White supremacy in postgraduate education at elite universities in England: the role of the gatekeepers

Home BAME students are under-represented on postgraduate courses in England, especially at elite universities, however, there has been little research on why this should be. This research starts to fill this gap, arguing that gatekeepers to postgraduate courses at some of the most elite universities contribute to maintaining white supremacy. Innovatively combining Critical Race Theory with Bourdieu’s tools, the study found that at these institutions, white supremacy is upheld firstly by an operationalising of discourses of meritocracy; secondly by non-transparent recruitment to programmes from UG courses which are mainly white; and thirdly by the gatekeepers interpreting the low numbers of BAME students either as ‘unconscious bias’, which in their view cannot be helped, or a result of individual or cultural deficit on the part of the students themselves. All of this, we argue, allows gatekeepers to excuse their own role and that of the institution in maintaining white supremacy.