Being black and female in a traditionally white and male space takes a toll!

What is it about?

In this article, I reflect on my lived experience as an African American woman teaching in the racialized and gendered context of a predominantly white institution (PWI) in the Deep South. I use the context of a southern campus in the Deep South to provide insight into the ways place, race, and gender continue to shape experiences of people of color and in so doing highlight the fallacy that the United States is a colorblind or post-racial society. To do so, I utilize counter-storytelling—a tool advanced by critical race theory (CRT) scholars; while CRT is useful to understand the conditions that produce the unequal weight borne by faculty of color, it is insufficient to understand the social processes that create and maintain it. I argue that the dynamic nature of racism requires new theoretical approaches to understand it. For this, I advance a new theory—bodies out of place (BOP). I utilize my narrative to provide greater clarity regarding how BOP fills gaps left by CRT and other racial ideologies. My narrative illustrates how the intersections of race, gender, and place can operate to create a disproportionate burden (professionally, personally, physically, and psychologically) on faculty women of color. Ironically, I conclude that this disproportionate burden often falls on a continuum between empowering and encumbering. However, both ends of the spectrum contribute to racial battle fatigue. Keywords racism, African Americans, bias, body, place, colorblind

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Why is it important?

This article is important because it attempts to explain how racism continues to operate in a society that purports to be colorblind. Specifically, the article explains how when white dominants say they do not have a problem (per se) with blacks, they mean it; but what they have a problem with is blacks who occupy social spaces and positions that place blacks in relative authority over whites.

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