ABSTRACT
In a time when your ‘belonging’, who you really are, is judged by the colour of your skin, the shape of your nose, the texture of your hair, the curve of your body – your perceived genetic and physical presence; to be black (not white), female and ‘over here’, in Scotland, England or Wales, is to disrupt all the safe closed categories of what it means to be British: that is, to be white and British. Black British feminism as a body of scholarship is located in that space of British whiteness, that unchallenged hegemonic patriarchal discourse of colonial and now postcolonial times which quietly embraces our commonsense and academic ways of thinking. Whiteness: that powerful place that makes invisible, or reappropriates things, people and places it does not want to see or hear, and then through misnaming, renaming or not naming at all, invents the truth – what we are told is ‘normal’, neutral, universal, simply becomes the way it is ((charles) 1992; Wong 1994).
