An interview with Dr Kennetta Hammond Perry

Cross posted from Canterbury Christ Church University, Interview with Dr Kennetta Hammond Perry, 26th September 2020

In regards to the Criminal Justice System, how can we reduce the representation of BAME individuals on the conviction side and increase the representation on the preventative side such as Policing, Lawyers and Forensics for example?

I think they are interrelated, I wouldn’t say that one explains the other but I think part of the reason why you particularly see some aversion to seeing policing as a pathway to a professional career trajectory for some people, is because of the perception around the experiences that are happening on the other end of the Criminal Justice System. I think there are often times a lot of stigmas that exist in communities about pathways to certain kinds of careers and I think policing definitely because of the history of these fraught relations. I do think it impacts the ways in which you have to make approaches to thinking about how you want to create pathways and have a more diverse and representative police force. I also think, to see different outcomes on the other end of policing that are also disproportionally affecting Black communities is actually necessary to see that kind of representation on the other side.

So I actually think the two are interrelated and I think that the representation piece matters and that was one of the things even with McPherson, it was about really being intentional in setting targets about what the police force as a force that is representative of the society and supposed to be reflective of that society. Making sure that institutions and police authority were committed to that but also at the same time, I think there are still challenges because there are still a lot of perceptions that that is not a pathway for a Black student to consider necessarily because of perceptions about what’s happening on the other side of policing. A young person has been subject to stop and search, that experience is something that can completely turn you off from thinking about that as a pathway. I think that alongside all of the other barriers to seeing transformations around certain kinds of professions in the Criminal Justice System, I think there an unspoken barrier around the stigmas and around the perceptions that exist within communities about those professions and the interactions that have been there.

To be a Black person that enters into that profession you’re overcoming a lot, you’re overcoming the ways in which there are all these different barriers to enter into most professions but you’re also confronting a bunch of stigmas as well, that might exist within communities about whether or not you should be in that profession. It’s interesting because I’m making all of these comments, I actually married my partner before we moved to the UK and he is a Black male that was in Law Enforcement for 17 years before we moved. He is now teaching in Criminology here and we would often have conversation about being, in US terminology, a Black man in blue and recognising that you’re representing both interests that are from the communities you care about, the communities that you’re from, that represent your background but you’re also apart of a institution that you are committed to the values that they’re trying to do, in terms of protecting, serving and providing a service for society and how sometimes those interests don’t always align.

I think people that are trying to do that, who are consciously trying to be conscious of their relationships to communities and the ways in which police are perceived in certain communities or the way the Criminal Justice System is perceived in some communities but at the same time also believing in those values and wanting to uphold justice to provide those services to communities. That is an achievement to be people in that space, there is also a way that they are acknowledged and recognise the value of people who are really trying to do that.

It’s the Criminal Justice System and I think at often times we focus so much on Police but it’s a whole system that’s at play here, that needs representation at all levels. Whether it’s the Police Officers, the Prosecutor, the people who are doing Forensics and trying to understand the context in which laws are transgressed. It’s the people who are able to advocate for setting bail, those perspectives are needed, those perspectives of Black communities are needed at all levels of those conversations, Judges and Barristers. One person that comes to mind that I think is a celebration of working in the legal profession but also has created a wider platform from that is Afua Hirsch.

Her professional career sort of started out professionally as a Barrister and I think that ability to see the law and to see its relationship to society, I think that guided her work in Journalism but also her role as an activist and public intellectual. To me she is definitely a success story about the understanding of the relationship between the Law and society and how that can come to play out in so many interesting ways.

Coming from someone who is part of the younger generation, quite a few of my colleagues and friends, including myself can be quite fearful of the stigmas that are attached to us. As a result of this, this can prevent us from achieving more, going that extra mile or connecting with certain people. So how did you overcome the stigmas, barriers or personal problems that you faced to get to where you are now?

I think I have always had really good mentors at every stage of my life. One of my most significant mentors, I watched the way she operated and I would always call her to say you did mentorship through proximity. She always pushed us to position ourselves to be in spaces where we weren’t necessarily supposed to be but just to even observe and not necessarily for us to feel like we had to be the person leading the conversation but to be in the room to really see how power operates, to see how certain kinds of decision making happens. I’m so grateful for her because she did that despite the fact that we were students and there wasn’t a lot we knew about being an academic or being part of a university but she was really intentional about exposing us as much as possible.

I think that was just really, really critical and that motivates me in terms of being apart of a university, interacting with students and just hoping that I can teach in a way that creates a level of curiosity where more students want to be exposed which is one of the reasons why I think things like studying abroad are so important as it can allow you to open up and become more curious about different kinds of things. I do think mentorship and having people around you who see things that you may not see in yourself. I was just very fortunate in having people who did that for me at phases in my life when I wouldn’t have necessarily connected all the dots and I think that’s what I definitely want to pay forward in my career and I hope that my career is about that.

It’s really about making myself available because other people made themselves available to me and saw that potential, if I had an idea they would listen to me. It sounds really small but it was just huge and it’s something I think about in terms of it just shaped so many different ways in which I was able to enter into certain kinds of doors. I think a lot of the language around the attainment gap, its not even that, it’s almost like a knowledge gap. I had people that could pull back the curtain for me and sort of give me a sense of if you see this person doing this in life and you see yourself wanting to do it, sometimes people are intimidated because they don’t know how. Nobody has told them how to get a PhD or what it means to be on a path way to becoming a professor or be a barrister. It’s a knowledge gap and I just think we have to demystify some of these things, so I was just really fortunate to have those people that did that for me.

It is quite interesting that you used the term ‘Knowledge gap’. Is that the way it is seen in America as more of a knowledge gap as supposed to an attainment gap?

I think in the US context I have noticed that there is definitely a complete shift away from the attainment gap. You hear more about knowledge gap and opportunity gap, these are sort of the two frames that I have kind of heard replace the language around the attainment gap. This is because the attainment gap can quickly get you into a conversation where you’re debating a kind of deficit, where you’re making judgements about because someone didn’t have this in their background, this helps to explain why they’re not achieving at the same level. It takes the systematic things that are in play off the hook which is the fact that certain people don’t have access to resources to support their attainment in the same way, certain people don’t have access to that soft knowledge that comes through certain types of networks.

When I think about the mentorship that I had, it wasn’t about any formal things I learned in the classroom, it was about who I began to have access to in terms of certain kinds of networks that then gave me the insight I would need, to navigate or prepare myself to become more competitive to be able to insource another chapter in where I was trying to go. It wasn’t because I was any smarter or anything like that but what gave me the edge at times was having that knowledge paired with the opportunity to do be able to do that. I think that the attainment gap conversation divorces the fact that the ways that certain people are not given the access to the information that they need to be able to make the most informed choices to structure their achievements and success. We forget all of that and we focus too much on the student that we’re looking at that has either attained or they haven’t attained.

We ignore the fact that there are certain ways that knowledge is circulating and in ways certain people are able to access and have opportunities to. I was talking to a secondary teacher who was doing some work with schools here in Leicester and she was telling be about how some of the schools will basically project what they think a student will attain on their GCSEs. Based on that judgement, they would also decide who will have access to certain types of tutorial sessions, so when the student who hasn’t even had access to the same tutorials as the other student. How can you measure their attainment in relation to the other student because you haven’t given them the opportunity to attain in the same way but yet the way that the attainment gap literature would tell you is that, okay this student hasn’t attained in the same way as the other student but it doesn’t attend to the fact that you haven’t given that student the same opportunity to be able to attain.

I think its true when you think about why your socioeconomic status matters. Often times a lifetime of standardised tests, you’re not thinking a student is necessarily smarter than another student. You’re seeing a student who been able to have the resources available in able to be competitive on a test or have parents who have been able to devote resources to it or to advocate for their child in certain ways that maybe another parent doesn’t necessarily have access to do. But that’s not about inherent failure, values, background or a lesser than, it’s about certain opportunities to be able to do those things. So the language particularly in the US context, I’ve seen it shift a lot earlier than what I’ve noticed in the UK having being here a year around that question of attainment and more of that conversation about knowledge gap and opportunity gap.

You previously mentioned that you have had the benefit of having mentors along your journey. Some parents traditionally want their children to follow certain professions, I think this is why certain roles lack in numbers, as there are individuals out there that want to have a profession of their choosing but are fearful of disappointing their family. What would you say or what advice would you give to those individuals that don’t come across those opportunities?

I think that’s tough. Even choosing to become an academic when I told my mum, my parents absolutely supported me going to university and all those sorts of things but this was a career path that didn’t make any kind of sense to them. You want your child succeed in such a way that they’re able to have a job that allows them to take care of themselves and take care of their families. There are certain career paths that people who are sending their children to universities and have invested a lot in trying to prepare their children for university and no they’re not always on board. I’ll never forget my mum, it didn’t make any sense to her and I think the only thing I can say is that I don’t think there’s any one answer to that but it does take the courage to reach out to people you see doing the thing that you want and really try to understand what pathway they may have taken to get there. I definitely understand that can be very intimidating to do and to think about, even the how of how you do that.

Again, I do think that its important to try and do that, even at the centre we’ve started a distinguished lecture series and we’re trying to bring in really high-profile people that are doing work on race and social justice. For the students here on campus, even though they are given a big talk, one of the things we’ve tried to pair that with is a more intimate conversation with students where they have the opportunity to ask questions about what your journey was like up until this point, what was influential and what did you do to get to this point where you are now being invited to universities. I don’t have an easy answer for that but I do think it is important in terms of if you do recognise people who are doing the work that you see yourself wanting to do, position yourself and make that known.

Like I said, it is intimidating but I think its important to seek out people who are doing that and to get to know their story about how they got there because they weren’t always what we see as the end product, there was a journey attached. Often times you can become less intimidated by the end product if you can see and connect with the journey that people took to get there because often times the journey is where you find it, you realise they’re not any more extraordinary than you are and you can make those connections.

Along the journey it takes a lot of desire, inspiration and you have to keep yourself motivated, so I wanted to ask you what influenced or what inspired you to have an interest in Black History and your profession?

I think my conversations growing up I was just always interested in Black History. I loved to hear my parents and grandparents tell stories about the times in which they lived. I was just really grounded in that growing up, my parents really stressed the importance of knowing who you are as a black person and being aware of history. It was something I always loved knowing about, knowing about more black figures that I needed to know about and could celebrate. I could see that Black people had a history, they had a history to celebrate and to be admired. I really think those seeds were planted early on for that and in terms of deciding to be an academic historian, I was very fortunate to go to a historically Black college, North Carolina Central, so that was another big thing. In that department they had a long legacy and history of getting students to think about pursuing PhD’s in History. They really stressed even in our classes, I’ll never forget one of the professors till this day that I admire so much, he would always call us young scholars. He wouldn’t call us students he would just call us scholars and it was just that mentality where you just saw yourself as somebody who had ideas and somebody who had something to say in society.

I think that environment, going to a historically Black college was really important but I went through a summer program. It was a summer programme for minority students, the aim of the programme was to try to diversify the academy and basically get more students to think about pathways to pursuing a PhD. You were matched up with a mentor and you got to pursue a research project of your own design. That programme also gave you writing skills, public speaking skills and all sorts of skills such as how to fill out your application for Grad school and how to prepare that but also how to really be competitive.

For the first time I really understood, I just thought the people that taught me at university were just teachers, I had no idea they did research and wrote books. It was that program that truly changed the course of where I found my life heading, so after doing that programme that was when I knew that I really wanted to pursue a PhD. I then had the opportunity to meet the person who ended up being my PhD supervisor, the woman I mentioned before, on of my mentors. She presented a paper at a conference and I went up to ask her a question about her presentation, so I knew I wanted to work with her and go to Michigan State to work with her. So the combination of both of those were really important, she was a Black woman at the top of her game, well respected and making pathways for other Black students. She was doing all the things that I saw myself wanting to do moving forward and so again, I was still very fortunate and that’s actually one of the big projects I’m working on now. It is getting a bid for those kind of pipeline programs in the UK for all sorts of fields, whether its History or another study but we want to get more students to think about careers in academia because our voices are really needed and they just severely underrepresented, still in the US but even more so in the UK. But I think a lot of those kinds of programmes are really pivotal, I know a lot of my colleagues in the US and a lot of the Faculty of Colour in the US have at some point, been involved in something similar that was designed for them to think about the possibilities of seeing themselves as academics. I think again there is just a huge need for that in the UK. There are really somethings that are happening around that, the Black Academia Network and Leading Routes are doing some incredible work but I also think more of those pipeline programmes are needed, so that was definitely a big part of my journey.