What does it mean to be a young Black woman in Britain now? In some ways, we are more of a force than ever; heading up companies, making political change, seeing and being seen in a way we weren’t for so long. But we’re also contending with a backslide that at times can feel overwhelming. Far-right protesters and firebrand politicians seek to normalise racist, sexist rhetoric. Global violence is a weight on our minds. The financial pressures and beauty standards and career hurdles bear down on us in a way they just don’t for other demographics. In short, we still deserve better.
Black women have been in the UK for centuries, but the community really began to grow in the early 1900s, when arrivals from British colonies including Jamaica, Nigeria, Ghana and Trinidad and Tobago were promised job opportunities and stability. What they didn’t bank on, of course, was the racialised hostility they were often met with; adversity that birthed the first Black British feminist movements as a form of resistance.
There are currently a pitiful three statues of Black women standing in Britain, but there are many more who deserve to be remembered. Take Una Marson, a Jamaican writer who, in the 1940s, became a driving member of the League of Coloured Peoples, an anti-colonial and anti-racist activist group. Or Claudia Jones, the Trindadian who organised a march against unfair immigration policies in 1962, and instigated the very first Notting Hill Carnival. Why don’t we teach our girls entire history lessons about Olive Morris, the woman who co-founded the Brixton Black Women’s Group in the 1970s, which valiantly fought to protect our reproductive rights? So many of the freedoms we enjoy today, from the right to abortion to lawful protection against racial discrimination at work, were won for us by the blood, sweat and tears of Black women.
We stand on the shoulders of giants, but the state of the UK for young Black women today shows we cannot afford to stand still. Despite those all-important laws, The Fawcett Society revealed that 75% of women of Colour still experience racism at work; Met Police figures show that Black women face higher femicide rates in London; and 28% of Black women are discriminated against during maternity care – a statistic that hides dangerous and often fatal assumptions within it. We only know this because of FiveXMore, a British organisation led by Tinuke Awe, a woman tirelessly fighting to shine a spotlight on the state of maternal healthcare and the horrifying rise in mortality risk that Black expectant mothers must face.
While once a young Black Brit may not have felt safe coming out at all, today we have activists like Tanya Compas creating spaces where Black LGBTQIA+ youth can come together and express their authentic selves. We have role models such as Ebinehita Iyere, who founded London-based community group Milk Honey Bees to help Black girls build skills that will set them up for life. We have Temi Mwale, too, whose 4FrontProject advocates for all young Black Britons who’ve been impacted by violence. Not only are these leaders making change that’s needed now, they’re also nurturing a whole new generation who’ll make Britain a better place to be.
To be a Black woman is to inevitably stand at an intersection, which is why so many notable activists are making positive change not just for the rights of women or their own communities, but for places and people around the world. Environmental activist Mikaela Loach’s latest book, Climate Is Just The Start, teaches us how closely the world’s injustices are linked, and how the Global South bears the brunt of Western excess. Writers and thinkers such as Afua Hirsch and Nesrine Malik are using their platforms to draw attention to the horrors in Gaza and Sudan. There is a sensibility that prevails in so many of the Black women who make change in Britain: that we are not, and cannot, be the centre of the universe. That solidarity and sisterhood dissolves borders.
There are thousands of names that deserve a place in the Black British feminist hall of fame, too many of whom have been written out history by the very discrimination they fought hard to beat. We owe them our gratitude, our ongoing support and the small honour of remembering – while we all keep pushing for more – that without them we would have a lot less.
Additional words by Meena Alexander.
