Black African Youth Research Articles

Combination Social Protection Programme as an HIV Prevention Mechanism: Experiences of Youths in Resource-Constrained Settings of Gauteng Province, South Africa

Regardless of the tremendous growth of combination social protection as a human immunodeficiency virus prevention mechanism in South Africa, little is known about the ways in which combination social protection improves prevention outcomes for youths. In this article, we report on the experiences of youths participating in the combination social protection. In the study, which was conducted among Black African youths in the City of Johannesburg township settings of Soweto, Alexandra, and Orange Farm, we adopted a qualitative approach. The aim of the study was to explore the experiences of youths participating in the combination social protection and their views on how the programme changed their risk behaviour and sexual practices. We used a purposively selected sample to identify participants for semi-structured qualitative interviews. In-depth individual interviews were conducted with thirty youths and focus group discussions with six non-governmental organisations practitioners and five Department of Social Development officials. The data were analysed by implementing Creswell and Creswell’s strategy of qualitative thematic analysis. The findings show that when youths are equipped with prevention informational resources, economic capabilities, and social assets, they are empowered with agency and purposefulness that may alter their intentions to engage in risky sexual behaviour. It is also revealed that, by providing space for youths to engage on issues of gender and differential access to health and economic opportunities, the programme advanced the empowerment of female youths. Thus, combination social protection could be part of the country’s comprehensive social work package for empowering youths in poor localities.

Migrant Black African Youths’ Experiences of Racial Microaggressions in the Workplace

This article offers an exploration of migrant Black African youths’ (MBAYs’) experiences of racial microaggressions in Australian, predominantly White, workplaces. Data for this article are drawn from qualitative interviews conducted with 20 MBAYs working in Newcastle, a traditionally White working-class city. Drawing on a theoretical framework that approaches racial microaggressions through a Critical Race Theory lens, the article centres MBAYs’ experiences of racial microaggressions in the workplace as a site of legitimate experiential knowledge. The findings of this article underscore how MBAYs perceive questions like ‘Where are you from?’ posed by their White colleagues and clients as a racial microaggression. They showcase how MBAY experience racial microaggressions in the workplace as an invisible, insidious and infantilizing process. Finally, the findings highlight how some MBAYs respond to racial microaggressions by accepting or contesting them in the workplace. The article concludes by reflecting on how these microlevel, subtle forms of racism contribute towards institutionalizing and sustaining White supremacy.

The coloniality of labor: Migrant Black African youths' experiences of looking for and finding work in an Australian deindustrializing city

AbstractThis paper explores migrant Black African youths' experiences of looking for and finding work in Newcastle, a deindustrializing Australian city. Data for this paper were drawn from interviews conducted with young people who migrated to Australia as temporary and permanent residents. Drawing on concepts of coloniality, racialization, bodywork, and hidden labor, this paper demonstrates how, when looking for work, participants' names get attached to their racialized bodies—a situation which deems them as suitable or not for specific kinds of work. Their strategies of finding work differ according to their migration status; that is, temporary residents draw on their personal networks, whereas some permanent residents with full citizenship rights rely on social welfare support services to find work. However, irrespective of the different strategies used to find work, they all end up doing jobs that they described as “work which others do not wish to do.” I argue that these experiences re‐articulate the coloniality of labor because, as workers in these jobs, they play a crucial role in the economic transformation taking place in the city due to deindustrialization. This is not merely because they form part of the workforce responsible for working in unwanted jobs, but because they are also consumers of Newcastle's emerging welfare support and educational services sectors. The paper contributes to an understanding of how race shapes the labor market experiences of racialized youth in deindustrializing labor markets.

Reclaiming racial dignity: An ethnographic study of how African youth in Australia use social media to visibilise anti‐Black racism

AbstractThe #BlackLivesMatter Movement has amplified the role of social media in visibilising anti‐Black violence. Drawing on the narratives and expertise of those who have experienced anti‐Black racism, this paper employs the theoretical concept of racial dignity to highlight how young African Australians participate in racial discourse on social media. The findings of this paper demonstrate that social media is a significant site where Black African youth reclaim racial dignity through: 1) reversing the white gaze; 2) recognising and calling out anti‐blackness; and 3) cultivating and engaging in communities of healing and belonging. Through these digital practices, Black African youth in Australia foster racial agency that promotes positive self‐recognition, racial resilience and racial dignity. We argue, therefore, that social media offer Black African young people in Australia spaces to engage in positive expressions of Afro‐blackness and challenge anti‐blackness in ways that are safer to them than in physical, offline settings in white contexts.

“You don’t sound black” African immigrant youth experiences of discrimination in the labor market in Calgary

This paper aims to understand the factors promoting racial microaggression from the perspective of first-generation Black African immigrant youth in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Most of the literature on Blacks and other visible minorities [1] in Canada is centered on integration challenges, which have been identified in terms of socioeconomic and political marginalization. Within the context of immigrant challenges of navigating the job market, one realizes that many institutionalized factors influence access to opportunities. However, there is little research on immigrant youth, notably Black youth, and their experiences of racial microaggressions in Canadian society. This study fills this gap by offering an understanding of the experiences of microaggressions among Black African youth in Calgary. This city is arguably becoming increasingly diverse with the influx of immigrants from different countries and other Canadian provinces. Drawing on qualitative research methods (40 semistructured interviews with Ghanaian and Sudanese youth immigrants, 20 females and 20 males between the ages of 18 and 30 years), we incorporate meaningful insights from African immigrant youth on racial drivers of microaggressions. The analysis is grounded in critical race theory (CRT). Findings indicate that the youth face marginalization in the labor market during the hiring process (linguistic discrimination), discrimination at the workplace, and exclusion because their names are exploited as identity markers. Overall, policies advocating for an inclusive society need to be strengthened to address these inequalities that are ingrained in Canadian cities. [1] In this study, a visible minority is defined by the Government of Canada as ‘persons, other than aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour’ (Statistics Canada, 2015).

Global South to Global North youth migration: a decolonial exploration of Black African youth experiences of migrating to and being in Australia

ABSTRACT This paper offers an exploration of how race shapes the migration trajectories and labour market experiences of Black African youth who migrated to deindustrialising Newcastle, a traditionally White working-class city. The paper draws on qualitative data gathered from interviews with 20 Black African youth (10 males and 10 females) residing in the city in 2018. Their ages ranged between 18 and 30 years and they migrated to Australia under different circumstances as students or dependents of their carers who travelled to Australia as skilled migrants or as refugees. These young people migrated to Australia from different African countries including: The Republic of Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Kenya, Nigeria, Liberia, Uganda and Ghana. Theorising their experiences through decolonial theory and Critical Race Theory, this paper explores how these young migrants imagined Australia pre-migration in contrast with how they experienced Australia post-migration. With this, the paper forwards the argument that pre-migration Black African youth draw on modernist notions of development associated with Whiteness to position Australia as a developed place, and they have the expectation that once in Australia these experiences of development would be available to them. Post-migration, these young people negotiate being racialised on the labour market while looking for work and working, meaning that these experiences of ‘development’ are not available to them. The paper concludes by reflecting on the importance of accounting for how other processes like racialisation impact on young people’s experiences of migration and labour market engagement in deindustrialising localities like Newcastle.

‘Nobody feels safe’: Vulnerability, fear and the micro-politics of ordinary voice in crime news television

The new prominence of ordinary voice in crime journalism – claims to have seen things, experienced things, felt things ‘first-hand’ – has the potential to decenter elite perspectives and open up crime news narratives to the voices of systemically criminalized subjects. However, I argue in this paper that the political potential of ordinary voice can only be realized in and through concrete instances of its use, and so needs to be examined within news texts as sites of micro-political struggle over meaning. Looking at Australian current affairs television coverage of so-called ‘African gang’ crime in Melbourne, this paper approaches crime news texts as sites of vulnerability politics, where different and sometimes competing claims to vulnerability encounter one another and struggle for public recognition. A close multi-modal analysis of three episodes of current affairs television uncovers four specific strategies of textual composition and presentation by which the criminalization of Black African youth is able to persist despite the testimonial interventions of the criminalized: appropriation, marginalization, subjugation and calculation. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this analysis for future studies of ordinary voice and citizen testimony in news reporting.

Article 2 from Series of 5: Empowering African-Canadian Career Excellence

NOTE: THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED WITH THE INFORMING SCIENCE INSTITUTE. Aim/Purpose...................................................................................................................................................................................................... The African-Canadian Career Excellence (ACCE) initiative was developed to address the loss of highly-educated, English-speaking Black youth from the Greater Montreal Area (Quebec, Canada) facing issues of unemployment and underemployment. Background........................................................................................................................................................................................................ The ACCE initiative partners – African and Caribbean Synergic inter-organizational Network of Canada (ACSioN Network), Black Community Resource Center (BCRC) and Community Economic Development and Employability Corporation (CEDEC) – worked to mitigate the exodus of educated Black youth through building their professional capacities to attain meaningful, sustainable local employment; encouraging their contribution to Quebec’s vitality, and assisting employers to diversify their workforce. Methodology....................................................................................................................................................................................................... The Black undergraduate students of African descent who were surveyed were English-speaking youth from the Greater Montreal Area; these included Canadian citizens, landed immigrants and temporary and permanent residents. Survey respondents will be referred to as Black African undergraduate students for the remainder of this article. In the 2011-2012 academic year, Black African undergraduate students from five Montreal post-secondary institutions were surveyed. On-campus promotion and in-person solicitation resulted in a non-random convenience sample of 92 individuals. Data from the 34 categorical and open-ended questions in an English-language online survey were analysed using SurveyMonkey, Microsoft Excel and SPSS. Contribution........................................................................................................................................................................................................ Montreal's English-speaking Black African undergraduate students represent an under-documented demographic in migration studies, specifically in terms of career plans, workplace skills, career path, employment resource awareness and discrimination. This portrait highlights the experience and career expectations of Montreal Black African undergraduate youth and is relevant within the contexts of Black history, community development, skills and career development, education and employment. Findings.............................................................................................................................................................................................................. These results suggest that English-speaking Black African undergraduates expected to follow an appropriate career path in their desired field by attaining meaningful and sustainable local employment commensurate with their skills. Many of these youth were not able to access the same career opportunities as their peers, and therefore left before fully participating in Quebec’s economy. Recommendation for Practitioner................................................................................................................................................................... This article suggests that businesses seeking to diversify their workforce can collaborate with public institutions and civil society organizations to better prepare and integrate Montreal’s skilled Black African youth. It is suggested that career-advancement training focus on addressing job security and skills gap concerns, in addition to awareness of discrimination in the workplace and strategies for identifying and redressing the situation. Recommendation for Researcher.................................................................................................................................................................... Future research could be conducted within the same Montreal population to compare the findings a decade later. Subsequent outreach to targeted employers might reveal progress and additional recommendations in diversifying their workplace. Impact on Society.............................................................................................................................................................................................. Collaboration among public institutions, private businesses and civil society organizations can lead to increased integration of Black African youth into the labor market.

Post-apartheid representations of youth in the Zulu novel Kungasa ngifile

In this article representation of black African youth in the Zulu novel “Kungasa ngifile” is examined. The view is presented that the novel, though seeming to be politically neutral, deals with images of the youth that have ideological concerns in terms of theme, plot action and character portrayal. Such ideological modes of representation seem to be in tune with the present call for moral rejuvenation and the empowerment of the youth who lost opportunities during the liberation struggle. In this respect, the novel backs positive post-apartheid cultural forms.