Black Women Leaders Navigating Racism on Campus

• In Event: Reimagining Leadership Learning Experiences for Black College Women

Short Description

This study explored how undergraduate Black women in leadership roles coped with racial issues at a predominantly White university. Qualitative interviews showed that Black women leaders managed racial battle fatigue by reframing it positively, intellectualizing racial oppression, and striving to “just live.”

Detailed Abstract

Higher education’s social environments, such as student organizations and campus activities, represent unique opportunities for students to learn how to work together with others who are different from themselves, culturally and ethnically. These postsecondary environments also provide space for students to differentiate how to think and how to behave in what will inevitably be racially and ethnically diverse professional environments and the everyday world around them (Cabrera, Nora, Pascarella, Terenzini, & Hagedorn, 1999; Hurtado & Carter, 1997; Hurtado, Carter, & Spuler, 1996; Museus, 2007; Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005).

Yet the ideologies of race-neutrality or colorblindness in student leadership development tend to maintain the role of race in preserving disparities for privileged populations (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Gotanda, 2000; Harper & Patton, 2007). Many students of color bring their experiences of exclusion, oppression, and problematic education to their higher education journeys (Lewis, Chesler, & Forman, 2000). Students of color must often negotiate their own sense of what it means to be a person of color in the face of racial/ethnic stereotypes and microaggressions in the college setting (Ospina & Foldy, 2009; Ospina & Su, 2009). This study explored how Black women developed a leadership identity and managed their racial battle fatigue while attending a regional masters comprehensive university in New England. This study used counterstorytelling to explore how these Black women perceived themselves as leaders in a traditionally White higher education environment and made meaning of their racial challenges.

Theoretical Framework: Racial Battle Fatigue
Racial battle fatigue as a concept was developed by Smith (2004) to help explain the health consequences of prolonged experiences of racial stress. Based on interdisciplinary scholarship involving sociology, education, and health psychology, the racial battle fatigue conceptual model emphasizes the racial stress that people of color experience from the oppressive conditions of White supremacy and systemic racism, primarily from unrelenting exposure to racial microaggressions. The notion of coping with racial battle fatigue further addresses the amount of energy that people of color expend in their efforts to fight racism, especially in historically White environments (Smith, 2008).

The racial battle fatigue model includes specific types of racialized psychosocial stressors that people of color experience at increased levels, and three subsequent categories of stress responses: psychological stress exemplified by frustration, apathy, anger, worry, fear, and resentment; physiological stress characterized by headaches, pounding heart, sleep disturbance, fatigue, insomnia, increased perspiration, and frequent illness; and emotional/behavioral stress responses, demonstrated by prolonged, high-effort coping with difficult psychological stressors, increased commitment to spirituality; impatience, withdrawal or isolation from others, poor school or job performance, changes in close family relationships, and quickness to argue (Smith, Hung, & Franklin, 2011).

Thus, racial battle fatigue has become a salient theoretical concept in contemporary scholarship on the experiences of people of color in postsecondary education, engaging critical discourse on the consequences of institutional racism in higher education for students, staff, and faculty (Smith, 2004; Smith, Yosso, & Solorzano, 2007). Smith et al. (2007) together defined the racial battle fatigue experience through a critical race theory investigation into the experience of Black misandry, defined as “an exaggerated pathological aversion toward Black men created and reinforced in societal, institutional, and individual ideologies, practices and behaviors” in both social and academic spaces in the college environment (p. 559). Moreover, Smith et al.’s (2007) findings revealed that Black misandric beliefs influence the development of hostile collegiate racial climates, and suggested that higher education administrators learn to better listen to and centralize the experiences of people of color tasked with navigating these hostile environments as a first step toward addressing how institutions might better mitigate racially oppressive conditions. Thus, it is critical to examine the experience of student leaders of color who are coping with racial battle fatigue in the higher education environment in order to provide them better support as faculty and student affairs educators, and to pressure our educational institutions to embrace meaningful systemic changes.

Significance of the Study
This study would provide insight into how undergraduate student leaders of color cope with their racial battle fatigue on a historically White campus. Through counterstorytelling these leaders vulnerably shared how they just wanted to be and to live in a space where they are not constantly confronting and dealing with racism. They longed for the sense of “normalcy” in their student leadership experience that their White counterparts apparently had. The findings in the research literature also suggested key implications for higher education administrators and faculty regarding the continuous—and we would argue more focused—work that is needed to address endemic racism at all levels, which is ingrained in campus communities, structures, and cultures. Implications from this particular study indicate the need for administrators to create more space for purposeful meaning-making about how systems of oppression and privilege intersect and impact the lives of students of color, specifically those enduring racial battle fatigue. The research question that guided this study was: How do students of color deal with experiences of racial battle fatigue as campus leaders?

Participant

• Cameron C. Beatty, Florida State University
  Presenter