ABSTRACT
The inaugural seminar for the Centre for Rights, Equalities and Social Justice (CRESJ) at the Institute of Education, University of London, was a turning point, not only for me, the newly appointed Director of the Centre, but for the several women of colour1 now associated with the Centre. As a group, we could collectively celebrate our research and writing in a small corner of a powerful, consumingly white institution of higher learning. We settled on a theme to embrace our commonality, ‘Black feminism and postcolonial paradigms: researching educational inequalities’.2 We had sessions on gendered racialisation of refugees in the UK, ethnic identity among Chinese, Indian and Malay schoolgirls in Malaysia, tensions between globalisation and traditionalism for middle-class career women in India, and feminised working-class Caribbean grassroots educational movements in Britain. Emails and notices went out across the UK inviting a broad range of participants. Responses flowed in: they were celebratory and uplifting. Women of colour from the length and breath of Britain wanted to join us and share their scholarship in a safe place – and then there was the one email which signified the turning point. It was from a young black woman. She wrote enthusiastically: ‘Thank you for organising this; I thought black feminism was dead!’ I was taken aback and it made me think. I have been long consumed by the desire to celebrate black feminist scholarship and naively assumed that out there black feminism as a body of scholarship was alive and well. We have established a small but important community of women scholars of colour in Britain. I belong to a generation of postcolonial women who have struggled together in the world of academe since the 1970s, and many of us are now professors. There is also a new generation of hopeful young women of colour challenging the traditions of the academy – but even then we are so few in number. Data on staff in higher education show there are just 15 black and 80 Asian women professors in the UK out of a total of 14,305 professors.3 Perhaps I was deluded by our newfound status and assumed that a few black feminists having a place in the academy means we are no longer considered an endangered species.
