Tag Archives: Black studies

Black History Month and beyond: in conversation with Dr William Ackah

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Senior Lecturer in Black and Community Geographies in the Department of Geography, Dr William Ackah’s academic specialism is around issues of religion and politics across the African diaspora. Here, we find out more about his work.  

Where did your interest in Black diaspora and community development start?
My family came from Ghana to Britain in the 1960’s, and I was born in Walthamstow, East London – so my childhood took place in fairly multicultural setting. I went to Liverpool for university, and after that, went to live in Haiti for a year, to teach English. It was what I experienced there that had a profound impact on the shaping of my political and academic interests.  

Haiti was the first independent Black Republic in the Western Hemisphere, the place where African descendents had thrown off the shackles of white supremacy. It was a place of inspiration but also a place of pain and suffering. I witnessed oppression and poverty based on years of corrupt governance, international neglect and the crazed absurdity that Haiti was paying France reparations.  Seeing what was happening to my fellow African brothers and sisters made me recognise that when I came back to the UK I would want to undertake work to assist in restoring the legacies and improving the lived experiences of people of the African diaspora.  

How did you begin to do that?  
Back in the UK, I initially pursued a more academic vocation, studying for a Master’s in Pan-Africanism, which was all about linking the experiences of Black communities across the globe and looking at their relationships, their common points and differences. And that was the kind of work I then pursued in some shape or another, whilst living in the North West of England for several years.  

I worked in a Black Community College, teaching students largely from Black communities in Liverpool, who had been failed by the school system and lacked confidence in their academic ability. It was really rewarding work. I taught them Black history and Black studies and saw how it helped build their self-esteem and confidence. I saw how in turn, that enabled many of them to get into Higher Education spaces – something that up until that point, many of them had felt wasn’t accessible to them. 

After several years doing this, I moved into higher education, teaching Race Equality Studies at what’s now known as Edge Hill University. All the while, I was doing my PhD doctoral work in Government. Once that was complete, I came to Birkbeck, teaching about Community Development. It was similar work to what I’d always done: all about uplifting marginalised communities, encouraging thought about people whose stories and experiences get ignored and how they can be empowered to improve their own lives, to challenge unfair systems, and fight for equality and justice. That’s at the heart of what I do for Birkbeck, as the programme director for Community Development and Public Policy.  

What else has influenced your work?  
While in the USA in 2009, on a sabbatical, I interacted with some African American Scholars, including Drew Smith, a Professor of Urban Politics, looking at the impact of religion and politics on Black communities. We became good friends and found our interests overlapped and fed each other in very interesting ways. So, we formed, along with Rothney Tshaka from South Africa, the Transatlantic Roundtable on Religion and Race. This initiative brings together scholars of African descent with faith-based leaders, to think about how spiritual and religious connections can enable people to make a difference to improve the lives of people of African descent.  

Then in 2016/17, I was a Fulbright Research Scholar, again in the US. I was looking at the city of Pittsburgh, urban revistalisation, and the impact that gentrification has on African American congregations and communities there. I’m currently writing that research up, then working on a broader book project that explores the idea of Black space. I make the argument that Black space matters, and that African descended people need our own geographical, cultural and spiritual spaces to resist patterns of erasure, of racism, of gentrification; patterns that have denied us space and in doing so, denied us the opportunity to be who we want to be. 

What are you doing to help create Black space? 
A lot of my work for both Birkbeck and the Transatlantic Roundtable on Religion and Race (TRRR) involves community building. With the TRRR, we hold international conferences, two of which have been hosted by Birkbeck, exploring African diaspora and faith. We also produce academic texts on various themes such as culture and spirituality across Africa and the African diaspora, Black churches and contesting multiculturalism, and most recently racialised healthcare in the context of Covid-19. 

Community building is an important aspect of my academic and personal practice. During Covid, working with a group of Black Christians, we started an online space called ‘BlakPak’. It’s a two-pronged initiative. First, we interview prominent people in the Black community in Britain who have something to share with the wider community. It’s called BlakPak as a play on the word, backpack: what’s in your BlakPak? What’s your historical experience and understanding of life? What is it that you’ve drawn on and learnt that you can share with the wider community? We’ve had speakers like Margaret Busby, one of the first Black publishers in Britain, and Gus John, a leading Black academic and activist.  

The second prong is an international dimension that we call ‘Critical Conversations’, where we bring together people from Britain with people from the US, the Caribbean and from the continent to have conversations around issues that we think are impacting us as a community globally. These might be about health, criminal justice systems, the state of Black womanhood and so on. The whole thing is targeted at ordinary people, the idea is to create a repository of Black wisdom, in the hope it can contribute to uplifting communities.   

For me, it’s a win if people access this information, then go away and, in their sphere, think ‘let me go and make a difference’. Raising awareness and disseminating wisdom and conversations from community elders and experts is so important, because it can result in people taking tangible action.  

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Many Days Late and Many Dollars Short: COVID-19 Institutionalised Racism and the Black British Experience

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Dr William Ackah, Lecturer in Community and Voluntary Sector studies, reflects on how COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting Black, Asian and other global majority heritages.

I watched my first virtual funeral this week. I and around 80 others joined the 15 or so people who were physically present in Bristol UK to say goodbye to an amazing woman. I first met this woman nearly 20 years ago, when I moved to the city. She was then recovering from a brain tumour operation. My wife and I would give her a ride to our local church and on the way she would tell us stories about her nursing career in Britain and the obstacles she had to overcome as woman of Jamaican heritage to gain recognition in her profession. She would talk with pride about her children making lives for themselves in the UK and in the United States and of her dream that when she was able to drive again, she would buy herself a Jaguar. I never quite believed that she would get the car, but lo and behold eventually she did. She was the quite the character, one of a number of wonderful people in that congregation in St Pauls in the heart of the city.

I fondly remember tasty lunches with people of Indian heritage, playing games with families from Singapore, becoming a godfather to a daughter of Malawian descent, being pastored by a man of white south African descent and praying and fasting with Nigerian descendants, Guyanese, Ghanaians, Jamaicans, Brazilians, Romanians, Croatians, Australians and white and black British. In that small church we weaved an international tapestry that criss-crossed continents, cultures and identities. Doctors mingled with taxi drivers, who talked to cleaners, dentists, lawyers, barbers and cooks. It was a living, breathing community with a network that was global in its reach and connections. The death of one the precious members of that community at this time is a very hard pill to swallow.

The bitterness of death is made even harder by the fact that the precious life of this woman will barely register outside of her immediate community. She alongside so many others will invariably be reduced to a BAME statistic. Night after night via the media and the data machine of the day, complex individuals with amazing stories and profound life experiences are reduced to racialised entities. In this reduction they are robbed of their humanity and their dignity. In life they faced discrimination in death they face denigration by statistics.

The primary data sets that reference the Black British experience primarily tell their/our story in proportion or disproportion to the ‘white’ population. The value of Black lives therefore according to the data only exists in relation to ‘whiteness’.  This invariably leads to them/us becoming a freak side show. Them/us are people that require further research and investigation, as opposed to being human beings that first and foremost need support and protection!

The statistics reveal that people from Black, Asian, and other global majority heritages are dying in some cases at four times, the rate that ‘white’ people are. A question that should be asked is why is this public health disaster only warranting calls for a public enquiry and a Public Health England investigation? We might not know why they/us are more prone to the virus, but we do know without question that they/us are particularly vulnerable so why are they/us not being shielded as a matter of priority? Why are they/us not being placed on automatic furlough?  Why are the circumstances around Black deaths not considered a national health emergency that demands immediate action?

Why oh why yet again after Windrush, Grenfell and so many other countless failings by the authorities of this nation are Black citizens once again left to suffer and die? Time after time like clockwork all we hear are words of regret and the promise of an investigation. Is that really all we are worth? Is this nation pathologically predisposed to continually s…t on its non-white citizens?

When a migrant descendant doctor, nurse, care worker, bus driver, supermarket assistant dies the impact often goes far beyond that of their immediate family. ‘Successful’ migrants and their descendants are often at the apex of complex and unfolding pyramids of influence. Their finances, knowledge and influence support communities and individuals both locally and globally. Where the state is absent here and abroad these women and men are often a vital cog in sustaining families and communities. COVID-19 is fracturing these community structures and the state through its lack of action to protect its ‘global majority’ citizens is adding salt to the wounds.

The country faces challenging times ahead. How we treat minorities and the vulnerable in a time of crisis is a true test of how ‘Great’ a nation we are. Britain’s Black, Asian and other descendant communities with origins from all over the globe have demonstrated once again their courage, loyalty, and integrity to support the nation in its time of need. What will the nation do in return? We need a systematic and comprehensive plan backed by substantial resources to eradicate racialised discrimination from our society. It is ultimately the only way to end the curse of the BAME label and stats with all their marginalising characteristics and connotations. There are many lessons that the nation needs to learn from this life-changing event, but one must be that it is time to end the madness of racialised inequality in this country once and for all.

 

 

 

 

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British universities need Black Studies

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This post was written by Dr William Ackhar, a lecturer in community and voluntary sector studies in Birkbeck’s Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies. It was originally published on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.

In San Francisco in 1968 a group of primarily black students went on strike to demand that their college establish an academic programme that reflected their lives and experiences. Their demand was met, and San Francisco State College became the first in the US to have a department and degree programme in Black Studies.

Nearly half a century later, Black Studies, Africana Studies or African-American Studies, as they are now variously named in different institutions, are a coast-to- coast academic discipline. Their academic departments in Ivy League institutions such as Harvard, Yale and Columbia are home to internationally renowned scholars.

Built on the two foundational pillars of academic excellence and social responsibility, Black Studies in the United States has led to the emergence of more black professors, heads of department and university administrators. From small beginnings, it has emerged as a genuine success story of the 1960s Civil Rights struggle.

As someone who draws heavily on the work of African-American scholars to inform my own teaching and research, I can only look with envy at what has been achieved in the US and wonder why, after all this time, there are still no equivalent Black Studies degree programmes and academic departments here in the UK.

In the past, universities did not feel there was a demand, need or interest in the subject but this is no longer the case. Britain’s black population is approaching 3 million and its increasing significance nationally and internationally in politics, religion, economics, science and the arts more than justifies the need for an academic discipline dedicated to researching and teaching the black experience, to UK society and the wider world.

On 15 May, a group of black scholars will meet to set up a British Black Studies Association, which will call for Black Studies degree programmes to be established. There has been a growing sense of frustration and anger among black British academics over how our communities have been treated by the British university system.

Black students are being encouraged to enter higher education in ever increasing numbers, yet there are no courses or departments where we can learn about ourselves, there is very little likelihood of being taught by a black professor, and according to the latest data there is no chance of seeing a black person leading and shaping the strategic direction of the university.

No wonder many black students, according to the National Union of Students, have a demoralising experience in higher education and on average are leaving university with poorer results than white counterparts who entered with equal A-level grades.

Black Studies – a social science covering subjects such as history, politics, religion, the arts, economics, geography and psychology – is needed to counter the damaging and corrosive idea that black culture is somehow anti-intellectual and that black people are not capable of contributing meaningfully to the intellectual life of this country. For example, it could include study of the Notting Hill carnival, building insight into its historical significance and connections to the Caribbean, South America and Africa, the complex religious symbolism that underpins it, its economic, geographical and cultural impact, and its role in establishing London as a global city.

Gender Studies has played an important role in shifting cultural attitudes and public policy towards women. The study of the black experience could be transformative for schools, police forces, mental health services and other arenas of public life that still have issues with black people. In education, a Black Studies perspective could be instrumental in tackling the underachievement of African-Caribbean boys.

By seeing their intellectuals, scientists, artists, technicians, being discussed, analysed and eulogised in schools and universities, the relationship between the black community and the authorities would change from that of “problem” to one of being productive contributors to society, resulting in engagement and achievement rather than continuing disengagement and underachievement.

This enhanced status of black life in Britain would ultimately result in more black teachers, intellectuals, and professionals being seen and heard in public life. And that is something many communities and public institutions in Britain need as a matter of urgency.

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