Dear Professor Damien Page

I am writing with dismay to strongly object to your treatment of Aysha Khanom, who you publicly cut ties with following a twitter discussion relating to my appearance on the BBC Big Questions on Sunday 14th February. Following the Race Trust’s (which Khanom is the founder) tweet to Calvin Robinson asking ‘Don’t you feel ashamed that most people see you as a House Negro?’ a twitter storm engulfed Khanom. The next day, and regardless of the fact that Khanom never wrote the offending tweet, Leeds Beckett bowed to the pressure of the right wing Twitter mob and announced you had ‘terminated all association with immediate effect’ and ‘condemned the use of racist language’. The result of the university’s kneejerk response has been a public attack on Khanom, first from fringe right wing sites and now a feeding frenzy by their national counterparts. The lead of all these stories is the university’s decision to publicly condemn Khanom, without which there would be no news story here. We cannot blame the right wing press for taking the chance to sensationalise a story for the culture wars, the responsibility lies squarely on your shoulders for your reprehensible conduct in this matter. The result has been the harassment of a young racialized academic by the press leading to investigations at her place of work. That a Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality (CRED) would do the bidding of the baying of a right wing mob makes a mockery of the work we have been doing to transform the sector into a space that is not hostile to racialized academics and knowledge.

It is tragi-comic that in the week Gavin Williamson proposes a ‘free speech champion’, Leeds Beckett cancels a young racialized academic because of remarks on Twitter. In correspondence with me on this matter it was stressed that Khanom was never an employee of CRED, her role being an affiliate. This is basically an admission that had she been an employee you would have had to treat her fairly, and not rush to make her a sacrificial lamb out of some misguided attempt to maintain your ‘reputation’. If you genuinely found her comments inappropriate then there were countless steps to take before publicly condemning Khanom. You cannot pretend there was a meaningful process when the events happened on Sunday and by Monday the university was on the public attack. The whole episode is a reminder that the hysteria over cancel culture is in truth about maintaining the right of those with privilege to speak, whilst silencing those with critical views. The university, and CRED specifically, should be ashamed that you have contributed to the hostile environment that we have to do our work in.

Equally important to how you have mistreated an academic affiliated to the university is the utter disregard you have shown for Black intellectual thought. Terms like ‘House Negro’, and even ‘Coconut’ are not racial slurs equivalent to the abuse hurled at racialized groups (it is bizarre that a centre supposedly about anit-racism would support a ‘reverse racism’ position). They are all concepts that come out of struggles for racial justice. As a centre with Decolonial in the title I would hope you are aware of the work of Franz Fanon, and that Black Skin, White Masks is a central feature of your work. I recently shared my experience of going through an identity crisis when I was young, where I rejected Blackness thinking I had to be White to be successful. The term they used in school was ‘bounty bar’, and the recognition of that experience was absolutely vital to my current intellectual output. As I have worked with members of the centre I know you are aware of the intellectual output of Malcolm X, and would assume you know the context which produced the idea of the House Negro. Essentially, it is a recognition of class distinctions in Black communities, that there are those who are slightly better off and therefore might not understand the problem of racism. Not only is it a concept that I use regularly in my academic writing and teaching, I have no problem admitting that I am a House Negro, given the privileged position that I inhabit. The point of these terms is to make us uncomfortable, re-evaluate our positions and ensure that we are accountable to the broad range of Black experiences, and not just our own.

A major step in decolonising the university is opening up what we consider ‘legitimate’ knowledge, which means specifically including intellectual thought produced in struggle. It is the height of anti-Black racism to censor central concepts in Black intellectual thought as ‘racist’ or ‘inappropriate’, and undermines the credibility of CRED and Leeds Beckett University. As CRED is clearly not a space open to Black intellectual thought I must request that the podcast interview I did for the Talking Race series is removed. I cannot affiliate myself with an institution that has displayed such a lack of regard for the rights and safety of racialized staff, or the importance of Black intellectual thought.