We pledge our support to our Black students and staff across the University. We condemn the violence and terror of racism, particularly within governments and law enforcement bodies tasked with protecting people. Black lives matter.

Recent events are a stark reminder that we can lose no more time in producing the cultural shift we would like to see reflected in the wider society within which we work. We know that we have a role to address racism and secure racial equality within the HE sector, to ensure that our staff, students, and curriculum reflect the values that will move us towards justice. Staff and students are critical in helping us all to learn about our shortcomings and these conversations inform our ambitions for the future and feed our commitment to dedicating resources towards making changes.

Whilst many of our students and staff work tirelessly on anti-racist projects already, we acknowledge the labour that this entails, and that that labour is overwhelmingly provided voluntarily. This is not acceptable. We will continue to urge the University to support this work by putting additional actual resources in place. At School level and beyond, we will work to develop increased mental health support for Black students and staff; to improve recruitment practices to ensure more equitable opportunity for Black applicants; to continue our support for decolonising the curriculum; to make training on cultural competency and race equality mandatory for all staff.

The School of Media, Film and Music is committed to understanding why there is an awarding gap between Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic students and their white counterparts in the school, and has made this a standing item for the School's Senior Management Team to develop resources to help overcome this gap.

The School of Media, Film and Music's mission includes critical engagement with equalities, freedom and social justice. As part of this we acknowledge the need to be part of addressing the issue that has been impacting the lives of black people and people of colour for generations: Racism. In 2019, the School appointed Dr Naaz Rashid as its Director of Race Equality; other colleagues focus on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion; all these colleagues are on the School's Management Team. But we recognise the need to do much more, and to stand in solidarity with our Black students and staff by helping to embed principles of justice and equality into the foundation of the new School of Media, Arts and Humanities, which the School of Media, Film and Music will join in September 2020.

The links below provide further information for students and staff wishing to learn more about the broader contexts of these issues:

Statement with further links and resources from the Sussex Students’ Union:

https://www.sussexstudent.com/news/article/ussu/Black-Lives-Matter/

Anti -racist reading list at the University of Sussex Library:

https://twitter.com/sussexlibrary/status/1270625428470931458

Black Lives Matter on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blklivesmatter/?hl=en

Black Britain on Film – free archive from the British Film Institute:

https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/collection/black-britain-on-film

Books and Articles

Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (Bloomsbury, 2017): https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/reader.action?docID=5246807

Reni Eddo-Lodge, ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race,’ Guardian (30 May 2017): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/30/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race

Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (Two Roads, 2018)

Afua Hirsch, Brit(ish) On Race, Identity and Belonging (Vintage, 2018)

David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (Macmillan, 2016)

Jeffrey Boakye, Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explained (Dialogue Books, 2019)

Colin Grant, Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation (Jonathan Cape, 2019)

Academic Resources

Gargi Bhattacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the War on Terror (London: Zed Books, 2008)

Gargi Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017)

Luke de Noronha, ‘Deportation, racism and multi-status Britain: immigration control and the production of race in the present.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol.42, no.14 (2019), pp. 2413-2430.

Nadine El-Enany, (B)ordering Britain : Law, Race and Empire (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2020)

Liz Fekete, ;The Emergence of Xeno-Racism.’ Race and Class, vol.43, no.2 (2001), pp. 23-40.

Paul Gilroy, "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack": The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987)

Malcolm James and Sivamohan Valluvan, ‘Higher Education: A Market for Racism?’ (2014): http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2014/04/25/higher-education-a-market-for-racism/

Arun Kundnani, ‘In a Foreign Land: The New Popular Racism.’ Race and Class, vol.43, no.2 (2001), pp. 41-60

Naaz Rashid, Veiled Threats: Producing the Muslim Woman in Public Policy Discourses (Bristol: Policy Press, 2016)

John Solomos, Black Youth, Racism and the State: The Politics of Ideology and Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)

John Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

Sivamohan Valluvan, The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019)

This statement has been placed on the home pages of the School's internal and external websites.