Adeola Aderemi: Softness Is Our Birthright

Adeola Aderemi is a multilingual Afro-Greek and multi format artist, scholar, activist and healer, who spends a great deal of time amplifying the voices of and fighting for marginalised women. She is the editor in chief of Distinguished Diva – a community of Black women storytellers – and is currently working on raising awareness among the general public on issues such as human trafficking, gender equality, women’s health and equal representation for Black women in media. We discuss her research on violence against women, her key learnings during her John Lewis Fellowship in Atlanta and the moment she became Black. Adeola is now based in Brussels and pushes back against the narrative of Europe as a post-racial project. She suggests that Europe does its Black citizens a disservice by pointing to problems abroad it has yet to address at home. As well as her insights about fighting for and defending the Afro-Greek identity and the ways conversations about citizenship and representation differ in England and in Greece, she also calls us to ancestral healing and to realise that our softness is our birthright.

This conversation forms part of a special series funded by the European Cultural Foundation and exploring queer Black solidarity across Europe during Covid-19.

A special thank you to our newest funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community. Thank you to our community partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth and Schools Out.

Busy Being Black listeners get an exclusive discount at Pluto Press, an independent publisher of radical, left‐wing non¬‐fiction books. See Busy Being Black’s curated booklist here, and use code BUSY50 for 50% off.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices