“Women Like Us”: Common Themes of Struggle and Progress Among Black Women in Academia

• In Event: Black Women Faculty: Stories of Trial and Triumph, Recommendations for Change

Abstract

Women sometimes occupy a tenuous position within the Academy due to pervasive male privilege and the marginalizing dynamics of hegemonic patriarchy. Women's continual quest to be regarded as serious scholars who make important contributions to the field, to attain parity with their male colleagues, can prove more arduous for Black women whose professional and personal lives are mitigated by the intersectionality of race and sex and the navigational implications that derive from conflated racism and sexism.

This study explores the complexity involved in conceptualizing shared experiences of Black women in the Academy through social and cultural capital lenses. The capital used by Black women in the Academy is frequently positioned as congruous with values and norms of their White counterparts within the literature (hooks, 1981; 1984; Few, 2007; Giddings, 1984). Academicians employing forms of capital differing from those of the dominant culture are often viewed through a deficit lens and in need of transformation or acculturation (hooks, 1989; Martin, 1993).

This study grounded in Black feminism (Collins, 1989; Few, 2003; 2007) gives voice to Black women and amplifies their experiences with more accuracy. A necessary “transformation of silence into language and action” (Lorde, 1984, p. 40) is possible when research is grounded with this theoretical base. The Black women professors in this study often met the familiar opposition that comes with assumptions that deem Black people’s culture, values, and norms oppositional to that of schooling in the United States (Ladson-Billings, 1994; Delpit, 1995; Edwards et al., 1999; Yan, 2000; Noguera, 2001). Often, attainment of elevated class status through education does not exempt Black women from stereotyping and differentiated treatment Black people of all classes experience. Hence, class as reported by participants, was secondary to race and sex in explaining negative experiences within the Academy.

“Double consciousness” was characterized by W.E.B. DuBois (1903/1969) as "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" (p. 45). Black women professors in this study explicitly acknowledged and articulated a double consciousness, an acute awareness of perceptions they believed peers who were members of the dominant culture espoused in relation to the fact that they were Black women. The participants spoke specifically of double consciousness when talking of the awareness of themselves in relation to an awareness of how they and their work were perceived and regarded within the Academy.

Author

• Rema Ella Reynolds, Eastern Michigan University