And Sweden is certainly no exception.
Read the full story on the BBC and help us build the most comprehensive directory of organizations across Europe that support black women. Send submissoins with links to contact@bwiesmg.org.
I wouldn’t feel safe onboard Ryanair
Leave our mothers and grandmother alone.
It is always precarious travelling while black, especially for a woman. Let’s face it. Women are less valued in society or we would earn the same pay as men, proportionately occupy the same leadership positions as men, and not get punished for having children as career women. Another irrefutable truth is that black women suffer even more just because we are black.
Queue up the latest attack on us, this time by a white man and supported by Ryanair, the low budget airline that disrupted the industry. Fair well you pioneer. We’d rather have our self-respect, thank you. Don’t know what I’m going on about? Please take a few minutes to view the video below, read the open letter and add your signature.
NOTE: Please add your signature on this open letter to Ryanair in the comments. However, you can’t add your comment signature if you are using a mobile device. Please use a laptop or PC.
This is why our work is so important. Help us compile the most comprehensive directory of organizations across Europe that support black women by submitting their names and websites to contact@bwiesmg.org.
La V?rit? – Amandine Gay and others Speak Up
Amandine Gay?s documentary ?Ouvrir la Voix? confronts a political and historical paradox: the illusion of color blindness that?s central to the French national self-image.
OUVRIR LA VOIX/Speak Up is a feature-length documentary on black female Afro-descendants in French-speaking Europe (France and Belgium).
This film project was born from my desire to occupy the public space and explain why the racial question in France is an eminently political problem. Whether born in France or not, French parents or not, Muslim, Catholic, agnostic, Jewish, atheist, lesbian, hetero, bi, pansexual, cis or transgender, what society sees about us is above all, our skin color. Since my experience as a black woman is necessarily limited and subjective, it seemed necessary to give the floor to women different from me in order to draw a political portrait of black women in Europe and France as multiple as the realities and identities it includes.
For about 80 years critical theories of white supremacy, class relations and patriarchy have emerged . These theories have been articulated by intellectuals such as Claudia Jones, Ella Baker, James Baldwin, WEB du Bois, Franz Fanon, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Aime Cesaire, Audre Lorde, etc. And although these tools have been available for so long, the fact that the level of daily feeling and material living conditions of black women has changed – little has changed: greater economic precariousness, more likely to be victims of physical or symbolic violence. combination of negrophobia and sexism) etc.
How do we change the paradigm for black women? How do we disseminate these ideas, reflections, tools for preserving self-esteem and guaranteeing the emancipation of the entire black community?
I therefore consider this film in the spirit of a sociological inquiry, even if the militant and artistic dimension is affirmed. In sociology, the principle of the presentation of the person conducting the inquiry is called: situating one’s subject. And that is my intention: to know where I am from. I therefore choose to use my presence in this film as a guide to the themes that will be addressed, introducing each topic by a personal anecdote. My life has led me to apply for permanent residency in Quebec, but among the interviewees, we will meet as many women entrepreneurs – who are determined to settle permanently in France – as women who have already left or are planning to leave. This is our collection of anecdotes!!
–Amandine GAY, Director & Producer
https://ouvrirlavoixlefilm.fr/
These women’s experiences highlight why us building the most comprehensive directory of organizations across Europe that support black women is vital work.? If you know of organizations in France, Belgium and in other European countries, send their names and website links to contact@bwiesmg.org.
Microaggressions are not in your head.
It. Is. Not. In. Your. Head.
Wonderful Black women in Europe. It took me researching and writing a chapter in a book about Black Feminism in Europe to realize how many microaggressions I have experienced and continue to experience.
Standard definition:
microaggression
[m??kr?????r??(?)n]
NOUN
microaggressions (plural noun) ? micro-aggression (noun) ? micro-aggressions (plural noun)
-
a statement, action, or incident regarded as an instance of indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group such as a racial or ethnic minority.“the students made signs detailing microaggressions they had heard or experienced”
-
indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group.“they are not subject to daily acts of microaggression”
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ORIGIN
1970s: from micro- + aggression.
Still not sure about microaggressions? View this short video for more information.
Tell me about the microaggressions you face, particularly in Europe. Include how you react, respond and deal with them. How do they make you feel?
If you want to you can comment here on this post or send them in via email to contact@bwiesmg.org. If you want to write a blog post about it you can submit that to me too.
Help us build the more comprehensive directory or organizations across Europe that support black women by submitting them to contact@bwiesmg.org.
It is not in your head.
News about austerity the UK – Minority-ethnic working-class women experience triple discrimination
Low-income black and Asian women are paying the highest price for austerity. By 2020 they will have lost nearly double the amount of money poor white men have. You wouldn?t know any of this from the current discourse around austerity, poverty and?Brexit Britain: women of colour are consistently written out of the picture.
Women, people of colour and in particular women of colour are suffering the most. And they will continue to suffer disproportionately until 2020, according to research from the?Women?s Budget Group and the Runnymede Trust. If you dig down into their findings you see lone mothers are hit the hardest ? and in this group it is once again women of colour who stand to lose out the most financially. This magnifies a trend that existed before austerity gripped the UK: even before the 2008 financial crash the poverty rates among minority ethnic communities were significantly higher than for the white population.
Read the full story on The Guardian. This is why our work is so important. Help us compile the most comprehensive directory of organizations across Europe that support black women across Europe by submitting their names to contact@bwiesmg.org.
The Windrush row and children of Caribbean migrants who settled in the UK
Source: Sheerluxe’s The Brief
?I think she needs to consider her position.?
Labour MP Diane Abbot suggesting that Home Secretary Amber Rudd should quit over her department?s treatment of?Windrush-generation?immigrants. Many of the Caribbean immigrants, who came to the UK as children in the aftermath of WWII, have been pursued by the Home Office and threatened with deportation if they do not have paperwork to prove their residency. Some have lost their jobs and access to NHS services as a result of tightened immigration rules. Abbot has accused Rudd of withholding information about the number of people wrongly detained and deported.
Our work is important. Hep us compile the most comprehensive directory of organisations across Europe that support black women. Submit your suggestions to contact@bwiesmg.org.
Racial Discrimination in Europe Against Women of Colour Persists
Source: ENAR
NOTE: Help us build the largest directory of organizations that support black women across Europe by sending the names of the groups you know to contact@bwiesmg.org.
No progress in curbing racial discrimination in the European labour market ? in particular for women of colour
Brussels, 21 March 2018 ? Despite anti-discrimination laws, ethnic and religious minorities and migrants continue to face racial discrimination when looking for a job and in the workplace, according to a new report by the European Network Against Racism (ENAR). Women of colour are disproportionately affected, as a result of the intersection of race, gender and class.
The report, released on International Day Against Racism, explores racism and discrimination in employment in 23 EU countries in the last five years. Little has changed since ENAR?s last 2012-13 report on racial discrimination in employment, which had already pointed to persistent discrimination faced by ethnic and religious minorities in the labour market. Not only is there is a lack of enforcement and awareness of existing anti-discrimination laws, but some laws and policies limit migrants? access to the labour market.
Ethnic and religious minorities have fewer chances of getting through recruitment processes. In Belgium, research showed that job applicants with foreign sounding names have 30% less chances of being invited to a job interview compared to applicants with a similar profile but Flemish sounding names. In Hungary, one in two Roma said they had suffered discrimination when seeking employment. Discriminatory recruitment practices and structural inequalities also mean that migrants and ethnic minorities tend to have a higher unemployment rate and to be overrepresented in certain job positions or sectors, in particular agriculture, services and care.
Once in a job, ethnic minorities and migrants face additional obstacles, including racist incidents in the workplace, wage disparities, job insecurity and in the worst cases, exploitation and difficult working conditions. In Ireland, a large proportion of racist incidents reported is in the workplace (31%). In Germany, the monthly income of people of African descent was almost 25% less than the national mean monthly net income. In Italy and Greece, migrant workers face inhuman and exploitative working conditions, in particular in the agriculture sector.
Women of colour in Europe face multiple obstacles in the labour market: they are particularly vulnerable to discrimination, exploitation, sexual harassment and mistreatment, experience high rates of overqualification, as well as segregation in specific sectors, in particular domestic work. In France, women with an African background have the lowest labour market activity rate. In Cyprus, the majority of female migrant domestic workers are subjected to multiple discrimination, unequal, unfair and abusive treatment, violence and/or sexual abuse. In Belgium, 50% of discrimination complaints by women on the ground of religion (Islam) received by the equality body in 2014 concerned employment.
?It is shocking to see that so little has been done to tackle persistent and widespread racial discrimination in employment across Europe, and in particular the intersections of racism and sexism,? said ENAR Chair Amel Yacef. ?Ethnic and religious minorities and migrants are an integral part of the workforce and are contributing to the European economy. But the structural and individual racism that they experience in the labour market impacts their lives, and also prevents them from fully utilising their talents. EU governments must urgently take both preventive and proactive measures to ensure equal outcomes in employment.?
For further information, contact:
Georgina Siklossy, Senior Communication and Press Officer
Tel: +32 (0)2 229 35 70 – Mobile: +32 (0)473 490 531 – Email: georgina@enar-eu.org – Web: www.enar-eu.org
Notes to the editor:
1. ENAR?s 2013-17 Shadow Report on racism and discrimination in employment in Europe is based on data and information from 23 EU Member States: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, United Kingdom.
2. The report and key findings are available here: www.enar-eu.org/Shadow-Reports-on-racism-in-Europe.
3. The term ?women of colour? refers to women of racial, ethnic and religious minority background, and does not necessarily relate to skin colour.
4. The European Network Against Racism (ENAR aisbl) stands against racism and discrimination and advocates equality and solidarity for all in Europe. We connect local and national anti-racist NGOs throughout Europe and voice the concerns of ethnic and religious minorities in European and national policy debates.
Memory and?Performance in African-Atlantic Futures
Memory and?Performance in African-Atlantic Futures
31 Aug?- 2 Sept?2018
University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Three-day International Conference
At a time when new dynamics are emerging around the issues of justice (transitional, reparative, etc.), mourning and commemoration in Africa and its diaspora, the conference ?Memory and?Performance in African-Atlantic Futures? seeks to consider the current historical conjuncture and the extent to which it reveals new questions about memory in the historical, temporal and social contexts of slavery and imperialism.?For example, how do the growing calls for reparations and the urge to restructure or challenge the politics of commemoration within imperialist societies point to the emergence of new ?conceptual-ideological problem-spaces? (Scott, Conscripts of Modernity) in how African-Atlantic postcolonial communities engage with historical memory? How will an analysis of these dynamics, of the gaps they point to, and of the urgencies they highlight, foster new understandings of the stakes that the particular memories of slavery and imperialism bear within the spaces marked by this history, including the imperialist societies themselves?
In tackling these questions, we wish to consider the valences of performance in the contemporary moment and the extent to which they are cross-fertilising and mediating the most urgent issues in Africa-Atlantic memory. We wish to reflect on how spaces and modes of performance ? including, but not limited to, theatre, dance, literary texts, music, visual art and sports ? are being used to energise both the particular and the entangled concerns of aesthetics, politics and epistemology within the memories linked to African-Atlantic colonialism and slavery. Are contemporary performances of memory, particularly those that point to African and Afro-diasporic alternatives to Euro-Western modes and models, reflecting historico-political and cognitive shifts in how the relationship between African-Atlantic pasts, presents and futures is conceived?
The three-day international conference ?Memory and?Performance in African-Atlantic Futures? seeks to approach these issues from a vigorously cross-/inter-disciplinary perspective. We invite scholars, artists, curators and other professionals within fields as varied as literature, theatre and the performing arts, visual art, history, law, anthropology, cultural studies, to engage in a conversation around the dynamics of memory within the historical framework of African-Atlantic slavery and colonialism and the political, aesthetic and epistemological specificities that they engage in the current moment. We hope to underscore how these dynamics, too often overlooked in the critical and theoretical sites of memory studies, are currently shaping, reshaping and (re)mediating the global flows of memory.
We propose two main axes of investigation:
Shapes and forms of memory
How do we think the forms and effects of the enfleshed, material memories of slavery, colonialism and their afterlives and the ways in which these are enlisted in the spaces of performance, be they physical (theatre, dance, ritual, oral performance, etc.) or textual (the different performative manifestations of the written word)?
This question necessarily involves a consideration of how African diaspora time-senses fashion modes of performance of memory and how oral and ritual performance forms impact, shape, record and encode memory in the context of colonial violence. Can African and diasporic forms of embodied memory become tools that combat imperialism? How can the performance of post-slavery/ post-Empire memory shed new light on Western theories of memory that emerge from Holocaust studies or on Western theories of haunting, trauma and mourning?
Epistemologies of memory
What challenges do African diasporic modes of memory bring to Euro-Western epistemologies of justice, History, and the human? How does postcolonial memory call into question the social deployment of memory within the nation and across nations? At a time when the movement for reparations for slavery in the African diaspora is achieving unprecedented momentum, we invite contributions that question settled understandings of the triad of time, history and justice and those that address postcolonial engagements with memory through ?corrective? performance practices of justice, ?truth-telling? and witnessing. Additionally, in considering institutional marginalization, suppression, and exclusion of postcolonial memories, we seek contributions about practices that challenge the order of remembrance in official commemorations, museums, schools, archives and discourses.
Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:?
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institutions of memory
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memory and the law
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memory and reparations
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memory and colonial enlightenment
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memory and ?the human?
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new ?problem-spaces? of?memory
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memory and futures
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Black Speculative Arts Movement and futures
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Afrofuturism
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ritual performance and futures
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decolonising memory
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decolonising the museum
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decolonising the curriculum
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citation as a politics of memory
Each presentation should last no longer than 20 minutes in order to save time for questions and to ensure a smooth program.
Submission Guidelines
Abstracts in English of no more than 300 words should be sent to??by Friday, 2 March 2018. Please send abstracts in PDF or Word format, accompanied by the title of the paper and a short biography. ??????
We also welcome proposals for complete panels, which should consist of?3?presenters. Panel proposals should not exceed 500 words and should be accompanied by short?biographies of each of the presenters.
The organising committee will communicate acceptance decisions no later than 9 March 2018.
Conference Conveners
Dr. Jason Allen-Paisant (University of Leeds)
Prof. Maxim Silverman (University of Leeds)
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
Dr. Louise Bernard (Museum of the Obama Presidential Center)
Prof. Lubaina Himid?(University of Central Lancashire)
Prof. Tavia Nyong?o (Yale University)
Prof. Adam Sitze (Amherst College)
Dr. Chokri Ben Chikha (Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent)
Please address enquiries?to Dr. Jason Allen-Paisant.
Quiet racism and why our work is so important.
Source: nbcnews.com
LONDON ? Disparaging reactions to?Prince Harry’s relationship with actress Meghan Markle?have highlighted the racism and class snobbery that persist in British society.
The American will become the first person who identifies as biracial to join the upper echelons of the U.K.’s royal family when?she marries Harry in May.
But some black women said coverage of the Los Angeles native’s roots by some media outlets is indicative of the underlying racism that they experience daily.
“I feel like racism in the U.K. is pretty insidious,”
said Paula Akpan, a co-founder of Black Girl Festival which celebrates black British women.
Read the full story. Quiet and overt racism against black women in Europe is a problem which is why our work is so important. Help us build the most comprehensive directory of organizations in the UK and across Europe that support black women. Submit the names to contact@bwiesmg.org today.
You have been accepted into the Google Developer Challenge Scholarship
Investing in our future
I am very pleased to have received this news! In my application I stated that I want to learn how to ensure that I can fulfill one mission of our organization:
To provide alternative platforms to mainstream media to showcase and promote positive images and news stories about black women in Europe. The platforms will include a multi-award winning blog and social media.
Congratulations! #GoogleUdacityScholars
We are excited to offer you a Google Developer Challenge Scholarship to the Front-End Web Developer track. We received applications from many talented and motivated candidates, and yours truly stood out.
Class begins November 6, 2017. As a scholarship student, you will be automatically enrolled into the program. We’ll be sending you an email on the first day of class, November 6th, 2017, with instructions to get started.
Chaitra, on behalf of the Udacity and Google Scholarship Team.