UAL mandatory training course Breaking Bias includes a TED talk entitled “What does my headscarf mean to you?”. Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Muslim woman of colour, starts by pointing out that the way she wears her headscarf determines the way people see her, and asks the audience how surprise they would be if she told them she is a racing car engineer, who designs her own racing cars, and runs her University’s car racing team. “Because it is true” she says. The “surprise”, she explains, is the product of our unconscious bias, or the filters through which we see the world. (Abdel-Magied 2009)
To understand why the racing car engineer’s challenge is so powerful, we need to look at Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality because what causes the ‘disassociation’ between Yassmin’s image and the image of a racing car engineer, is not only her headscarf, but the interplay between her ‘visible’ identities of faith, gender and race.
We live in a world shaped by the ideas of patriarchy, white supremacy and Christianity, and our individual and collective filters, or the ways we see the world, have been shaped and valued against those backgrounds. In the video 1, Appiah (2014) argues that it is because different groups, cultures and beliefs are framed against Christian assumptions that “some vast generalisation about religions” are made. And Singh (2016) reiterates in video 2 that it is this “tendency to try and paint entire communities with a single brush stroke” that leads to stereotyping, and explicit and implicit forms of discrimination.
Systemic forms of discrimination are so intrinsically structural to our society that it becomes difficult to recognise them. In the article ‘Is race still relevant? Student perceptions and experiences of racism in higher education’ (Wong et al 2021), the authors find that “there is a wider challenge for racism to be recognised as racism”, and call universities to urgently acknowledge the existence of racism and to ensure that all students can recognise it.
Jaclyn Rekis in her article Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice: An Intersectional Account (2023), argues that, in relation to religious subjects in higher education environment, the result of a “knower” being undermined because of their religious identity has a negative impact in their knowledge-producing and dissemination efforts, creating a dysfunction in the overall epistemic practice and/or system. The result of this injustice, she argues, is a loss of knowledge.
Everyone has an experience of the city which makes my students “bearers of knowledge”, the most valuable source of knowledge in my teaching and learning practice. In my studio, BA Architecture CSM, I consciously and passionately try to create a fair space to avoid any epistemic injustice, and loss of valuable knowledge, but I know that my efforts are not without “filters”.
Yassmin, the car engineer, closes her talk with a brief anecdote: A father and his son get involved in a bad car accident. The father dies in the crash and the boy is taken to hospital in need of an emergency surgery. When the surgeon looks at the boy, the surgeon says: “I can’t operate this boy, this child is my son”. At this point Yassmin stops and gives the audience 10 seconds before she asks: “How was that possible?” And, in my head, I was thinking how was that possible. She then says: The surgeon was his mother. (Abdel-Magied 2009)
Videos:
What does my headscarf mean to you? (2009) YouTube video, added by TED [Online] available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18zvlz5CxPE
Is religion good or bad? (2014) YouTube video, added by TED [Online] available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2et2KO8gcY
Challenging Race, Religion, and Stereotypes in the Classroom (2016). YouTube video, added by Trinity University [Online] available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CAOKTo_DOk
References:
Rekis, J. (2023) Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice: An Intersectional Account [online] Hypatia, Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://doi:10.1017/hyp.2023.86.
Wong, B., Elmorally, R., Copsey-Blake, M., Highwood, E. and Singarayer, J. (2020) Is race still relevant? Student perceptions and experiences of racism in higher education. [online] Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2020.1831441
I’ve spent the past few weeks going to engineering open days with my son and reading this after that feels so shocking. I really dislike the anti-bias course, to me it’s just another institutional diversity window dressing. There is so much diversity in those courses. The more I visit other universities, the more I feel that UAL is actually so far behind.
Hi Andrea
I had to take the mandatory training few weeks ago which included anti-racism and breaking biases courses. They are institutional top-down courses which focus on limited definitions and perspectives, the bar is really low, but I didn’t dislike them or got angry at any point. Maybe because I have seen much worse.
The point that raised an alarm was the one I described in the post when I got catch in this banal anecdote. Why did I not associate the image of a surgeon to the image of a woman and a mother? I have several woman friends who are doctors and surgeons, my best friend is a surgeon and a mother. How come?
The truth is that I grew up in a very sexist family and society (Italian family in Latin America) and that the devalue of women which I felt through my life is ingrained in my structure and unconscious. It is one of my ‘filters’, regardless of how much work I have done to build a different reality for myself and people around me.