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This special issue emerged out of the continuing concern with how best to deal with institutional racism in higher education institutions (HEIs) that we have long shared as colleagues in the Center...

‘Unconscious bias happens by our brains making incredibly quick judgements and assessments without us realising. Biases are influenced by background, cultural environment and experiences and we may not be aware of these views and opinions, or of their full impact and implications. This article opposes this point of view by arguing that bias is not unconscious but is (un)conscious and linked to Charles Mills’ ‘Racial Contract’ and its ‘epistemologies of ignorance’. These epistemologies emerge from what the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) calls ‘our background, cultural environment and personal experience’. Asserting that racism stems from ‘unconscious bias’ diminishes white supremacy and maintains white innocence as a ‘will to forget’ institutional racism. In equality and diversity training ‘unconscious bias’ has become a performative act to move beyond racism through training to participate in a constructed ‘post-racial’ reality. The article argues that through decolonizing ‘unconscious bias’, ‘w...

Black liberation thought is foundational for Black Critical Race Theory (BCRT) which in turn is crucial for unpicking the operation of white power in organizations. Such unpicking is urgent given the observation that in organizations racism melts into thin air even as it permeates their very walls. ‘I just can't quite put my finger on it’ engages with the struggle to identify racism's invisible touch. In the academy, postrace sensibilities present us with slippages where ‘race’ no longer matters, racism does not exist and BCRT is not theory whilst teaching on ‘race’ and racism is mainstreamed. Racism is transmitted through the flinching away from Black touch, whether as theory or body, a movement away which contains contempt/ disgust. This is the ordinariness of racism where BCRT is aligned with the Black body so as to alienate it from sociology as a discipline and erase its decolonizing impetus.

This paper speaks against tolerance as an instrument of institutionalized anti-racism within academia where collegiality is a minimal expectation in interpersonal interactions. Through auto-ethnographic readings, the discussion focuses on the racial affective economies produced in universities as tolerance ‘makes race ordinary’. Within this reading, ‘making race ordinary’ is shown to produce unliveable lives because of its racial affective economies animated by contemptuous tolerance, disgust and disattendability. These negative affects emerge within the epistemology of ignorance produced by the racial contract and have affective and career consequences for racialized others placed outside of organizational networks. The paper argues that to destabilize the white power in networks that decide on access, tenure and promotion and to enable liveable lives within universities, the transformative potential of the transracial intimacy of friendship must be engaged. This entails ‘race made ordinary’ through disa...

Evidence is produced to show that in London Jamaican, a type of Jamaican Creole, Bradford Jamaican, another variety of Jamaican Creole, and the London English of Caribbean adolescents, the tags you know what I mean and you know are used to perform rather than to elicit agreements, as they do in better-studied varieties of English. The evidence rests on conversational data collected by the authors in different parts of London and in Bradford, in the course of two separate research projects. It is argued that the sequential placement of you know what I mean and you know , and the responses to them by other participants in the conversation, require them to be treated as instances of agreement marking.