“How did they protect you?” The lived experience of race and gender in the post‐colonial English university

With this article, I seek to contribute to understandings of how racial and gender hierarchies are reproduced through organizational processes. Using an autoethnographic method, I seek to demonstrate the workings of Mill's Racial Contract Theory and Ahmed's concepts of raced and gendered encounters through the implementation of a university diversity initiative: the Race Equality Charter. My findings demonstrate how the “doing” of diversity work results “undoing” the non-white diversity worker, as their lived experiences catastrophically diverge from the sunny promise of the diversity project. Furthermore, the Race Equality Charter's is revealed that the Charter is a factual, rather than normative type of contract, which enshrines a socio-political reality in which colonialism continues to shape white over non-white domination. Scholars and activists have long been naming the secret weapons of white supremacy in order to expose how anti-racist practice is co-opted by institutions. In this article, I theorize my lived experience to expose how policy and organizational processes fail to protect me, a non-white woman early career academic. I conclude that the Race Equality Charter, far from being a tool of social justice, enforces raced and gendered privileges in academic settings.