On Tuesday, CUSU Women’s Campaign and the BME Campaign hosted a poetry reading and panel discussion that condemned the lack of diversity in feminism at Cambridge.

An audience of around thirty people turned up to the Trinity Hall Lecture Room for the poetry reading by former Cambridge student Siana Bangura, followed by a panel discussion between her, Lola Olufemi (CUSU BME women’s representative) and Audrey Sebatindira (CUSU women’s officer).

Bangura is a blogger, writer, freelance journalist and public speaker. In 2014 she created the blog No Fly on the WALL, which focuses on the voices of black British women and black women living in the UK.

Bangura has worked with Channel 4, BBC 1, Sky TV and The Guardian. She has also written for Metro, The Evening Standard and The Huffington Post. She is currently on tour, performing poems from her bestselling debut poetry collection, Elephant.

The discussion on Tuesday evening was based on intersectional feminism, built on the idea that women experience oppression in varying forms and with different degrees of intensity because of their race, gender, class, ability and/or ethnicity. It contests that different oppressions interact to create entirely new experiences, such that a black woman's experience of womanhood will be different from a white woman's, same for queer, disabled women.

The message of the event was that feminism must include woman of all types, not only white, middle class, cis-gendered and able-bodied women. There is no one-size-fits-all feminism because every plight is different.

The panel started off considering Cambridge’s influence on the intersectionality of their own feminism. Sebatindira said that she “never felt able or angry enough to speak out about the limitations of white-centric feminism before Cambridge”.

Olufemi picked up on the positive side of this statement, agreeing that Cambridge gave her access to relevant academic works and the tools to understand texts and black feminism.

However, Bangura said, “Cambridge made me angry, really and truly. Feminism in this university is racist, it is all about white people.”

Speaking to Varsity, Bangura later added: “Cambridge doesn’t have a relationship with black feminism because there's still no real acknowledgement of how oppressive the environment still is for black female students, other female students of colour, and students of colour as a whole. It starts with recognising the problem, then dealing with it.”

In the talk, Bangura described how shocked she was when she joined Cambridge as one of only three black girls in her year at Peterhouse. She had never been defined as ‘the black girl’ before. She knew something was off but didn’t have the tools to express it, so she spent a lot of time feeling isolated. She didn’t join the Women’s Campaign or the African Caribbean Society, thinking at the time “Why should we be friends just because we’re black and women?”

That is why she and three other students founded FLY, the network and forum for women of colour to describe their experiences at university and beyond. Four years later, Olufemi sings the praises of FLY, saying it creates a space where people can share things that they can’t talk about with others. “Even if you go back to your college and feel marginalised, you still have FLY.”

Recently, safe spaces like these have been controversial in Cambridge, but Bangura argues that they are incredibly necessary. “Whatever it’s for, it’s very important for people to congregate with people who are the same as them. It’s very exhausting existing as ‘the other’, through microagression and marginalisation. The safe space equips you to go forth outside of that safe bubble.”

According to Bangura, Cambridge doesn’t do enough to support these initiatives: “The very fact a group like FLY has not been given funding or a budget despite existing for over four or five years says a lot. The fact no women of colour were on the reading list when I took the gender paper says a lot.”

What can be done? “The curriculum needs to be decolonised. Microaggressions need to be taken more seriously. The staff needs to be more representative also. I did an entire paper about the global South and only white people taught me.”

Sebatindira explained that the CUSU Women’s Campaign is doing “a lot of work to entrench decolonisation in the curriculum. The key is making it a criterion of a good course. Getting across the idea that good knowledge comes from all people. This has to come from the students’ liberation of the curriculum ... If Cambridge does it, because of its prestige and reputation, other institutions will follow.”

Later, Sebatindira told Varsity that at a college level “femsocs should make sure that the principle of intersectionality is at the core of the events that they put on, and hold discussions that explore and deconstruct this principle. There are lots of resources on the women’s campaign website about it!”

Olufemi also pointed to this. She told Varsity: “I’d encourage more feminists at Cambridge to research intersectional feminism for themselves. In an ideal world, it won’t take having black women or women of colour in the room for feminist discussions here to be intersectional.”

An audience member raised the question of allyship, and how people who are not part of the category being opressed can help the cause.

Both Olufemi and Bangura were adamant that the key is to listen and to be humble when you get it wrong. They said to always call people out on racism, even when the targeted party isn’t present. You should not rely on others to educate you, but actively use the resources available to you.

The discussion also covered the pay gap, the need for intergenerational conversation about feminism and social media’s effect in combating alienation and providing a platform for self-expression that can lead to action.

The panellists looked at the new hashtag ‘#blackgirlmagic’, the positive campaign which celebrates the beauty of black women, adding another dimension to how they are perceived.

Bangura is curating an exhibition this month exploring anger and the stereotyping of black women called I, The Angry Black Woman & Other Stories, which will be held in Buster Mantis, Deptford from Thursday 20th October.

You can find out more about all of Siana's work on sianabangura.com.