Making Black Lives Matter in academia: A Black feminist call for collective action against anti‐blackness in the academy

Abstract

In this article, as have many Black women scholars in the past, we again call for collective action against anti‐blackness and White supremacy in the academy. Drawing from black feminist theory, we discuss the long history of Black women academics' activism against anti‐black racism and introduce the current movement: Black Lives Matter (BLM). Although BLM is often construed as resisting anti‐black violence outside the academy, it is also relevant for within the academy wherein anti‐blackness is likely to be manifested as disdain, disregard, and disgust for Black faculty and students. We discuss some of the ways in which anti‐blackness and liberal White supremacy are manifested in the lives of Black faculty and students, and propose that non‐Black allies have key roles to play in resisting them. Like second‐hand cigarette smoke that harms everyone in proximity, anti‐blackness and White supremacy harm us all, and a shared movement is needed to dismantle them.

Qualitative Inquiry, Activism, the Academy, and the Infinite Game: An Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Whose knowledge is given credibility and why? Universities have, in some cases, become sites of collective action, of Black scholars coming together to challenge the long-standing epistemic hegemony of the white, heteronormative, male, positivistic scholarship (e.g., Bell et al, 2020; Scholars4BlackLives https://www.scholars4blacklives.org/home; Learning Scientists for Racial Justice https://www.insidehighered.com/users/learning-scientists-racial-justice; Race.Ed https://www.race.ed.ac.uk/)…”

Making black lives don't matter via organizational strategies to avoid the racial debate: The military police in Brazil

“…However, Anglo‐Saxon journals in the field of management and organizations (MOS) tend not to focus on non‐English speaking knowledge and contexts (Alcadipani et al., 2012; Boussebaa & Tienari, 2019). Moreover, if we are to focus on how #blacklivesmatter can inspire debates toward changing racial and gender inequalities in diverse fields, such as MOS academia and institutions (Bell et al., 2020) as well as antiracist activism in the world of sports (Agyemang et al., 2020), it is still necessary to discuss persistent organizational practices that make black lives don't matter nowadays. On that topic, researchers have been discussing racial profiling by the police and the criminal justice (Bridges & Steen, 1998; Kim & Kiesel, 2018), the role of police violence in structural racism (Boyd, 2018) and racist practices within police organizations (Fassin, 2013; Rubinstein, 1973).…”

Particularising 'experiences': Naming whiteness in the academy

“…An intersectional lens reinforces the complexity of experience at the intersection of different social identities 7,8 : the experiences of racialised women working towards full professorship are understood to be distinct from those of White women, because of the unique ways racism and sexism collide to structure the social world. Practically, research has found these differences reflected across the academy in teaching evaluations, 9 service work expectations, 10 and the lesser value accorded to research approaches practised more often by racialised, feminised scholars in tenure reviews 11 . In medical education, in particular, it is also reflected in the ways female Black and Indigenous physicians are called upon to teach and practise medicine in systems that often fail to recognise their dignity and humanity as patients and as people 12‐14 .…”