Maulana Karenga's Operational Unity Concept in Black Power Movement

Black Feminist Thought (BFT) is a foundational work by Patricia Hill Collins that examines the experiences, knowledge, resistance and social position of Black women through a specifically Black feminist perspective. The 30th Anniversary Edition revisits and extends Collins's influential framework for understanding how race, gender, class and other systems of power interact to shape people's lives. At its heart, the book challenges the idea that Black women's experiences can be adequately understood by studying either racism or sexism independently. Black women experience multiple, interconnected forms of oppression, and their knowledge and lived experiences provide important resources for understanding those systems. Black women are not simply objects of knowledge; they are producers of knowledge about their own social realities. Black Women's Health Imperative, Black Feminist Fund, Black Feminist Future, Black Feminist Praxis, Feminists In Kenya (FIK), Feminism and Organization, Feminism In India, Feminism from margin

Questioning our black heroes - Part 6 It’s Not as Clear as Black and White Over almost 40 years in higher education starting as one of the first race equality professionals in HE in the UK, I have met many PhD’s, professors, advisors and activists. They could tell me everything about white people, white fragility, white guilt, white privilege, and of course whiteness. Unfortunately, few could tell me anything about themselves, about me, about anything black that wasn’t driven by an issue with white people. They write books titled ‘Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race’ which is almost entirely talking to white people about race or to black people fixated on white people and race. According to Alexander Saxton: “Since Europeans are generally white-skinned, while the peoples they encountered are generally dark, for three and a half centuries basic human relationships centered on the domination of whites over people of color” The world has moved on but most of our European mainstream thinkers have not. We now have Black Europeans such as Black British, Black Americans etc. (they even capitalise black). What we call racism was developed to justify enslaving Africans and to facilitate the colonisation of Africa and other peoples. It was about securing European supremacy not hating black people. That is still the case. Racism is colour blind. It’s not only white people who believe in European supremacy. Lee Jasper said black people can’t be racist. Yes, they can and are. This is not about reverse racism, nonsensical as that is, but the same racism practiced by far-right fascists. It was the power of women that changed their status, the power of those with ‘disabilities’ and the power of the LGBTQ+ community that changed their status. That power comes from knowing, accepting and believing in what you are. Our status will never change if we don’t even know what we are. What is our identity? Is it merely a physical descriptor, one that was used to reduce us from being a people with a strong history and culture to an object identified by its colour? The Civil Rights Movement made the mistake of going immediately for inclusion. True inclusion cannot happen unless there is true diversity. True diversity cannot happen without true identity.

It hurts my heart deeply to write this. I am not someone who posts often on social media, but after hearing about Professor Jason Arday’s death, and seeing the countless articles surrounding him, I found myself unable to stay silent. At first I was overwhelmed by the coverage. Then I began asking: why had this become such a public spectacle when the allegations against him had not been conclusively established? I did not know Jason Arday or his family - I am an alumni of LSBU and share the proud Ghanaian heritage also who value education - and the news of his death affected me deeply. I hope others understand why this loss resonates so strongly for the Black community. I am heartbroken that this ended in the death of a human being. Jason Arday was an academic, a professor and, from everything I have learned, someone who contributed positively to education and society. He had reached a position that few attain within British academia, an achievement that would have required enormous dedication. I remember hearing that Black people have to work twice, some say fifteen times, as hard. Knowing what it took him to become a professor only makes this harder to bear. I keep thinking about the intense scrutiny he faced, and the personal attacks that came with it. Fair, transparent investigations are necessary when genuine concerns are raised, but there must also be limits. Journalists, please. A person’s humanity, dignity and mental wellbeing should not be forgotten in pursuit of a story. And yet, after the sheer volume written about the case, there has been barely a fraction of that coverage since his death. He denied the allegations yet he resigned. Not enough? We were explicitly and continuously reminded he was autistic. Those of us in education understand what that can mean. It does not define him, but sustained scrutiny would have pressed on him far more heavily than most. Society needs to know when to pause, when to step back, and when to let someone simply be treated as a human being. Instead of more compassion, it seemed to invite more delving. He was not a criminal or a threat to society. He was an educator whose life and work deserved careful consideration. Being human means we are all capable of error, not saying he did, but every one of us is. Some will wonder why this is such a big deal. It is. As a Black person, I find it painful that in 2026, we can still feel that the smallest mistake or disputed claim carries consequences far greater than it would for others. We are often expected to work twice as hard, or more, to reach positions of recognition, yet face disproportionate scrutiny once we arrive. We need systems that investigate serious concerns while still protecting people from dehumanising treatment. We need accountability, but we also need compassion. Nothing can bring him back. My thoughts and condolences are with his family, friends, colleagues, students and all who knew him. May Jason Arday rest in peace 🙏🏾

Black women are responding to job losses and attacks on DEI by building businesses, organizing communities and pursuing political leadership.

Associate Professor Raquel Muñiz recently co-authored a new book that explores the lack of Black women represented in the field of higher education. In “Disrupt the “Not-Telling”: Gatekeeping Issues on the way to Tenure and Promotion for Black Women at HBCUs, MSIs, and PWIs,” Muñiz and her co-authors present case studies and narratives from Black women to investigate this representational discrepancy. Read more about this issue and how institutions can move forward: https://bit.ly/43jXDhx

CFP: “We Wish to Plead Our Own Cause”: Black Women, Gender, and the Black Press In March 1827, Freedom’s Journal, the first Black newspaper in the United States, famously declared, “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” Across the two centuries that followed, Black newspapers, magazines, and periodicals have served as crucial sites through which Black women articulated political demands, crafted literary identities, challenged racial and gender hierarchies, cultivated communities, and imagined new social futures. As part of the conference The Black Press at 200 at Howard University in Washington, D. C. on March 17-18, 2027, this SSAWW-sponsored panel invites papers exploring the diverse roles Black women played in shaping Black print culture from the nineteenth century to the present. Black women have participated in the Black Press as journalists, editors, correspondents, poets, fiction writers, activists, religious thinkers, educators, clubwomen, and public intellectuals. Their contributions illuminate how questions of gender, race, sexuality, religion, citizenship, labor, migration, and cultural production have been negotiated through Black periodical networks. See the full CFP here: https://lnkd.in/g__3kgr6

Such an important read from Lovette Jallow about #liberation, #community, #allyship and all the harms that happen when these concepts are misunderstood and misused often intentionally by those espousing white feminism. A few quotes that stood out: - “if whiteness has given you access to doors other people cannot open, why are you consumed by the few doors deliberately closed to you instead of examining what your existing access requires you to do for everyone else?” - “White women occupy a particularly revealing position because they can be subordinated through patriarchy while receiving racial advantage through white supremacy.” - “A white woman may recognise immediately that a male colleague dismissing her expertise belongs to a wider pattern of misogyny, then individualise the same workplace’s treatment of a Black woman by asking whether her communication style contributed to the problem. Her capacity to recognise structure has not vanished. It has reached the edge of the experience she considers politically legible.” 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

www.shareflame.com From The Coaching Room | What If It Isn't Only Resilience, But Leverage? I recently read a post celebrating Black women who successfully moved into entrepreneurship after being pushed out of corporate America. The conversation centered resilience. Then a commenter offered a distinction that stopped me: The pattern wasn't simply resilience. It was leverage. That stayed with me. Because we often celebrate Black women's extraordinary capacity to survive, recover, adapt, and keep moving. And yes, there is resilience there. But what if resilience isn't the only story? What if we're also witnessing what happens when expertise, intellectual capital, leadership, relationships, creativity, and knowledge that may have been undervalued within an organization become leverage outside of it? That shifts the questions. Instead of only asking: How did she survive what happened? We might also ask: What did she already possess that the system failed to adequately recognize or value? Being pushed out should not have been required for someone to discover their value. And entrepreneurship is not automatically liberation. But an organization's valuation of someone's expertise was never necessarily an accurate measure of its worth. The Coaching Question What if the expertise you've been asking an organization to recognize is expertise you haven't yet fully recognized as leverage yourself? And as we do here in The Coaching Room: What might change if you gave yourself permission to explore this question rather than immediately solve it? #JusticeRootedLiving™ #TheCoachingRoom #BlackWomen #Entrepreneurship #Leadership #CareerDevelopment #WomenInBusiness

✨In today’s post, Mickell Carter interviews Jaimie D. Crumley about her article, “‘And Then Forget’: Charlotte (“Lottie”) Forten and the Nineteenth-Century Black Feminist Project to be Remembered,” which examines how Antebellum Black abolitionist women were proto-race women. They were moral leaders of the biracial abolitionist cause. They were productive writers and helped form mutual aid and anti-slavery societies. However, their contemporaries often overlooked them and their contributions to abolitionism. Freeborn author, activist, and educator Charlotte L. Forten (1837–1914) was a proto-race woman. She served as a personal, intellectual, and relational bridge between antebellum abolitionist women and the race women born during and after the Civil War era. This article situates Forten within the historiography of nineteenth-century race women whose private, semi-private, and public writings, activist pedagogy, and relationship-building demanded that Black women and their ideas be remembered. https://lnkd.in/grktcSv3

All over the world, Black feminist movements are holding communities together through intensifying, overlapping crises. They are protecting people and the earth where institutions have not, defending rights and freedoms, transforming oppressive systems, and bringing us into a future grounded in our collective liberation. From Africa to Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America, that work looks like schools and shelters, advocacy and legal support, mutual aid and community savings groups. It lives in the intimate fabric of everyday life and in the infrastructure of global politics. As we mark five years of the BFF, we’re bringing you into the worlds that Black feminist movements are building. Black Feminist Worlds in Action is a series of five essays on our Movement Partners in Jamaica, Kenya, Lebanon, Mozambique and Colombia; five examples of Black feminist organising and evidence that this world building is happening now. As institutions grow more polarised, the necessity of Black feminist leadership becomes ever clearer, and the urgent resourcing of their work more vital. Our call to philanthropy is to fund Black feminists better and differently, centering their knowledge, their definitions, their leadership and dreams for the future. Through this series, we invite you to reckon with the magnitude of what Black feminist movements achieve when they are resourced abundantly, and how greatly it costs us all when they are not. Save the Date, August 28, 2026, for the first story in the series. #BuildingBlackFeministWorlds #BFFat5 #FundBlackFeminists