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Oxford and Cambridge Have Always Been Racist

I was one of the few Black scholars at both institutions. I understand—and loathe—how their tendency to undermine the suffering of Black people led to Jason Arday’s demise.

Supporters leave flowers and photographs after taking part in a vigil for late Cambridge professor Jason Arday in Trafalgar Square in central London on August 17, 2026, following his death at age 41 on August 14.

The summer before I began studying as an undergrad at the University of Oxford, I braced myself for racism. I spent several hours each day preparing by scrolling through blogs, newspaper articles, and social-media posts. Across these platforms, Black students documented racist encounters with white students, and occasionally, staff. Stories about campus guards blocking Black students from entering campus, tersely questioning their credentials; one where a group of white men joked about Black women’s genitalia and sexual viability at fancy dinners; instances of being mistaken for other Black students with whom they shared no facial characteristics; inappropriate touching of hair and faces; uncomfortable staring at clubs or on the street. Once I landed at St Hilda’s college, these experiences recurred with exhausting banality. They felt both routine and normalized, despite the obvious distress they caused. At some point, it was more practical to stop mentioning them.

I would soon learn that these instances were not relegated to social life but extended into academia itself. For one, there was the dearth of Black academics in the humanities, and the appalling figure of under 1 percent teaching at the university: a proportion in line with the national picture, where Black academics still make up only around 1 percent of all professors in the United Kingdom, according to the Society for Research into Higher Education. A Black visiting professor from an American university made a joke during a lecture that by teaching at the university, she had raised their statistics on Black professors from less than 1 percent to 1 percent. At the end of my time there, I was told in no uncertain terms by an American professor that if I wanted to study anything related to Black people, I was better off leaving the institution as soon as possible and heading to the United States. He emphatically pointed out that there was really no place for that kind of research or thinking to flourish there. It was a shame, but he was also right. Experiences like these showed me that our intellect and contributions were not respected, funded, or even desired.

I noticed however, in the recounting of this distress to friends and family, a peculiar tension: a gnawing sense of “who are you to be speaking about this?” or “is your experience really that bad compared to what people are experiencing outside these institutions?” One white classmate once actually asked me, “Do you really feel like you’re being oppressed?” in a sarcastic tone that implied I was anything but. To be silent about these experiences was to participate in a process of subjugation, in the predations on one’s mental health and well-being, but to speak up about them was to be ridiculed for not simply ignoring disrespectful comments and soldiering on, grateful to be “accepted” in the first place.

As a former student at both Oxford and Cambridge, I expected two things: that this kind of racism would be perpetrated in daily encounters, but also that it would be minimized as belonging to a lower order of microaggression—one that paled in comparison to the larger structural racism that prevented Black people from accessing places like Oxford and Cambridge in the first place—rather than being recognized as its counterpart. Part of the reason for this stems from a wider societal tendency to undermine or relegate the internal and external sufferings of Black people in a racist society, a phenomenon that is well documented in the psychology of Black mental health patients. Because Black patients are perceived as “emotionally tougher” than their white counterparts, they are frequently undertreated, misdiagnosed, or deemed not to require intensive mental health interventions even when these might be necessary. This is the “Black superwoman/superman” phenomenon: an expectation that Black people can triumph, persevere, and surmount obstacles easily, and that we possess an ingrained and limitless strength; a belief that also leads to Black people like Jason Arday to be failed persistently by institutions of all kinds.

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