An earlier and shorter version of this essay was initially on the University of Bristol’s Law School, Rich Law, Poor Law blog. It has been republished here with permission.

A post on the Rich Law, Poor Law blog of the Law School, University of Bristol, argues that by failing to waive the Covid vaccine patent, the Global North has failed the Global South. This argument resonates with our Rich Law, Poor Law workshops on race, in which we consider how the artificed category of ‘race’ has been used [historically and contemporarily] as the fundamental technology to abstract property out of manufactured identity traits and thus as a tool for accumulation of capital.

This is an extended version of an introductory contribution that I delivered on the 28th of October 2020 at a panel event hosted by the Oxford Law Faculty. The event was titled, ‘Race Equality in Higher Education’. A recording of the full event can be found here. I was asked to give my reflections on the state of racial justice in higher education – what has gone well, what needs improvement, what hopes for the future. My thoughts on those particular points are reproduced below.

In Adebisi, Foluke, “Law, Race and Development,” an entry in the Encyclopedia of Law and Development, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021, I examine the nexus of the seemingly straightforward concepts of law, race, and development. The full text can be accessed here or through your local library or other institutional channels. [Alternatively, contact me.]

Some years ago a colleague of mine asked why, despite the fact that I blogged a lot about decolonisation, I did not write about decolonisation in my academic work. My real answer [of which I responded with an abridged version], was that I did not think that anyone in UK HE wanted to hear about decolonial thought. Taking my colleague’s advice, I decided to switch my academic focus round – write scholarly about decoloniality and blog about everything else… and decolonisation. Decolonising Education in Africa is the first piece of academic work where my scholarship on decolonisation intersects overtly with my scholarship on Africa. In this essay I reflect on where the field and myself have found ourselves, five years after I wrote it.

When I started writing this, it was only 8 days into 2021. COVID-19 is stalking all lands. The vaccine distribution line is the abyssal line. The United States of America is being very disunited. The oppressed are still being oppressed and the obscenely rich are still amassing obscene amounts of wealth. Though we are all glad to escape 2020, 2021 has not brought the automatic refreshing we promised. I am saying this to remind us, that stepping into a new calendar year does not miraculously make all things new. We have to actively make change happen. Looking back matters. By looking back we ensure that we learn from the past. We take the lessons with us, from the good and bad. We look back so that we can do better in future and not drive further into perdition.

Parts of this essay were first published in the Critical Legal Thinking blog as part of the ‘Our Favourite CRT’ series curated by Kojo Koram and Yvette Russell. The aim of the series was to reflect on what different Critical Race Theorists teach us about the world we live in. In the initial post, I focus specifically on Baldwin’s 1979 address at Berkeley [See: James Baldwin at Berkeley, also below]. I have always found Baldwin’s insight into the nature of the world we live in quite unsettling. And I mean this in a good way. We think of many things as settled, despite the fact that the evidence of our senses tell us that they are definitely not settled. We think of land as property, as always having been property, as always being property… now and forever more. We think of the human as an individual body. When it is obvious the human thrives most in relationships – platonic or otherwise.  Thus, both Birhane and Gordon, suggest that the human is relational. I think, however, that one of the most intractable ideas we have, one of the most difficult concepts to dislodge, is the presumed fragmentation and linearity of European time.