“Why isn’t my professor black?”

This chapter is made up of three contributions from a discussion that took place at University College London in 2014.

First, Karim Fereidooni asks, “Why are there so few black professors and professors of Color in Germany?” In order to answer this question, the university is regarded as a space that is, inter alia, structured by racism. Racism-relevant knowledge has been (re)produced in the university context for centuries, with the consequence that the university career paths of Black people and people of Color in Germany are blocked for reasons of racism, both institutionally and individually. Thus, the German university landscape is predominantly shaped by white people. Any university lecturer can help remedy this problem by critically questioning, with a view towards racist practices, their own socialisation, their own field of research, their own academic work, and staffing decisions in their field, taken both by them individually and by their educational institutions.

The second contribution is provided by Vanessa Thompson, who notes that struggles for the decolonisation of the university have gained more attention in the last few years, including in European contexts such as Germany. Drawing on these struggles and embedded in a critique of diversity politics, Thompson’s contribution discusses the shift from “Why isn’t my professor Black?” to “Black lives matter in and beyond the university”.

Finally, in “Decolonising Diversity”, Emily Ngubia Kessé briefly examines the concept of diversity and how its current use within German universities undoes its origins in civil rights movements and in anti-racism work. This discussion is made against the background claim that German universities are essentially white and therefore racist. This racism is evident on three levels: in the narratives that are produced as knowledge, in the conceptual framework where bodies of Colour are made absent, and in the very architecture of these institutions—how they are named and adorned.