Black Women Teacher Educators, Race Uplift, and the Academic Other-Mother Identity

Abstract

This paper examines the intersections of teacher educators' identities and the notion of race uplift. It is basedon a larger study that explores the experiences and practices of Black women professors at three differenthigher education institutions. The author maintains that as a result of their outsider-within position and raceuplift stance, Black women teacher educators may produce an academic other-mother identity. Whileconsidering the concepts of womanist theory, this paper attempts to offer a thick description of the kind ofrace uplift practiced by teacher educators of color. The author defines the outsider-within position and thehistorical relationship between the race uplift theme and womanism, reviews current literature about teachereducators of color - highlighting their experiences and how they view their work in the academy, andexamines the outsider-within position in Black women teacher educators. The author concludes with adiscussion of the other-mother identity and Black women teacher educators.Research indicates that the experiences of Black women faculty involve racist and sexist practices bycolleagues and students. Additionally, these women experience feelings of isolation, discrimination, andtokenism. Collins (1998) cautions that being marginalized in intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality,and/or citizenship places a variety of well-meaning intellectuals engaged in higher education in commonborder zones, and these same systems of power reproduce hierarchies in "outsider-within locations." Middleclass African Americans in the United States, for example, are aggressively recruited to join eliteinstitutions of higher education and other sites of institutional power, only to find themselves, upon arrival,confined to a new designated "place", or "outsider-within location" (Collins, 1998). Professor AnnetteHenry, also a teacher educator, describes the outsider-within location clearly from personal experience:Standing like an oak by the photocopier, a White male graduate student utters the only words hehas ever said to me during his years in the college of education: "You're lucky you got this job;"he mutters, assuredly, un-stapling a document. "They don't usually hire, well;" he leans towardme and whispers,"outsiders," as if telling me a deep dark secret. (Henry, 1998, p. 5)That is, they appear to belong, because they possess both the credentials for admittance and the rights offormal citizenship, "but that does not automatically translate into substantive citizenship rights" (Collins,1998, p. 5). Several Black women scholars have termed the race-, sex-, and class-based oppression theyexperienced in institutions of higher learning as "double", "triple", or "multiple oppressions" (Anzaldúa,1998; Guy-Sheftall, 1995; James, 1999; James & Farmer, 1993; King, D., 1993). These terms are meant tosuggest the cumulative effect of experiencing, gender, race, and class exploitation (Knight, 1998).These new spaces that marginalized Black women occupy in the academy, coupled with the possible erosionof activism within teaching due to a growing Black middle class (Collins, 1990), led me to ask questionssuch as: what is the current relationship between agency and teacher preparation?; in what ways are teachingpractices influenced by these new "outsider-within" locations?; and, how do contemporary Black womenteacher educators utilize notions of "race uplift" to shape their work?This paper examines the intersections of teacher educators' outsider within identity and the notion of raceuplift. While considering the concepts of womanist theory, it attempts to offer a thick description of raceuplift as practiced by Black women teacher educators. It is based on a qualitative investigation of threeBlack women teacher educators that sought to answer two questions: In what ways do their experiencesinform their teaching practice, and how does the notion of race uplift inform their work? The sample wasclearly purposive because the goals were to deepen society's understandings of the significant experiencesand practices of Black women who prepare teachers for K-12 classrooms.