InQuire www.inquiremedia.co.uk
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“Your campus, your voice” Monday 19 October 2020 16.2
Exclusive: Khaliq Martin on UKC response to racism
The climate clock: we haven’t long left
Opinion page 7
Flying home during lockdown
Features page 12
The Shining at 40 By Tarini Tiwari Newspaper News Editor
“Everything I say is substantiated by black, queer feminist socio-political theories,” student Khaliq Martin disclaimed before he started discussing how he founded the Afro-Diasporic Legal Network or ADLN. He spoke at the launch for DecoloniseUoK’s book Towards Decolonising the University: A Kaleidoscope for Empowered Action. Martin highlighted his Bahamian upbringing meaning he “was cognisant of colonial systems engrained in society”. Upon coming to the University of Kent, he “was flabbergasted that there was nothing, besides the brilliant black people at DecoloniseUoK/UKC” by way of an organisation for black Law students. “[T]hat’s how ADLN started. I was able to create sustainable structures such as a black discussion series. There’s joy in integrating and finding your place while still being cognizant of colonial structures.” InQuire sat down with Khaliq Martin to talk about the ADLN and the university’s response to the concerns they have raised. Tarini Tiwari: I wanted to first ask you to elaborate more on your call to action that you released to the university. Just in your own words discuss what you were requesting the university to incorporate in order to make campus more inclusive. Khaliq Martin: Yeah, absolutely. So, after we saw throughout the global context people having conversations about Black Lives Matter, we saw different ways people were protesting not just in Canterbury or in London. We acknowledged that these protests and even the ways that we show up to not just pay homage
but grieve and mourn the people who have been impacted by state-sanctioned violence. We understand that protests and things like that can be incredibly cathartic, can be incredibly therapeutic, and can allow for the processing of that grieving. What we at ADLN and certainly a lot of black students (more than it appears to be) were saying was “Hey, this is cool, it’s nice that we were able to pop up and do something,” but we were critical about what was next. A lot of us who were first, second or final year students were upset about the ways that anti-black racism has been allowed to occur. We were like “Okay, we understand the importance of this space to grieve and mourn, but how are we actually addressing some of the ways that anti-black racism shows up at our university?” So, there are folks like myself who did a mini action, and it was Baby Shark in comparison to what’s happening in the global context, but we were interested in having a conversation with the rest of the student body in a communal way by postering certain questions like “Hey, we know that the complaints process not just for racism but for various forms of discrimination is ineffectual,” and this is known throughout multiple departments so it’s not new knowledge. Another poster said that the curriculum isn’t diverse, and again this is not new knowledge because student organisations such as DecoloniseUoK have been reporting this for a long time. We also had a significant question surrounding black students’ treatment by campus security, and the different ways that they were showing up for us while they weren’t giving the same energy to our other non-black counterparts when complaints were raised against them. This is something that I have also personally experienced. So, we had that mini action and we saw a clear disparity between how certain folks were allowed to take up space, you know, as a part of this institution, and how folks who
were a part of that action were immediately policed by campus security, as in the freedom of expression, the freedom of being allowed to protest, was immediately denied within minutes, and that was something that we did not necessarily expect but wasn’t entirely surprising. Despite that, we were still interested in a conversation, a very critical conversation to say “Okay, the question still stands: how are we ensuring black students’ safety at our university but still addressing some of these issues of anti-black racism at our university that have not gone away?” So, I think us at the Afro-Diasporic Legal Network were very much open to having that conversation with other societies to say “Hey, what are some issues you folks have faced or are currently facing?” And we saw how some of that was emerging from, say, the previous UKCACS (Afro-Caribbean Society) statement that was published in the summer. We had conversations with those folks and we suggested recommendations that we’d seen globally and those folks gave their feedback on it. Then, we submitted it to the student community. And, sure enough, we got some endorsements from different societies and individuals. We also got endorsements from outside of the institution because they recognised these as pivotal steps that would change the institutional structure, the student culture and the student community. But also, it was very apparent that what we were asking for was the bare minimum, right? If we study the global context, a lot of these conversations are ones that people had five or seven years ago. And so, we got the institution and the student union to publicly endorse the demands. They immediately wanted to have private meetings about this. We said no. One reason is because it does not allow for the accountability that folks within the ADLN or even the Continued on page 3...
Entertainment page 15
The destruction on our doorsteps
Science and Technology page 18
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Culture page 17 Neuromancer retrospective