Suffering from the intersectional oppression both as Black people and as women, Black women face communal microaggressions and exclusion in academia, as elsewhere, making an already steep career path even more difficult for them. This is reflected in the challenges …

Pioneering Black British women in education and research Read more »

Looking after ourselves means taking time to care for bodies and minds together. It doesn’t matter what you read or what exercise you do, only that you enjoy what you are doing. As I was once told, “life is not a rehearsal”, so make the most of your time. Enjoy every moment you can, and if you can’t, see if there is anything obvious you can do to make life better.

Bringing an admittedly selective sweep of leading Black ladies up to the late twentieth century, we see how Black women have been instrumental in making up for deficiencies in the welfare state, building self-sufficient communities, neutralising some of the most dangerous periods of interracial strife in British history, while still making waves in popular culture.

Looking back over the Black History Month blog posts from last year, you will find descriptions of the many powerful Black women who successfully overcame the frightening violence and persecution that followed the uptick in racism and fearmongering in the 1950s following the post-war economic collapse. Figures such as Mavis Best who changed the law from a tool of persecution to a standard for equality that gave police sweeping powers of arrest without cause and allowed them to intimidate Black people with the threat of arbitrary arrest and instigated the Race Relations Act of 1965 that replaced colonial laws and established equal rights in law for everyone, regardless of their ethnicity. These figures are so important that I wanted to revisit them again briefly here.

Every reading list should be preceded with the words “don’t panic” in large, friendly letters. Almost everything you need to read for your course is available through the library. Most are available as ebooks that you can read from anywhere …

A librarian’s guide to saving money (on books) Read more »

Contrary to the prevailing myth that Black people arrived to an entirely white population mid-20th century on the Windrush, archaeological evidence suggests Britain was ethnically diverse from at least the time the Roman Empire arrived in Britain, facilitating international trade and mobility and have answered the call to aid Britain from every corner of her empire ever since.