Harshad Keval on White Narcissism in the Academy
Sociologist Jason Arday, one of two editors for Sage’s Social Science for Social Justice book series, interviews Harshad Keval about his book Whiteness, Racial Trauma, and the University. Keval, a writer and scholar activist, explains the book’s title, which he had originally considered “white narcissist,” but changed to better connect with readers. He discusses the concept of “white narcissism,” describing it as a systemic narcissism within institutions that excludes people of color.
“Very often people say, what can you summarize what this book’s about in one sentence? … The book really is the discussions that take place when whiteness leaves the room,” Keval details. “So when there is an opportunity to talk with honesty, with experience, with the felt, lived reality of what we’ve all experienced in so many different ways, that is whiteness. And when whiteness can’t be articulated, identified and then unraveled, actually, for its impacts and for its insidious nature, we end up with harm, which is a form of trauma, and this for me, I think I articulate it as racial trauma.”
Keval emphasizes the importance of compassion, connection, and critical questioning within academia. He highlights the need for vigilance against racial trauma and the necessity of allyship and concludes by encouraging readers to engage with the book thoughtfully, pausing to reflect on its implications.
A transcript of the interview appears below the video.
Jason Arday: Good day, everybody. I hope you’re all keeping well. It’s really exciting day today for a number of reasons. I get to break bread with a with a very good friend of mine, Harshad Keval, who’s done some amazing work that we’re going to talk through, and hopefully some of the richness of this conversation will really come to the fore. My name is Jason Arday, and I’ve been very fortunate to do work in the areas of race and the intersection, but most importantly, I’m going to be talking to a very dear friend today.
Harshad, I would be extremely grateful and privileged if you could introduce yourself your work and where we’re kind of where, how we ended up here, really, in the first instance.
Harshad Keval: Absolutely. First of all, hi, Jason. As always, as always, really lovely to see you, to meet with you, to talk with you, and to talk real, right? Which is what this is all about — to talk real. So my name is Harshad Keval, and I’m currently a lecturer in social sciences, but I’ve kind of been around in academia and outside academia for a long time now. It’s that long time really, which the book is really about. It’s about the fabric that gets woven and interwoven into our lives. It gets woven into our social, psychological, emotional mechanisms of everyday meaning making. And I guess in many ways, they say, write what you know. And I guess that’s what this book really is about. It’s about writing about something which I felt experienced and then observed and listened and witnessed lots of things around me which I felt were important to talk about in real terms.
Jason Arday: That’s brilliant. It’s absolutely brilliant. One of the things that I’m really intrigued in, or intrigued with, sorry, is the title. How did you come up with the title, and what was some of the thinking behind that?
Harshad Keval: Sure. Yeah, that’s a really good question. And the title originally was, it was a choice of two titles, and one title was actually to call the book by the name of the thing that I really talk about in the book, which is this two word phrase, “white narcissist.” The book’s title, I said, is Whiteness, Racial Trauma, and The University, I think, better encapsulates and has a better reach in terms of connecting to people. And that is really principally about connecting to experiences. Very often people say, what can you summarize what this book’s about in one sentence? And I’ve been so reluctant and unable. Actually, I don’t think I’m articulate enough a lot of the time to be able to do that. But over the past few months, I’ve gone back to why I started the book, and that’s given me a route into the one liner. The book really is the discussions that take place when whiteness leaves the room.
So when there is an opportunity to talk with honesty, with experience, with the felt, lived reality of what we’ve all experienced in so many different ways, that is whiteness. And when whiteness can’t be articulated, identified and then unraveled, actually, for its impacts and for its insidious nature, we end up with harm, which is a form of trauma, and this for me, I think I articulate it as racial trauma.
And racial trauma is a term that never gets used in the university system, in educational contexts. And yet, harm is real. Racisms are real. And the university is a principal site at which, on which these harms get produced. So that’s where the title really comes from. Really Jason.
Jason Arday: I really, I really love that. Harshad. I mean, one of the things that you kind of speak about, which is a recurrent tenor, it’s almost a spine of the trees, is the white narcissist of it. Could you just unpack that? For people that will be engaging with this will be listening, you know, as far as I’m aware, I haven’t heard of that term before, so I would credit you with, you know, the development of the term. So what does that mean for people who’ll be listening in and who might be using, who may be able to use that as a proxy to explain their experiences with whiteness?
Harshad Keval: Sure, and I’ve been very careful and cognizant about the term “white narcissist,” because it has lots of implications and underpinnings from, you know, psychoanalytic and psychological therapeutic work, clinical psychology, formulations of narcissistic personalities, etc. For me, I’ve been very careful to say, “I’m not talking about an individual psychological structure.” But rather, what I’m trying to do is, I think something that we all do really, which is make sense of this very real, effective thing, right? It’s inside us. We feel it. We experience it. We observe it in schools, in classrooms, in boardroom meetings and in lecture theaters. We observe it in the canteen and the cafeteria, but we can’t quite make sense of it. The literature and the research has in a very, very, very rich way talked about whiteness and whiteness, grammar, whiteness, systems.
But for me, there was something missing from that. It needed an add on. And every time I thought about what I had experienced and what other colleagues had experienced, there was something about narcissism, inside structures, inside institutions. Now for me, certainly, when I’m talking about white narcissistic structures, I am talking about individuals. I am talking about people who take agency, they make decisions about what kinds of norms and values and cultures of harm, or cultures of what, you know, Charles Mills talks about militant ignorance. These are individual actions which, when aggregated, when formulated inside relations of power, actually then cascade these systems that are fundamentally narcissistic. And by that, what I mean is narcissism requires a constant reproduction of its own idealized image bounced back to it.
And so when I’m when I’m observing the university over the past few years, what I’m seeing is a constant re-performance and a constant reinforcement of imagery, of particular types of words, particular types of positive facades, which make it look like a very beautiful, liberal, equality-based system that sits outside of all the rough stuff that happens in society. In actual fact, you dig deep enough, if we are able to give ourselves the time to think critically enough about these things, it’s fundamentally narcissistic, which means the system is run through narcissism and requires individuals to take often decisions which require that narcissistic whiteness to be there all the time. And that fundamentally excludes anyone we can define people of color, racially minoritized people, anyone who doesn’t reflect back what the system requires for it to replenish itself. And so that for me, is my narcissist.
Jason Arday: I really appreciate that explanation. And you know, many readers of this book will also appreciate that, including allies of the sort, as well. One of the things that I’m really intrigued in, and I guess, I could lay claim to saying that I’m very fortunate to be able to call you a friend, and from, I guess, a friend perspective, and having some understanding of how you’ve traversed this kind of really thorny terrain in terms of higher education and the racial inequality and discrimination that happens within it. I’m really intrigued to know how much of you is in these pages, how much of you makes up the words that are on this page, or how much of it is just a general experience that, yes, comprises some of your experience, but speaks to the wider diaspora, in terms of people who make up the academy, that are ethnic minority.
Harshad Keval: That’s a really interesting question, Jason, that I can always rely on you on asking those questions that make me pause and think, and I really appreciate that. It’s both. On the one hand, I would say it’s 100 percent me, because I think I saw this book as an opportunity to pause at a moment when there wasn’t much pausing going on. So over the past few years, and this is especially since, the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, the statues toppling, decolonize my curriculum, why is my curriculum white, all these major programs have changed, instigated by many students around the world who were asking very powerful questions.
Just at this time, I started observing institutions, producing them as machinery of movement, where suddenly everybody was anti-racist, suddenly everyone was decolonizing everything. You yourself have written about this in very powerful ways, as have many other colleagues. What does it actually mean? What does it lead to? How is the problem being formulated and conceptualized and by who? So there was very little time for pause and to think, what actually is going on and what questions are not being asked? And so the pausing, the breathing, the taking stock, both of the situation, but also my position in it. You know, I write very, very candidly, very honestly in the book that in many ways, this book, it sign posts, my relationship to the academy, which has been really, really problematic, in the sense that there’s always a scrambling around and are trying to chase affirmation, adulation, acceptance. You know, if only we work harder, if only we adopt the norms and the values and the mechanisms for success that the academy deems valuable, then maybe we’ll get promoted, or then we’ll get acceptance.
And it gave me a chance to think about these things critically for me, and that required having a thought about what my need in the moment is. And my need in the moment, as I think, actually always has been, is the fullest creative expression of myself. So everything of me is in the book. But I think usefully, the things I talk about in the book, as I’m getting feedback from people from different bits of the world who are reading the book saying, you know, I could apply this stuff to lots of other institutions. I could apply it to what goes on in healthcare, what God goes on in business management, what goes on in other parts of the education system. And suddenly people are seeing resonances inside their conversations with other people outside of work. So it’s a long answer to your very powerful, short question. But yeah, I think it’s both. It’s completely me, and it’s about the wider diaspora of experiences out there.
Jason Arday: Harshad, I really appreciate that, particularly in relation to the wider diaspora of experiences out there. And one of the things that I’m also really intrigued to kind of learn is that we are living in a state of high societal and political turbulence, where actually a lot of this work is being infringed upon. You know, our liberties are being infringed upon, the egalitarian ideals that we hold so dear being infringed upon. And the relevance of anti-racist work has been completely dismissed here, across the pond and across the world, generally speaking, at this moment, as we find ourselves over the last two decades, leaning heavily to the right. What I’m kind of intrigued to know is, how does this book steady that turbulence and how has it been received? Because in these really difficult times now, this work becomes even the precarity of individuals producing such amazing work like yourself becomes even more difficult to put your head above the parapet, so to speak.
Harshad Keval: Yeah, I agree, Jason, and it’s, I think it’s really interesting that you raise this, this aspect of contemporary, the contemporary landscape. I think in many ways, what we’re seeing is a is a particular moment in time when things are appearing in consciousness much more. They’re in social media. They’re in the news. They’re everywhere. This stuff that people like us do at various levels around race and DEI doesn’t seem to have any relevance anymore, because it’s been kind of, you know, it’s been pushed out of the mainstream. Now there’s no need for it. I think, if anything, a book like this and other books that do similar kinds of work in maybe using different formulations, are, of course, even more important now than ever. Because I think we do need to continue the vigilance in systems like education systems, higher education university systems, because if we don’t keep up the vigilance, then all the gains that we may have made over the past 20, 30, 40, years end up being lost, and we end up with another blank page.
And of course, if that blank page of equality and meritocracy is fundamentally defined by majority white systems and white players and white senior management, then we’re in big trouble, because we keep on having to reinvent the wheel about compassion, humanity, equality, anti-racism. So I think there is an increased precarity right now. And, you know, I’ve been kind of doing this for quite a few decades, and I consider myself as a speaker from a position of privilege to be able to say these words, to write these words, without too much fear of backlash. Although I’m sure these kinds of ideas, if they’re taken up by various groups in society, they can certainly target anyone. But I think there is a precarity. As I say towards the end of the book, which we can kind of talk about in a bit, but I do say that we need to keep on championing a change in the system.
So the university systems are really characterized by the very people who have been marginalized in the first place and excluded. You know, all those people whose voices never appear in the policy documents, who never appear in the promotional literature, whose voices never really appear as legitimate bodies and minds, they’re the voices were going to keep on creating solidarity networks with, for and through. And through that, even precarious moments like this, well, they’ll kind of, they’ll calm down. You know, there’s, there’s enough of us, and I say in the book, we’re not going anywhere. We’re going to continue writing and resisting and teaching and being compassionate with each other, because this is, I think, where the power is.
Jason Arday: You know, there’s two things, and it’s the penultimate question, but you spoke about compassion. One thing that reflects back in these pages, in you know that there’s almost a paradox, in some respects, is the absence of compassion for people of color in the academy, and then the need for compassion in the academy in terms of making it a racially inclusive space and allowing people of color to be able to land in those spaces without fear of marginalization, victimization or systemic violence. Could you just talk to me about compassion and how you conceptualized it in this book and the practice in terms of how you engage with this concept on a day-to-day basis? Because I would, I would say you’re one of the most compassionate people I’ve come across in the sector. And it’s not a given that people are compassionate — actually, I would say I could probably count on less than seven fingers how many compassionate people I’ve met in the sector. So how do you conceptualize it within the book, and then how is it lived out in your practice as an academic and a practitioner?
Harshad Keval: I like the word compassion, but it’s so full of different layers, isn’t it? Layers of what we’re able to mobilize in any given moment, layers of what we can’t mobilize for fear of security or lack of security for our positions. I think compassion with each other, inside what has been classed as the neo-liberal marketization of the intellectual and academic endeavor. I think compassion is the only answer there is to a problem that won’t even be conceptualized properly. In other words, compassion is the answer to the question that hasn’t been asked. In any kind of in any system that sits outside of the key performance indicator, machinery, the mechanics of extraction, any system that sits outside this that fundamentally relies on each other’s kindness, so that we can all rise together, we can all help each other. I think that is the only solution there is, and that can only happen when we can talk to each other, we can connect with each other, and we can create our own spaces.
Now people have said, well, how do you do you see these spaces sitting inside the system? Because if they do, you could ask questions about how much compromise is needed and what gets lost, or are these spaces sitting outside? And for me, it’s both. It’s always going to be both. There is always going to be losses and gains, whichever decision one makes. But I think compassion is the key to radical justice. It’s in the writings of all the global, Southern, decolonial, critical writers of the past 100, 150, 200 years. It’s in the words of writers like yourself and all the other contemporary academics and writers, compassion needs to be the key.
Something that really came across, and you know, Jason, you will have seen this that in part of the book, in at the end of the chapter, “White Narcissus,” there’s a poem, and I lay out very clearly why I’ve done this. It’s because this notion of white narcissus arrived to me as an invitation, and it was two words that haunted me for six months. I had no idea what they meant or where they came from, but I did know that my body and my emotions were speaking to me in a language that my mind couldn’t yet understand, but my creative expression attempted to interpret. And so the poetry that rolls out of the two words white Narcissus really accurately explains my experience of whiteness in the academy. And I think from what I’ve heard from other people, it seems to resonate their experiences, too. So I think the narcissistic whiteness structures that I speak about in the book are fundamentally devoid of compassion, and that itself is something that comes out of, if you like, colonial racial history of whiteness, you know, there is a fundamental brutality to how these systems work. So I guess I’m speaking to the need to go back to what we know best, which is that human, compassionate need to connect with each other.
Jason Arday: I think that’s beautiful, and I you know, and it’s difficult, because academia is a space that is bereft of that kind of compassion, and actually, society is a microcosm. Universities or the academy are microcosm of society, and so it’s only reflecting what we have as a point of navigation in society, unfortunately. So that is really, really powerful. To the final question, then in terms of the book and the kind of take-home message, if I was to ask you to summarize the book in three powerful take-home messages, how would you summarize this for people currently reading, people who are going to be future readers? What are take-home messages? Because it’s a book that’s so rich that can speak to so many different experiences in terms of race, against the intersection. And you know, as someone that’s actively engaged in your work, there’s something in it for everyone who engages in this work, and it will strengthen their resolve. So for me, I’m really intrigued to hear your three take-home messages for the book in terms of how we orientate forward.
Harshad Keval: It’s going to be a tough call, Jason, but I’ll try. There’s a section at the end where I place the epilogue, and it’s called ”Writing yourself in and out of the text.” For me, I think, asking, who do we, who do we write for, and why, is really, really important. Because I think that becomes a key question, who are we doing the work for? If we’re in the academy and we’re trying to work our way through the system, who is it for and what compromises and losses are made in that process?
The second thing, I think, is ask the questions that haven’t been asked about systems and structures of white narcissism, because when we start to formulate and articulate this particular thread, that’s when the imagery and the psychology and the emotional faculties kick in. I think I really firmly believe that our bodies have an intelligence that can really help in these situations, because it’s our bodies and our minds that take the brunt of what race and racism does. And of course, as I write in a book, racisms attempt to dismantle you from the inside out. So let’s figure out what it is that these white narcissistic systems look like, how they work, and we need to point them out and call them out whenever we can.
Thirdly, connection. It’s always going to be connection with each other. We’ve got to reach out to each other, we’ve got to talk to each other, and we’ve got to create the spaces where we can talk about the things that we can talk about when whiteness leaves a room. You mentioned allies before, and yeah, I do believe in this. I think without allyship, you know, it’s so much harder, and I’m including our allies in this. Our allies can talk with us, can learn through us and with us. They can learn for us, but it’s going to be their journey, their burden, too.
So I guess there’s three take-home messages. Number one, ask who are we doing this for, and what compromises losses and gains might accumulate and the impact on our minds and bodies? Number two, we can point to systems of like narcissistic structures, because they are everywhere, and they are fundamental, a part of racial colonial history. And number three, we’ve got to connect with each other and keep on connecting and creating our spaces.
Jason Arday: Dr Harshad Keval, I just want to say it’s been an absolute privilege to break bread with you. I can’t emphasize enough, and I’m slightly biased, but I do have the occasional ability to be objective, that I do think this is a wonderful contribution to knowledge, but more importantly, a movement that really requires galvanizing, reorganizing and restructuring in the face — in the ever changing face — of the racisms that we face. So just thank you so much for your contribution to this space. Thank you for your existence and thank you for your perseverance. It’s a beautiful, amazing book that’s powerfully written, and within the pages there is something there for everyone to take from that. So thank you, Harshad, and as the custom would go, the last word goes to you. So is there anything you’d like to say to prospective readers also that will be reading this book, to bear in mind, possibly?
Harshad Keval: All I can say to prospective readers is, read, engage, but do so with a real sense of pause and space. I didn’t write in one week or one month. I wrote with a great deal of pauses and starts and fits and lurches, because I took time to think through what it was I needed to do. So I would imagine people reading at their own pace, but to take time and to pause with it and to allow it to sit and land and from their discussions, it’s only ever going to be a springboard to more people doing more of this wonderful work.
And thank you, Jason, as always, it’s really great to speak to you. Thank you for your ongoing support. It was you know, your amazing invitation to be a part of this fantastic series. So it’s a real honor to have had this journey, had the opportunity the commissioning editor, Delayna, and, of course, Sage or all the people behind the behind the behind the background, actually, who do so much amazing work to make this happen. So yeah, I’m very honored and very grateful you.
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