Black Women’s Sharing in Resistance Within the Academy

Black Women's Sharing in Resistance Within the AcademyLove is a term that can sometimes be used flippantly and carelessly; however no more so than when we as Black women claim to 'love one another' or call each other 'sister'.As Black critical race feminist (CRF) scholars (Wing, 1990;Berry, 2010), who are seeking a career behind the hallowed walls of the academy, we have found that love has sometimes been lost on us and lost for one another (Baszile, 2018).This article is the result of a committed effort to connect with each other despite all the other busy and unloving related parts of our lives in academia.The constant battle we engage in as Black women in academic spaces is necessary as we disrupt cultural practices and traditions which marginalize Blackness and womanness.We draw on duoethnography as a methodological approach that supports the multiple ways people "construct both unity and disunity... hence we engage in dialogue which intentionally makes room for our voices to rise and fall… (Sawyer, 2013 p. 10).However, it is through a form of Black Girl Reality/Solidarity (Ladson-Billings, Cooper, and Ore, 2016) that acknowledges differences and similarities that we empower each other in spaces such as the academy that have not been designed for us, but have been built on the backs of the generations of Black women and men who have come before us (Wilder, 2013;Anderson, 1988).Despite tremendous efforts to change the overall way Black women are regarded in imperialist white supremacist patriarchal capitalist culture, there is no Black woman, no matter how liberated, who does not encounter on some level in daily life efforts on the part of dominator culture to restrict her freedom, to force her into an identity of submission.(bell hooks, 2013)