In his seminal 1992 publication Faces at the bottom of the Well, the eminent scholar and founder of Critical Race Theory (CRT) Derrick Bell proffers what some might consider a harrowing and defeatist proposition. He insists that racism is permanent. Recent data published by the Home Office in the aftermath of the 2016 EU referendum in the UK revealed a surge in racist incidents and hate crime and, the polarising rhetoric and actions of the Trump campaign and his subsequent Presidency in the US, indicate that empirical evidence substantiates Bell鈥檚 claim. In this session, I take up Bell鈥檚 provocation and consider how the 鈥渃onfiguration of policy, economics and governance鈥 (Warren, 2016:2) come to inform the ways in which racial justice is imagined, rationalised and actioned within the field of higher education. Drawing on both Bourdieu, and CRT, I explore which narratives and cultural imperatives gain 鈥渓egitimacy鈥 and how they accrue and retain dominance within a wider popular policy framework which continues to promise 鈥榚quality and diversity鈥. I employ the Critical Race Theory tool of counternarrative to engage a series of composite case studies – that is semi-fictional incidents drawn from a series of real life events -interspersed with empirical research data from a two year study examining race within education policy, to attend to the ways in which these processes are operationalised, validated and sanctioned. My intention is two-fold: first, to reveal these institutional practices as a fa莽ade concerned primarily with what I term organisational protectionism and, second, to make the case for the permanence and salience of everyday racism in British academia, an assumption which is a common feature of race debates in the US but which has yet to gain traction within the UK.