harder for you though, because people your age seem so much more aware now.
FN: Do you not think that uni is a time when you become more political anyway?
PN: I think the way young people engage in politics has changed. When I was your age, most people on social media were just stalking each other. If you were interested in politics, you almost had quite a conventional view because you sought it out, from teachers, from newspapers, from philosophers. Now young people are arguing about politics all the time on social media. Cultural appropriation. Class fetishism. Race fetishism. I feel like you know so much more about your own oppression that it must be hard to look it in the face.
FN: It can be so frustrating, knowing what’s going on but not being able to say it. It’s a battle to feel heard and people will always call me angry. They’ll say, it’s just because you’re brown that you believe this stuff exists. But it’s hypocritical. If you say “of course you think that, you’re white”, you’re ridiculed. But now that I’m in a group that isn’t majority white, things are quite different.
PN: What about people who say, that’s dangerous, you’re in an echo chamber? When I was at uni I just had to learn to deal with it, which is sort of how it is in the real world too.
FN: Obviously it’s easier for me now to live in an echo chamber. But people here see where I’m coming from. They can relate because perhaps they’ve been through something similar themselves.
PN: So you’re happier now?
FN: Yeah, and I don’t even have to pretend racism doesn’t exist like you did.
- This article has been amended to clarify the meaning of two quotes.
Follow Guardian Students on Twitter: @GdnStudents.
