By Sagal Khalif, Third Year, Law
Black History Month is approaching, and once again universities will produce Instagram posts. Bristol will look as if it is paying attention. Yet appearances are not enough. Outside campus, St George’s flags are painted on homes and streets, and graffiti declares “This is England.” The echoes of the 1970s football chants, “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack,” are unmistakable. And they are almost right. The flag we had to colour in at school does not include black, and neither does the curriculum. Black history, Asian history, Jewish history, none of it forms part of what we are taught. How can universities claim to be sincere when the education that shapes us from childhood ignores the histories it claims to celebrate?
When Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week in 1926, his aim was education, recognition, and resistance. He wanted to challenge the erasure of Black people from history and insist that their experiences were fundamental to our shared past. Almost a century later, at Bristol University, Black history is still treated as optional. It appears in October, then disappears again. It is not part of the curriculum, not embedded in the national story, and not consistently recognised on campus.
Bristol’s 2024 Black History Month programme carried the theme Reclaiming the Narrative. It offered events from a Black Engineers Society meet and greet to a conversation with DJ Krust at the Central Library. These events create space, and the students and staff who organise them deserve recognition. But the majority of attendees will already be engaged with these issues. For most students, these events are optional and easy to ignore. Panels and cultural events matter, yet they cannot substitute for systemic change. Without curriculum reform, reading lists that reflect history, and serious institutional commitment, Black History Month remains symbolic. The university can claim to celebrate Black history for one month while leaving it invisible for the rest of the year.
There is no British history without Black British history. As the writer Akala argues in Natives, the history of empire, migration, and resistance is inseparable from the history of Britain itself. To strip it out of the curriculum is not an oversight. It is a political choice. It leaves generations of students with a distorted view of their own country, one in which Black people exist as optional extras rather than central actors.
'Black history should be embedded into the national curriculum from the start. It should not be optional, not contained to one month, and not dependent on student societies or extracurricular programming.'
When Black history is taught, it is often narrowed to a single storyline: slavery and abolition. This narrative presents Britain as the benevolent power that ended the trade. It centres white agency and erases Black struggle, activism, and achievement. The fight against the far right in the 1980s and 1990s, campaigns for justice after police brutality, resistance to racist housing policies, and contributions to culture, science, and politics are often ignored. These are not marginal episodes. They are central to modern Britain. Condensing them into one month insults their significance.
Universities cannot solve this alone. By the time students arrive at Bristol, most have already been taught a version of history in which empire is marginal, migration is barely addressed, and Black contributions are absent. Four weeks of events cannot compensate for years of systemic neglect. Black history should be embedded into the national curriculum from the start. It should not be optional, not contained to one month, and not dependent on student societies or extracurricular programming.
This issue extends into university curricula. Granted it is hard to directly intersect a degree like Mechanical Engineering with Britain’s racial history, even within the disciplines that can do this, engagement with history is optional. As a Law student myself, I have had to actively seek out modules that address migration and legislation. It is possible to complete a degree without seriously studying the racist nationality and citizenship laws once enforced, despite their profound effect being relevant today. Students are entitled to have varied interests, but is it not in the best interest of the United Kingdom for future lawyers, policymakers, and citizens to know this history?
'Until Black history is embedded into the teaching every student receives, Black History Month will remain an exercise in optics rather than substance.'
The contradiction is clear. Black History Month is celebrated while the country produces exclusionary symbols and rhetoric. Students can attend panels and cultural events, but the education system that shaped them ignores the very histories that justify these celebrations. Black history is not an optional supplement. It is British history. To present it as a month-long festival without structural integration is to render it performative.
At Bristol, the effort of students and staff to create meaningful events deserves recognition. Yet the institution itself has not done enough. Posters cannot substitute a curriculum that recognises Black contributions to British history from the start of education. Until Black history is embedded into the teaching every student receives, Black History Month will remain an exercise in optics rather than substance.
Milan Perera
Black History Month may come and go, but the far-right will not vanish with it. The graffiti on streets, the ugly slogans, the attempts to claim Britain as only white, none of that will disappear in October. A month of scheduled social media posts cannot erase the daily reality of exclusion or the erasure of Black history from what we are taught. Addressing history for a few weeks is not enough. Black people, their stories, and their presence will not disappear, and neither should our insistence that the education system, and the universities that follow it, recognise them as central to British history every day of the year.
Featured Image: Epigram / Tim Harris
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