This Marker I Call My Body: Coloniality and Racism in the Academy

Abstract

Women of colour have had to navigate a particular set of interpersonal and structural challenges in the academy that frustrate and deny their aspirations. These concerns defy a simplistic analysis, as they are part of a complex amalgam of raced, gendered, and classed experiences. I present a framework to analyse how racist/sexist hierarchies of power created during colonialism are continuously rearticulated within academic spaces to account for the persistent marginalisation of people of colour in universities in the USA, and Black women in particular. I argue that we need to understand coloniality as operating within the university as the everyday state of affairs and, as such, as an obstacle to diversity. I show how, in practice, coloniality and white racism work in partnership to construct a world that reduces Black women to their flesh and to beings that are by nature inferior. An analysis that begins with coloniality situates the intersections of racial identity and processes of othering in a system underpinned by social hierarchical relationships of domination and exclusion. My point is not to reject attempts at changing the university, but to call for a deeper understanding of the experiences of Black women in relation to its colonial legacy.