I have been thinking about the concept of belonging for a long while – especially the ways in which racialisation produces various experiences of belonging. Even though belonging is a very human desire. My thoughts on the way the term “belonging” is sometimes deployed uncritically surfaced in my wider discussions of the limitations of EDI – both in the language and the actual concepts. So, I was overjoyed when I got the opportunity to contribute to a special issue on belonging in law schools. The resulting article was published in 2025: Adebisi, F. I. (2025). Seeking the university that is ours: understanding, unpacking and unsettling Black students’ racialised (un)belonging in UK law schools. The Law Teacher, 59(2), 200–216. In that article, I use the phrase “racialised (un)belonging” to describe the specificity of exclusions that racialised students experience in law schools. My argument was that these specificities must be understood in order for the measures to combat them to find any purchase. In the essay below, I unpack the term “racialised (un)belonging” as I used it in the article. Nevertheless, do let me know if you would like a copy of the published article.
Content warning
This essay contains discussion of rape and sexual assault in the context of racialised enslavement.
What is race?”
In a previous blog post, I critiqued the misuse and abuse occasioned in the adoption of a singular acronym as an umbrella term to describe all non-white people in the UK. The type of misuse and abuse is produced, inter alia, by an abject misunderstanding of the nature, history and use of “race”.
Historically, race was manufactured by European scholars as an almost entirely scientific/biological concept – through various markers (religion, culture, skin colour) – to convey supposed fundamental and hierarchical differences between different groups of people. The manufacture of this false category across history almost always had a material function – often dispossession of resources and/or liberty. According to Cedric Robinson, some of the first uses of racial categories emerge within Europe in the (circa) 12-15th centuries and were used to dehumanise working-class and Traveller peoples, among others. The same logics of false human hierarchies was deployed thereafter outside of Europe for the kidnap and enslavement of African peoples, as well as the colonisation (settler and non-settler) of most of the rest of the world. This latter function of racialisation has had a significant impact on how we currently understand race in the modern world as a neutral biologic categorisation based on skin colour. The concept of “racialisation” is a bit more helpful, as it clarifies the fact that the creation and reproduction of race is a social and evolving process.
Shilliam describes racialisation as the “way in which racist attributes and hierarchies come to determine the everyday meaning and common-sense valuation of an entity or phenomenon”. In other words, it describes “the process by which the creation of race, as a supposedly legitimate categorisation of humanity, becomes a salient and normalised tool implicated in the organisation of all social relations in all human time and all human space, for all human bodies.” This organisation places those racialised as white at not only the top of the ladder of humanity, but also as the standard norm of objective human existence. On the other side of the scale, those racialised as black are at the very bottom of this manufactured hierarchy of humanity.
In this sense, the use and function of the category of racialisation to dispossess racialised, enslaved and indigenous peoples of their lives, liberty and land/resources is the very thing that produces many of the macro- and micro-geopolitical and domestic disparities that we experience in the modern world as “race”.
Ultimately emphasis on skin colour as the only driver for “race” inadvertently and erroneously focuses our attention on false biologic distinctions while we look away from the material and sociolegal drivers and impacts of racialisation across space-time. This also means that we are more likely to concentrate on easy fixes to racial disparities, such as visual representation, rather than structural and epistemological transformations.
Our poor understanding of the nature of racialisation leads us to pathologise racially minoritised peoples rather than the logics and structures that have produced and continue to enable this continuous process of racialisation. For example, we would say something bad happened to X because of their race, rather than because of the perpetrator’s racism – alleged or otherwise.
Thus, our frames of references are shaped and distorted by this history. Therefore, I argue that the ontological delegitimisation of Black life through the mechanism of racialised enslavement, in a world that relied so heavily and so brutally on Black labour, required, and requires, more than the granting of liberty. It requires us to revisit some of the fundamental concepts we have developed about what it means to be human in this world. How can we even begin to understand belonging when our frames of reference automatically expel large swathes of humanity from the groups to which we are trying to suggest they should unquestionably belong?
What is belonging?
Belonging is particularly important to university measures that aim to improve student participation, retention and achievement. Yuval-Davis notes that people can experience belonging in the context of a place, a group and/or an idea. Therefore, structures that promote “feeling at ‘home’, feeling safe and… self-identification or identification by others” can help students do well at university. This could be especially significant to closing the awarding gap, recommendations for which have included increased staff representation and mentoring of students. Belonging thus fits into the affective domain of learning. Writing in 1956, Bloom identified three domains where learning happens: cognitive (mental), psychomotor (manual), and the affective (emotional). According to Bloom, the affective is a vital part of forming understanding during the learning process. It describes the ways we deal with things emotionally, such as feelings, values, appreciation, enthusiasms, motivations, and attitudes. Consequently, feelings of belonging to the university should help students improve their learning.
However, as Ajjawi and Gravett observe, belonging is often erroneously considered a uniform experience, and those presumptions do not always take into account the experiential and embodied differences of a diverse collective of students. Therefore, in the context of the university, it is also important to also ask questions that recognise the stratification of belonging, such as: “What are we wanting students to belong to?” What is the space of the university? What is the history of our discipline? Who are the key intellectual voices and ideas that we engage with? Should we really be asking racialised students to “be at home” in these spaces, with this history and with these ideas?
In the present, institutions of higher education continue to be increasingly drawn into the logic of racialised capital, reliant on rising tuition fees, growing unequal casualisation of academic staff, unmanageable workloads, discriminatory pay gaps, incongruous funding models, and unequal access to higher education. Additionally, in the past, universities in the Global North developed under a logic of a hierarchy of knowledge that placed racialised peoples outside the context of the human. That hierarchy of knowledge, despite some progress, has been maintained into the present, giving rise to calls to “decolonise the university”. So, I ask again: should we be asking racialised students to “be at home” in these spaces, with this history and with these ideas? Should we be asking racialised students to belong to the university?
What is racialised unbelonging?
My use of the phrase “racialised unbelonging” here is heavily influenced by Spillers’ articulation of “ungendering”, most especially in her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” Therein, Spillers uses the concept of “ungendering” to refer to the societal effects of racialised enslavement and its afterlives on the treatment of the bodies and personhood of Black women in the USA. In the light of this history of enslavement, lynchings and Jim Crow, Black women, through the experiences of sexual brutality, forced reproduction, torture and manual labour, have their humanity placed outside the norm of femininity – not as the opposite of it, but completely foreign to it.
Thus, Spillers distinguishes the process of gendering of White women that transpires in the domestic space, predicated on the gendered roles of motherhood and care for family, from the process of ungendering of Black women that begins on the slave ship and is predicated on captivity and coerced servitude, as well as loss of gender, family, and bodily autonomy. For women who are racialised black, their relation to gender is produced by a divergent temporality and spatiality – a different genesis that has a different trajectory, destiny, and quality. The slave ship is a space that is far removed from the home where societal power produces an experience that subordinates the feminine to the masculine.
In essence, gendering involves the process by which cultural and societal expectations produce clear demarcations in the experiences and outcomes of people gendered masculine and those gendered feminine. The expectation that women wear certain clothes, should be protected and therefore take up particularly nurturing roles in society are examples of this. In contrast, ungendering unmoors women racialised black from this process. Ungendering, therefore, produces a body that is open to be violated by all, in all ways. In her essay, Spillers describes scenes where racialised Black women are whipped by an overseer and suggests that this:
“materialized scene of unprotected female flesh – of female flesh “ungendered” – offers a praxis and a theory, a text for living and for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations.” (Spillers 1987: 68).
Fundamentally, the whipping scene sharply deviates from expectations of protection and idealised femininity. These divergences in experience noted by Spillers are also illustrated in the differential treatment of Black and White women in the USA during the period of racialised enslavement.
This is keenly demonstrated in the introduction of the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem – a legal doctrine translated to mean, “that which is born follows the womb”. This doctrine was adopted, beginning in 1662, in Virginia and many other English slave-holding territories in the Americas, which decreed that a child born of a female enslaved person was themselves born a slave. Partus sequitur ventrem operated irrespective of the status of the father and in direct contradiction to pre-existing English common law, where status was inherited through the father. Consequently, slave masters were provided with a commercial incentive and legal reason to sexually assault those they held in slavery so as to enhance their own capital wealth. So, this doctrine sanctioned rape and sexual violence against enslaved African women and girls, whose labour was already coerced and unfree and whose humanity was already ignored and denigrated. Thus, the production of human commodities through the violence of abstraction was assured by legal decree in repeated acts of cruel violation, brutally reducing the human body to a unit of labour and to the goods and services they could produce.
Spillers asserts that emancipation/the end of racialised enslavement does not bring an end to the ungendering of Black women, because there is no re-evaluation of what it means to be human, and society is still underpinned by the thought patterns and cultures that operated to maintain the practice of enslavement.
“Even though the captive flesh/body has been “liberated”… dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement, as the human subject is “murdered” over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise.” (Spillers 1987: 68)
In the same vein, I understand racialised unbelonging as a process that is produced through a colonial history that inscribes the racialised other – especially the racialised black other – not as subhuman but beyond the bounds of humanity – not as the opposite of it, but completely foreign to humanity. The end of racialised enslavement in the UK and its dominions did not return racialised peoples back into the category “human”; instead, compensation was paid to the slaveowners. The “end” of colonisation did not grant freedom to the formerly colonised to choose their own paths; instead, they were forced to adopt the law, political structures and global economy of their colonial overlords as superior systems. The recent “immigration culture wars” are just one manifestation of the extension of that “unhumaning”. In other words, despite liberation, “dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded” in the logics, language and structure that produce historical and contemporary disparities.
In this way, I wish to distinguish “not belonging” that is produced through other lenses of societal disadvantage that see belonging as attainable within that same structure from “unbelonging” produced through racialisation whose sole purpose is to enact the absolute negation of humanity for people thus racialised.
In essence, the structure of the modern world is predicated on that unbelonging; belonging cannot happen within it. Unbelonging, therefore, produces a condition for racialised students (especially those racialised black) outside all other axes of belonging. For them, it negates the possibility of bringing their whole selves into the university classroom.
The question for us as law teachers is whether we can reverse unbelonging that has been produced by Euro-modern law and epistemology using Euro-modern law and epistemology, especially when both are largely silent about the ways in which unbelonging has been produced. Law students who are racialised thus experience the law school classroom as persistent outsiders – alienated by the structure, content and process of the law in ways that deny not just their specific experiences but the fundamental anti-Black nature of the world. They cannot be at home in the law school as it is, and so they call for its abolition.
