‘Are You Supposed to Be in Here?’ Racial Microaggressions and Knowledge Production in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy

Drawing upon the theoretical concept of racial microaggressions, this chapter considers what it means to study race(ism) in the ‘everyday’ whilst being subjected to everyday racisms within the academe. What does this mean for academics of colour who are fixed as a racialised spectacle within the academe? How does this reproduce a fetishisation of our work (and the racialised people that we work with/for) when the academe situates these inequalities as outside of the institution rather than produced through the academe? We explore this by developing Yancy’s ideas of an episteme of Blackness. By centring our own experiences (and the experiences of other racialised academics) we point to the pervasiveness of white supremacy within these legitimised spaces of knowledge production, and end by exploring the potential within epistemes of Blackness to challenge the legitimacy of the academe as THE legitimate space of knowledge production.