The ‘angry Black woman’ as intellectual bondage: being strategically emotional on the academic plantation

ABSTRACT

Using a doctoral examination question as a starting point, this paper explores the specific race-gendered challenges Black women academics face when doing research on race. I argue that the stereotypical, racialised controlling images regarding Black women are not exclusive to African-American women and this has led some, in education, to draw on epistemologies such as Critical Race Theory (CRT) because of its usefulness in illuminating patterns of racial discrimination and structural disadvantage. The paper builds on this work by exploring the impact on the researcher who might too have faced similar inequalities they are now researching. Consequently, I offer the concept strategic emotionality to pay specific attention to the conscious decisions Black women academics might make about engaging with their emotions as part of the research and analytical process and the potential impact on epistemology.

KEYWORDS:

• Black women
• race research
• critical race theory
• higher education
• double consciousness
• emotionality

Acknowledgments

For who else, but Black women?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. White supremacy refers to the direct processes that secure domination and the privileges associated with it for persons racialised as white (Leonardo 2009, 75).

2. The Research Excellence Framework is the UK’s system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. It first took place in 2014. The next exercise will be conducted in 2021.

3. The names of the schools and teachers are pseudonyms.

4. Colourblindness/colourblind racism is ‘the superficial extension of the principles of liberalism to racial matters that results in “raceless” explanations for all sort of race-related affairs’ (Bonilla-Silva 2015, 1364).