151. INSTITUTIONALLY AFRAID - On The Importance Of Acknowledging Institutional Prejudice
On Tuesday, Louise Casey’s long-awaited report into the London Metropolitan Police Force was published, concluding that the London Met are institutionally racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. The Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley responded to the Casey Report with an almost paradigmatic response of someone in charge with an organisation accused of institutional prejudice: he admitted that he agreed with the findings that there was significant racism, misogyny, and homophobia in the Met but refused to say that these prejudices were “institutional”.
On Friday, however, offering a vastly different perspective, I was attending an online lecture from SOAS, a university in London, where philosopher, Linda Alcoff, made a strong case that we ought only to speak of structural racism and other prejudices because once the structural analysis has been made (which it now has been), to speak only of individual actors - “bad apples” - and individual actions is to mischaracterise the true character of those prejudices and ignore crucial information necessary for understanding, and eliminating, it.
I believe that Alcoff is right. Rowley’s refusal to utter the word “institutional” is to actually misunderstand (wilfully I’m sure) the complaint. That an organisation can be found institutionally racist as far back as 1999, when the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry published a report from Sir William Macpherson first describing the Met in those terms, only to be found just as institutionally racist nearly a quarter of a century later is pretty significant evidence in itself that racism within the London police force is not simply the result of a few, or even a majority of, individual racists. It is something baked into its very structure. (Unsurprising when one considers the origins of the Met with Sir Robert Peel, a form of inherently racist colonial oppression imported back by this demonstrably prejudiced enforcer of occupational violence to the homeland to keep only certain members of the domestic population in line). When we refuse, as Rowley has, to acknowledge the institutional nature - the structural nature - of the racism (and misogyny and homophobia) that permeates an organisation we are refusing to fully grasp the nature of the problem, or fully see what such prejudice looks and feels like for those who experience it.
When the prejudice is institutional, not merely the result of bad actors and bad actions, one doesn’t even have to intend to be prejudiced to be complicit in prejudice.
Consider the teaching profession, for example, where many well-meaning teachers engage everyday with their students in ways which could be argued are laced with prejudice and discrimination. Also this week, Education lecturer, Ian Cushing, published this article about the institutional way that black children in the UK continue to be made to feel like the very way they speak is wrong. Not because teachers are consciously equating black voices, black slang, black dialect, as something negative for racist reasons, but because the very construct of “proper language” within the UK education system is based on a model of white middle-class language which presents such language as “proper” and any derivation as being somehow not proper. Cushing notes that this “anti-black linguistic racism” attacks the words of black students - silences them in many cases - and often no teacher responsible for doing this will have even realised that they were doing anything “racist”. They were just encouraging students to speak in the way that would make them most successful - a teacher’s job, many might say - using the language parameters and teaching methods supposedly supported by “the research”. But “the research” and the parameters of what is acceptable are biased towards a certain way of talking. Hence, as an institution, schools which perpetuate this thinking, even if filled with well-meaning individuals who wouldn’t consider themselves racist (even if many of those teachers are, themselves, black), could be called out as being “racist”. The racism is baked into the institution whether the individual members want it to be there or not. Importantly, until that institutional prejudice is dealt with, the individual actors have very little meaningful ways to make the institution stop being racist.
Remember - just as the London Met were deemed institutionally racist back in 1999 and, with no institutional change, are still institutionally racist today - schools in the UK wrongfully (and shamefully) labelled many black students as being educationally “subnormal” in the 1960s and 70s until people like Bernard Coard exposed the structural reasons why children from the British Afro-Caribbean community were failing supposedly neutral tests riddled with deeply biased Anglocentric questions that had nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with a particular kind of “cultural capital”. All these decades later, the term “educationally subnormal” is not being used, but things like Cushing’s report, and the continuing disproportion of black British students being excluded from education compared to their non-black counterparts, show that, as an institution, schools in Britain seem to continue to be racist regardless of the intentions of individual teachers or school leaders.
Homo/Trans/Biphobia, too, seems baked into schools as an institution, even now that the overtly prejudiced Section 28 ruling (which actively banned acknowledgment or discussion of the very existence of LGBTQ+ people in schools) has been repealed. Despite most schools running LGBTQ+ clubs, and spending time in PSHE lessons discussing LGBTQ+ acceptance, there remain day-to-day heteronormative assumptions within schools as institutions, from gendered rules around uniform, to inadequate sex education, to the outdated biology and religious studies curriculums, to lazy discussions around parents as “mum and dad”, to fears around organising residential trips with both boys and girls that never seem to arise when only one group are involved… To be an LGBTQ+ student or teacher within such institutions is to continually be reminded that you are the exception to the rule, rather than the sort of person the rules were based upon, even in schools where, if asked, the majority of students and staff would not consider themselves to hold a prejudice. They don’t, but the institution seems to.
One might wonder, also, about the rise of popularity in people like Andrew Tate amongst school-aged young men and ask how this insidious form of misogyny is on the rise if schools themselves aren’t part of the institutional landscape sowing the seeds. After all, has there been any better advertisement for the man’s vile propaganda than the government’s insistence that schools talk about Tate to their boys? Once we consider misogyny to be something structural, rather than individual, we might suddenly take pause and ask how many of the male teachers discussing Tate with their students - and female ones too - might themselves, despite their best intentions or deeply held commitments to equality, be unwittingly misogynistic simply by dint of their unquestioning contribution to misogynistic systems and norms? When you simply target individuals like Tate without analysing the structures that made him, you present a false picture of the problem: that if our students simply stop watching this man’s videos their misogyny will go away. But why did the videos appeal? Why did Tate make them? And why are we still talking about him long after his arrest? Philosopher, Kate Manne, has described sexism as the “theoretical and ideological branch of patriarchy: the beliefs, ideas, and assumptions that serve to rationalise and naturalise patriarchal norms and expectations - including a gendered division of labour, and men’s dominance over women in areas of traditionally male power and authority”, with misogyny the “‘law enforcement’ branch of patriarchy - a system that functions to police and enforce gendered norms and expectations, and involves girls and women facing disproportionately or distinctly hostile treatment because of their gender, among other factors”. But if we don’t acknowledge first the patriarchy - that structural foundation for both - then we can’t ever truly tackle its symptoms. Schools often work hard at addressing the symptoms of sexism and misogyny, but as institutions seldom name the disease which is causing them, and can often continue to contribute to it.
We see the institutional nature of prejudice in schools when we consider the recent spate of EDI or DEI initiatives in such institutions. Equality, Diversity, Inclusion, Equity - these words, and their initials, have been discussed at great length, added to school improvement plans, and had committees formed to promote them, but in my own experience of seeing such things, and speaking to colleagues both at schools and universities with similar commitments to diversity and equity on paper, much of what comes out of these groups is superficial. More visual diversity perhaps, in promotional materials for the school and posters around the walls, but never going as far as tackling the root causes of why such diversity and inclusion was lacking to begin with. On Friday, Alcoff also spoke of Sara Ahmed’s long-time claim that “visual diversity can coincide with ongoing social injustice” and I couldn’t help but think back to a place I once worked at where, following student reports of the embedded racism they believed they were experiencing, we demanded year after year some basic training for all staff in unconscious bias as a starting point to trying to improve the situation, only for such training to never meaningfully materialise. When it did, it was focused on the biases we might have when marking student work: making judgements about handwriting and trying to anonymise scripts. Training in identifying the whole package of biases we all likely had which made simply existing in the school difficult for some students was a step too far because it would mean having to actually make real changes to both our thinking as individuals, and the school’s thinking as an institution.
Rowley’s reticence comes from the same place. If he concedes that the Met’s problems are institutional, then it means the institution must change, and change quite radically. If they are merely the results of individual behaviours, then changes only need to happen with the personnel. But such a viewpoint - in the police as in schools - is a viewpoint of denialism and is part and parcel of the very institutional prejudices which have been identified. When a commissioner of the police, or a leader of a school, refuses to accept a structural analysis it is important to remember that they are part of the structure. They are part of the institution.
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Last week we reached 150 posts since this website started with absolutely no fanfare at all, but I think it’s probably worth pausing a moment and saying thank you to everyone who has read this blog over the years. I know that there have been far fewer guest writers over the years than I would’ve liked (turns out in our highly competitive education system writing philosophy essays just for “fun”, without a possible cash prize or UCAS prestige doesn’t seem to have the allure I thought it would - but if you would like to write for us, please do!) and I can’t quite believe that the majority of the 150 posts here have been written by me on top of a (mostly) full-time teaching career, but I hope they have served some use to you readers and that you think it’s worth my continuing for at least another 150 more. See you after the Easter break!
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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