The Stony Road We Trod: Black Women, Education, and Tenure

Abstract

The focal point of our book is the comparative examination of Black women in higher education across the United States and the Caribbean, their professional experiences, and strategies for negotiating their institutional environment. We start therefore with an acknowledgement and shared epistemological position that while (post)colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, as systems of domination, provide common sociohistorical experiences and structural realities for Black women in the United States and in the Caribbean, they do not represent a monolithic group; their localized experiences, and related specificities of such social locations, will produce diverse responses to systemic systems of oppression (Collins in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, New York, 1990; Collins in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, New York, 2000; Richardson, Bethea, Hayling, & Williamson-Taylor in Handbook of Multicultural Counseling. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2010). Through our comparative examination of Black women in academe therefore we center the experiences of African American and Afro-Caribbean scholars (including those who work in the United States and in the Caribbean).