January 2025 marked the thirty-first anniversary of the conference “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name 1894-1994.” The event, organized by Robin W. Kilson and Evelynn M. Hammonds, provided Black women spaces to share research, articulate aspirations, and describe challenges they met in higher education. Anthropologist and educator Johnnetta B. Cole, political activist and philosopher Angela Davis, and legal scholar and civil rights theorist Lani Guinier anchored the event with cogent analyses at the intersection of race, class, and gender. Despite incremental progress since then, fundamental issues raised—such as the exclusionary nature of the academy’s hidden curriculum—persist.
Since 1994, many racial flashpoints have led to dialogues on antiblackness in the United States. In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement catalyzed institutional commitments to challenge systemic inequality. This movement also found its way to college campuses. However, the recent scaling back of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at colleges and universities has countermanded such commitment to rectifying intentional erasures and extractive practices. During a plenary at the 2025 American Association of Colleges and Universities annual meeting, journalist and Howard University professor Nikole Hannah-Jones observed that the swift collapse of commitments to justice work made clear that the infrastructure of higher education was never designed to sustain inclusive practices.
Black women faculty are the canaries in the coal mine in this regard. Institutional change within higher education is slow, and this is particularly the case where advancement of Black women is concerned. What they experience in tenure-track roles is a compelling case study. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) data show that while faculty diversity has grown during the past seven years, it is mostly due to the increased number of Asian and Latinx faculty. The proportion of Black women in tenure-track positions has been relatively flat over the past decade. In the 2022-23 academic year, 4.7 percent of tenure-track faculty were Black women, while white women made up 35 percent of faculty. The proportion of Black women decreased through the ranks such that only 1.5 percent of Black women hold the rank of professor. These trends persist across disciplines, including sociology (Green & Jackson-Jefferson 2020; Combs 2023), pointing to widespread misogynoir—the interaction of anti-Black racism and misogyny.
How Misogynoir Is Manifested
Research addressing anti-Black racism and misogyny is indebted to Black feminist scholars such as the Combahee River Collective (interlocking oppressions), bell hooks (white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy), Patricia Hill Collins (controlling images, matrix of domination), Kimberlé Crenshaw (intersectionality, critical race theory), and Moya Bailey (misogynoir). Recent works demonstrate how misogynoir operates in higher education. Books such as Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class in the Academy (Utah State University Press 2012) and Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia (Utah State University Press 2020), Spirit, Space and Survival: African American Women in (White) Academe (Routledge 1993), Dear Department Chair: Letters from Black Women Leaders to the Next Generation (Wayne State University Press 2023), and Black Women, Ivory Tower: Revealing the Lies of White Supremacy in American Education (Broadleaf Books 2024) highlight the experiences of Black women. Stories shared on X (formerly Twitter) under the #BlackInTheIvory hashtag elevated voices in higher education, providing another space for Black women’s testimonials.
These works outline common themes:
- Identity taxation: Often Black women are expected to initiate equity and justice-oriented work by virtue of their being Black and female. Pressure is particularly acute at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) where they may be one of the only Black staff or faculty on campus. Despite the demands on their time and the intensity of the work, this labor is seen as just what Black women should do. Though they may experience personal satisfaction from the work, their efforts might not be recognized in annual performance reviews.
- Minimized scholarship: Peers question the importance of Black women’s scholarship even when their credentials are impeccable. Their work requires extra validation to achieve recognition, particularly in disciplines commonly viewed as the canon (focused on European subjects). At the same time, if their work focuses on marginalized groups, it is considered “me-search”—characterized as less rigorous, self-indulgent, and/or less valuable.
- Hyper/invisibility: When their numbers are few, the viewpoint of any one Black woman serves as the representative voice for all Black people. Yet conversely, Black women report that colleagues discount the importance of their perspectives and knowledge.
- Biased assessment: Students express biases on course evaluations and are more inclined to question Black women’s expertise, credentials, and skill sets. Annual performance evaluations often focus on whether Black women fit into the local culture and call for them to produce more than white counterparts.
- Racelighting: The risk of calling out microaggressions or bias is that Black women are asked to rethink whether they accurately recalled the incident and whether it was as bad as imagined. Upon experiencing this racelighting (racial gaslighting), they second-guess their judgment and avoid voicing related concerns or objections.
- The glass cliff: Black women are disproportionately appointed leaders of struggling organizations. As a result, they experience role instability, intensified public scrutiny, and criticism. They are more likely to have institutional failure linked to personal failing rather than structural challenges. This phenomenon has also been documented in the C-suite and the nonprofit sector, as compellingly showcased in the spring 2025 issue of Nonprofit Quarterly.
- Health effects: Since racism causes health disparities and negative outcomes, it is no surprise that misogynoir is also a driving source of health challenges. The cumulative effects of racism and sexism lead to erosions of protective barriers and resilience needed to thrive.
Resistance to Change
Given the extensive scholarship on misogynoir and its impact, why don’t we use it to get our own house in order? As I wrote in the chapter I contributed to the Higher Education Leadership for Democracy, Sustainability and Social Justice report (Council of Europe Higher Education 2023) on broadening the reach of racial justice in U.S. higher education: “A university that commits to antiracism might also be one that does not recognize racism as an ongoing reality, or if it did recognize such racism, it would be more likely to see that racism as coming from ‘strangers’ outside of the institution rather than ‘natives’ inside it. It is as if the university is now saying, If we are committed to antiracism (and we have said we are), how can we be racists?” (White, 146). If claims of racism in the academy are taken as an affront by academics, they are likely to focus energy on proving that they aren’t racist rather than on repairing systems that circumscribe opportunities for marginalized people.
Expressing surprise at the persistence of misogynoir becomes a strategy to deflect attention away from confronting structural issues. Instead of being a means for improvement, requests for testimony along with calls for task forces, working groups, and panels become the end goals. When work gets stuck in this loop of exploration and discovery, it invites those who are unharmed by misogynoir to remain in “learning” mode, enabling them to continuously claim ignorance and asking that their Black women colleagues teach them how to be different (better). This shifts responsibility for change from those with the most power and privilege to those who are the most vulnerable. The often-risky work of improving campus life becomes the duty of those same marginalized people whose work is already perceived as less valuable, more disposable, and thus less necessary for institutional vitality. If they leave, burn out, or struggle, their failure is due to their inability to function within the local campus culture rather than being caused by institutional underinvestment in their work.
Spending time on learning about institutional inequalities without getting to actual change is a form of nonperformativity. It preserves hierarchy and obscures people’s resistance to progress since what is visible is a public commitment to improved campus conditions. In contrast, true equity work would have highlighted systemic flaws and biases that privilege some and throws up barriers for others, who persist despite them. The idea that higher education is a meritocracy would be questioned, and along with it the presumption that Black women scholars’ success is proof that higher education has made noteworthy progress toward equity.
Whither the Academy?
In spring 2023, as part of “The Moment is Now: In Dialogue with Changemakers” series, my office hosted Tracie D. Hall—then executive director of the American Libraries Association—as a scholar-in-residence at The New School. During one lecture, she asked us, “What do you do when an institution doesn’t love you back?” One answer is that Black women are increasingly saying no to burdensome and emotionally costly campus activities that rely on them to shoulder responsibility for institutional change. Others are exiting the academy. Many Black women scholars hear and understand that the national clarion call for rest is a strategic necessity and a long-term adaptive strategy.
Beyond these, widespread institutional solutions are urgently needed, ones built on analytical and practice-based tools that we deploy in our research and in our classrooms. Naming the problem is a necessary but insufficient step. The reality is that ongoing anti-Black racism and sexism require that those with power be attentive to how our institutions reproduce these inequalities and focus on dismantling them. We can turn to extant work such as the Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation project, or the inclusive excellence initiatives funded by the Mellon Foundation. We can draw on disciplinary expertise within our campuses and organizations, where the tools for change are within reach. The question is, are we ready for a reimagined academy?