The issue is change' Edinburgh University review must not just be 'symbolic apology'

For Tommy J Curry the question about Edinburgh University's institutional racism, or its debts around transatlantic slavery and scientific racism, can be captured by one simple fact: he is the first Black philosophy professor in its 440-year history.

- Severin Carrell

As the Louisiana-born academic who helped lead the university's recent self-critical inquiry into its extensive links to transatlantic slavery and the construction of racist theories of human biology, that sharply captures the challenge it faces. Not just that; Curry suspects he is the first Black academic in the UK to lead a university's investigation into its links to enslavement and empire. His goal is to guarantee he is far from the last Black professor.

"I'm a first-generation person. I grew up in poverty, grew up at the end of segregation," he said. "Why is that important to not be the first? Well, it's important because everybody has an 'in', and if there's nothing left after your 'in', you just become a symbol for somebody else's story."

The point was not to simply produce a report but to act, he said.

"The real fundamental issue is change. Not a symbolic apology, not a pay cheque. [How] do you create leagues of Black thinkers and clinicians and doctors and engineers and artists that fill the gap of what were lost by what white people engineered for centuries that deprived the world of Black human genius? That's why this report matters so much to me."

In turn, he added, Scotland could become better equipped to tackle the endemic problems of racial disparity in health outcomes, mortality, employment, housing, and education. "So when you think of it this way, what does reparation mean if it doesn't mean dealing with the consequences that were created by the very institutions you want to write the cheque?"