"Since the 2nd grade when I started being bussed in to white schools, I've spent my entire life proving that I belonged in elite white spaces that were not built for Black people. I got a lot of clarity through what happened with the University of North Carolina. I decided I didn't want to do that anymore. That Black professionals should feel free and actually perhaps an obligation to go to our own institutions, and bring our own talents and resources to our own institutions and help to build them up as well.
This is not my fight. I fought the battle that I wanted to fight which is - "I deserve to be treated equally and have a vote on my tenure". I won that battle.
It's not my job to heal the University of North Carolina. That's a job for the people in power who created the situation in the first place."
This is Nikole Hannah-Jones Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist announcing to Gayle King on CBS News in July 2021, that she has declined a tenured professorship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and will instead take a position as the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at Howard University, an Historical Black University (HBCU).
This is a real world scenario echoed in YA fiction in both Legendborn by American author Tracy Deonn (set at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where Bree deals with racism and exclusion at her new school whilst grieving the loss of her mother); and in Ace of Spades by British author Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé (set at a fictional elite all white high school, Neveus Academy where the only two Black students are subject to increasing instances of racism and physical threat).
That young adult fiction is speaking to current times in different genres, especially those written by Black voices, is so exciting and enriching to all readers.
