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Before my internship began, I was burdened with the quiet weight of a question that I —and many others before me—couldn’t shake:
How do you disrupt decades of institutional racism?
Not just critique it. Not just survive it. But dismantle it.
This question followed me out of the seminar rooms of my second-year medical sciences module: Decolonising Medicine . In those discussions, it became impossible not to see the gaps: in who we studied, whose stories were left untold, and who never quite appeared in the curriculum at all. That feeling of absence lingered throughout the term. And in time, I began to feel absent myself.
This rumination became the starting point for my application to the Anti-Racism Project Internship with the Students’ Guild — an invitation to explore the intersection of student experience, institutional culture, and equity work.
I shaped the project around two core areas:
1. A Decolonise Your Own Curriculum resource tailored to specific degree programmes
2. A study into how students in sports societies perceive and respond to racism.
Here’s why:
We often look to society to tell us who we are — and for many like me, academia was where I tried to form that identity. But what happens when you look to a mirror and don’t see yourself at all? Perhaps that’s a fate already familiar to those whose intellectual contributions have been erased from our educational systems — whose absence is often mistaken for non-existence.
University has always been more than just a place of education — it’s a cultural infrastructure, built on power and colonialism, mirroring the fractures of society itself. Likewise, sports culture often imitates society — and within student communities, it can be where belonging is felt most strongly, or most painfully.
A racism-in-sports survey I conducted revealed a pattern: while many students felt confident recognising racism, far fewer felt confident responding to it. That gap — between awareness and action — spoke volumes about where we stand as a community.
And perhaps, it echoes a deeper, more uncomfortable sentiment that many of us quietly carry. As a Black woman at a predominantly white institution, I could write a book on my racialised experience. But if I did, I might realise that the book is written in third person, not first.
Often, we are left feeling like spectators to systems too large to move. We narrate our experiences through the lens of prescribed victimhood — and more often than not, we don’t move beyond it.
Bystander culture doesn’t just exist in teams — it lives quietly in classrooms, committees, and corridors. We become so used to navigating around injustice that responding to it begins to feel disruptive.
But this work reminded me that disruption isn’t always loud.
Sometimes it looks like asking a question no one else thought to raise.
Sometimes it’s offering a tool — a reading, a resource, a response — that makes space for someone else.
Alongside the internship, I developed a Hidden Figures resource for Medical Sciences: a contribution that sought to expand the narrative around who has shaped science, and whose stories deserve to be heard. That work, which led to my recognition as an EDI Champion within the programme, felt like a quiet reclamation — a way of saying: we were always here.
There is progress. And still, so much more to be done. Two truths held in tension.
What I’ve learned is that institutional change rarely arrives all at once. It grows from slow, thoughtful acts — from intention, from care, from small decisions to do things differently.
If you’ve ever felt like you’re not cut out for the mental weight of protest, or the exhaustion of calling out a colleague — if you’ve simply felt too tired to speak or have grown a little too familiar with your own absence — know that you are not alone. And know that — while it can feel like it — making change isn’t a solitary pursuit.
Sometimes, all it takes is a question. A shift in language. A resource left behind for someone else.
Sometimes, all it takes is gentle disruption.
And then you realise: there were others before you, who disrupted it too.
ByShalom Agbo -Anti-Racism Project Intern