The Problem with Black Women in Higher Education

Who's really the problem here?

This is the second installment in a series on Black women’s experiences in higher education in observance of Women’s History Month. I’m getting some stuff off my chest here, things that I’ve held for years and rarely, if ever, written about. I’m not writing about it for myself as much as I am for the women have similar stories that they are not in a position to voice, especially for untenured and adjunct faculty, and for the student support, administrative support, and facilities staff that are often disproportionately Black women. I am grateful to be in a season in my career where I have the safety and privilege to be able to give voice to these issues without fear of reprisal. Well, that and I have zero f*@#s left.

There was a point when I got it, when I said to myself, “this is how it happens,” why I finally knew why so many senior Black women faculty in theological education seem weary or angry or perhaps even bitter. But even though I have a clear memory of making that statement to myself, I can’t recall what occasioned my enlightenment. Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of overt racism that I’d experienced in my years in culturally White graduate programs in both psychology and theology.

There was the White woman – an internationally recognized scholar – who informed me that she knew that my Black male graduate student couldn’t be the menace he was being accused of, because she’d never felt scared around him even though she was afraid of Black men. There was the White classmate who responded to my explanation about the use of corporal punishment by Black parents with, “well, if Black parents knew what they were doing, then the inner cities wouldn’t be so screwed up.” There was the White man who casually stated, “Well, of course, we couldn’t hire an African American for the admissions director position,” in a group conversation about our program’s lack of staff diversity. Not to mention the White man who laughingly said, “Does anyone even know a Native American these days?”

For every overtly racist statement, there were probably dozens of covert discrimination: the annual doctoral student review where every Black student was labeled as “high risk” for failure, while the identical performance issues among White students were dismissed as aberrant; the course proposals that routinely omitted any works by non-White scholars, even though African American students made up half of the student body; the programs and policies that clearly privileged White (especially cishet male) students; the inappropriate comments or chilly reception from donors at events that I felt pressure to attend because my absence would have been conspicuous.

Maybe it was the years of White institutions cannibalizing my labor while giving credit for it to others: a male colleague being appointed director of distance education after I developed the online version of a required course that allowed us to offer a fully online masters program; multiple male colleagues being appointed to lead the diversity committee that I proposed and fought to get approved; the dean telling me that an administrative title wasn’t feasible because our faculty was too small to justify it, though that never seemed to matter when titles were given to White colleagues; the federal grant officer who encouraged my former postdoc to resubmit my research project under her own name, the same project the officer had claimed was “weak” when she participated in blackballing me.

Frankly, it’s a wonder that I didn’t reach the “this is how it happens” point sooner. Even still, it wasn’t until a year into my new position when I realized that I had been traumatized by my former job. As a psychologist, I tend to eschew our modern habit of labeling any difficult experience as “trauma.” I had always reserved the category for experiences that caused or threatened serious harm to one’s safety. In my mind, workplace trauma was something experienced by first responders or possibly vicariously for professionals who worked with highly traumatized populations. This was a different type of trauma, but the symptoms were similar: irritability, reliving the event, hypervigilance, being excessively guarded and mistrustful with others, avoiding people and places associated with my former employer.

Increasingly, the mental health profession is recognizing that workplace trauma can occur from working in toxic environments over an extended period of time. Unfortunately, for far too many Black women in theological education, “toxic environment” is a daily reality. So the next time you see a Black female professor, thank her for her service. And try to be understanding if she doesn’t feel like taking a selfie or talking with you about your career ambitions at the moment. After all, she might be in the midst of a battlefield or trying to recover from one.

In other words, the problem with Black women in higher education is not us.