She scowled and laid it back on her desk.
‘Mr Malik-Edwards, I’m not clear—’
‘Look, dude—’
I smiled.
‘I’m afraid I don’t identify as dude.’
‘OK, whatever. Mr Gilmour, then. It’s the word you used to describe an Asian influence on this guy’s painting.’
The fact that he couldn’t even remember the artist’s name was aggravating.
‘Orientalism?’
The blonde girl gave a sharp intake of breath. The screen of her phone was active. I realised, too late, that she was still recording.
‘Yeah. That’s really offensive.’
‘In your opinion, maybe …’ I started.
‘No. It’s just wrong. You’re reducing an entire continent of different countries and people to a colonialist stereotype.’
‘Am I?’ I said. I looked at my accuser, slouched back against his chair. Not a hint that he was intimidated by my authority, negligible as it was.
He reminded me of every single boy at school who had ever made me feel inferior, who had looked at me and sneered at my wrongness from the first day of term. At Burtonbury, I had been the scholarship kid who turned up with the wrong kind of suitcase, the wrong shoes, the wrong jeans, the wrong hairstyle, the wrong way of speaking, the wrong way of being. I was the wrong kind of everything until I befriended Ben and the dazzle of his popularity cast its protective shadow over me. Temporarily, at least. Until I’d served my purpose. Until he’d decided his political career was more important than almost three decades of friendship. He’s in the cabinet now. Energy Secretary, no less! I can’t imagine he’s ever recycled a day in his life.
Back in the lecture hall, I felt a brisk tug of anger.
‘I think I’m best placed to know what I mean by using a certain term,’ I said.
The blonde girl in the front row snickered. I glared at her.
‘It’s racist,’ Jacob said.
‘I beg your pardon, Mr Malik-Edwards. That is a very serious accusation to be levelling.’
I tried to keep calm. I wanted to lunge across the room and throttle his scrawny neck but I held myself back. I should have said ‘Japonisme’, I thought, kicking myself. I was normally hyper-attuned to this kind of nuance. Typical that the one time I slipped up, I did it in front of an individual so woke his name crossed several cultural intersections. It was too late to apologise without admitting wrongdoing andrunning the risk of immediate dismissal by nervous university authorities. The other week they’d been forced to return a sizeable financial donation after the business magnate who’d given it had been accused of assuming the British-Jamaican female Professor of Cultural Studies was a tea lady.
‘I am not racist,’ I protested.
‘You might not realise you’re racist,’ Jacob countered. It was only now that he had the audacity to remove his baseball cap. ‘But, unconsciously, you’re part of an institutionally racist system.’
Smug little bastard.
‘Alright, Prince Harry,’ someone murmured from the back row. More snickering.
Jacob packed up his laptop and his textbooks and slung his rucksack over one shoulder before sauntering, with excruciating casualness, to the door. He turned back and looked me straight in the eye.
‘Do better,’ he said, before walking out.
Better than what? I wanted to shout after him.
The door swung shut behind him. I returned to the class. They were staring at me in a collective gape of amazement. The blonde girl had the grace to slip her phone back into her jacket pocket.
‘Would anyone else like to leave?’ I asked, every word tightly controlled. No one moved. ‘Right then. Back to Manet.’
I had hoped that would be the end of it, but it wasn’t. Jacob Malik-Edwards made an official complaint to the university chancellor and I was summoned to defend myself to my head of department, who spoke to me about the need for anti-racism training and reminded me of the necessary sensitivity to gender identification and the use of pronouns. The footage filmed by the blonde girl – who I later learned was called Blossom (of course) – had been posted on Snapchat and picked up by the local newspaper and then by one of the left-leaning nationals under the headline ‘University Lecturer in Race Row’. Jacob Malik-Edwards turned out to have a powerful barrister father who alluded to legal action. The university suspended me withoutpay, launched an investigation and issued a public statement saying that it had a zero-tolerance policy on racist language and actions, and that I was attending a twelve-week therapy course to teach me how, in the words of Jacob himself, to ‘do better’.
