Introduction

Professionalism as a concept requires staff and students to behave with integrity during the university experience (Van der Sluis, Burden & Huet, 2017). This theme directly tackles what antiracist professionalism could be and look like for a university. ‘Professionalism’ is a code (Sethy, 2018). This is true both in its role as a code of conduct, written and unwritten rules for behaviour within a workplace, and as a system of meaning that is designed to include a select group of people while maintaining the illusion of inclusion for all. It is no coincidence, for example, that the concept is associated with roles and industries that have often been gatekept from working-class communities.

Scrutinising the notion of professionalism and its respective responsibilities and attributes further, from within a culture where the concept of ‘work’ and the places we do it in have been moulded by racial capitalism (Mehri, 2020), reveals them as mechanisms of maintaining an exploitative status quo. Dominant themes covered in critiques of the concept of ‘professionalism’ concern the double standards of behaviour for marginalised staff that relate to oppressive stereotypes within being and acting professionally (Rios, 2015). Codes of ‘civility’ and ‘politeness’ flatten the historic roots and inherently traumatic nature of experiencing oppression, and demand a lack of emotion on the part of the marginalised when encountering racism, while allowing for racist and anti-Black behaviour that is presented through the lens of ‘politeness’ (Pillay, 2015).

When exploring the wider systemic influences, we see the ways in which capitalism-engendered means of subjugation, such as gentrification, shape the ways racialised communities, and Black communities in particular, are policed by the concept (Uddin, 2020).

The ways in which the concept of professionalism is used to enforce a ‘you’re not welcome here’ message through every individual aspect of being, for example, clothing, language, hair and food, require marginalised employees, and Black employees, to ‘shrink themselves’ to assimilate (Gray, 2019).

It is no coincidence that the ‘professional’ as a racialised concept is reminiscent of racialised concepts of ‘tidiness’ and ‘propriety’ as levied in uniform policies against school children from racialised communities (Dabiri, 2020), with numerous cases of Black children being excluded from UK schools because their natural hair was deemed as ‘not meeting school uniform requirements’ (Joseph-Salisbury, 2020).