An unforgettable campaigner talks social injustice

“I can’t say I always wanted to be an academic, but I can tell you that I always hated injustice,” she says.

A 47-year-old social justice advocate, with a steely authority in her voice, Dr Joseph believes in education as a vehicle for battling social inequality.

For years, she campaigned for a black studies undergraduate course to be offered in University College Dublin (UCD), where she studied social justice and served as a career consultant for nearly a decade.

The college agreed this year, becoming the first in Ireland to purvey the module, through its School of Education.

Dr Joseph and her former PhD supervisor at UCD’s School of Social Justice, a prominent gender and race equality activist, Prof Kathleen Lynch, are now the coordinators of the course.

“I’m really excited. I think it was long overdue,” she says.

“Blacks have been in Ireland for many years now. We should have a course that studies and understands them from a non-stereotypical perspective.”

Dr Joseph, the middle child of a family of seven, was a bright student, in her home country of Nigeria. She flew through school years, receiving her bachelor’s degree in microbiology at the age of 20, only to start from nil in Ireland at 30.

As a middle child, she says she had to continually fight for her parents’ attention, becoming familiar, from early on, with the notion of inequality in its gentlest form.

“I grew up having what they call the middle child syndrome. I think that’s part of why I hate inequality so much,” she says.

The ‘syndrome’ describes middle children’s feelings of exclusion in response to parents’ displays of favouritism toward siblings.

When Dr Joseph migrated to Ireland in April, 2002, she says her eyes opened to a heightened level of disparity.

As a career consultant, her job was often focused on helping migrants to land job interviews, where she discovered raging race inequality in the workforce, focused on black and white, familiar names versus strange ones.

“It was always easier for us to find work for a person who was white, even when they couldn’t speak English properly.

“I saw people with 18-years of experience not being able to get even a cleaning job, because of their home countries,” she says.

“If you look at a person and justify that they’re not any good because of where they come from, you’re stereotyping. You’re making their life difficult.”

Campaigner, Dr Ebun Joseph, talks to Shamim Malekmian about social injustice, being a middle child, and the battle to get Ireland’s first black studies university course on the curriculum in UCD.An American study found that resumes sent out under foreign-sounding names have a 50% less chance of landing job interviews than identical resumes sent out under Anglo-Saxon names.

“It was just difficult for me to watch. I kept asking myself ‘why and what can we do to change that’?,” Dr Joseph says.

As an early step, she centred her PhD dissertation, titled ‘Racial Stratification in the Irish Labour Market’, on workforce discrimination. She also founded The Unforgettable Women Network, an organisation aimed at empowering women of minority groups in Ireland through motivational talks.

Even though others’ struggles have motivated her pursuit of social justice, Dr Joseph has felt the strain of being a foreigner of African descent.

“I’ve been fortunate. I’ve worked really hard, and my efforts paid off,” she says.

“But I promise you, if I wasn’t as black as I am, with the skills that I have, I would’ve went so much further than where I am now.”

An accredited career counsellor with multiple degrees, Dr Joseph recalls many positions she applied for and how she was repeatedly told that better candidates were coming forward, like long-lost siblings revealed in pursuit of an inheritance.

“The most challenging experience for me was that struggle to navigate my way through the labour market. When you apply for a job with a person you’d trained yourself, and they get invited for an interview, and you are not even shortlisted, for me, that is shocking,” she says.

Proud of the young people from our youth group who gave a presentation of their activities in achieving the SDG goals to a large audience on their ‘pack it in’ campaign, sch talk, & installation at Tesco @trocaire @Irish_Aid @ECOUNESCO with @AminaJMohammed @IClaudiad @wikhine pic.twitter.com/Rzd1zlCigE

— Dr Ebun Joseph (@EbunJoseph1) September 8, 2018

“I had two masters in adult guidance and counselling, but I did not even get an interview.

“That’s the reality we live with constantly.”

Between workforce discrimination and verbalised racism, Dr Joseph prefers the latter.

“Abuses I can live with. If I’m walking on the streets and somebody calls me the N-word, frankly, I don’t care. I don’t get bothered by that, I know that’s not my name,” she says.

“But when you have skills and abilities, and you’re not able to get a job, that is a bigger frustration, knowing that you have to constantly prove yourself, just to be considered for a job.”

Over time, the irksome disparity laid bare to her the importance of education; making her determined to try her hand at colour-blinding the society via academia.

“The main culprit for inequality is education. The education system has not changed for a long time,” she says.

“Take sociology: we’re still quoting people from a time when blacks did not have any rights.”

So, she began discussing with UCD officials the launch of a black studies programme.

In her battle of persuasion, she turned to Prof Lynch for aid – whom she reveres as a stalwart of the gender and race equality movement.

“She is one of the biggest allies that we have. She pushes our agenda as much as she can,” Dr Joseph says.

The two women joined forces and finally attained their goal. The course will commence in January.

According to UCD, the black studies module aims to counter ahistoricism (lack of appreciation for history) by highlighting historical achievements and struggles of Africans across the globe, while introducing pathbreaking black thinkers and their body of work.

“I want people to know that slavery was only a small part of black history,” Dr Joseph says.

A single mother to Patrick, 16, and Alex, 14, for whom she did not choose African names, fearing it would ruin their employment prospects, Dr Joseph says her children are the engine of her battle for social equality.

“I don’t want them to suffer and struggle the same way that I did. I want them to be judged based on their character and their abilities, not their colour,” she says.

Her boys had their share of hearing the racist trite, ‘go back home’, even though they don’t know any home besides Ireland.

“When I take them to Nigeria, for them, they’re going on a holiday, and when we’re coming back to Ireland, they say ‘We’re going home’.” says Dr Jospeh.

She shared the news of UCD’s newly included course on her Twitter account with gusto, and says many people have congratulated her on online platforms, with only a few “trolls” leaving negative comments.

“Most of the reactions were positive. If 1% is unhappy, we can live with that,” she says.

Besides her new academic role, Dr Joseph is a career development consultant at Ireland’s Royal College of Surgeons. She also serves as the chairperson of the African Scholars’ Association of Ireland (AfSAI).