Book contents
- Frontmatter
- COntents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The long road ahead
- one BLAME the BAME
- two COVID-1984: wake MBE up when Black Lives Matter
- three Black vaccination reticence: HBCUs, the Flexner Report and COVID-19
- four Pregnancy, pandemic and protest: critical reflections of a Black millennial mother
- five It’s alive! The resurrection of race science in the times of a public health crisis
- six It’s just not cricket: (green) parks and recreation in COVID times
- seven Muslim funerals during the pandemic: socially distanced death, burial and bereavement experienced by British-Bangladeshis in London and Edinburgh
- eight Racial justice and equalities law: progress, pandemic and potential
- nine Out of breath: intersections of inequality in a time of global pandemic
- ten An exploration of the label ‘BAME’ and other existing collective terminologies, and their effect on mental health and identity within a COVID-19 context
- eleven COVID-19 in the UK: a colour-blind response
- twelve Reviewing the impact of OFQUAL’s assessment ‘algorithm’ on racial inequalities
- thirteen The impact of COVID-19 on Somali students’ education in the UK: challenges and recommendations
- Conclusion: Long COVID, long racism
- Index
four - Pregnancy, pandemic and protest: critical reflections of a Black millennial mother
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- COntents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The long road ahead
- one BLAME the BAME
- two COVID-1984: wake MBE up when Black Lives Matter
- three Black vaccination reticence: HBCUs, the Flexner Report and COVID-19
- four Pregnancy, pandemic and protest: critical reflections of a Black millennial mother
- five It’s alive! The resurrection of race science in the times of a public health crisis
- six It’s just not cricket: (green) parks and recreation in COVID times
- seven Muslim funerals during the pandemic: socially distanced death, burial and bereavement experienced by British-Bangladeshis in London and Edinburgh
- eight Racial justice and equalities law: progress, pandemic and potential
- nine Out of breath: intersections of inequality in a time of global pandemic
- ten An exploration of the label ‘BAME’ and other existing collective terminologies, and their effect on mental health and identity within a COVID-19 context
- eleven COVID-19 in the UK: a colour-blind response
- twelve Reviewing the impact of OFQUAL’s assessment ‘algorithm’ on racial inequalities
- thirteen The impact of COVID-19 on Somali students’ education in the UK: challenges and recommendations
- Conclusion: Long COVID, long racism
- Index
Summary
This chapter takes an auto-ethnographical approach to understanding the impact of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests on Black millennial resistance. This emerged from my doctoral research into Black millennials and their observations and responses to Black criminalisation and resistance. It will analyse my journal entries, reflecting on my thoughts and feelings towards being a pregnant Black woman during a global pandemic, and the parallel of the international Black Lives Matter protests.
I reflect on my positionality as a researcher and the ‘subject’ of research. Using two of my journal entries during lockdown, one during pregnancy and the other after childbirth, I will explore how racial justice protests during the pandemic reveal Black millennials willingness to shatter institutional racism. Generating auto-ethnographic research on Black millennial resistance during the pandemic acknowledges and validates Black millennials’ perspectives of resistance. This discussion builds on the scholarly discourse of Black resistance in Britain through the lens of a Black millennial mother.
Mimi ni a mother. Mimi ni a daughter. Mimi ni a wife. Mimi ni a activist. Mimi a PhD student. Mimi ni a millennial. Mimi a Black woman.
In January 2020, I visited Kenya with the Racial Justice Network to engage with local activists and academics on decolonising education. During one of our workshops, one of the energisers said this phrase ‘Mimi ni’ which means ‘I am’ to introduce who we were to the space. The use of this Swahili phrase to declare who we were was a powerful affirmation in the attempt to decolonise our language and the space. Often Black people are othered and criminalised, but in the effort to decolonise the academy and redress epistemic injustices caused by a white supremacist society, the stories and experiential knowledge of Black people must be valued, including their languages. Scholarly work on critical race pedagogy and education has utilised auto-ethnographies to draw attention to epistemic injustices reproduced in educational structures often embedded in white supremacy (Chavez, 2012; Hancock, Allen and Lewis, 2015). Therefore
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- COVID-19 and RacismCounter-Stories of Colliding Pandemics, pp. 59 - 69Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023