Statement of Allyship
In October 2018 the Royal Historical Society published the self-commissioned Race, Ethnicity & Equality Report, a detailed account of the status of the discipline in UK Universities. The results were alarming although not surprising. The call for greater diversity was loud and clear, and, most importantly, urgent. The numbers speak unequivocally: only 11% of History students are from BAME backgrounds; curricula are largely exclusive of diverse voices, and a staggering 96.1% of University historians are white (of which less than 1% are Black). History is not the exception in the Arts and Humanities in UK Universities: quite the opposite. And our School, the School of Culture and Communication at Swansea University, is no different.
Our campaign for Black History Month aims to showcase the scholarly work that some of our colleagues do on the history and culture of groups which remain underrepresented in our classrooms, despite their centrality to local and global histories. The campaign aspires to position itself as an act of allyship and it does so with the awareness that this is a role that cannot be self-defined, but one that can only be granted and recognised by the communities it is meant to serve and amplify.