Racism and Decolonizing Higher Education

Decolonising movements in higher education aim to unsettle and reconstitute taken-for-granted systems of Eurocentric knowledge production upon which the Western academy is built. Through intellectual and activist endeavour, Black, Indigenous, and global majority scholars of colour campaign for honest, open ‘decolonial dialogues’ that offer the possibility of a new inclusive geopolitics of knowledge that challenges the dominance of the cultural and scientific narratives of European modernity, which lie at the heart of the academy’s ‘hidden curriculum’. The mantra of the radical decolonial movement that ‘the university is not racist—the university is racism’ alludes to the fact that the very structures and systems that constitute [Page 1265]the White Western academy are designed to reproduce institutions that benefit the interests of the White privileged elite. Furthermore, the ...