Act up and act out! An uppity manifesto for institutional racism in higher education institutions

Anti-racism is slowly being institutionally-integrated in Higher Education Institutions (HEI's) in numerous Liberal democracies. However, HEI elites are characterized by Whiteness and White Fragility privileging managerialist approaches pushing Impression Management agendas that compromise the degree to which internal challenges to institutional racism may be 'tolerated', permitting change primarily only where anti-racist drives from below align with institutional interests among elites. When anti-racist resistance breaches the limits of what may be permitted by an HEI, White Fragility disciplines its interrogators. In response, a recent contribution in this journal argues, we may create institutional 'margins', from where People of Colour may take refuge from institutions that conduct and deny racist practices, and mobilize collectively in resistance. Building on recent contributions in this journal by Dar et al, this work draws on historical anti-imperial resistances to propose an expansion of collective institutional resistance approaches into an extra-institutional dimension designed to make HEIs more publicly accountable when their internal efforts to end racism are compromised by hegemonic White Fragility, managerialist practices and neoliberal structures.