If, hypothetically, Mitt Romney had related the perceived failure of Obamacare to the President’s ethnicity (it doesn’t require too much creativity to imagine him doing that), it would have been seen as a gross display of discrimination – an Olympic leap over the acceptability line. Yet eliding difficulties of leadership with racial prejudice seems to have become a popular pastime for critics of the GU and CUSU.

March saw the CUSU Presidential elections marred by allegations of prejudice as candidate Akilah Jeffers was docked 200 points for an alleged breach of campaign regulations. Had Akilah beaten eventual winner Rosalyn Old, she would have been the first black CUSU president. And so, instead of a thorough exploration of campaign regulations or of Jeffers’ conduct, her penalty elicited immediate cries of racial discrimination. All this despite the fact that during her campaign Jeffers did not once use her ethnicity as a selling point.

Indeed it was her intellect, involvement with the student body and vision for CUSU that she consistently emphasized. Had she been elected by virtue of her skin pigmentation, the University’s student body would not only have been exposed as positive discriminators but would have simultaneously undermined Jeffers’ real leadership capabilities.

A major Pakistani website, The News International, claims in a scathing article on the Graduate Union that Jeffers’ penalty exposed the racial prejudice endemic at Cambridge University. As the current Graduate President Arsahlan Ghani takes action against the GU for perceived racial discrimination, The News are emphasizing his “dysfunctional[ity]” and lack of power rather than looking at the actual problems which are “undermining” his rights as the democratically elected president. Investigating the “prejudice” which has allegedly reduced Ghani to a “toothless” President, Varsity’s graduate reporter discovered that the alleged discrimination was in fact due to a misunderstanding about the new GU constitution, which automatically makes the Welfare Officer a trustee of the Union, something which Ghani sees as reducing his Presidential influence. 

If there is conflict in the Graduate Union, the injustice has nothing to do with race or ethnicity but is about the structure of the Union itself. If the appointment of the Welfare Officer to the trustee board does undermine the President, then it will do so whether that President is British or Pakistani.

The News International’s portrayal of Ghani’s case is both disconcerting and disheartening. Irrespective of whether Ghani is the first Pakistani GU president or not, his success at elections came down to his ability to move the Union in a positive direction. If he is being undermined, then anger should be directed to the possible loss of that vision.

I wonder whether the impassioned declarations of foul play which the article caused would exist if Ghani were white. Too quickly are issues in leadership aligned to questions about ethnic discrimination. To assume or imply that someone’s success is down to race, or to see constitutional issues as manifestations of xenophobia is to do a disservice to the very real problems our student leaders face. We perpetuate an anxiety about race that ultimately reinforces differentiation to the detriment of minority students. 

The success or failure of Obamacare has never been and will never be dependent on either Obama’s white American mother or his Kenyan father. As Cambridge improves its racial diversity, the proportion of ethnic minority students in leadership positions will inevitably increase. Like any leaders, they will face challenges – and it will become more and more important that these trials be analyzed according to job descriptions and not race relations.