Teaching While Black: Black Women Millennials’ Experiences of Teaching in South African Universities

Abstract

The South African government continues to work tirelessly to reverse the effects of apartheid by addressing social inequalities and transforming the higher education sector by dismantling structural, cultural, institutional, and interpersonal discrimination. Black¹

¹ The use of the lowercase “w” for white or whiteness in this article is the author’s stylistic act of decentering whiteness to amplify African women’s experiences.

South African women have fought for the right to access education as well as to pursue higher education to the top levels of teaching in these institutions. Traditionally, the custodians of knowledge have been older white men. Millennial Black women’s presence in these spaces of higher institutions is disruptive and continues to be a site of conflict and negotiation for younger Black women academics. This article argues that race, intersecting with gender, age, and class, influences their teaching experiences in universities and how students perceive Millennial Black women in postapartheid South African universities. Intersectionality underpins this qualitative study, which explores nine Black Millennial women’s teaching experiences in universities in South Africa. The findings suggest that these women’s experiences are influenced by the kind of university in which they teach. The narratives showed how Millennial Black women lecturers at historically white institutions experience more hostility, mostly from students who share their same race and gender. This contrasts with the experiences of Millennial Black women who teach at historically Black institutions. The study has implications for university and government transformation agendas.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The use of the lowercase “w” for white or whiteness in this article is the author’s stylistic act of decentering whiteness to amplify African women’s experiences.

² The term Black is used to refer to African. It is not encompassing of Colored, Indian, or other races that are classified as Black in contemporary South Africa. However, throughout this article the terms Black and African are used interchangeably and are inclusive of Indigenous Africans only, not Colored or Indian people.

³ Afrikaans is a language of southern Africa, derived from Dutch which was brought to the cape by settlers in the 17th century. There is a distinction between historically white and historically white Afrikaans universities. The historical white institutions were English speaking and are heavily influenced by the British colonizers of South Africa. The historically white Afrikaans universities were of the Afrikaner nation, which was derived from the Dutch settlers in South Africa.

⁴ This process involves the researcher taking voluminous amounts of information and reducing it to certain patterns, categories, or themes and then interpreting this information by using some schema. Creswell (2009) calls this “decontexualization” and “recontextualization.” This process results in a “higher level” analysis “while much work in the analysis process consists of ‘taking apart’ (for instance, into smaller pieces) the final goal is the emergence of a larger, consolidated picture” (Creswell, 2009).

⁵ Flexibility form is a form students fill out to apply for an extension on an assignment. Some students have different struggles and may need extra time to be able to submit assignments. Students apply for this extension and the course convenor decides on whether to grant it or not.

⁶ This is the generation born after the Millennials. “Z” generation (those born between 1997 and 2012), are part of a new generation who became adults in this Millennial century (Howe & Strauss, 2000).