We Will Not Be Quiet: Exposing White Allyship, Erasure, and Black Women’s Institutional Trauma

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 9:45 am - Gold 1
  In Roundtable Session: Addressing Campus Climate and Representation Issues in Higher Education

Abstract

This collaborative autoethnography explores the lived experiences of three Black women scholar-practitioners during a contested leadership transition at a Predominantly White Institution. Using the Sankofa Writing Method and rooted in Black feminist and decolonial frameworks, we interrogate the institutional silencing, semantic violence, and racialized gendered precarity often masked by performative equity rhetoric. Drawing from reflective journaling, institutional documents, and embodied memory, we expose the systemic erasure of Black women in academic leadership. Our work critiques false allyship, foregrounds refusal as resistance, and offers storytelling as a liberatory method. This is both documentation and disruption - a counter-archive that refuses institutional amnesia and dares to name harm in the name of truth.

Authors

• Ayana T. Hardaway, Stanford University

• Patrice Renee, Thomas Jefferson University

• Brittany N. Glover, San Diego State University

• Janelle L. West, Rutgers University