Racialized Care Work in Minority Serving Institutions

• In Event: 21061 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: Labor and Workplace Dynamics

Abstract

Minority Serving Institutions in the United States are defined either as institutions that have been established to educate populations who have been formally excluded from accessing higher education such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Tribal Colleges and Universities or as institutions which have enrolled a particular threshold of historically underrepresented students (25% of Latine students in Hispanic Serving Institutions and 10% of Asian American, Native American, or Pacific Islander students in Asian American, Native American, and Pacific Islander Serving Institutions). While HBCUs and TCUs have historically stated commitments to serving their student populations, HSIs and AANAPISIs do not share this historical commitment to their students. Despite many MSIs being majority, minority spaces, they can still operate as ‘white spaces.’ A white space can be understood as a space where whiteness is the norm and is unquestioned (Brunsma et al 2020; Anderson 2015). White spaces are reproduced and maintained through the racial logics of whiteness, cultural norms, and rules about said space. In this paper, I draw on this framework to show that in Minority Serving Institutions, women of color faculty do racialized and gendered equity work, and care work that is frequently informal and under-recognized in formal promotion expectations. Based on interviews with 41 women of color faculty currently working in a federally designated minority serving institution, I find that women of color faculty will make sense of their service obligations through a lens of giving back. Because this work is frequently not shared equally among faculty, WOCF take on the burden of doing equity oriented work maintaining MSIs as white spaces.

Author

• Angela J. Silva, University of Illinois-Chicago