Written by Dr Amelia Baldwin
Content Warning: This text explores issues such as racism and colonisation
I am a counselling psychologist whose personal story is very much linked with UWE’s. Back in 2004, I was part of UWE’s original cohort on what was then a brand-new doctorate in counselling psychology. It has been quite a journey from those initial steps into UWE and the profession of counselling psychology. I am very proud to be a graduate of UWE’s doctoral counselling psychology programme. I was honoured to be invited as a speaker at this year’s Black History Month (BHM) launch on the 2nd of October, 2023. The following is the speech I gave at the launch event, and it explores what this year’s BHM theme of Saluting our Sisters means to me:
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What are you?
I started being asked this as a 4-year-old when my parents moved back to their recently liberated home country of Zimbabwe. I came to realise that this referred to me as a racially marginalised woman.
It was the ‘what’ rather than the ‘who’ that I came to see would often shape my world. In other words, my intersectional experiences as a Mixed-Race neurodiverse woman would determine my reality. Contemplating and addressing the ways in which people, both in the past and the present, have engaged with this question has led me to a career that offers potential ways to address why this is a question and what the possible answers might be.
What am I? You can see why this question is posed. It reveals that my body could be classified as white or something else. To me Stuart Hall (1997) captures my experience when he says: “the body is” read like “a text … we go around looking for this … closer and closer for those very fine differences”. These are not random differences. Farhad Dalal (2002) explains: We are not “[chromatically] … black or white” (p. 3). Race has work to do – to separate the “haves … [from] the must-not-haves” (Dalal, 2002, p. 14).
In my case, the daughter of a Mixed-Race African mother and a father whose grandparents had immigrated to Africa from India. I was born into a world where Zimbabwe, still under an apartheid system, was called Rhodesia, so named after British coloniser Cecil John Rhodes. As a child growing up in Zimbabwe, the legal apartheid may have ended, but the very openly and deliberately structured system set up to divide and keep people in their relative positions of power had not.
My racial ambiguity in such a racialised world leads to the frequent and flagrant question and need to know – what are you?
As you can imagine, the 4-year-old’s understanding and, therefore, answer to this question compared to the 16-year-old’s answer were quite different. I will not repeat here how I responded as a 16-year-old, but needless to say, it did not offer any clarity regarding my racialisation. Friends from school later told me that they turned to the teacher’s register, which, unbeknownst to me, had all their student’s racialised categories, as determined under the apartheid system, listed next to their names. For me it had a capital ‘C’ for “Coloured”, the category for those of Multiple Heritage. What are you? In this context, the expected answer was this racial category.
There is something important in the intersectional experience of being a Mixed-Race woman that cannot be explained by looking at me or my characteristics on paper. It can only be understood by hearing my story. When you ask me what I am? (And let me be clear that I am not referring to the importance of accounting for the differential outcomes for those that are othered.) What I refer to is the figuring out my position within a system of power. It means: How do I think about you? How do I conceptualise you? How do I treat you?
I do struggle at times to identify with the International or Black student experience referred to in some discussions. Although I grew up in a very openly racialised environment, I also count myself lucky to have become politically conscious in an African country. I would say that many of my difficulties as an International and Mixed-Race female student, and now academic, often lie within the isms of a British system.
The focus is often through a kind of privilege-blind lens – our education systems, being less critical, being less able, speaking too much, speaking too little, asking for too much clarification, ignoring feedback, just being unwilling, being wilful, being passive, being aggressive; and not to mention the many hardships that seem to exist solely outside of the university space. … leading to explanations and solutions that don’t require us, as a university, to inspect what we do within the university environment. This is not to be dismissive of the real socio-economic differences that lead, for instance, to Black women being disadvantaged by gender and racial pay gaps. But somehow, whiteness becomes the measure of how to get it right; whiteness is equated with benevolence, and power differentials are mystified.
As a student, the message was often clear – you are just not good enough. And it is not only the difference in terms of grades but also in the time you are given to speak, the language you receive when you do, how many times you’re silenced, how often you are spoken over, your words and contributions repeated without credit or changed into something so unrecognisable that it is actually used to reinforce the status quo; and the extra number of years that you are put through. It feels like the system wishes for you to just give up and leave. You internalise these negative voices. You can feel paranoid and that you don’t belong.
As a staff member, sometimes the message is equally as clear: I can find myself in deficit. Although I have the same title, I went through the same recruitment process, and I have a couple of decades of experience under my belt, my expertise, my professionalism, my ability, and my presence are questioned. It feels like not being given the benefit of the doubt. It is exhausting trying to figure out how to ask a systemic question as an individual person. I need not point out that not being racist is very different to being anti-racist. And I won’t claim that I have not been tempted to just keep my head down and avoid challenging the system, but I find this position equally tiring.
Luckily, I cut my teeth in practice, in spaces that championed the need to be a critical friend to those in positions of power. My research allowed me to explore Asian cultural experiences of indigenous healing – highlighting not only that Western folk psychological practices are only a few of thousands of healing practices from across the globe but also the damage of culturally inappropriate and neoliberal practices. My doctoral research offered me the opportunity to explore British women’s experiences of racist hate crime. In no uncertain terms was the message clear here – the problem and the solution to these experiences of Black women must not be solely located within individuals but addressed as the systemic issues of racism and sexism that exist across society. This requires an intersectional lens. We need to address the lived experiences of Black women.
Fortunately, I have benefitted from inspirational and supportive colleagues who offer their time and energy to make and develop places to listen, mentor, decompress, think about what could be done, and practice self-care. The reason that I am a part of UWE is because of these supportive spaces. But it does feel risky – sending that initial e-mail or knocking on that door. There is a real fear that I will end up experiencing epistemic injustice and be problematised.
Anti-racism and decolonisation take bravery (Hull et al., 2016). This work will mean challenging ourselves, our viewpoints as well as the system. Many point out that feeling comfortable is a clue that barriers are at play, preventing the achievement of anything of meaning. We cannot let discomfort prevent us from redressing what makes us all uncomfortable.
We are not going to understand where we are unless we understand how we got here. We cannot make the change needed without hearing the stories rooted in the past and re-enacted in the present (Butler, 1990; hooks, 2015). bell hooks (2003) warns that without real change to our education system, this will lead to a repeat of the past, as the only knowledge developed will be that which legitimises the current system.
This seems to me to be a central purpose of BHM. It emphasises the importance that this is not an annual event after which we return to the status quo and, therefore, have 11 de facto white history months. We need to not only hear these stories but to understand why they were silent, why they occur and how they are continued.
BHM is a month created to recognise and focus on Black history, which is British history. The omission and appropriation of Black his-stories and her-stories that occurred, for example, during the Enlightenment period, leads to our Eurocentric curriculum.
This year’s theme of Saluting our Sisters reminds us that Black women’s lived experiences need to be central in order to understand and, therefore, to address issues such as racism and sexism. Black Feminist voices are being silenced, and I see real potential for a university like UWE to address this issue. But I will not be the first nor, sadly, the last to say that academic spaces are renowned for being all talk and no action.
So, I will sum this up by asking:
UWE, what are you?
Where are Black women empowered to tell their story?
In fact, where are Black women present and not present?
Are Black women being valued equally?
How will Black women be central to determining all our stories going forward?
References:
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Abingdon: Routledge.
Dalal, F. (2002). Race, colour and the processes of racialisation: new perspectives from group analysis, psychoanalysis and sociology. Brunner-Routledge.
Hall, S. (1997). Race, The Floating Signifier, Featuring Stuart Hall, Transcript. URL:https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Race-the-Floating-Signifier-Transcript.pdf (last access: 02.10.2023).
hooks, b. (2003). Rock my Soul. New York: Washington Square Press.
hooks. b. (2015). Ain’t I a woman Black women and feminism ([Second edition].). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Hull, A. (Gloria T. ), Bell-Scott, P., Smith, B., & Cooper, B. C. (2016). But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (2nd edition). The Feminist Press at CUNY.
