Reexamining racism, sexism, and identity taxation in the academy

ABSTRACT

Amid the 2020 COVID pandemic and officer-involved deaths of numerous Black Americans, US colleges and universities stated commitments to improve ethnoracial diversity and address structural racism. This type of diversity-related work, which fell mostly upon faculty of colour, was not new, however. In 1994, Padilla coined the term “cultural taxation” to describe the disproportionate labour faculty of colour are expected to perform. Hirshfield and Joseph expanded on this work by developing the term “identity taxation” to emphasize labour performed by faculty from marginalized groups because of their intersectional identities. Scholarship about these concepts has since proliferated. This special issue brings together a diverse group of scholars studying these topics to spark much needed structural change through providing: 1) additional terminology describing nuances of identity taxation; 2) empirical insights about identity taxation for groups not previously examined; and 3) recommendations for resistance and advocacy to change inequitable practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural taxation
• identity taxation
• racism
• sexism
• diversity
• academia

Introduction

Ethnic and racial studies special issue

The violent acts of racism that caused the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others in 2020 were heartbreaking and tragic, and sadly, all too familiar. These acts catalyzed a reinvigoration of the Black Lives Matter movement and activism against anti-black police brutality in the United States. In the aftermath, protests ensued across the country and around the world as concerned citizens, politicians, and corporations began to challenge the entrenched status quo of white supremacy and anti-black systemic racism that has plagued the United States for centuries. At the same time, the COVID pandemic swept through the United States and the world, infecting, and ultimately causing the deaths of, millions of people – particularly the most marginalized and vulnerable. Former US President Trump's stigmatization of COVID as the “Chinese flu” also contributed to a rise in anti-Asian rhetoric, sentiment, and hate crimes in the United States. As the nation (and world), mobilized to respond to these acts and the COVID pandemic raged on, institutions of higher education also took action. Many stated institutional commitments to creating inclusive environments for all community members and increasing diversity through the admission or hiring of more Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American students, staff, and faculty. Others organized various virtual meetings, presentations, and rallies in support of addressing racism and racial inequality within their institutions and the broader communities. Unfortunately, and again expectedly, much of the labour associated with overhauling racist and problematic structural, curricular, and programmatic systems in these institutions has too often fallen upon community members of colour, particularly Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people. Given the impact of long-standing racial discrimination towards these groups, these labour expectations occurred at the very time that they themselves were often personally experiencing greater loss and trauma than their peers due to COVID and the racial violence of 2020. However, the extra “diversity-related labour,” asked of underrepresented faculty during the 2020 pandemic and calls for racial justice is not new.¹ In 1994, scholar Amado Padilla coined the term “cultural taxation” to describe the expectation placed on faculty of colour to address diversity-related departmental and institutional affairs. In our 2011 Ethnic and Racial Studies article entitled “Why Don't You Get Somebody New to Do It: Race and Cultural Taxation in the Academy,” we expanded Padilla's definition of cultural taxation to include extra burdens that stem from faculty of colour's commitment to campus diversity issues and the lack of legitimacy they experience from colleagues challenging their existence in the academy. The following year, we proposed further expansion of the concept and adoption of the term “identity taxation” to include and emphasize the extra labour performed by members of a variety of different marginalized groups because of their intersectional identities (Hirshfield and Joseph 2012). These articles have been cited extensively and scholarship about these concepts (or related ones) has proliferated since they were published. Taken together, this scholarship demonstrates how the pervasiveness of systemic racism and entrenched patriarchy in academia in the United States have served to perpetuate, rather than ameliorate, ethnoracial, gender, and other forms of social inequality.

Unfortunately, the years since 2020 have not been significantly easier for people of colour in the US or worldwide. Despite, or perhaps in reaction to, the increase in anti-racist social movements in the US, there have been widespread attacks on scholars of and pedagogy using Critical Race Theory (Hatziponagos 2021; Kolhatkar 2022). The US has also seen a national rollback of legislation designed to protect the rights of marginalized people, especially related to voting rights, gun control, immigration, and reproduction (Leonhardt 2022). These shifts in government and the loss of protected civil rights have important implications for everyone, but especially for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous Americans. As such, this is an important socio-historical moment for revisiting the concepts of cultural and identity taxation. Both have relevance for addressing systemic racism and improving the experiences of marginalized people in academia.

The aim of this special issue was to bring together a diverse group of scholars from a variety of racial, cultural, disciplinary, and professional backgrounds who have published work in this area to learn from their experiences, insights, and significant research regarding cultural and identity taxation in various contexts. With these six articles we hope to accomplish three main goals. First, we bring cultural and identity taxation into critical conversation with scholarship using other similar terms (i.e., cultural tax credit, inclusion tax, racialized equity labour, institutional penalty) that describe the extra burdens academics experience due to their underrepresented social identities (Lerma, Hamilton, and Nielson 2020; Melaku 2019; Rosales et al. 2022; Zambrana, Carvajal, and Townsend 2023). Second, we broaden the scope of research on the topic by empirically assessing the ways that cultural and identity taxation affect a variety of academic stakeholders, including students and staff, rather than the faculty members that were the primary focus of previous work. Finally, the articles in this special issue provide a unique opportunity for reflection about the consequences that this type of work has on the careers of marginalized academics at a moment when institutions and the broader society are ripe for transformation in disrupting structural racism.

First, we aim to explore and synthesize the wide range of terms that have been used to describe cultural and identity taxation in recent scholarship on this topic. Amado Padilla, the originator of the term “cultural taxation” among faculty of colour, is joined by three junior colleagues in an article exploring how cultural taxation plays out among graduate students of colour (Rosales et al. 2022).² Padilla and his colleagues argue that differences in pre-graduate school socioeconomic status (SES) and other privileged identities (i.e., gender) may allow certain graduate students of colour to benefit from participating in diversity-related labour compared to students of colour with less privileged social identities. Padilla and his colleagues refer to this benefit as a “cultural tax credit.” Next, Ruth Zambrana and co-authors use nationally representative survey data to explore how the burdens of mentoring, service, and perceived discrimination differentially affect the career pathways of Latino faculty of different ethnicities (Zambrana, Carvajal, and Townsend 2023). The authors argue that these burdens contribute to an “institutional penalty” for Mexican American and Puerto Rican faculty, where the institution extracts identity-based service from and enacts penalties on marginalized groups that negatively affect their careers and health. They deliberately use this language to shift the responsibility for the burden of work from the individual to the structures that cause them. Finally, Melaku and Beeman (2022) argue that the “inclusion tax” – various types of labour, especially presentational labour, that people of colour exert to be included in their predominantly White workplaces – increased Black women faculty's marginalization during the pandemics of COVID-19 and police racial violence against Black Americans in 2020.

Moving beyond discussions of terminology, the next two articles are empirical studies highlighting experiences of underrepresented academics from various professions, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and academic ranks. Using recent data, these articles provide additional evidence of the immense and pervasive nature of cultural and identity taxation on university campuses. First, Ebony McGee and co-authors use the concepts of identity taxation and stereotype management to qualitatively explore the ways that women of colour engineering faculty differ in their approaches to addressing racialized and gendered salary disparities in their departments and institutions (McGee et al. 2023). Next, Laura Hamilton and colleagues extend their previous work on “racialized equity labour,” which they define as uncompensated efforts for people of colour to address systematic racism and racial marginalization within their organizations (Lerma, Hamilton, and Nielson 2020). Their article explores how different organizational logics of race such as “diversity” (identity-focused infrastructure) and “equity” (infrastructure addressing systemic racism) shape the experience of racialized equity labour for university employees – both people of colour and White allies – on two college campuses (Hamilton, Nielsen, and Lerma 2022).

As a conclusion to this extensive empirical overview of racism, sexism, and identity taxation in academia, the special issue ends with recommendations for reducing the burden of identity taxation for marginalized faculty. Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner (2022) draws from her vast experience as a faculty member and administrator to share her insights about the vital role of departmental and institutional commitments in developing a diverse faculty, alleviating identity taxation among underrepresented faculty, and creating authentically inclusive environments for their community members.

This special issue is being published nearly 15 years after we were first invited as graduate students to work on a qualitative research project examining how professors recognized for excellent teaching deal with difficult moments in the classroom and their respective departments at a large midwestern research intensive public university. Those difficult moments usually addressed topics of race, diversity, and inequality within various university settings. We joined the team in part because of our research interests and desire to develop our qualitative research skills. Tiffany racially identifies as Black and ethnically identifies as an African American cisgender and heterosexual woman; much of her graduate research focused on race and racism in the US and Brazil. Laura is a White, Ashkenazi Jewish cisgender, heterosexual woman whose research background mainly focused on gender and sexuality. Both of us aimed to pursue academic careers.

For me (Tiffany), working on the project was an eye-opening and at times traumatic look into what my future as a Black woman in the academy might hold. The accounts of explicit racial discrimination and challenges that faculty of colour endured from students and colleagues gave me pause about entering the professoriate. At the same time, this work also prepared me for the road ahead. I learned early on the importance of being strategic about my time, became empowered about strategically saying no to extra service obligations, and understanding the academic structure so I could better navigate it amid the structural disadvantages I would encounter due to my intersectional identities. Working on this project and the papers we published from it was similarly eye-opening for me (Laura) – it taught me terms to describe the challenges I had heard about from my professors and peers who were members of marginalized groups. As a white (cis heterosexual) woman, I also knew that I had the immense privilege of likely not facing the identity taxation that Tiffany (and others) faced. Yet I have been struck by how universal our findings are for women faculty. Though our work on identity taxation focused on women faculty in departments where they were minorities (e.g., Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math departments), gendered labour seems to be taken up by women faculty across the disciplinary spectrum (including sociology and my new professional context, medicine).

Indeed, we have consistently noticed how ubiquitous this extra work is for people of colour, for women, and for other marginalized people. However, the terminology that has been used to describe this labour is extremely varied. As a result, scholars struggle to find the right way to talk about the challenges marginalized academics face. What we have learned over the years since we first published our work in this area, and especially over the course of working on this special issue, is that these various terms are useful for highlighting the different features of this labour. The additional terminology introduced by scholars in this special issue provide more precision in recognizing the multifaceted ways that diversity-related labour influences the experiences of marginalized faculty, staff, and students. In doing so, institutional community members ranging from administrators to students can use this language to better assess and improve institutional cultures and climates that have for so long excluded, extracted substantial service from, and penalized marginalized populations.

Fortunately, as terminology for this type of extra work has become more precise, knowledge about the labour that is being asked of marginalized academics has also become more widespread. In response to increasing awareness of systemic racism after the events of 2020, institutions are increasingly prioritizing the hiring of administrators whose focus is on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and promoting and developing programmes that support the recruitment and retention of faculty and students of colour (Scanlon, Zupsansky, and Sawicki 2022). Yet, as the articles in this special issue show, there still is so much further that the academy needs to go. Before and in the aftermath of 2020, the burden of identity taxation among faculty, staff, and students of colour led to negative health consequences and immense emotional labour and feelings of guilt. More importantly, even as institutions shifted their emphasis to engage in more DEI labour, high profile cases of promotion being denied to academics of colour who study racism highlight that identity taxation is still a major barrier faced by academics (Flaherty 2022; Mochkofsky 2021; Weissman 2020).

Working on this special issue a decade later, we are both now tenured professors at our respective universities. We have worked at two institutions each, and both have appointments in Sociology and in an interdisciplinary field (International Affairs for Tiffany, Medical Education for Laura). However, the number of faculty of colour at our past and present institutions remains low. Tiffany is also the first and still only tenured Black faculty member in her department. Both of us are in service leadership roles and have noted that the majority of those in similar positions (i.e., heavy workloads, low prestige) are also women. Aside from our personal observations, previous scholarship and the research highlighted in this special issue indicates that even as institutions state that they value having diverse communities, they must also acknowledge and value the hidden, informal racialized and gendered equity labour that disproportionately falls upon marginalized community members. The intensity of such labour often reduces the research productivity of those faculty, which is still the currency of the (White, male-dominated) academy. Despite the physical, emotional, mental, and productivity toll this labour extracts, it still is not considered relevant in tenure and promotion cases. Additionally, faculty who engage in research on race- or equity-related topics are still viewed as less legitimate scholars. Thus, until the structural inequality within academia is addressed to effectively acknowledge and ameliorate this uneven playing field, DEI efforts will remain futile and systemic racism and the burden of identity taxation among underrepresented faculty, staff, and students will persist. We hope this special issue will be a catalyst to spark much needed structural change by providing academic administrators, scholars, staff, and students with: 1) additional terminology to describe the nuances of identity taxation; 2) empirical insights about the experience of identity taxation for groups that have previously not been examined; and 3) recommendations for resistance and advocacy to change current inequitable practices and structures. We also hope that it may be used as a guide to transform and effectively counter racism and sexism within academia, as well as the identity taxation that has developed as a consequence.

Acknowledgements

We thank the editors and staff of the Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies for accepting and navigating us through the publication of this special issue on a topic that has shaped our careers in unanticipated ways. We also wish to acknowledge the contributors to this special issue for their patience, persistence, and dedication throughout the revision and production process. This special issue could not have come together without the reviewers who closely read and provided feedback to contributing authors and we thank you for the time you devoted to this process. Lastly, thank you to Alford Young Jr., and Mark Chesler, who were the primary investigators of the research team that generated the data for our two earlier articles on cultural and identity taxation. We so appreciate your mentorship and generosity in allowing us to be part of the team.

Notes

1 We interchangeably use the terms “underrepresented” and “marginalized” to refer to individuals whose social groups have been and remain underrepresented relative to majority faculty, staff, and students based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. When discussing “cultural taxation,” these terms apply to faculty, staff, and students of colour.

2 For this paper and several others, we have named the senior authors due to their well-known work in the area and their role in development of the theoretical frameworks that undergird the papers in this special issue. We are sensitive to “the Matthew Effect,” however, and want to highlight the important contributions of all authors of these papers (Merton 1968).