All in Black Women
By the 1680s, the institution of slavery in the Atlantic colonies was premised on race. Blackness became intertwined with servitude, whiteness became an attribute of the free and by extension white identity functioned as a “shield from slavery.” In the American and Caribbean colonies, a tiered system based on skin colour distinguished whites and light-skinned Creoles from Africans.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries enslaved men, women, and children were culled from West African ethnocultural communities of the Wolof, Mandingo, Mende and Yoruba. Africans were frequently resisting their enslavement. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jamaica for instance, outbreaks occurred on an average of every five years.
If the nineteenth century was the age of mechanical reproduction, wherein the image became the most valued visual form, and print and photography were its agents, in the twentieth century, visual forms were also subject to the latent demands in society. These new images helped to co-create the modern visual landscape, and in so doing, Black women and men became part of the "new."
It is a uniquely challenging time to be employed or a student at a university, especially if you are Black woman or a student(s) with divergent opinions. From the high profile firing of Claudine Gay at Harvard and its aftermath, to the tragic suicide of Dr. Antoinette Candia-Bailey, Vice President of Student Affairs at Lincoln University, to the Toronto Star’s investigation into my own university’s Law School and the student letter in support of Palestine, where there's a bad news story, institutions of higher learning are in it.
I have been thinking a lot about Taraji P. Henson’s viral interview where she spoke about pay disparity in Hollywood: “[I’m] tired of working so hard, being gracious at what I do and being paid a fraction of the cost and people are like ‘you work a lot’ well, I have to, the math ain’t mathing.”
