Racial Battle Fatigue in Higher Education

Exposing the Myth of Post-Racial America

Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Katrice A. Albert, Roland W. Mitchell, Chaunda Allen

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781442229822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Racial Battle Fatigue is described as the physical and psychological toll taken due to constant and unceasing discrimination, microagressions, and stereotype threat. The literature notes that individuals who work in environments with chronic exposure to discrimination and microaggressions are more likely to suffer from forms of generalized anxiety manifested by both physical and emotional syptoms. This edited volume looks at RBF from the perspectives of graduate students, middle level academics, and chief diversity officers at major institutions of learning.

RBF takes up William A. Smith's idea and extends it as a means of understanding how the "academy" or higher education operates. Through microagressions, stereotype threat, underfunding and defunding of initiatives/offices, expansive commitments to diversity related strategic plans with restrictive power and action, and departmental climates of exclusivity and inequity; diversity workers (faculty, staff, and administration of color along with white allies in like positions) find themselves in a badlands where identity difference is used to promote institutional values while at the same time creating unimaginable work spaces for these workers.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• A Testimony of a Black Male Cadet Facing Racial Battle Fatigue
• Navigating the Academy, Creating Counterspaces: Critically Examining the Experiences of Three PhD Students of Color
• “What Are You Anyway?”: Racial Fatigue as a Daily Experience in Public Schools
• The Ubiquitous White Shadow: A Counternarrative of a Doctoral Student in a “Liberal” Teacher Education Program
• Traumatic Pedagogy: When Epistemic Privilege and White Privilege Collide
• Black. Woman. Nontraditional Other: Creating Hybrid Spaces in Higher Education
• Indigenous Peoples in the Racial Battle Lands
• “I Ain’t Your Doc Student”: The Overwhelming Presence of Whiteness and Pain at the Academic Neoplantation
• Assault in the Academy: When It Becomes More Than Racial Battle Fatigue
• Psychological Heuristics: Mental/Emotional Designs of Racial Battle Fatigue and the Tenure/Promotion Terrain for Faculty of Color
• Examining Intragroup Racism and Racial Battle Fatigue in Historically Black Colleges and Universities
• Wearing You Down: The Influence of Racial Battle Fatigue on Academic Freedom for Faculty of Color
• An Adopted Korean Speaks Out About His Racialized Experiences as a Faculty Member at a Predominantly White Institution
• Two Narratives from the Allied Front: Can People Not of Color Have Racial Battle Fatigue?
• Racial Battle Fatigue and/as Impostorship: Implications for Academic Mentoring and Psychosocial Development
• “We Didn’t Know You Meant THAT by Diversity”: Contested Diversity and Strategic (Administrative) Responses in Colleges of Education
• Standing on My Head Spitting (Indian Head) Nickels: Racial Battle Fatigue as It Relates to Native Americans in Predominately White Institutions of Higher Education
• Behind Enemy Lines: Critical Race Theory, Racial Battle Fatigue, and Higher Education
• A Hyphenated Life: Power and Liberation within the Research Academy
• Exploiting the Body and Denouncing the Mind: Navigating a Black Female Professional Identity within the Academy
• Exercising Agency in the Midst of Racial Battle Fatigue: A Case for Intragroup Diversity
• Racial (and Gender) Battle Fatigue: The Transdisciplinary Applied Social Justice Approach
• Clashing with Tradition: The Chief Diversity Officer at White Public Institutions
• References
• About the Contributors