“It’s Wellness Week for Everyone but Me”: Black Women Knowledge Workers’ Attrition as Self-Care

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

Abstract

Research on Black women staff in higher education often focuses on student affairs staff’s experiences as they interact with and mentor students, thus contributing to their sense of belonging and retention (West, 2015, 2017). While important, Black women knowledge workers, or those who work in roles within marketing, communication, program management, or other business functions (Drucker, 1959), within higher education are often ignored or conflated generally with faculty and staff (Briody, Rodriguez-Mejía & Berger, 2021; Roberts, 2018). This oversight contributes to a gap in understanding their contribution to historically White institutions of higher education (HWIs) and staff retention. This qualitative study addresses that gap, combining intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1994; Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021) and racialized and gendered organizations (Acker, 1990; Ray, 2019) within a critical ethnographic case study to examine the experiences of women knowledge workers who left an HWI during the Great Resignation (May 2021 – August 2022). Black, Black-identified biracial, and Afro-Latina participants in the study revealed cultural taxation (Reddick, Smith, & Bukoski, 2020), moral injury (Jinkerson, 2016), and emotional trauma for which leaving the university served as acts of self-care.
Through surveys, journaling, and interviews, participants revealed experiences of exploitation and cultural taxation. For example, Nicole, a Black woman whose work connected her department with HBCUs described being ignored, under-resourced, and overworked. She said she felt like a neglected child in a fairy tale, “they only bring [you] out when there’s an occasion for it… you’re left down in the cellar and you only get a bowl of soup.” Yet after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 when her work was highlighted as valuable, she was still being under-resourced and overworked. Sunshine, a communicator in the university who also led the university’s minority faculty and staff resource group, likened her experience to working on a “plantation,” stating, “When I think of a plantation … there’s so much work that I do and that my ancestors did that was not validated or recognized… there is so much I have done for the university that has not been … affirmed.” Jackie, a Black woman DEI director, described entering her White woman supervisor’s home for a work retreat and discovering a Confederate flag. The experience highlighted a disconnection between the university’s and her supervisor’s stated diversity, equity and inclusion values her own, which instilled a sense of moral injury, “a type of trauma characterized by guilt, existential crisis, and loss of trust that may develop following a perceived moral violation” (abstract, Jinkerson, 2016). Black women knowledge workers subsequently left as acts of self-care. For example, Sunshine said that working from home had allowed her to control her experiences with microaggressions, and when the university “told me to come back in the office and re-expose myself to that … no thank you.” Findings showcase how HWIs’ racialized and gendered organizational structures inflict trauma on Black women knowledge workers and contribute to their attrition.

References were removed for word count.

Author

• M. Yvonne Taylor, Northwest Education Access