“So, you want to go to the deep end when you can’t swim? Bringing Fanon into conversation with Black African Social Workers in the struggle against racial microaggressions”

This study explores experiences of racial microaggressions on first generation Black African social workers in Britain. This is with a view to bring understanding on the distinctiveness of racial microaggressions as experienced by this specific racial group. The study is premised on the suggestion that there is an inherent complexity in experiences of racial microaggressions, on Black African social workers who are first generation immigrants to Britain, arising from not only the specifity of their racial socialisation in African settings in the context of colonial legacy, but also from the experiences of racialisation post migration. Underpinned by a critical realist ontology, the study deploys a decolonial epistemology to guard against the colonising tendencies in research, particularly when research is in the context of individuals who have been casted in the role of the marginalized ‘Other’. The study synthesises psychosocial research methodology and decolonial thought, to simultaneously address the social and the psychological elements of racial microaggressions, without reinforcing the hegemonic belief in the inferiority of Black Africans. As a result, the study unveils simultaneous experiences of racial microaggressions which are still framed with colonial fusions, while at the same time privileging various ways participants in the study exert their agency. This study has found that internalised racism is embedded in the African child at an early age through racialisation process, and that this continues to influence how participants in this study perceive and respond to racial microaggressions. In this study, racial microaggressions are common occurrences for Black African social workers. However, they do not trust the broader professional/ organisational structures to support them when they experience this. But despite this, these Black African social workers have continued to find means to exercise their agency. The significant contribution made by this study, is its unfolding of the process of coming alive to racialisation, for those who migrate a Western white setting as adults, and how this interacts with experiences of racial microaggressions. The study documents Blackness simultaneously as an imposed identity that inferiorises dark bodies as subhuman and as a site of liberation. The study articulates how decolonial thought can be utilised to counteract traditional social work pedagogy, which tends to assess challenges faced by marginalised people through a deficit lens.