inclusion. Female academics also described the additional layer of sex discrimination over institutional and systemic race discrimination. Understanding intersectional experiences is a priority for the Study and is a key consideration for the survey and fieldwork component. 3.3 Low racial literacy Racial literacy is the ability to name, understand and confront racism and is made up of an essential set of skills that: • enable critical and intersectional understandings of racism and how race operates in society • increase awareness of the power dynamics that influence the process of racialisation and racist practices, systems and structures • equip people with tools to understand and challenge racism • are built over a lifetime and involve continuous learning and unlearning, including normalised practices, ways of being and knowing and understandings of history, particularly in relation to colonisation • are determined by the needs of communities who experience racism. 63 Low racial literacy was discussed across many of the consultations as an inhibitor of anti-racism in universities. On one level, low racial literacy manifests in individuals not recognising racism. For instance, international students suggested that they may not be able to recognise racism when it happens to them. When students describe unwelcoming situations, they may be encountering racism, but they often lack the racial literacy to identify it. On the other hand, consultations also suggest that conversations about racism are shut down and there is a reluctance to discuss institutional and structural racism. In consultations, academics from negatively racialised backgrounds noted that concepts of racialisation were not discussed openly in universities and there is a reluctance to interrogate concepts of negative racialisation that aim to make power dynamics and white privilege visible. Anti-black racism was specifically called out as symptomatic of this, with academics arguing that Black people are the furthest from the ‘line of whiteness so they experience the worst and most intense form of racism.’ In consultations, academics spoke about feeling gaslit when they raised issues of institutional and structural racism. The discomfort in discussing race contributes to silencing experiences and shifts focus from institutional to interpersonal racism. 42