The power of community
Waithera Sebatindira, co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University: Being a woman of colour at Cambridge and other institutions of power and elitism, eloquently discusses the challenges of navigating elite institutions as a black or woman of colour. Sebatindira talks about how finding community helped her, and others, navigate the daily racism, classism and sexism she encountered as a minority in Cambridge University.
Freedom, Love, You (FLY), a Cambridge University Society founded in 2012, by black women, and later opened up to all women, gave Sebatindira and other students “a space to vent about racism and sexism, without being dismissed or called overly sensitive. Because other people in the group had had similar experiences, I knew that when I’d share my own, I’d be met with empathy, and ideas for how to cope with daily instances of bigotry.”
“In this way,” Sebatindira says, “FLY gave me resilience. Not a stiff upper lip, but a place to come home to, where I could lay down the microaggressions I’d collected outside the meeting. Lay down the pain that they caused and help other people do the same with theirs.”
Through community, the group were able to discover the commonality of their experiences, and collectively start to make sense of them using intersectionality, a theoretical paradigm proffered by the legal scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw, in 1989. Crenshaw, highlighted how the confluence of different axes of oppression or disadvantage such as racism and, sexism,compound each other, situating black women and women of colour differently to other cohorts, within anti-discrimination and feminist discourse. 1
Sebatindira is also the author of Through an Addict’s Looking Glass.
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, 1989 U. CHI. LEGAL F. 139 - 67, (1989). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/3007, p. 149↩︎