Reflections

As two Black women academics working in higher education institutions, one with a background in Youth and Community Work and the other in Social Work, the trials of institutional racism and gender discrimination are writ large upon our histories. At the personal level, it is not the being Black or the being female that creates the challenges we face but being at the nexus of the intersection of both race and gender discrimination. In the academic setting, although gender clearly matters and has mattered to us at every level of our progression, the injustices we have come across seem mostly to have their roots in racism. This is borne out by evidence discussed in Chap. 6 that shows that while women represent 44 per cent of academics in UK universities, the percentage of Black academics remains disproportionately low at 1.6 per cent. Our immersion in the Abasindi Black Women’s Cooperative at a time when our careers were just beginning, emboldened us to stand tall when we were expected to sit, to speak up in engulfing silence and to throw a spanner in the works when acquiescence with injustice was called for. Though we have been enraged at the discrimination we have witnessed, rage is a difficult emotion to sustain and there came a time when it seemed more sensible and more potent to write down the words rather than only speaking them out. Beyond the academic mandate ‘publish or peril’, writing has therefore become something of a passion of politics for us both—a strategy for the social activist as crucial as any other. But ours is not a calcified approach that assumes cognitive knowledge is enough, and we have been preoccupied equally with the knowledge of experience (situated knowledge), of emotion and of the relevance and application of our writings for activism and for human rights more broadly.