Racially minoritised students’ experiences of racism and anti-Blackness in ‘post-racial’ higher education

In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd and the reinvigoration of the Black Lives Matter movement, many UK universities made public statements of support, committing to anti-racism. This was a critical moment when ‘race’ and ‘racism’ were on the agenda. This article explores racially minoritised students’ accounts of their experiences around that time (2020–2021). It centres a heterogeneous group of racially minoritised students and highlights their experiences of racism in higher education at a time when the salience of racial equality seemed to be on the rise. It explores how the majority of these students characterised their universities in ways that align with notions of ‘new’, ‘post-racial’ racisms – that are covert and subtle – while simultaneously recounting experiences of traditional, overt racisms, particularly in relation to anti-Blackness. Through this, the article shows that ‘newer’ modalities of racism are in fact continuations of traditional and overt racisms, rather than being a break away from them.