When the levees break: the cost of vicarious trauma, microaggressions and emotional labor for Black administrators and faculty engaging in race work at traditionally White institutions

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to offer insight to administrators and human resource professionals at Traditionally White Institutions (TWIs) about developing action plans that provide meaningful support to Black administrators and faculty who are coping with racial trauma. Operationalizing tenets of Critical Race Methodology (CRM), the counter-narratives presented here are drawn from 15 years of unpublished professional and personal communication created by an individual Black faculty and administrator. The lectures, conference presentations, commencement addresses and other ephemera trace the development of battlements and emotional battle scars over the early years of one scholar-activist’s career at TWIs. The calamitous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is considered in this context both as metaphor and collective psychic wound. As such, it illuminates other instances of vicarious trauma, foreshadows the Movement for Black Lives, and provides a devastating illustration of administrative unpreparedness. Revealing the ramifications of racial trauma can serve to help others who suffer to feel less alone and can provide stakeholders in higher education with valuable knowledge for the sake not only of recruitment and retention, but institutional transformation.

Keywords:

• Higher education administration
• critical race methodology
• racial trauma
• emotional labor

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Vignettes are titled with quotations from the documentary film When the Levees Broke (Lee, 2006).

2 The seven-point Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale (National Hurricane Center, 2018) describes storms according to wind speed, from tropical depression to tropical storm, then up through hurricane Categories 1 through 5.