Whiteness, Racial Trauma, and the University

Universities are regarded as safe havens for knowledge production and the educational transformation of lives. There is however a long history of universities as sites of contestation where structures of hierarchical legitimacy are played out. In response to the upsurge in global protests against racial violence and contestation of colonial, racialised and Eurocentric forms of thinking, universities have adopted new roles as ‘anti-racist’ and ‘decolonial’ beacons of hope. This book unravels how such liberal progressive ‘acts’ hide a much deeper racialised logic of whiteness-framed structural narcissism, producing insidious powerful and difficult to trace forms of racialised harm.