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Lecturer says she faced online abuse after Question Time clash with Laurence Fox

A mixed-race university lecturer accused of being racist by the white actor Laurence Fox has been bombarded with hate messages via social media, she has told the Observer.

Rachel Boyle, a researcher on race and ethnicity at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, clashed with Fox during a television discussion about press coverage of the Duchess of Sussex.

Since the row, Boyle said she had received a barrage of online abuse, mainly from people who appear to be of the Alt Right, via Twitter and email.

“At this stage I’m not worried but it’s something I’m going to monitor closely,” she said.

Positive responses to her appearance on BBC Question Time far outweighed the abuse and she would “absolutely” make the same points again, Boyle insisted.

“The lad that was sitting next to me in the audience leant over to me and quite jovially said something like ‘You’re going to go viral tomorrow you know’. I started laughing like ‘Oh yeah, whatever’. In terms of how it’s unfolded I’m incredibly proud of the way I handled the situation, of what I said. I’m proud to be this voice, proud to have this platform.”

As the panel members discussed press coverage of the duchess, Boyle, an audience member, said: “Let’s be really clear about what this is, let’s call it by its name – it’s racism. She’s a black woman and she has been torn to pieces.”

“It’s not racism,” Fox responded. “We’re the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe. It’s so easy to just throw your charge of racism at everybody and it’s starting to get boring now.”

Boyle then described Fox as a “white privileged male”, which led the actor to label her as racist.

Boyle believed it was Fox’s immediate response to her comments – rather than the point she made about the press – that had seen the row “go nuclear”. She said: “It was the way in which he simply dismissed my perspective, talked over me and then made really ridiculous statements for which he has no basis apart from his own personal position.”

Fox has responded on Twitter since the pair clashed, provocatively tweeting a quotation from Martin Luther King and mocking his critics. “I was just speechless when I saw that,” Boyle said. “I thought how can you conflate what you said to me, your viewpoint, your position, with the views of a civil rights activist who was shot and killed?”

Boyle, 39, comes from one of the oldest black families in Liverpool. “My family have been here since the 1800s. My great, great-great grandfather was a slave of the island of Barbados.”

Her experiences of what her mixed-race parents went through in Liverpool in the 70s – “lots of micro aggression, incidents in isolation that form a pattern” – and the racism she encountered as a teenager that her secondary school chose to ignore, have influenced her chosen career.

“There was a moment yesterday when I thought: Oh my word. But being a black academic researching race and ethnicity is not easy. Having conversations with people such as Laurence Fox is not easy, dealing with the fallout is not easy. But ultimately this is what I came to do. You don’t sign up for this and think it’s going to be easy.”

Her decision to highlight white privilege has been heavily influenced by the work of the Amercian anti-racist activist Peggy McIntosh. “She talks about the invisible, weightless knapsack of privilege,” Boyle said. “Within this knapsack she says there are special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, passports, blank cheques [which] you carry around. You have no idea that it’s there, but you also have no idea of the privilege that whiteness affords you.”

The media’s treatment of the Duchess of Sussex, Boyle suggested, clearly showed there was a need to question privilege and to be alert to racism. “The way she is treated by the press deeply worries me and makes me uncomfortable. The comments that I’ve seen in both the press and on social media do have racist undertones.”

In contrast, she recalls how she felt when Barack Obama was elected US president. “I saw that as the paradise moment – as in there’s somebody on the television who I recognise because you look like me, you look like my family and you are in a position of power and that had never happened before.”

Now, though, she fears the clock has been wound back. “With Trump I felt like we came right back,” Boyle said. “I feel like I’m 15 again and I’m in school and nobody cares about how I feel in terms of racism. And the other side is being given all kinds of light.”