Building the Anti-Racist Classroom: How the collective makes the radical possible

Building the Anti-Racist Classroom (BARC) is an international collective of five women of colour scholars working in the Management field within Business Schools. Our aims are to promote and facilitate anti-racist feminist community-building that bridges university stakeholder groups including students, academics and professional services staff. These aims have been developed in response to intensifying individualism and competition among these groups that have further entrenched white masculinist power structures governing Black women’s and women of colour’s capacity to flourish in academia. A such, the work engages with racism within our academic field and also with how it manifests in our working conditions. We have organized our ways of working with one another, and of engaging others, informed by the prior experiences, knowledge of collective work and skills we each bring, but without a normative vision for what our anti-racist collective should and will become. We take inspiration from the rich narratives included in Gabriel and Tate (2017) that affected us and our politics at the time as we were forming political relations with each other and dreaming about what we must do in order to survive in our academic discipline and respective places of work.