Higher education in the UK constantly emphasises  critical thinking for students. However, analysis of comments made about *Black students and staff indicate that some academic staff fail to critically analyse their thoughts, words, and deeds. This paper sets out to analyse these utterances of HE staff and to investigate whether they actively reproduce and are intended to reproduce racist practices in HE, which could affect the experience, performance, and confidence of some of these students and staff who identify as Black and Global Majorities.  Applying critical race theory and socio-ideological analysis of language (Bakhtin 1981 and Voloshinov 1973) to analyse these utterances, which seem to be thoughts trapped in cobwebs, I seek to understand whether some HE staff fail to practise critical thinking and what this absence reveals about their ideological position and beliefs. I further explore whether critical reflection is required for those of us working within the university sector to become aware of our uncritical habits of mind (King 1991), i.e., the cobwebs in our minds. This paper discusses why one-off workshops such as unconscious bias training may be ineffective in tackling these deeply ingrained false assumptions and in dismantling racial structures