The creative arts have long given expression to the downtrodden and the oppressed, enabling those with a less formal education to give affective expression to their experience. Still, mainstream media were created as exclusively white spaces and even now the appearance of Black women in key roles is groundbreaking. Still, Black women have spent decades laying claim to their share of the publishing infrastructure and are now taking centre stage in long running television and film franchises. Just take a look at these Black British women taking the creative industries by storm.

The legacy of violent discrimination against Black people sadly continues to this day but it continues to act as a rallying call to powerful Black women who have risen up to help create a fairer Britain for everyone. Today, we salute those Black British women who have taken the political scene by storm and continue challenging the status quo in British politics.

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.