The New Negroes: Black Faculty on Essence, Identity, and Artifacts of Professional Socialization

• In Event: The Hate U Give "F" Us All: "Race" and Racism in Student Evaluation of Teaching

Abstract

Racial horror stories from Black teacher educators are common, particularly from those who serve at predominantly white institutions. Indeed, concepts adopted to describe these professionals’ working conditions – such as racial battle fatigue and micro/macroaggressions - imply both epistemic and actual violence. Without question, each failure to recruit or retain Black faculty bears specific, contextual nuance. Still, research and testimonies indicate troubling consistency across Black teacher educators’ experiences with racism as both an ideology of Black dehumanization and as a disruptive professional force (Dixson & Dingus, 2007; Hill-Brisbane & Dingus, 2007; Landor & Santoro, 2017; Pabon & Basile, 2019). Racialized barriers to Black faculty’s success include the unreliability of teaching evaluations, the weight of invisible and cultural labor, as well as the absence of adequate mentoring.
In this paper, I read emerging findings on Black faculty’s professional identity dissonance (Costello, 2005) with concepts including double consciousness (DuBois, 2008), the outsider within (Hill Collins, 1999) and spirit-murder (Young & Hines, 2019) to advance theory about the racial estrangement of Black teacher educators. Specifically, this paper is a qualitative examination of four Black teacher educators’ narratives of formal and informal professional socialization. Data emphasize patterns across the messages about race that were communicated to these professionals. The discussion employs principles from Afropessimist thought to first highlight narratives about good Black professors that Black teacher educators encountered in their first days on a new campus. Then, I document how longstanding debates about the aims of racial integration are evoked in Black faculty’s recollections of their professional socialization. Two concerns emerge: first, that Black faculty believe that these narratives inform teaching, research and service evaluations at predominantly white institutions; second, that hidden or indirect messages cause identity dissonance with consequences far beyond work climate.

Author

• Ashley N. Woodson, Albion College