“I Felt Like a Mammie": Black Women Administrators Navigating Institutional Betrayal

• In Event: Hear Our Voices: Black Feminist Articulations of Systemic Oppression and Organizational Failure at HWIs

Abstract

“I felt like a mammie:” Black Women Administrators Navigating Institutional Betrayal

Despite sustained contributions to HWIs (Patton & Croom, 2017), Black women administrators have been and remain systematically ignored (Silbert et al., 2022). This structural undermining of Black women has created barriers to executive-level leadership positions, resulting in numerous Black women’s departure from higher education administration roles (Silbert et al., 2022; Townsend, 2021). Like many Black women who depart from the profession after repeated harm, traumas, and emotional injuries, many of the Black women who do remain do so at high social, emotional, and physical costs (Breeden, 2021; Williams, 2023). Using intersectionality as a framework and counternarrative as a methodology, I qualitatively explored the campus institutional betrayal experiences of current and recently departed Black women administrators in this study. I understand institutional betrayal as feelings of treason one experiences when an institution to which one belongs fails to respond, prevent, or redress transgressions within that same institutional environment (Linder & Myers, 2017). Participants recalled betraying violations culminating in three key themes: (1) problems of poor workplace planning and racist supervision, (2) office nepotism and hiring struggles, and (3) tokenization and hyper-(in)visibility.
Troy’s experiences with poor leadership and workplace planning best epitomize theme one. Troy found a lack of formal structure for addressing campus diversity issues, including within the campus diversity office, where her supervisor refused to let her implement, execute, or address campus diversity programs and problems. Troy explained, “They didn't really have a campus diversity strategic plan. They didn't really have the committees… Every time I got engaged about diversity…, there was always some kind of resistance… I didn't catch on to those politics right away.” Shane exemplified theme two when recalling being overlooked for promotions and expected to support an ill-equipped white male colleague who was promoted instead. Shane explained, “I think people manipulated others because they had certain personal or social connections… having family on the Board of Directors caused them to be able to elevate, but they didn't want to call this person Vice President because they don't have [the] education… It wasn't [just] that the person didn't have the education… they would lie on colleagues and pit people against each other just to save face and not own the [issues they created] or the harm they were actively doing…” Claudia’s experience personified the third theme when her campus described only wanting her presence when it best suited them. She explained: “I think the role of a Black woman at many colleges, whether you're doing diversity or not, is to be a caretaker, and whenever that woman decides not to do it or push back on them... To question that or to name that, that is a problem and there is a way to get that person out of there... I felt like a mammy.” Ultimately, the full findings from this study underscore the interplay among the lack of readiness and the lack of infrastructure to support Black women administrators at HWIs, and how these conditions elevate from individual missteps to institutional betrayal.

References separate.

Author

• Brittany M. Williams, University of Vermont