Faculty, yet Unrecognized: Black Women, Pedagogical Authority, and Everyday Surveillance in Higher Education

Abstract

Black women faculty perambulate public and private white institutions that relentlessly question their legitimacy, authority, and belonging. Despite their scholarly credentials, they are often subjected to indecorous scrutiny from students, colleagues, and institutional systems. This policing extends beyond the classroom to the brick and mortar campus space—evidenced in acts such as being asked to justify their presence in faculty parking lots and decision driven meetings. It is common for Black female faculty to experience interrogation of their scholarship through student and peer evaluations that are born of racism and gendered bias resulting from being reared in communities of homogeneity. These confrontations underscore how competing systems of racism and sexism inform the daily lives of Black women in academia. Subsequently they are positioned as perpetual outsiders within the academy. Drawing on Black feminist thought perspectives pioneered by Hillary Potter and critical race theory introduced by Derrick Bell, and expounded upon by Ladson-Billings, this paper explores how such incidences of surveillance, skepticism, and constant vetting function as apparati of institutional control and authority that attenuate their pedagogical authority and preserve exclusionary academic norms. With a focus on the phenomenology of Black women faculty, this review asks for a salient shift that distinguishes their intellectual labor as a needed component of the establishment of equity, opportunity, and inclusion in higher education.