Visible, but not always valued, whose voices are heard, whose excellence is recognised, and who gets forgiven?

The recent treatment of Professor Jason Arday has prompted important conversations about racism within higher education. For me, however, the discussion needs to go much further than belonging, wellbeing, support, or how minoritised academics are expected to cope when something happens to them.

His experience should force us to examine the deeper institutional conditions that make such treatment possible in the first place, whose excellence is assumed, whose credibility is questioned, whose achievements are treated as ordinary, and whose success appears to require repeated explanation or verification. What is particularly troubling is the way a highly accomplished Black academic can still find his standing exposed to forms of scrutiny, suspicion, or challenge that many of us struggle to imagine being applied in the same way to a white academic with an equivalent record.

For me, that is the wider issue. It is not simply about the impact on one individual, important though that is. It is about the systems of judgement, recognition, authority, protection, and accountability that continue to operate unevenly across higher education.

Those systems shape who is trusted, who is believed, who is recognised as a leader, whose achievements are celebrated, whose mistakes are remembered, and whose shortcomings institutions are prepared to overlook. They also shape who is expected to absorb the harm and then seek support afterwards.

That distinction matters.

We cannot keep responding to racism primarily by asking minoritised academics how institutions can help them recover from it. We also have to ask why the conditions that produced the harm were allowed to exist in the first place.

When excellence is still treated as unexpected

What happened to Jason Arday resonates with me because of a question I have increasingly found myself asking throughout my own career.

Would this have happened in the same way to a white academic with the same record, achievements, standing, and experience?

There appears to remain an uncomfortable presumption within parts of higher education that when a person of colour excels, particularly when we enter spaces of authority traditionally associated with whiteness, our success remains somehow open to question.

Our achievements can require further verification. Our competence can appear provisional rather than assumed. Our presence in senior spaces can be treated as something that requires explanation rather than the natural consequence of what we have achieved.

I recognise that experience personally.

Throughout my career, I have often felt that I am held to a different standard from some of my white peers. Achievements that have required years of work can be minimised, overlooked, or treated as simply what I was expected to do. At the same time, comparatively modest achievements elsewhere can receive greater recognition and celebration.

More troubling is the asymmetry around mistakes and perceived shortcomings.

When you are minoritised, it can feel as though you are required to demonstrate excellence repeatedly merely to establish your legitimacy, yet a single perceived misstep can be noticed, amplified, remembered, and subsequently used to redefine how your capability is viewed.

That produces a very particular kind of exhaustion.

You are not simply doing the work.

You are constantly having to prove that you deserve to be doing it.

Visibility is not the same as influence

This also brings me to something I have been thinking about increasingly, tokenism.

Tokenism is often understood too narrowly. We imagine someone being invited into a room simply so an organisation can claim diversity.

But contemporary tokenism can be far more subtle.

An institution can genuinely appreciate someone’s contribution and still engage in tokenism.

The important question is not simply, are people of colour visible?

It is, what happens when decisions are being made?

Are we trusted?

Are we heard?

Are we given authority?

Does our expertise change the direction of the conversation?

Are we able to shape priorities rather than simply deliver them?

I have increasingly experienced a disconnection between being visible when diversity is institutionally useful and being influential when substantive decisions are made.

Universities understandably want people from different backgrounds represented at graduations, open days, public events, widening participation activities, equality initiatives, promotional material, and celebrations of institutional success. These are moments when universities demonstrate publicly that people from different backgrounds belong.

But representation becomes problematic when the same people who are valuable enough to embody diversity publicly feel that their expertise, authority, and leadership are less readily valued internally.

That distinction between visibility and influence sits at the heart of tokenism for me.

I have reached points where I have had to ask myself whether I am being invited because my perspective is genuinely wanted, or because my presence makes the room look more representative.

Those are profoundly different things.

Being allowed to lead is not the same as being afforded authority

There is another dimension that receives much less attention.

Even when minoritised academics successfully reach leadership positions, appointment does not necessarily bring the authority, respect, or institutional protection that should accompany those roles.

You can hold the title and still find your expertise questioned.

You can carry responsibility while decisions within your area are made without you.

You can be expected to resolve problems while having been excluded from the decisions that created them.

You can have formal authority on paper while discovering that, in practice, that authority becomes negotiable when it conflicts with the preferences of others.

My own experiences have repeatedly made me reflect on whether the authority attached to my leadership is interpreted in the same way as it would be for some of my white colleagues.

This matters because representation without authority is not equality.

A diverse leadership photograph does not demonstrate inclusive leadership if some people within that photograph are afforded less credibility, less autonomy, and less institutional protection than others.

Which voices are valued?

There is a further question that institutions committed to equality need to confront.

What counts as expertise?

Different lived experiences cause us to see different things.

Someone who has experienced exclusion may recognise barriers that remain invisible to someone who has always moved comfortably through the same system. Someone who has repeatedly had their competence questioned may notice how credibility is distributed. Someone who has experienced racism may interpret belonging, progression, psychological safety, representation, and student experience through a different lens.

That is knowledge.

Yet institutions can unconsciously continue to treat familiar, predominantly white Eurocentric perspectives as the neutral benchmark against which leadership is judged, while perspectives shaped by different lived experiences are seen as specialist, peripheral, or primarily relevant to equality work.

This creates an extraordinary contradiction.

We say we want diversity because different people bring different perspectives.

Then, when those people arrive, we reward them most readily when they reproduce the perspectives already present.

True diversity cannot simply mean allowing different identities into the selection process.

It has to mean valuing the different knowledge, priorities, questions, and understandings that people bring with them.

Otherwise, what we have created is diversity of appearance without diversity of power.

And who gets forgiven?

Perhaps one of the most difficult issues is forgiveness.

All of us make mistakes. People should be able to learn, change, and grow.

But institutional forgiveness is not always distributed equally.

Some people seem to receive repeated opportunities for rehabilitation. Their behaviour is contextualised. Their intent is considered. Their strengths are weighed against their shortcomings. Their mistakes become learning experiences.

Others find that relatively minor errors become part of an enduring narrative about their character, credibility, or suitability for leadership.

That difference matters.

It matters even more when colleagues who report experiences of racism, bullying, undermining, or unacceptable behaviour see little discernible consequence, while those whose behaviour they have raised concerns about continue to receive opportunity, recognition, and institutional confidence.

The issue is therefore bigger than any one appointment or individual.

It becomes a question of what the institution communicates through its decisions.

Whose experiences are believed?

Whose wellbeing is protected?

Which behaviours carry consequences?

Who receives the benefit of the doubt?

Who receives another opportunity?

And who remains permanently required to prove themselves?

For minoritised colleagues, repeatedly watching concerns acknowledged without meaningful accountability can send a damaging message, that our experiences may be heard, but they do not necessarily carry enough weight to change what happens next.

Racism does not require racist intent

One of the barriers to discussing these experiences is the persistent search for intent.

Was race consciously considered?

Did someone deliberately discriminate?

Did they mean to undermine someone because of their ethnicity?

But racial inequity does not require someone to wake up intending to discriminate.

Patterns matter.

Who is repeatedly given opportunity matters.

Who is presumed capable matters.

Who is given latitude matters.

Who is challenged matters.

Who has to justify themselves matters.

Who is listened to matters.

And the cumulative impact of all of those decisions matters.

If the same groups repeatedly experience less recognition, less authority, greater scrutiny, and fewer opportunities, the absence of conscious intent does not make the outcome equitable.

The personal cost of repeatedly having to prove you belong

I have spent much of my career contributing to education, widening participation, equality, student experience, and anti racism, locally and nationally.

Yet despite what I have achieved, there are still moments when I find myself asking whether I am genuinely seen as a leader, or whether I am more readily seen as someone who can deliver, support, advise, represent, and contribute.

That distinction matters deeply.

There is a particular racialised pattern that I believe Asian academics can experience, being seen as dependable workers, people who will deliver, take responsibility, solve problems, and support institutional priorities, while strategic authority and leadership are more readily associated with others.

Eventually, repeatedly having to prove your legitimacy changes your relationship with the institution.

You begin to question whether another application is worth making.

Whether another opportunity is genuinely an opportunity.

Whether another invitation represents meaningful inclusion or merely visible inclusion.

Whether speaking again will produce change, or simply require you to explain once more why something that others experience as insignificant feels very different when viewed through the accumulation of decades of lived experience.

That is the part of racism that institutional language around resilience and wellbeing often misses.

The solution cannot simply be to make minoritised people more resilient to inequitable systems.

The systems have to change.

Jason Arday should prompt a bigger conversation

That is why the discussion around Jason Arday should not end with expressions of solidarity.

Nor should our response simply be to support minoritised academics when events leave them hurt, exhausted, or questioning whether they belong.

Support matters.

But support without structural change risks helping people survive systems we should instead be changing.

We need to examine how universities distribute opportunity, credibility, authority, recognition, scrutiny, accountability, and forgiveness.

We need to ask why people of colour can be celebrated as evidence of institutional diversity while simultaneously feeling that their voices carry less influence.

We need to challenge cultures in which minoritised academics can reach senior positions and still find their authority treated as negotiable.

And we need to recognise that lived experience is not an interesting addition to leadership.

It is expertise.

If institutions genuinely want diverse leadership, they must be prepared for that leadership to see different problems, ask different questions, challenge familiar assumptions, and sometimes make those already comfortable within the system uncomfortable.

The test of inclusion is therefore not who appears in the photograph.

It is who has power when the photograph has been taken.

Who is heard.

Who is trusted.

Who is permitted to lead.

Whose excellence is recognised without qualification.

Whose mistakes are forgiven.

And whose humanity is afforded the same generosity as everyone else’s.

Until we are prepared to confront those questions, we may continue to increase diversity without ever truly redistributing belonging, recognition, or power.