I am proud to announce that my latest article – Refuting ‘how the other half lives’: I am a woman’s rights – has been published by Area. In it, I work through my tension with explaining the need to decentre whiteness to those who consistently use feminism (and intersectionality) to maintain logics of white supremacy.
Thank you to the members of my writing group – Kumud, Thao, Kyoung, Jenny, Poonam, Helen and Cristiana. You helped me think through this piece with such honesty and generosity. This has been a really hard piece to write: I kept getting stuck within a desire to prove my humanity to those that refuse to see or hear me. Talking through our shared and differing experiences helped me navigate the pain of this erasure; because of our conversations, I could finish the article with a move towards the expansiveness of the Black feminist project that also honours my own embodied reality (also see Francesca Sobande’s interview that I reference in my article).
Connected to this, I have resigned from Feminist Review. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I could possibly say about Feminist Review that would address the toll FR has had on my intellectual, emotional and physical well-being, but I’m not there yet. More importantly, I will not force myself to provide others with a “teachable” moment about the belittling and gaslighting that I’ve seen and experienced. I choose my own embodied happiness over a place within a feminist institution that must also fall.
Since May 2020, Nydia Swaby, Jennifer Ung Loh, Terese Jonsson and myself – supported by FR’s Managing Editor Kyoung Kim – boycotted business-as-usual meetings and pointed to a Crisis of Care within the Feminist Review collective. Read our statement and their response here
DECENTRING DIVERSITY
by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (from Postcolonial Banter, shared with author’s permission)
Equal access to unjust systems is not liberation
More people of colour on pedagogically unchanged reading lists is not salvation,
and no number of black and brown faces in universities can fundamentally undo the racism
Just because they give you a seat at the table
doesn’t mean they want you to speak at the table
It’s a virtuous invitation that reflects well on the host
and the only thing that’s better than a generous institution
is a grateful beneficiary who’ll follow the key rule:
that people of colour should be seen and not heard
(fit for open-day handbooks but not safety in academia)
Equal access to unjust systems is not liberation
More people of colour on pedagogically unchanged reading lists is not salvation,
and no number of black and brown faces in universities can fundamentally undo the racism
Just because they give you a seat at the table
doesn’t mean they want you to eat at the table
They make out that the racism is the number of students of colour
but not that it’s the underestimation of their knowledge
the exclusion of their histories and distortion of their names
the policing of their speech and a culture of surveillance
They make out that the racism is the content of core modules
but not that it’s that whiteness is the mark of valued knowledge
the processes that underlie the racist drop-out rate
or the lack of mental health services that can understand race
Just because they give you a seat at the table
doesn’t mean that they’ll take their feet off the table
They make out that the racism is the number of academics of colour
but not that it’s the treatment of the other black and brown staff
the cleaners and the caterers, the security on the door
not that it’s the fees or the opaque decision-making
Equal access to unjust systems is not liberation
More people of colour on pedagogically unchanged reading lists is not salvation,
and no number of black and brown faces in universities can fundamentally undo the racism
Just because they give you a seat at the table
doesn’t mean they’re prepared to change the room
Azeezat Johnson | Learning through Black feminism 