A Real-World Discourse on Intellectual Identity, Thought Leadership, and the Black Woman Academic Chair

Abstract

A Real-World Discourse on Intellectual Identity, Thought Leadership, and the Black Woman Academic Chair Katherine Bankole-Medina (bio) Introduction: … and I Wrote My Name There Professor Cynara Robinson writes poignantly about the challenges and triumphs of Black women educators in segregated Louisiana before the 1960s. Like Black teachers in the South at that time, this was a group of stalwart women, dedicated to students and their own professional development. An impressive feature of these teachers' lives was that they spent the academic year in the classroom and used the summer months to attend college. It took many years for these women to earn their college degrees, but they succeeded.1 They operated from a strong sense of commitment in order to fulfill the needs of the community. Black women scholars, educators, and academics come out of a historical womanist tradition where scholarly excellence and social responsibility are interchangeable terms. They are in fact mutually supportive concepts essential to our survival and progress. Black women have a particular way of knowing and thinking about the world. Their journey is important as I reflect briefly on my own. As a first generation, older, part-time, non-traditional college student, I worked full-time while attending various universities, appreciating the great legacy we share. Over a twenty-year period, I held the various positions of department chair, academic program director, and chair-equivalent positions (i.e., program coordinator). This work involved direct engagement with more than twenty full-time faculty members and countless part-time adjunct professors. This work also consisted of providing administrative support to interdisciplinary faculty (including graduate teaching assistants), facilitating instruction for general education and upper-level history courses, and assisting with undergraduate and graduate student academic and thesis advising. [End Page 134] This essay is in the spirit of writer, educator, and activist Audre Lorde who understood: "It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken."2 This piece emphasizes the shattering of silences by reflecting upon some of the real-world challenges, insights, and important lessons of a Black woman faculty-administrator in higher education. This is a role that provided groundwork for advancement in the academy and support for critical social justice activism. However, this is not a theoretical or discursive criticism about the department chair's position. This essay is a counter-narrative that considers the overall administrative role based on my professional experience, an exploration into selected literature, and thoughtful observations of the actual work of department chairs. Several interrelated concepts and themes are briefly explored that focus on Black women academic professionals: double-jeopardy, selfless servant leaders, tropes of dominance, race-sex scripts, double standards, and planning for the chairwomanship. The broad impressions contained here (some disquieting) are derived from meaningful encounters and reveal a small but profound part of the department chair's realm from one Black woman's perspective. Consider that among Black women in academia, there are variations in how we perceive our experience; and there are other factors like differing perspectives on forms of oppression, access to professional development, and opportunities for employment at diversity-driven or prestige institutions. These, and other considerations, would result in a different kind of assessment. However, in moving the conversation forward, this reflection yielded an important artifact for Black women aspiring to gain a seat at the chair's table—that, in times of great challenge and triumph, always remember who you are. The Black Woman's Quandary as "Double Jeopardy"—and Beyond The liberatory movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Civil Rights, Black Power, and Feminist) revealed that Black women's lives were deliberately structured to reinforce the negation of racism and sexism. The major contributions Black women made to the progressive development of the American nation had long been marginalized. And at a time when White women's intellectual manifestos were being recognized as foundational feminist texts,3 the intellectual contributions of Black women were thought to be unimaginable. As Alice Walker noted in 1972, for Black women "the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action...