‘Why don't you get somebody new to do it?’ Race and cultural taxation in the academy

Abstract

There has been a marginal increase in the number of racial minorities among college and university faculty, yet current attacks on affirmative action and prevailing attitudes about the inferiority of non-white faculty place an extra burden on these individuals in academia. Amado Padilla (1994) introduced the concept of ‘cultural taxation’ to describe this burden where additional responsibilities are placed upon non-white faculty because of their ethno-racial backgrounds. These responsibilities include serving on numerous committees, advising larger numbers of students and serving as ‘departmental experts’ for their particular ethno-racial group. These expectations of non-white faculty are not placed as heavily upon white faculty, can impede career progress and affect job satisfaction. In this paper, we explore how cultural taxation affects faculty of colour in a research university. Additionally, we expand the analysis of cultural taxation to include issues of legitimacy that challenge non-white faculty's sense of ‘belonging’ within their respective departments.

Keywords:

• Race
• cultural taxation
• legitimacy
• qualitative methods
• academia
• racism

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Alford Young Jr., Dr. Mark Chesler, Faculty Members and Diversity Classrooms Project team members and participants and anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions on previous drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. These faculty were awarded distinguished teaching/service honours from the university.

2. The seven faculty members who declined to be interviewed were selected towards the end of the research cycle, which meant they were less likely to have been chosen for a teaching award. As such, they were also slightly more likely to be more junior in their careers than the faculty in our sample.

3. In the few cases where audio-transcripts were not available, interviewers took extremely detailed notes both during and after the interviews.

4. All names have been changed. Ascriptions of quotes include the pseudonym, race/ethnicity, gender, discipline and interview number of the cited participant.