Hypervisibility and the Media

As a black girl in Cambridge, you can’t really hide.

Being a black student in an elite space is being hypervisible because you are there. – Mikai

Whiteness as a category is powerful because of how it others non-white people. Whiteness is the normative position from which other races are defined, and being white therefore means that you can blend into the background in a way that black people can’t. We are hypervisible and identifiable, and it’s hard to avoid the media, especially if you are engaged in any form of activism.

With the Benin Bronze campaign, we tried very hard to avoid the press. The campaign came just after Oxford’s ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign had really taken off, and the media were practically waiting for a Cambridge sequel to erupt so that they could pursue this dramatic storyline of Oxbridge under attack from raging liberal snowflakes (as the media likes to characterise us). We had to be super careful about what we said to anyone. We released one statement, and decided that would be it – but of course, the press wasn’t going to relent. The papers picked up a post from my personal blog (which I quickly deleted) in which I said how proud I was of the progress we had made as a student body, and there were articles about our proposal in the Guardian and Daily Mail within a few days.9 I stupidly thought it would be a good idea to read through the comment section under the Guardian article, which was filled with people telling me to go back to my country, to be grateful to Cambridge for even giving me a place, and calling us troublemakers and ‘attention-seeking students’. After the incident of the college OGM, I thought I had developed a thicker skin, but it was still disheartening to see how many strangers were against us.

Another important reason why we chose to stay away from the media, apart from the fact that we needed to focus on our dialogue with the university, was that we wanted to retain control of the narrative. We knew how easy it was for student politics to be twisted in the mainstream media. This is a lesson that ended up being very helpful when the Black Men of Cambridge campaign came around.

The day after our post, I turned my phone off, because I really did have exams to revise for – but when I switched it on for a few minutes, I got a call from the BBC inviting me to be on Victoria Derbyshire Live, a huge morning show. I abandoned my revision for the day, did my makeup, put on a smart jacket and headed to the BBC Cambridge studios. While I was there, I ended up doing BBC World News as well. This, for me, was amazing, because it meant that my parents could watch from Nigeria. On my way to the interview, Chelsea prepared a research document with all our key facts and figures, and calmed me down in anticipation of my first-ever live TV interview. We were on a roll. The ACS was receiving heaps of messages from parents thanking us for being an inspiring image for their children, from teachers, from big sisters and big brothers, but also from people who had seen the pictures, and now felt emboldened to make a Cambridge application. This was exactly the effect that we hoped the pictures would have.

A few days later, I got a call from an executive producer at Al Jazeera. (I still wonder how all these people got my number.) Al Jazeera for me has always been a news organisation that I admire because it challenges dominant narratives of non-Western countries in ways that I think are admirable. The producer wanted to bring me on to Femi Oke’s show, The Stream. Femi Oke is one of the first black women I ever saw on TV when I was growing up, and as a fellow Nigerian, I was flattered by the request. This seemed like a big opportunity. However, they wanted to run a thirty-minute feature, without me, pitting the Cambridge black boys against the boys from Yale in a discussion about how awful it was to be at an elite, white-dominated university, connecting their experiences with police brutality, microaggressions and everyday racism at university.

I instinctively turned it down; it was straying so far from the positive narrative that we had set out to pursue. How do we show people that Cambridge is a place where black people can thrive, and in the same breath tell them that it’s awful? Al Jazeera wouldn’t budge. Femi Oke called me personally, and I had to tell a lady that I had looked up to for effectively my whole life that I could not honour her request. Someone went behind my back and reached out to the boys personally – but luckily we were all on the same page; they knew that this was a bad idea too. As a budding broadcast journalist, it could have been one of the best opportunities of my life. But I had to refuse it in the pursuit of something bigger. We had a story to protect. We were intentional about the message that we wanted this campaign to represent and we stuck to it – even when it meant turning down significant coverage from a global news outlet.

Fortunately, most of the coverage of the Black Men of Cambridge campaign was positive. There were exceptions, though. In the days following the campaign, Camilla Turner, the Telegraph’s education editor, interviewed one of the boys we had photographed.10 The headline that ran with her story was ‘Britain’s top universities should not be “attacked” for admitting low numbers of ethnic minority students’ – even though she knew that this was not the message of our campaign.

This would not be the last time that the Telegraph misrepresented the facts behind one of Cambridge’s black-centred movements. Later in 2017, the Decolonise English working group at Cambridge sent its open letter to the English department, asking them to diversify their reading lists. Unfortunately, it fell into the hands of the press. On 25 October 2017, a photograph of Lola Olufemi, a black woman who was then the CUSU Women’s Officer, was plastered on the cover of the Telegraph, with the headline on their print edition reading, ‘Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors’.11 This was another Camilla Turner story. Lola was vilified for her role in the campaign. Although she was only one of over 100 people who had signed the open letter to the faculty, as a black woman who had been at the frontline of the campaign she was a visible, easy target.

Her efforts to diversify the curriculum were about more than just ‘seeking to exclude white men’ from the syllabus. Reducing the movement to this was a clear misrepresentation, which sought to frame Lola as a troublemaker who didn’t appreciate the contributions of white men to English.

[The Telegraph was] misconstruing our claims for a more inclusive curriculum to be one of replacement or a kind of iconoclasm, which is bullshit. I mean, I’m all for iconoclasm. We can literally shut Shakespeare off the curriculum – but that’s not what the open letter said! – Arenike

By placing Lola in particular on the cover, the Telegraph opened her up to abuse from racist trolls online. The next day, following over forty complaints to the press regulator IPSO, it issued a fickle correction, a discreet square inside the paper:12

The academics’ proposals were in fact recommendations. Neither they nor the open letter called for the University to replace white authors with black ones and there are no plans to do so. We apologise to all concerned.

But the damage had already been done. The Telegraph had succeeded in making Lola a scapegoat.

Many black students on the frontline have had similar experiences. Incidents like this force black activists to recede. Their rallying cries are reduced to whimpers by the fear of becoming the next target. As a black woman fighting to decolonise the curriculum, Lola represented both those who would benefit most from a diversified curriculum and those who had the most to lose from the fight.

For many black people and [people of colour], you can’t just put yourself in the limelight. If you’re black, you’re very identifiable. I’m not gonna go and occupy anything! – Arenike

Media attention may expose you to other silencing mechanisms, too. When Stormzy announced his Cambridge scholarship programme, Chelsea was interviewed on Sky News, and mysteriously received an email from the university’s communications team with ‘tips’ on how to discuss Cambridge in the interview.

I just messaged him back: ‘Hi. Thanks for these but I’m fine. Cheers. Chelsea.’ He was basically telling me in a very coded way to be careful of what I say about Cambridge. – Chelsea

When Mikai was featured on the BBC in a discussion about mental health at university, Warwick sent its university press officer to wait behind the scenes. ‘I will say what I like, thank you very much!’ was her response to the university’s attempt to stifle her. Universities are always working to make themselves look good. They even take credit for student labour that they’ve done next to nothing to meaningfully support, in order to make themselves look better. Regardless of their efforts to maintain their reputation, institutions have to be held accountable, and sometimes using the pressure of the media to speak up against them is the most powerful tool you have to force a response. We’re already being silenced by the press – but a university silencing you too? You have a right to speak out against your institution, and you should do so if you ever feel the need to – and you’re brave enough.

I completely understand why black students choose to steer clear of media attention when they can, or even disengage from political work altogether. However, the media can also be used positively, and has played an important role in promoting black voices. While we were at Cambridge, Courtney and Renée made a video for Courtney’s YouTube channel about their journey getting into Cambridge.13 Courtney was maligned by racists in the comments, and told that she was only accepted into the university to fulfil its diversity quota. When Courtney fought back, her comments went viral, she was able to use her interviews with media outlets such as Channel 4 and Cosmopolitan as a medium to continue to inspire black girls with her story.

Using the media in your political work can be fun sometimes – but be cautious or you’ll risk becoming the media’s black token. The Black Men of Cambridge campaign opened doors to many opportunities for me, particularly speaking ones. I had to try and make informed decisions about whether or not I was qualified to take up these opportunities, or whether I was being used by organisations hoping to tick their ‘diversity’ checklist. It became harder to tell whether I was using the media to get my message out there or the media was using me. I found myself winging a panel on ‘Encountering Brexit’, by the modern languages department, and was asked to do an interview on a BME orchestra coming to perform at a Cambridge music festival. Besides playing a few instruments when I was younger, nothing I had done indicated that I would be the most qualified person to speak on the importance of the orchestra’s presence. It felt as if I was asked only because I was black and they had my phone number.

So, black girls, the chances of you finding yourself dealing with the press are higher than your white counterparts. It’s the price of hypervisibility that no one prepared me for. It’s up to you, but be aware of the potential risks before you make the call.