If you are one of those people for whom I signed my book titled ‘Towards Bicultural Competence: Beyond Black and White’ in 2007 and the years since, you will be familiar with the above intuitive message ‘for our new beginning’ in all of my signed books! I didn’t consciously conceive this ‘signature’! It just flowed from my being and I went along with it.
Ten years later, post the publication of ‘Towards Bicultural Competence: Beyond Black and White’, I have been made redundant (or should I say my ‘post’ has been made redundant?). This is in the university context with which I have been associated for the past 35 years and which has, albeit unwittingly, been instrumental in my transition from the unconscious ‘black’ racial identity to that of the conscious, integrated and self-authoring ‘British African Caribbean’ identity. One could read into this outcome that there is to be no ‘new beginning’ for descendants of enslaved Africans (DoEAs), culturally resocialised as racially ‘black’ over many generations, in this higher education context which positioned itself as a ‘black’ university in the 1980s.
Is my post redundant because I am no longer symbolic of what it means to be ‘black’ in the institutional context? This is having achieved a shift to a higher level of awareness beyond the ‘socialised mind’ of British culture. This opens up the question: what role, as ‘blacks’, do we play in perpetuating race-based human inequality, even if unconsciously?