On Being a Unicorn

Black Women in Higher Education

Two months ago, following the death of Dr. Antoinette “Bonnie” Candia-Bailey, I wrote about whether academic spaces are inherently toxic for Black women. Since then, I’ve had multiple conversations with Black women in higher education about our challenges we face, the gifts we bring, and why we stay. Today, in observance of Women’s History Month, I’m beginning a series focusing on this topic.

“We need to realize that most of our White students have never been in relationship with a Black person, especially not as a peer.” My White colleagues in psychology looked at me blankly after I made that statement in our two-day diversity training. We had finally reached the point of the mandatory training, facilitated by outside consultants, where we were discussing a racial crisis in our department. A few months earlier, a Black male first-year doctoral student (my mentee and one of two Black men in the entire program) had been unofficially accused of criminal and harassing behavior by several White female students. The allegations were patently ridiculous, but the rumors caused so much turmoil that the department which had been forced to hire a group therapist to come work with our first-year class. Even though the rumors were eventually acknowledged as false, White faculty continued to focus on the Black male as the source of the problem.

As the youngest, most junior, and sole Black faculty member active in the program, I was incredibly vulnerable and knew I had to tread carefully in defending my student. But when another professor uttered the paternalistic racist line that “he doesn’t know how to behave according to professional middle-class norms because he came from a disadvantaged background,” I looked at the Black woman co-facilitating the workshop and said drily, “he went to Morehouse.” Then I turned the tables, saying that the real issue was that most, if not all, of our White students had never had a meaningful relationship with a Black person. It was years later before I realized that how that also applied to me as a professor.

“Dr. C, I just realized something: you’re the first Black woman professor I’ve ever had.” The statement in itself wasn’t shocking. What surprised me was the source of the statement: a Black male student who had done part of his undergraduate education at a historically Black college.

By then, I was nearly ten years into my career as a seminary professor, having transitioned from psychology to pastoral care. I already suspected that I was the first Black woman that most of my White colleagues had worked with, other than service workers and support staff. Being from the South made me pretty sure that some of my older colleagues’ first relationships with Black women were with the domestic workers employed by their families. My White master’s students had mostly grown up in White neighborhoods, been educated at White schools, attended White churches, and graduated from White Christian colleges in the South. Many of them had been drawn to our institution because both the enrollment and the Atlanta location offered an opportunity to learn in a diverse (read: not solely White) context. In other words, they came because they wanted exposure to something more than Whiteness. But that didn’t mean that they were prepared for me and my pedagogical embodiment as a Black woman. It didn’t mean that they were prepared to accept my spiritual and intellectual authority. In fact, their familial connections to powerful people in the institution and its supporting denomination often made them insiders in a way that I never could be.

Theological education sits at the nexus of two fields that have been bastions for men: higher education and ministry. In the latest data from the Association of Theological Schools, the primarily accrediting body for independent and university-embedded seminaries in the US and Canada, men (mostly White cishet men) made up nearly three-quarters (73.8 percent) of the 2822 faculty in 2022-2023. Black women accounted for only 4.3 percent (by comparison, Black men are only slightly higher at 6.2 percent and White women account for 16.9 percent). Whit male privilege is in overdrive in theological education.

In 2022-2023, there were 244 ATS member schools in the United States and only 122 Black women professors. That means that at least half of US seminaries do not have a single Black woman on faculty. And I’m pretty sure that about ten percent of us are in Atlanta seminaries. (Quick commercial break: While Atlanta is full, we make an exception for seminarians so come on down and study with us. We make it really easy to cross-register so you could take classes with every womanist seminary professor in Atlanta!)

When we consider rank, the numbers are even worse. Only 30 Black women hold the rank of full professor in accredited theological institutions (representing 2.4 percent of full professors). As one of the 30, I am a unicorn.

As one of the 30 Black women holding the rank of full professor in theological institutions, I am a unicorn.

Today, we know unicorns as mythical creatures who primarily appear in popular culture. But in antiquity, unicorns were believed to be as real as they were rare. There were often reports of sightings of unicorns in medieval Europe, Persia, and India. In the King James Bible, the Hebrew re’em was often translated as “unicorn” because the term was recognizable by seventeenth century readers.

Unicorns have always been highly desirable, but not for their lives. They were hunted for their horns, which were thought to be imbued with magical and medicinal properties. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, false unicorn horns (usually narwhal tusks) were sold with the claims that they could cure disease and detect poison. In popular culture today stories about unicorns invariably involve someone trying to kill them. Think The Last Unicorn, or more recently, Maleficent.

Likewise, the academy often desires the presence of Black women as faculty without actually respecting our personhood. We are hired to quell the protests of the Black students who demand having faculty equipped to educate them for their religious contexts. We are trotted out like magic horns on display when institutions want to be seen as inclusive. We are brought in as leaders when seminaries (and churches, for that matter) are in crisis and in need of a magical cure. Far too often, being their cure comes at the cost of our physical, emotional, and relational health. They want our magic, just not us.

Unlike unicorns, though, we choose not to be elusive. Yes, we recognize the dangers of the academy, but we also know that it is no more dangerous than the rest of the world. At least here, sometimes, there is room for us as thinking women of faith. In our teaching, in our writing, and in our service to the church and the academy, we carve out spaces where we can show up as our full selves and use our magic to help others expand their theological imaginations of who God is and who God is calling all of us to be. We use our magic to envision the world that we need, one where we and our students and the communities they serve are no longer endangered.

Each time we show up, we disrupt the narratives about who we are. But more importantly, we disrupt the narrative that White supremacy tells about itself, about God, about the world. And that is vital work. That’s our real magic.