Black Women in Education
Stormzy Is Publishing These 21-Year-Olds’ “Black Girls’ Guide To University”
By Natalie Gil
Stormzy’s commitment to social activism, black empowerment and backing a generation of new voices is a far cry from the fruitless Instagram posts and woke hashtags we’ve come to expect from liberal-minded millennial celebrities and influencers. The British grime artist actually cares – and puts his money where his mouth is.
2018 has been a big year for the Stormzy social enterprise – in July, the 25-year-old announced his own book imprint with Penguin Random House, #Merky Books, to platform fiction, nonfiction and poetry by new talent, and just a month later it emerged he’d founded a scholarship to send two black students to study at the University of Cambridge this year and next to increase BAME representation, a notoriously sore point for Oxbridge.
Far from cynical PR ploys to garner adulatory headlines, both of this year’s initiatives were passion projects dreamed up by the south Londoner, with him approaching each establishment with the idea. Coming from a man who’s rapped about his mental health, backed hardworking nurses, supported Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing agenda and famously slammed Theresa May’s response to the Grenfell tragedy at the Brit Awards, his new commitments to lifting up other …
