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Please Don’t Kill My Love for Higher Education Vibes.
I love to teach! But please don’t come for me because of that love.
“The burdens women of color face in academia, doing their best to meet and often exceed tenure requirements as they also struggle to survive in a context of white supremacy, macro and micro aggressions, sexism, and classism, can be overwhelming …
A good place to start is to educate ourselves about the intersectional factors hampering the success of women of color. Books like Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (2012/2020), Counternarratives from Women of Color Academics: Bravery, Vulnerability, and Resistance (2018/2020), and Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (2016) collect the narratives of women of color faculty and make clear the often traumatic experiences they continue to endure in universities across the US. Patricia A. Matthew, editor of Written/Unwritten, explains that she decided to undertake the project of her book when four women of color were denied tenure in one year at her institution, the University of Michigan, in 2007. She invited women across the country to write about their experiences. She notes in the introduction to her book,
…what I’ve found is that there are codes and habits that faculty of color often don’t know about because those unwritten…
