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Black women need to create their own digital media, says academic


SOCIAL media and digital communication give black women a voice, but they need to create their own platforms, says Francesca Sobande, course director of the BA media, journalism and culture programme at Cardiff University. Giving the 2020 Claudia Jones memorial lecture online, Sobande paid tribute to the woman who gave her name to the lecture, pointing out that Jones was part of a long tradition of a black press which stretched from the West Indian Gazette, which she founded and edited in 1958, to new media company gal-dem (https:// gal-dem.com/) Jones was a Communist political


activist, feminist and journalist, who was active in the fight against racism and imperialism and promoted Afro-Asian unity in the 1950s and 1960s. She died aged just 49 in 1964. The lecture is organised every


year by the NUJ’s black members’ council, as part of Black History Month, in honour of pioneer Jones. Jones was born in Trinidad in 1924 and later moved to New


York where she encountered poverty and discrimination. In 1936, she joined the Young Communist League, subsequently joining the staff of the party’s Daily Worker newspaper. She was arrested in 1955 and served a year in prison then, as a


British passport holder, was deported to the UK where she was given asylum. Sobande said today’s digital world, including Facebook,


Twitter and blogs, had provided black women with new opportunities to pursue activism and combat racism on their own terms and escape marginalisation from the mainstream media, which continued to peddle stereotypical ‘hypersexualised’ images of them.


Social media and digital platforms


allowed black women to give a voice to grassroots movements, she added. And hashtags, such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, were being used as a way to globally mobilise campaigns against police brutality, the exploitation of women and other forms of oppression. Digital spaces were not, however,


always safe for women, who often found themselves open to abuse and


censorship. There were also continuing barriers to them getting jobs in the mainstream media, she said. Therefore black women needed to design, create and own their own media platforms.


Sobande is author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in


Britain and co-editor, with Professor Akwugo Emejulu, of To Exist is To Resist: Black Feminism in Europe.


Corporation not guilty over unlawful pay


AN INVESTIGATION by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has found the BBC was not guilty of unlawful discrimination over pay. However, the commission set out a number of


recommendations, including carrying out equal pay audits every five years. The EHRC said in its report


– Investigation into Unlawful Pay Discrimination at the BBC – that while it did not find evidence of systemic pay


discrimination by the BBC, it acknowledged there were individual cases. It said the complaints it


looked at in detail “highlighted some poor pay practices and recommended that the BBC


should adopt more rigorous and transparent pay systems to remove any unfairness and potential pay discrimination”. Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ


general secretary, said: “There will be many NUJ


members who read this report and feel it doesn’t address their lived experiences. “The fact that so many individual settlements, including Samira Ahmed’s NUJ-backed tribunal win, have taken place underlines the clear problems that have existed.”


“ Action threatened as BBC cuts jobs


NUJ representatives at the BBC are discussing the possibility of industrial action with union members over the threat of compulsory redundancies at the corporation. BBC England is cutting 450 jobs and although many of those have been achieved through voluntary redundancies, several dozen people are looking for redeployment.


04 | theJournalist


It is the union’s policy to take industrial action if any member is made compulsorily redundant. The mothers and fathers of chapels also discussed the BBC-wide pay freeze and the offer of an extra day’s annual leave for all staff. The union’s national executive council,


which met in November, has given contingency authority for industrial action.


Today’s digital world had provided black women with new opportunities to pursue activism and combat racism on their own terms


Francesca Sobande Journalism course director, Cardiff University


BBC


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