After launching a scholarship to help black students go to Cambridge, Stormzy became a topic of online debate – with some even calling his initiative ‘racist’. Nicole Vassell explains why this simply isn’t the case
If there’s ever a great time to be on social media, it’s for national A Level results day. Every year in mid-August, many young people count this as the most important day of their lives, as it’s when they discover whether they made the grades to get into the university of their choice.
Though I didn’t attend one of these institutions myself, I’m always extra giddy seeing young black people beaming with pride at the fact that they got into Oxford or Cambridge. Being the most prestigious universities in the country, it’s amazing to see intelligent, ambitious black people represented at this level, when they’re so often not seen.
Clearly, this is something that is close to the heart of another South Londoner, as Stormzy, who has long been an advocate for education and black achievement, announced on Results Day 2018, the launch of the Stormzy Scholarship: funding to help two black students attend Cambridge in 2018, and two in 2019 as well.
‘It’s so important for black students, especially, to be aware that it can 100% be an option to attend a university of this calibre,’ Stormzy ‒ real name Michael Omari ‒ explained. Immediately after the announcement, social media was flooded with praise for the well-loved musician’s generous idea.
However, like clockwork, the detractors wasted no time in coming out of the woodwork to criticise the fact that the scholarship is for black students only ‒ with some even going as far as calling this distinction ‘racist’.
‘Imagine if this said “for white students”, instead of black?’ was a common refrain ‒ reminiscent of arguments against the existence of black media (‘What if there was a White Entertainment Television?’) and black empowerment movements (‘All lives matter, not just black ones!’).
And like in those other examples, there’s an easy explanation as to why a specific scheme to help black people is not racist; because calling it racism draws false equivalences between the racial experiences of the two groups, and ignores the realities of white privilege and a lack of diversity that operates throughout society at large.
Black people have been historically underrepresented at Cambridge, with the Financial Times discovering earlier this year that some colleges failed to take any black students between 2012 and 2016. By introducing funding specifically for black students, the Stormzy Scholarship is a step towards rebalancing this specific issue by making it easier for two students to get the chance.
And this doesn’t mean that other demographics wouldn’t also benefit from help in accessing Cambridge; Stormzy could have opened his scholarship to all students, or working-class students, or students only from single-parent homes ‒ however, it wasn’t his job to be an advocate for those different groups: it wasn’t even his job to help out black students. The choice to help out was his alone to make, and it doesn’t make him a villain for wanting to help people who resemble himself, when it seems as if no-one else is doing the same. In the same way that breast cancer advocacy doesn’t mean you don’t care about other cancers, looking out for black students doesn’t mean that Stormzy wants all other students to fail.
Stormzy put it best himself in response to an angry ‘fan’, who messaged the rapper himself with his upset. The language of some of his response is too spicy to reprint here, but he ended with ‘Shut the door on your way out’; in summary, Stormzy is doing what he wants to do, and it’s a great thing; if anyone has a problem with it, it’s their issue, not his.
