Black Studies at Birmingham City University
In February 2026, Birmingham City University quietly decided to close its Black studies master’s degree. The decision was reached eight months after the degree had launched and was communicated to staff in a meeting. Professor Kehinde Andrews, who leads the university’s Black studies department, said it was the first time university management had indicated the degree was under threat. Five Black members of staff were placed at risk of redundancy. No equality impact assessment had been completed. Current students were informed by email, which one described as cold and dismissive.
Among those students was Charmaine, one of the last cohort on the MA course. She had enrolled because she believed the degree offered something that nowhere else in British higher education provided: a sustained, rigorous engagement with Black intellectual life on its own terms, not as a module appended to a curriculum organised around other priorities. When the email arrived, she put the question that the institution had no answer for: was it performative? She meant the commitments the university had made - publicly, in writing, with some ceremony - to racial justice. She meant the gap between the language of solidarity and the administrative decision that had just ended her programme. That question deserves a structural answer, because what happened to Charmaine and to those five staff members is not an isolated failure of institutional follow-through. It is the British racial settlement operating as designed.
What makes this episode analytically instructive is not the closure itself, though the closure matters, but the contradiction it exposes. In 2021, Birmingham City University had published its Black Lives Matter Antiracist Commitment Plan. “We stand with our Black students and our staff,” it declared. “We want to be part of the solution.” Four years later, the same institution had closed its undergraduate Black studies degree, placed the master’s under threat, and admitted it had not carried out the equality assessment its own policy frameworks required. This is qualitatively different from hypocrisy, though it involves hypocrisy. It is the expression of a structural condition that shapes how racial inequality is reproduced in Britain - quietly, administratively, and with very little political friction. That structural condition is the absence of a civil rights struggle and understanding it is the purpose of this essay.
Absence of a Civil Rights Struggle
The absence of a civil rights struggle in the United Kingdom is not simply a historical gap. It is an ongoing structural condition. It has determined the specific form that racial capitalism takes in British cities, shaped the legal and political terrain on which racial inequality reproduces itself, and created the conditions under which what I call lawfare - the use of formally neutral legal and policy frameworks to maintain racial hierarchy while offering plausible deniability to those who operate them - can function with minimal friction and near-total impunity.
I want to be precise about what the absence consists of. I am not claiming that there was no Black political organising in Britain. The history of Claudia Jones, the Caribbean Artists Movement, the Mangrove Nine, the New Cross Fire marches, the anti-deportation campaigns, the community self-defence networks that developed in the 1970s and 1980s - this history is real, important, and largely suppressed in the official account of post war Britain. What the UK never produced, and what the American civil rights movement did produce, was a consolidated juridical confrontation with the state that forced the legal apparatus to develop an institutional language for structural racial harm. That juridical confrontation is what built the infrastructure - the case law, the legislative precedents, the doctrinal architecture - that at least requires the American state to account for racial effects and not merely racial intentions. Imperfectly, inconsistently, and in a system that has worked systematically to hollow out those gains: yes. But the confrontation happened, and its traces remain in the law in ways that have no British equivalent.
The first consequence of this absence is the failure to produce a named Black political subject with legal standing. The American civil rights movement generated a political subject - Black America - that was recognisable to the state as a claimant, with organised infrastructure, institutional memory, and a documented claim on the terms of citizenship. What the British state produced instead was the administrative category of “ethnic minority” - a classification that disaggregates, absorbs, and neutralises. It does not name a political subject. It names a bureaucratic convenience. The result is that Black British political identity exists, but has never been institutionally consolidated in the way that gave rise to the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP Legal Defence Fund, the HBCU network, or the legal architecture of the Voting Rights Act. There is no British equivalent of any of these, and the absence is not accidental.
The second consequence is the liberal alibi of multiculturalism. In the absence of a confrontational rights struggle, the British state was able to substitute cultural recognition for structural redress. Multiculturalism became the framework - food, festivals, representation in the arts, diversity in public appointments - which gave progressive cover to a settlement that never engaged seriously with housing, wealth, policing, or capital. This is qualitatively different from the American situation, where the civil rights movement forced a confrontation with the structural question even if the answers were inadequate. In Britain, that confrontation was largely pre-empted. Scarman in 1981 is the template: acknowledge the grievance, recommend community liaison, commission a report, leave the property order intact. The form of recognition was used to foreclose the substance of redress.
The BCU case is a precise contemporary instance of this template, updated for the post-Floyd moment. In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, British universities competed to issue statements of solidarity and commitment to racial justice. Birmingham City University, as the first institution in the country to offer Black studies at undergraduate level, had particular standing to make such a commitment, and its Black Lives Matter Antiracist Commitment Plan was a document of public recognition. What followed was the closure of the undergraduate degree in 2024 and the effective termination of the master’s programme in 2026. Robert Beckford, who taught on the undergraduate course before it was shuttered, named the dynamic precisely: whether deliberate or unwitting, the outcome was the erosion of Black intellectual infrastructure at precisely the moment universities had claimed renewed commitment to racial justice. Cultural solidarity in 2021; portfolio rationalisation in 2026. The Scarman template holds.[i]
The third consequence is the weakness of accountability infrastructure around state violence. In Britain, police killings of Black people - Oluwaseun Adigun, Rashan Charles, Chris Kaba, Sean Rigg, Darren Cumberbatch - are processed through a coroner system and an Independent Office for Police Conduct that structurally favour non-accountability. There is grief, there is organising, and there are families whose courage and persistence in the face of institutional obstruction deserves to be named as political struggle. But there is no juridical infrastructure, built through prior struggle, that treats these deaths as a systemic challenge to the state requiring a structural response rather than a series of isolated incidents. The accountability architecture is weak precisely because no political movement has forced it open from below in the way that the American civil rights movement and its successors forced the development - however incomplete - of federal civil rights litigation as a terrain of contest.
The fourth consequence, and the one I regard as most significant from the standpoint of political economy, is what happens to the property question. The civil rights movement in the United States at minimum put reparations, redlining, and the racial wealth gap on the political table, even if Congress never acted and the courts progressively weakened the tools. In Britain, the equivalent conversation barely exists in mainstream political discourse. The figures from my work with Zakiya McKenzie on crack-up urbanism make the scale of the problem visible. The UK’s racial wealth gap remains stark: ONS Wealth and Assets Survey data show that the median Black African household holds around one‑tenth of the wealth of the median White British household. Evidence from Shelter (2023), the Runnymede Trust (2021), and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (2018) demonstrates that Black and minority ethnic renters face systematic barriers in the private rented sector, including higher rates of rejection, greater scrutiny, and more onerous affordability checks. In mortgage lending, analysis by the Financial Conduct Authority (2021) finds that Black African and other minority ethnic applicants experience lower acceptance rates and are more likely to be offered higher‑cost products than White applicants with comparable financial profiles.
Lawfare
It is at this point that lawfare enters the analysis as a concept with specific explanatory purchase. Lawfare, as I use it, describes the operation of legal and policy frameworks that maintain racial disparities while offering plausible deniability to those who uphold them. It is a mode of racial governance that is distinctive to societies - Britain chief among them - where the absence of a civil rights struggle means that the state was never forced to develop a juridical language for structural racial harm. Because that language was never developed, “neutral” policies can produce racialised outcomes without anyone being legally required to explain the gap.
The American civil rights movement produced, under sustained political pressure, the doctrine of disparate impact - the legal principle that a policy can constitute unlawful discrimination even if it makes no explicit reference to race, if it produces racially unequal outcomes. The doctrine has been progressively weakened by the courts since the 1980s. But its existence at all - its availability as a legal instrument - represents a concession that was extracted from the state through struggle. No equivalent doctrine exists in British law. The Equality Act 2010 contains indirect discrimination provisions, but they are drafted and interpreted in ways that place the evidentiary burden on claimants, require comparison with specific comparator groups, and are routinely defeated by employers and institutions who can demonstrate that a policy serves a “legitimate aim.” The framework is designed to manage individual complaints, not to contest structural patterns. It was drafted in the absence of a political movement capable of demanding more.
This is what makes lawfare so effective as an instrument of racial governance in Britain. Section 21 no-fault evictions do not mention race. Permitted development rights that strip planning consultation in minority neighbourhoods do not mention race. The permitted development conversions of commercial space to residential that are exempt from affordable housing requirements do not mention race. The administrative mechanisms of the Hostile Environment policy - the requirement to prove immigration status to rent a home, open a bank account, access healthcare - did not mention race. The decision by Birmingham City University to close its Black studies master’s degree without completing an equality impact assessment did not mention race: it was a portfolio review, a financial calculation about low student recruitment, an administrative determination about course viability. Each of these, individually, is defensible on bureaucratic or economic grounds. Collectively, they constitute a racialised system of urban dispossession. And because no prior juridical confrontation forced the development of a legal language for structural racial harm, that system operates largely uncontested in the courts and largely unnamed in political discourse.
The Windrush scandal is the clearest recent illustration of lawfare in operation. The Hostile Environment policy was a set of administrative and regulatory mechanisms, each individually presentable as legitimate border management, that collectively made life legally untenable for a generation of Black British people who had arrived lawfully, built this country, and paid into it for decades. The policy destroyed livelihoods, separated families, produced wrongful deportations, and in documented cases contributed to deaths. The response - an apology, a compensation scheme that has still not paid the majority of claimants, a public inquiry whose recommendations have been partially implemented at most - is itself a form of lawfare: the management of grievance through process without structural accountability. In a political system with a functioning civil rights infrastructure, built through struggle, what was done to the Windrush generation would have produced a constitutional crisis. In Britain, it produced a parliamentary apology and Wendy Williams’s Lessons Learned Review.
There is a final dimension to this argument that concerns the grammar of grievance - the available language through which structural racial harm can be articulated and made politically legible. The civil rights movement gave Black Americans a grammar for naming structural harm in terms that the state was, at least formally, required to respond to. In Britain, the equivalent grammar - when it is deployed, and it is deployed, by scholars, by activists, by communities who know what is being done to them - is routinely dismissed as American importation. This is a remarkably effective closure mechanism. Any analysis that names systemic racism, that draws on the vocabulary of structural racial harm, is met with the assertion that Britain is not America, that the histories are different, that the framework does not travel. The histories are indeed different. But the function of this dismissal is to ensure that British racial inequality remains perpetually without an adequate political language that the mainstream is obliged to take seriously. Lawfare thrives in precisely this discursive environment, where the naming of what it does can always be deferred on the grounds that the name belongs to somewhere else.
The net result is a settlement in which racial inequality in Britain is reproduced quietly, administratively, and with very little political friction - which is, from the perspective of those who benefit from it, considerably more efficient than the American version. The crack-up that structures British cities - the racialised distribution of environmental hazard, mortgage access, housing wealth, policing intensity, and spatial mobility - does not require explicit segregation. It requires only that the legal and policy apparatus continue to do its work without a juridical tradition, born of struggle, that would force it to account for what it produces. The absence of a civil rights struggle is not a historical curiosity about a road not taken. It is the active infrastructure of the present. It is what allows five Black academics to be placed at risk of redundancy, a student’s education to be ended by email, and an institution to look at the gap between its 2021 commitments and its 2026 decisions and find nothing there that the law requires it to explain.
[i] Lord Scarman’s report into the 1981 Brixton uprising - triggered by the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Swamp 81, which deployed stop and search powers against young Black men at a rate that became unsustainable - acknowledged that policing had been heavy-handed and that social deprivation had contributed to the disorder. It recommended improved community relations between police and Black communities and a review of the sus laws. It explicitly rejected the argument that institutional racism existed within the Metropolitan Police. Its framework of individual bad practice rather than structural discrimination became the template for official responses to racial unrest in Britain for the following four decades. The Macpherson Report (1999), which introduced the concept of institutional racism into British public discourse following the murder of Stephen Lawrence, represented a partial departure from the Scarman framework - but its central finding was progressively diluted in implementation, and the Metropolitan Police’s subsequent record on stop and search, undercover surveillance of Black political organisations, and the deaths of Black people in custody suggests that the Scarman settlement proved more durable than Macpherson’s intervention.
Note- For further reading: Scarman Report (1981), Williams Review (2020), Kehinde Andrews on Black studies in Britain.
Thanks for your critical perspective on Black Studies at BCU. I am deeply concerned at the potential loss of the MA in Black Studies at Birmingham City University, a programme that has served as one of the UK’s few dedicated academic spaces for the study of Black history, politics, and culture. This comes at a moment of heightened global tension, making its preservation all the more urgent.
Six years after the murder of George Floyd, the need for rigorous, critical engagement with structural racism has not diminished. This programme stands as a tangible legacy of the global reckoning that followed his and other deaths occasioned by sustained systemic racism, offering students and communities a place to examine inequality, Black achievement and resistance with intellectual rigour.
In the UK, the rise of the far‑right and the intensification of culture‑war narratives have created a climate in which race‑equity work is increasingly misrepresented as divisive. In the US, coordinated legal challenges to DEI initiatives and restrictions on teaching race demonstrate how quickly hard‑won progress is being unravelled.
Against this backdrop, the MA in Black Studies is an essential institutional safeguard for Black scholarship at a time when such scholarship is being contested, constrained, or dismantled. Its loss would mark a profound step backwards.