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African American Women as Change Agents in the White Academy

Pivoting the Margin via Grounded Theory

MURIEL E. SHOCKLEY and ELIZABETH L. HOLLOWAY

In this chapter, we discuss African American women scholar-activists and the ways in which they act as catalysts for transformational societal, institutional, and individual change. Through the use of grounded theory methodology (GTM), we have uncovered the institutional conditions of the white academy under which African American women establish their presence as change agents, a process that leads to personal strength, resilience, and institutional change. Through our research findings, we describe a holistic model of their lived experiences with their voices and perspectives at the center. The model has implications for African American women as change agents actively engaging and strategizing within white institutional and organizational contexts.

Existing Scholarship

Only 4 percent of faculty in higher education are African American women (Snyder & Dillow, 2012), but they have a long history of contribution to the academy. The intersectional identities of African American women often produce conditions that devalue “both their sex and their race” (Myers, 2002, p. 5). This results in the experience of gendered racism in the context of everyday life experiences or, as Essed (1990) describes, “the integration of racism into everyday situations through practices that activate underlying power relations” (p. 50). It is particularly important in this historical moment that we illuminate the subaltern leadership knowledge possessed by African American women, as these experiences may have broad applicability across a variety of organizational settings.

Existing scholarship on African American women’s experiences in the academy locates these academicians in predominantly white research universities and liberal arts colleges, as well as historically black colleges and universities, and focuses on the tenure process, recruitment and retention, evaluation, student relationships, career satisfaction, mentoring, survival strategies, and administrative leadership.1 Overwhelmingly, the foci of the research are the challenges African American women scholars face and the concomitant strategies employed to mitigate the consequences. Less apparent are the ways African American women scholar-activists in the white academy act as catalysts for transformational societal, institutional, and individual change (hooks, 1994).

Studies of race and ethnicity in the professoriate have discovered that faculty of color were significantly more likely to see their position as an opportunity and responsibility to create social change (Antonio, 2002; Astin, Antonio, Cress & Astin, 1997; G. D. Thomas, 2001; Tyson, 2001). Davis (1999), drawing a parallel between the plantation kitchen and the academy as contested spaces for African American women, advanced the notion of the power of the “kitchen legacy” as a transformative metaphorical space for African American women. She asserts, “The kitchen provided a space within which black women during and after slavery transformed their oppression into resistance and transformed an institution of white dominance” (p. 370). This kitchen-table space is similar to the space hooks (1990) invites us to as she distinguishes between being marginalized and recognizing the power that conscious location at the margin can bring. She names the margin a “space of radical openness … a profound edge … [a] site of radical possibility, a space of resistance” (p. 149). She suggests an embodied location here “nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternative, new worlds” (p. 150).Davis (1999) suggested that the legacy of the kitchen can be used to “redefine [our] importance in the domain of whiteness … transform students and faculty … and … define and inform experience through provocative scholarship” (p. 372). In spite of and because of our outsider/within status (Collins, 2000) in the white academy, Hoke (1997) recognized the “potential for social change” as African American women initiate “individual and collective acts of resistance” in the academy (p. 299). It is here, in this interstitial space at the margins of the academy, that a postmodern grounded theory approach is adept at uncovering the lived power of African American women in academe.

We chose to study the ways in which African American women faculty have navigated and influenced the institutions in which they have worked. More specifically, our study is centered on black feminist thought (Collins, 2000) and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) as defining frameworks in the professional and personal lives of the women interviewed. Through this process, we sought to uncover the ways these women embody and understand leadership and change in the academy. Specifically, we articulate the processes by which African American women initiate and participate in the decolonization of the academy. The landscape of methodological approaches to African American women in the academy has been dominated by descriptive quantitative and qualitative approaches—for example, survey (A. J. Thomas, Witherspoon, & Speight, 2008), case study (Carter-Frye, 2015), autoethnography (Perlow, 2018), and narrative (Nash, 2004). Thus, our methodological approach to this study of lived experience claims a framework that positions African American women as agents of knowledge, rejects additive notions of oppression, and validates an alternative epistemological system. It is our contention that the unique capability of an approach to GTM that takes a postmodern, feminist stance (Olesen, 2007) both honors the voices of those marginalized and builds conceptual understanding of silencing in complex social situations (O’Neil, Green, Creswell, Shope, & Plano Clark, 2010).

A Feminist and Constructivist Stance

Constructivist GTM (Charmaz, 2006; Morse, 2009) is a rigorous qualitative approach that honors the voices of those individuals who are embedded in the situation of interest. GTM supports inquiry into the conceptual and theoretical understanding of “what all is happening” (Schatzman, 1991) in a given situation, thus going beyond mere description of actions. A feminist stance to this methodological approach allowed us to “not merely describe women’s situations, but consider how race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, and material circumstances in multiple contexts render the taken for granted problematic in ways that move toward social justice (Olesen, 2005; Roman, 1992)” (Olesen, 2007, p. 421). For the interested reader, a detailed examination of the GTM approach to studies of equality, diversity, and inclusion can be found in Holloway & Schwartz (2018).

As researchers immersed in the discovery of these processes and the meaning they hold for African American women, we were acutely aware of our own positionality in relation to the work and in relation to each other. At this time, we are colleagues and professors in different progressive universities; however, our relationship has embraced a multitude of roles, beginning with those of student and professor and extending to those of friends, colleagues, and coauthors. Although we have much in common as psychologists, professors, and women close in age, we have very different origins and cultural sensitivities. Muriel is African American and is the third generation in her family to have obtained college and advanced degrees. She has spent a lifetime immersed in the culture of the white academy. Elizabeth is an Anglo-Canadian, first-generation college student who came to the United States in the social upheaval of 1968–1969 to pursue her education. Her graduate education and career were in major public institutions in the United States until joining Antioch University in 2001.

In the remainder of this discussion, we highlight the findings from this study that related to the central concept that emerged: African American women’s Robust Sense of Self. This sense of self undergirded a presence of being and becoming that allowed these women to think and strategize as activists in their places of work. Using quotes from the interviews completed for this study, we illustrate the emergent themes that characterize their perception of the conditions in the academy and their engagement as they traverse the topography.2 First, we provide a brief outline of the sample and data-collection procedures to situate our discussion of findings.

The Research Approach

A purposive sample of African American scholar-activists in predominantly white institutions of higher education was sought for participation in the study. A total of eighteen women participated in the study, with an age range of thirty to seventy years. The participants were faculty at the early, mid-, and senior career levels in tenured and nontenured positions in the social sciences and the humanities across eighteen different institutions. Although five of the participants taught in the same institution, they also taught in a second, predominantly white university and spoke about their experiences in both, thus bringing the total count of institutions represented to nineteen. The types of institutions represented were public and private Research I universities, state and city colleges and universities, and private liberal arts colleges. The institutions are geographically located in urban, suburban, and rural communities.

The women were interviewed from the fall of 2011 through late spring 2012. Two broad, open-ended prompts began each interview: “Talk to me about your experience as an African American woman in a predominantly white institution,” and “What impact, if any, do you believe your presence has on the environment in which you work?” The interviews were an average of sixty minutes in length.

All elements of the GTM approach were exercised in the implementation of the study, including line-by-line coding, axial coding, memoing, dimensional analysis, and theorizing.3 Three coders of different cultural backgrounds worked with the interviews to gain rich and varied perspectives in the interpretation of the stories told. Once this coding process was completed, the most robust concepts representing social processes in the context of organizational life were labeled primary dimensions.

Naming Social Processes

Our sample of African American women scholar-activists ably and vividly told the story of everyday life in the white academy. Their stories as a whole created a rich avenue of microprocesses that were transacted with students, colleagues, administrators, and friends. In the interviews, the participants revealed the intricate dynamics they face on a daily basis; they shared the stress, frustration, discouragement, and rage felt, as well as the energy, zest, and determination. The thematic analysis of the women’s stories led to the conceptualization of a central concept, core dimension, and four primary dimensions. The primary dimensions (see table 13-1 later in this chapter) represent the kinds of interactional situations that were deemed critical from the women’s perspective. With further analysis and conceptualization, we explored the context in which the social interactions or processes took place, the conditions under which they occurred, and the impact they had on the women, others, or the institution. Throughout this analysis, we became very aware of the power inherent in these interactions and their role in promoting the women’s understanding of self. We ultimately named this understanding a Robust Sense of Self, a central construct in African American women’s engagements at work.

A Robust Sense of Self

Unlike other narrative approaches, GTM takes a systematic view of participant action by contextualizing the conditions and consequences of specific actions. The context is created from the stories told and reflects the constantly changing conditions that emerge from social interaction. An explanatory or theoretical matrix is formed around each of the primary processes (dimensions) identified in the analysis, ultimately leading to a heuristic model that ties all elements of the analysis to answer the fundamental inquiry, “What all is happening here?” For example, a dimension might become a social condition that facilitates or obstructs certain terms of engagement and ultimately results in consequences and impact on self, others, and the social conditions of the situation (Kools, McCarthy, Durham, & Robrecht, 1996).

At the heart of figure 13-1 is the core dimension Robust Sense of Self, a condition of living in the white academy; it is the sturdiest dimension. When an architect designs a building, a primary consideration is the load, the force that acts on structures. Buildings must withstand loads, or they will fail. In this study, the loads experienced by African American women scholars are many, and the fulcrum that supports their ability to withstand and negotiate the pressure is this core dimension. This dimension is a social and psychological condition or attribute that the African American woman scholar brings to the context of the white academy. It is the self-knowledge and self-definition reflected by Lorde’s (1984) assertion, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive” (p. 137); it is “a belief in self far greater than anyone’s disbelief” (Robinson & Ward, 1991, p. 87).

After years of scholarship and preparation, some African American women begin an academic career trajectory in white academic institutions. They bring not only their academic backgrounds but also a strong sense of self and an embodied female blackness. They come to the academy with a strong desire to pursue their own intellectual interests, and many of those (though not all) pertain to brown-on-brown research, scholarly inquiry focused on issues relevant to communities of color, as well as a strong commitment to rigor and excellence in the classroom and an expressed commitment to students. Possessing a robust sense of self ensures a protective layer, an armoring of resilience. To survive in the white academy demands certain emotional competencies and the possession of clearly articulated beliefs, values, and a sense of purpose, as one participant noted: “I’m guided by Fanny Lou Hammer. I’m guided by the legacies of Harriet Tubman. This ain’t nothing. We ain’t picking cotton, not yet.” For the participants, their sense of self is inextricably tied to their understanding of self as black women.

FIGURE 13-1

Core dimension: Robust Sense of Self

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Robustness should not be conflated with the myth of the strong black woman who silently endures the weight of the world, an imposed and at times internalized construction that has been used to pathologize and stereotypically define the lived experience of the intersectional identities of African American women (Howard-Baptiste, 2014). Conversely, the robustness articulated in this conceptual visualization represents an internal process of self-knowledge and self-definition that feeds African American women’s ability to resist objectification, confront injustices, and guide conscious and critical interactions with the environment. Robustness supports an individual’s ability to give voice to lived realities; it is the process of becoming as opposed to “becoming everything to everyone, [and becoming] less of someone to themselves” (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2005, p. 107). This construct is about recovering and nurturing the self and developing a black female critical consciousness that is enacted in the external world.

The Context of the Academy

In the environment of the white academy, the mortar board of figure 13-1, the African American woman scholar engages in interactions that have certain impacts. Her work requires her daily interaction with students, colleagues, staff, and administrators, and these encounters necessitate use of the self in a myriad of ways that require her to draw from the well that robustness represents. Robustness operates on two levels, micro and macro; it is an internal process that operates to sustain her, and it also has an external feature that emerges as she navigates the terrain. Notice that the properties Risking Self, Exercising Voice and Agency, Persisting, and Seeing and Naming the Whiteness of the Academy, which interact with the Robust Sense of Self and each other in figure 13-1, contain internal and external processes. We now turn to a discussion of these four social processes and their role in supporting the Robust Sense of Self.

The processes of Risking Self, Seeing and Naming the Whiteness of the Academy, Persisting, and Exercising Voice and Agency all contribute to and challenge a Robust Sense of Self (table 13-1). The primary dimensions suggest a dynamic and fluid experience, while the properties named in table 13-1 form and elevate understanding of these experiences by naming related actions and conditions of their occurrence. Properties might be further understood as agentic qualities and inner processes that, as a whole, build the strength of self-awareness and action. These findings dispel any notion of African American women as static recipients of action and instead identify them as engaged, emotionally present agents of action. Their narratives were not reductive accounts of internalized victimization but rather multifaceted tales of redemption through resoluteness, understanding the promise for the future, feeling a sense of responsibility to support the uplift of others, and articulating emancipatory purpose.

TABLE 13-1

Primary dimensions and their properties

Perspective: African American women scholars Robust Sense of Self

Context: The white academy

Dimensions

Properties (ways in which dimensions are enacted)

Robust Sense of Self

(core dimension)

Embodied female blackness

Aliveness of received values

Risking Self

Diss/ease, Impact on Body/Spirit

Challenges to Authority

Uneven Burden

Feeling the Need to be Perfect

Inimical Environment

Seeing and Naming the Whiteness of the Academy

Critiquing the Topography

Under/Over Exposed: Visibility, Invisibility, and Hypervisibility

Outsiderness

Intraracial Complexities

Persisting

Connectivity

Cultivating Reciprocity

Actively Learning

Exercising Voice and Agency

Responsibility to Students

Acting

Valuing Rigor

Having an Impact

Asserting Personhood

Although these were stories of pain and struggle, the metastory shouts a clear declaration of spirit that cannot be denied, a counternarrative of salvation of leading despite the environment found in the white academy, not because of it.

Risking Self

The dimension Risking Self illuminates the process that occurs when our participants chose to pursue an academic career in white institutions. There is a difference between being at risk and the process of risking self. While at risk has come to connote some deficit characteristic, such as low socioeconomic status, that puts a particular demographic group at risk in a particular environment, Risking Self places the agency, the act of risking, in the hands of the individual who experiences the consequences. The African American women scholars we interviewed chose to engage in the act of risking self in spite of the numerous situational and interpersonal attempts to undermine their sense of worth and value. Women reported being faced with a range of situations in which risking self is evident. Among other things, they reported attempts by colleagues to sabotage their success, feelings of being disposable, being at greater risk of being fired or laid off, and the devaluation of their scholarship when its focus is race, class, gender, or another such topic. They described feeling unsafe and used, experiencing the loss of voice, and being accused of not being collegial. At times they were pitted against each other and penalized for not embracing the projective roles imagined for and assigned to them, all of which can be experienced as attempts to deny personhood. These experiences are articulated in the properties Diss/ease, Impact on Body/Spirit, Challenges to Authority, Uneven Burden, Feeling the Need to be Perfect, and Inimical Environment, described as follows:

  • Diss/ease, Impact on Body/Spirit.  This property reveals the ways the white academy has affected the physical, emotional, and spiritual selves of interviewees. Participants made a direct connection between their identity as African American women and the strain and taxing weight on their spirit that they experience.
  • Challenges to Authority.  Participants reported experiences in which their authority and intellectual ability were challenged by students. Challenges come in the form of outright disrespect, lack of boundaries, being tested in the classroom, and confrontation.
  • Uneven Burden.  This property reveals the ways in which African American women in the academy are vulnerable to an “invisible” workload that includes the material work as well as the psychological burden that results from the stress they endure.
  • Feeling the Need to be Perfect.  Participants reported feeling the need to be perfect, to be “better than.” This need to work harder is based not on deficit ability or the need to “catch up” but rather on the knowledge that ability, appearance, and command of Standard English are judged and scrutinized, no matter our qualifications or achievements.
  • Inimical Environment.  Participants found the white academy a hostile and unwelcoming environment. Some spoke of outright hostility, others the subtle hostility that comes with the lack of support from colleagues and administrators.

Participants make a direct connection between their identity as African American women and the strain and taxing weight on their spirit that they experience: “Our emotions and spirits are always at stake, if we don’t respond properly. If you respond positively, then you’re rewarded; and if you don’t respond positively, then you’re not rewarded. And so, either you’re the kind of go-to happy Negro, or you’re the person to avoid. Either you’re the angry black woman or the nurturing nanny figure … so I can’t really think about the impact because I feel disposable and replaceable. You know that if it’s not me, it’s someone else who is performing those functions.” Being present physically, intellectually, and emotionally in the academy requires an enormous amount of energy and internal processing. The reflections revealed in this dimension allow a glimpse into the participants’ deep understanding of the dear price that commitment to the white academy can have and the significance of risking self to maintain a presence and space for their agency.

Seeing and Naming the Whiteness of the Academy

This dimension represents the whiteness of the academy as experienced by the respondents. The respondents’ experiences occurred in a specific environment, a white academic environment that is not benign. The respondents have keen observational and analytic skills. Seeing and Naming the Whiteness of the Academy represents the respondents’ ability to reflect on and make meaning about the environment in which they work in terms of the sociopolitical landscape, historically and in the present. This ability to unpack and understand the environment supports their continued sense of agency and ability to proceed and be impactful despite the significant challenges they face. These insights include the impact of class differences of African American women in the academy and how this may affect how they are seen by others, as well as their comfort level and ability to navigate the academy. This dimension also recognizes the embedded nature and often covert insidiousness of racism in the academy and the difficult nature of changing the system. As one participant observed, “It’s a plantation. Yep, it’s a plantation,” a theme that surfaced in the review of the literature (Davis, 1999; Harley, 2008; John, 1997). These experiences are named Critiquing the Topography; Under/Over Exposed: Visibility, Invisibility, and Hypervisibility; Outsiderness; and Intraracial Complexity. These properties expand understanding of participants’ experiences in the white academy.

  • Critiquing the Topography.  Participants offered insights about and displayed awareness of the realities of the sociopolitical landscape of the white academy. They demonstrated an ability to see and analyze the context in which they work while making personal meaning as they are confronted with the external environment.
  • Under/Over Exposed: Visibility, Invisibility, and Hypervisibility.  This property reveals the common paradoxical experience of being invisible in the white academy while simultaneously being hypervisible.
  • Outsiderness.  This property describes how the lack of a critical mass of African American scholars magnifies the alienation and isolation of African American women’s experience in academia. The unwritten institutional codes are not shared with them but serve to perpetuate their outsider status.
  • Intraracial Complexity.  This property reveals the impact of white normativity in the academy on relationships between African American scholars. Participants described colleagues being co-opted by the system, accommodated to white interests, and subjected to competition based on scarcity of positions and resources, as well as a replication of power over relationships and the feeling that the actions of other black faculty reflect on them.

These properties are illustrated in the following quote from a study participant: “The invisibility that I feel as an African American woman in institutions, and the hypervisibility that I feel also sometimes simultaneously in institutions because I’m outspoken. So I’m one of those people that has spoken back when I see an inequality. And when I see people acting out in ways that to me say this is more about my race and what your stereotype about me than it is about you really listening to me.” Outsider status can ultimately result in dismissal or an individual making the choice to leave the institution and ultimately the academy, as one respondent described: “My experience as an African American woman in a white—predominantly white—academic institution, it’s been a kind of mixed bag of great intellectual growth, community, and culture stymied by just a kind of lack of sense of belonging.… I’ve taught at three universities now that are in these kind of rural spaces, … so, those are the kind of isolating factors in addition to kind of the institutional ways in which, I guess, systemic racism functions in the academy at these various levels.”

Persisting

This dimension represents the tenacious and steadfast resolve demonstrated by African American women scholars in the white academy. Despite the ongoing challenges to their very presence in the academy, participants recounted bringing the full force of their lifelong experiences as women of color and concomitant skill at border crossing, their intellect, and their emotional intelligence to bear by utilizing strategies that ease the impact of outsiderness. These features are demonstrated in the properties Connectivity, Cultivating Reciprocity, and Actively Learning. These persisting properties are described as follows:

  • Connectivity. This property represents participants’ yearning for community as a way to support their presence in the academy. It has the power to mitigate the impact of isolation and outsider status experienced by many.
  • Cultivating Reciprocity. Participants observed the importance of having white allies in the academy. White allies are individuals who are doing their personal work on issues of power and privilege, as well as the microaggressions aimed at people of color in the academy.
  • Actively Learning. This property reveals the ways in which participants found ways to carve out space to do the work necessary to develop agentic strategies that transform the challenges that they face.

Participants reported a yearning for and appreciation of community as a way to support their presence in the academy. This persistence through connectivity and reciprocity with colleagues is particularly important; it has the potential to mitigate the impact of isolation and outsider status experienced by many. Some participants rely on being a part of or building community outside the academy, while others attempt to create nurturing spaces for contact and engagement within it. One participant stated communities provide spaces for African American women scholars to “kind of drop the masks” and breathe deeply into their true selves. Although it is not unusual for workplaces to support lasting friendships and a social life for employees, several of the participants revealed the expectation that community for them is to be found outside the white academy: “I don’t rely on where I work to have friends and colleagues.… [I]t does make you feel vulnerable sometimes when you’re dealing with issues of race, gender, those kinds of things. But in terms of community, I get my community from so many places, that didn’t matter.”

Exercising Voice and Agency

The dimension Exercising Voice and Agency represents the assertions and demonstrations of personhood by women in the white academy. This dimension illuminates the ways in which African American women’s presence through action affects the environment of the academy. Many respondents directly tied their call to exercise voice and claim agency to familial and cultural value systems that they named as an impetus for their action. These are revealed in the properties Responsibility to Students, Acting, Valuing Rigor, Impacting, and Asserting Personhood, which are described as follows:

  • Responsibility to Students. This property reveals a deeply felt responsibility to students. Participants recognized the embodiment of that responsibility as central to their ability to affect their environment. Acting for students in some ways means acting on behalf of themselves.
  • Acting. Participants feel responsible for speaking up and out because there are so few African American women. The women, on the whole, understood that their engaged presence is necessary for change to occur in the academy.
  • Valuing Rigor. Participants spoke about their love of and dedication to rigorous inquiry in their own research and in the classroom. Participants described creating containers for rigorous inquiry for students and themselves.
  • Impacting. This property reveals the multitude of ways that African American women scholars understand their impact on the academy.
  • Asserting Personhood. This property illuminates the ways that participants, when faced with multiple challenges to their personhood, intellect, and presence in the academy, control their environments to mitigate the assaults and assert their personhood.

The need to take action by speaking out against the embedded nature of the injustices noted in the academy was a strong theme in all of the interviews. It was clear that for these women, this was not just a choice but in fact an imperative. As one observed, “The people who were most invested and like showed up for those meetings and have those conversations were almost all faculty of color. And so, that’s what is like this unequal burden.” Although committed to all students they teach, participants understood the potential impact their presence has on African American students in particular: “I care about all my students equally, or I shouldn’t be teaching. But I realize that students who are in a minority and have to negotiate different types of subjectivity have a story that I can understand.… I have to be available because I might be one of the few people who intimately understand that story. And so, if I don’t talk to them about it, if I don’t help them, they will not be helped because there is no other support system for them.”

Robust Sense of Self, to which all other dimensions and their properties are related, reflects the interconnectedness and significance of these elements and becomes a heuristic model of African American women’s perception of life in the academy (see figure 13-1).

Theoretical Propositions

The theoretical matrix describes the potential explanation of the women’s experience in the academy. In figure 13-1, the matrix is visually represented to illustrate the relationships between the social processes, both internal and external, in which the women participated and their contribution to the women’s strength, presence, and awareness of the conditions of the academy and their impact on building a Robust Sense of Self. The final step in GTM, posing theoretical propositions, seeks to articulate the underlying human processes that govern the dynamic interplay of processes described in the theoretical matrix. Theoretical propositions offer both the practitioner and the researcher an opportunity to place the findings of this study in the broader scholarly discourse on African American women in the academy and to suggest ways of acting as change agents in institutionalized “whiteness.” Three theoretical propositions emerge from this study to explain how African American women in the academy are change agents of the academy: Seeking Full Range of Motion, Creating and Claiming Free Space, and Living Truth to Power.

Proposition One: Seeking Full Range of Motion

African American women scholars have a desire to live productive lives in the academy and experience satisfaction through engagement in their communities and relationships. This yearning is represented in the first theoretical proposition, Seeking Full Range of Motion. African American women scholars choose careers in the academy for a variety of reasons: to stretch themselves intellectually and make significant contributions through new scholarship that many times troubles the status quo, to support their communities, and to inspire and engage students to be critical thinkers and engaged members in a global society. The data surfaced not only the myriad of ways that African American women’s range of motion is systemically limited but also the ways in which they resist and fight to lead full intellectual and personal lives, as reflected in the primary dimension Persisting.

Used in this context, full range of motion refers to the African American woman scholar’s ability to contribute abundantly and freely while bringing the fullness and complexity of her personhood to bear on the environment. These women “take up space”—physical space, intellectual space, and emotional space; by virtue of their being, they cannot be ignored, even when being rendered invisible.

As reflected in the property Diss/ease, there are casualties, for how can individuals continue to live under constant stress without real consequences—the physical, emotional, social, and psychic impact of the everyday assaults they described? Being mistaken for service staff or students, having their authority challenged in the classroom, and being accused of a lack of collegiality all create racial battle fatigue. Taken at face value, what is known about the lived experiences of African American women in the white academy is disheartening and demoralizing. The attempts to restrict the movement of African American women take many forms, and these women’s acts of positive resistance contribute to the robustness of their personhood.

Proposition Two: Creating and Claiming Free Spaces

The white academy remains contested ground, yet participants found “sites of resistance” (hooks, 1990). These interstitial spaces, as described by the women in this study, take various forms: physical (e.g., the classroom), psychological (e.g., a robust sense of self), relational (e.g., creating generative connections via community, affinity groups, and allies), and intellectual (e.g., scholarship and research). The women in our study claimed psychological and intellectual space in the academy that thereby nurtured their Robust Sense of Self. One participant reflected on how much healthier she has been since refusing to be silenced and embracing her whole self: “I’m not leaving who I am at home anymore, because that’s what I was doing. I was leaving myself at home, close that door, go to work, take on that persona, do well, leave work, close that door, come home, and embrace who I am. And I decided I wasn’t going to do that anymore, that I was going to bring who I was to the table.”

This participant acknowledged that the embrace and articulation of self in the context of external interactions in the academy was not a foregone conclusion; it didn’t just occur but was part of her process of “becoming” whole. Crucial for the psychological health of African American women is the dimension of exercising voice and agency, which is liberatory when one is faced with the convergence of multiple oppressions. The relational space serves the psychological space and vice versa. The creation of intentional space to cultivate supportive relationships with other African American women, foster connections with white allies, and, in some cases, work with students of color is essential in the white academy (Pitt, Vaughn, Shamburger-Rousseau, & Harris, 2015). The connectivity afforded in relational space provides a counterspace that militates against the onslaught of discouraging messages, explicit and subtle, that emanate from the academy.

Proposition Three: Living Truth to Power: Leaving Footprints

The women in this study struggle to live truth to power, a theoretical proposition that illuminates the impact and import of critical resistance and the need to birth and nurture a radical black female subjectivity. Living Truth to Power speaks directly to the embodiment of critical resistance. The participants in this study inhabit the white academy with courage, authenticity, and purpose. They honor the multiplicity of their identities and recognize the ways in which intersectional aspects of self converge in social and political spaces—in this case, the white academy—resulting in differing impacts and outcomes. They fight back from silence even when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds. This is the knowing, being, and expression of the Robust Sense of Self.

Some of the ways African American women leave footprints is documented; their presence in the academy has a positive impact on the retention of students of color (Myers, 2002), and they have changed the topography of disciplinary study with the advent of black studies departments and scholarship (McKay, 1997). These material ways are significant. What are less obvious, but no less significant, are the ways in which African American women have reordered relationships in the white academy—or, if not reordered them, then at least exerted tangible pressure on the norm. As one participant stated, “I’ve talked about the challenges of being in that environment, the alienation, the isolation, the being viewed with suspicion, my scholarship questioned, feeling like the mammy; in some ways I have to compromise my standards [yet] I really believe that if I wasn’t there, and other women like myself were not there, that these institutions would be poorer for the fact.”

Final Remarks

This study holds significance for African American women in the white academy, as well as having potential contributions to the larger discourse on the nature of leading and leadership. A feminist stance to GTM enhanced the discovery of microprocesses in the academy that became the center and foreground of making meaning of the African American woman’s experience. The propositions embody the “we-ness” of African American women. The African American women in this study do not seek full range of motion solely for themselves; their desire for free expression and healthy, whole lives is an aim extended to their sisters in the academy, their students, their communities, their institutions, and the global community. When a participant made the potent assertion, “I’ll choose which hill to die on,” she spoke directly of her intent to take control of her own destiny and exercise discretion, informed by received knowledge. The context was not only about her survival but also about her strategic assessment of ways to bring about change in the institutional environment—choosing which battles to fight—to benefit the whole.

NOTES

Portions of this manuscript are from the first author’s dissertation (Shockley, 2013) at Graduate School of Leadership and Change, Antioch University. The dissertation was supervised by the second author.

1. A comprehensive review of related studies may be found in Shockley (2013).

2. A full description of the method of the study and findings is available in Shockley (2013).

3. The emergent coding protocol builds theoretical understanding by first identifying in the transcripts key phrases and language, named properties; clustering these properties into categories, named focused coding; establishing the relationship among codes, named axial coding; and, finally, moving from codes to broader concepts, named dimensions, that cluster categories together (Holloway & Schwartz, 2018).

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