by Ginny Jones Boss and Nicole Bravo
University campuses are often microcosms of the world. On campus, student affairs professionals of color are confronted with the same or similar stressors they deal with in their lives outside of work, including experiences of racism, discrimination, and isolation (Gonzalez & Kemp-DeLisser, 2010; Husband, 2016; Jackson & O’Callaghan, 2009; Lozano, 2017). Additionally, external social issues (e.g., the #BlackLivesMatter movement, news, politics) are addressed on college campuses in ways that are emotionally exhausting and mentally taxing for student affairs professionals of color. Amid their own coping processes, they often support students of color who are also wrestling with these racialized campus and societal issues (Alvarez & Liu, 2002; Gonzalez & Kemp-DeLisser, 2010; Jackson & O’Callaghan, 2009; Maramba, 2011). The added labor of supporting students outside the parameters of their direct job responsibilities, tokenization by their colleagues and supervisors, and experiences of marginalization often lead student affairs professionals of color to experience compassion fatigue (Davis, 2019) and racial battle fatigue (RBF) (Bhattar, 2013; Garcia, 2016; Gardner et al., 2014; Gonzalez & Kemp-DeLisser, 2010; Husband, 2016; Jackson & O’Callaghan, 2009; Lithgow et al., 2018; Smith, 2004). RBF is the result of a collection of “social-psychological stress responses (e.g., frustration; anger; exhaustion; physical avoidance; psychological or emotional withdrawal; escapism; acceptance of racist attributions . . .)” experienced by people of color who are constantly exposed to systemic and structural oppression (Smith et al., 2007, p. 552). The experience of many student affairs professionals of color is paradoxical. They are simultaneously hypervisible, because of their minoritized status and expectations to support institutional diversity efforts, yet invisible, due to lack of recognition of their own racialized experiences and the hidden labor they perform in support of students and colleagues (Lithgow et al., 2018). This paradox is directly linked to hegemonic whiteness; professionals of color are tokenized for their marginalized identities while being pressured to assimilate to white organizational norms.
Lithgow et al. (2018) used the phrase “out of body experience” (p. 78) to describe how professionals of color are forced to dissociate from their racial identities and to align with whiteness. As a result of ideal worker norms, professionals of color are expected to be compliant and maintain the status quo (Green, 2008), but they are also expected to perform additional labor related to their racial identities. For example, professionals of color are often pressured to take on diversity work that is not directly related to their job requirements (Gardner et al., 2014; Husband, 2016; Maramba, 2011), yet they are still expected to perform as well as their white colleagues who do not have to take on additional work. New professionals must teach themselves to manage these additional burdens of systemic racism while receiving little if any recognition for doing so (Boss et al., 2018). Many professionals of color report feeling unseen and unsupported in relation to their experiences with racism and subsequent RBF (Lithgow et al., 2018; Smith, 2004). When professionals of color do speak out about their struggles with racism, they are often met with disbelief and inaction from white colleagues. For example, Bhattar (2013) shared, “it is exhausting to constantly explain myself to people and have them question whether or not I am telling the truth” (p. 32).
These experiences highlight how institutions of higher education utilize hegemonic whiteness and the concept of the ideal worker to exert dominance over professionals of color. Organizations actively deny the presence of racism, so they seem neutral, “even though [they are] fully immersed in white culture” (Reitman, 2006). Furthermore, the concept of disembodiment that Acker (1990) mentions in her analysis of the ideal worker demonstrates how invisibility exacerbates RBF for professionals of color. Employees are forced to hide and minimize their identities in the name of being professional (Acker, 1990; Green, 2008). Hiding, minimizing, or not being aware of one’s identities is a privilege experienced by people with dominant identities. Meanwhile, many professionals of color do not have the luxury of hiding their identities and can suffer professional consequences for not minimizing those aspects of their identity that disrupt ideal worker norms. Many professionals of color also suffer personal consequences, such as a decline in their emotional well-being, when they attempt to minimize their racial identities in order to align with whiteness (Green, 2008; Smith, 2004). Ideal worker norms influence a culture in which professionals of color are expected to endure oppression without challenging the systems that create it. Thus, professionals of color often work in institutions that exploit their labor and disregard their personhood (Davis, 2019; Husband, 2016).
Paradoxically, professionals of color also experience hypervisibility based on their embodied racial characteristics. The constant work required by ideal worker norms is compounded for student affairs professionals of color by the additional labor they engage in to support students of color (Maramba, 2011). Hypervisibility occurs when professionals of color are underrepresented on their campus and thus stand out or are singled out as a result of their minoritized status (Bhattar, 2013; Garcia, 2016; Lithgow et al., 2018; Maramba, 2011). In her study of Asian American and Pacific Islander women professionals in student affairs, Maramba (2011) described hypervisibility as the result of “feelings of tokenization and feeling used as a ‘diversity’ representative” (p. 345). Participants in her study described being called upon to serve diversity initiatives at their institutions. Bhattar (2013) described his experience of tokenization on campus, being called on to serve on multiple committees at his university. In his description of his experience serving on a search committee, he shared, “I found myself having to be the ‘diversity voice,’ asking questions that address social justice issues and consistently bringing awareness to issues of inclusion in the search process” (p. 31). While other scholars have detailed the ways universities tokenize professionals of color (Bhattar, 2013; Cabrera, 2018; Jackson & O’Callaghan, 2009; Lithgow et al., 2018; Maramba, 2011), some scholars note that hypervisibility also presents internalized labor obligations among this group. Garcia (2016) shared the accounts of professionals who felt the need to support students of color because the professional was the only person of color in their department or campus. In these examples, the ideal worker norm of tireless work comes as a direct result of the hypervisibility of professionals’ racial and ethnic identities.
Literature on the experiences of student affairs professionals of color and the ideal worker begins to converge at a call for intersectionality. Both bodies of scholarship suggest notions of the ideal worker and the experience of professionals of color are raced, gendered, and classed. Acker (2006) argued that the practices and processes of organizations can produce inequalities at any or all of the intersections of race, gender, and class. She offered that the picture of the ideal worker may shift depending upon the job. When jobs require workers who will be compliant and work for low wages, the ideal workers are often women of color (Acker, 2006). As Sallee argues in the introduction of this book, new professionals are expected to work tirelessly for low wages. In addition to their daily work, professionals of color also engage in added labor connected to their intersected identities (Bhattar, 2013; Garcia, 2016; Husband, 2016; Lithgow et al., 2018; Maramba, 2011). Acker’s (2006) assertion that hiring practices reveal an organization’s processes for identifying an ideal worker may serve to illuminate the invisibility/hypervisibility paradox that professionals of color experience on their campuses. She suggested that both the use of social networks and assumptions of competence, where competence is attributed to white men more than any other group, are a cause for inequalities in the workplace. Within this regime of inequality, professionals of color may be hired on the assumption that the competence they may have is tied to their racial identity or merely to fulfill antidiscriminatory hiring practice requirements. Under these assumptions, professionals of color become attractive hires in satisfying a need or mandate, but they are expected to uphold whiteness within the organization.
Many professionals express frustration with the field’s supposed dedication to racial justice, despite professionals of color being financially and socially disenfranchised from the same experiences and privileges that white professionals receive (Bender, 2009; Lithgow et al., 2018; Nkomo & Al Ariss, 2014; Roediger, 2005). People of color are expected to perform labor that white people are not, and for far less compensation, if compensated at all. This phenomenon can be observed in the differentiated pay received by faculty and administrators of color, particularly when the focus of their work is identity-based (Boss et al., 2019). Acker (1990) argued that men might enjoy the privilege of having women in their lives who will take up the labor of caring for their home and children so the men can focus primarily on their jobs. In this way men are ideal for the working environment, because they are unencumbered by external obligations. Similarly, and exacerbated by colonization and colonial logics, people of color have served similar functions for both white men and women, freeing them to focus on other matters and have access to economic gain. In higher education, those who are rewarded, financially and otherwise, for the retention, progression, and graduation of students of color are rarely the student affairs professionals of color who have supported them. Instead, high-level administrators, the majority of whom are white, receive accolades for the labor of entry-level and midcareer professionals.
Many of the issues named in this chapter have deep structural and systemic roots within U.S. society in general, and higher education specifically. It is necessary to understand inequality regimes in higher education to better understand how ideal worker norms impact the workload of professionals of color. As Acker (2006) suggested, inequality regimes include “systematic disparities between participants in power and control over goals, resources, and outcomes; workplace decisions such as how to organize work; opportunities for promotion and interesting work; security in employment and benefits; pay and other monetary rewards; respect; and pleasures in work and work relations” (p. 443). While their raced embodiments and willingness to support students of color may make professionals of color ideal workers for student affairs, their experiences demonstrate the inequality that regimes present in higher education. Full understanding of inequality regimes impacting professionals of color necessitates an intersectional understanding of higher education, though a helpful starting place may be understanding how race impacts valuations of student affairs work.
A shift in focus in the field to one that includes interrogating the embeddedness of racism in the academy (Harper, 2012) is necessary for illuminating inequality regimes. As Nkomo and Al Ariss (2014) and Harper (2012) suggested, we must begin to address whiteness itself rather than focusing most of our attention on the “diversity” of non-white racial/ethnic groups. It is only when we understand the structural foundations that uphold systems of oppression that we can begin to dismantle them. Acker (2009) argued that practices that perpetuate inequality are challenging to document because they are “often subtle and unspoken” (p. 210). Both Acker (2009) and Cabrera (2018) suggested that those who are marginalized are best able to name and tell the stories of their experiences. Student affairs professionals of color have also expressed the importance of sharing their stories to make visible much of the work they perform that has been rendered invisible and thus devalued by their institutions (Alvarez & Liu, 2002; Bhattar, 2013; Gonzalez & Kemp-DeLisser, 2010; Jackson & O’Callaghan, 2009; Lozano, 2017; Maramba, 2011). Despite the value of telling their stories, some student affairs professionals of color may be hesitant to do so, given the risk associated with highlighting their identities in their work (Bhattar, 2013; Gonzalez & Kemp-DeLisser, 2010; Lozano, 2017). The need to be seen, and yet the fear of the response to being seen, reflects the internalized impacts of the hypervisibility/invisibility paradox mentioned earlier. Ideal worker norms are pervasive in higher education, and pressure to conform occurs as early as at the graduate program level and persist through upper-level administration (Wolf-Wendel et al., 2016). As such, we believe it is important for constituent groups interested in improving working conditions for professionals of color to give focus to building (en)counterspaces.
Student affairs professionals of color experience compassion and racial battle fatigue at all levels of the field, and those working with them may be at various stages of understanding how to develop strategies for addressing the raced aspects of ideal worker norms. As such, we present recommendations in the following three areas: gaining awareness, increasing knowledge, and revising policy and practice. We believe much of this work may occur in (en)counterspaces, which involve constituent groups creating opportunities for student affairs professionals of color to share their counterstories and engage in community healing practices.
An (en)counterspace is the call for white professionals and administrators to actively seek out ways to encounter the experiences, knowledge, aspirations, and needs of professionals of color. Rather than reinforcing spaces in which professionals of color are exploited as voices of diversity or pressured to conform to institutional standards of whiteness and disembodiment, (en)counterspaces provide opportunities for professionals of color to fully embody their racial/ethnic identities without fear or consequences. The specific methods for building community and engaging in healing will be different in each context; not only will they differ for each space, but also for each individual participating in the space. These practices may include naming and confronting the racism and other forms of oppression professionals of color experience, sharing strategies for navigating hostile institutional environments, sharing personal stories and anecdotes to form connections and share counterhistories, and collaborating to create further opportunities for community support and healing. Regardless of the specific methods each (en)counterspace uses to serve its participants, (en)counterspaces give student affairs professionals of color the ownership of their embodied experiences that is often denied in white-dominated spaces.
(En)counterspaces are not predicated on the assumption that countering racism should be the responsibility of those being oppressed. For professionals of color, (en)counterspaces are focused on healing and community building, not on solving institutional oppression through the labor of these professionals. When white professionals are invited to (en)counterspaces for the purposes of hearing the counterstories of professionals of color, they are better positioned to dismantle oppressive structures from an informed place. As such, student affairs professionals of color should not be solely responsible for organizing time and physical spaces for (en)counterspaces.
Faculty, professionals, and administrators across identities and at all levels should actively acknowledge the need for such spaces and advocate for their creation. This is not to say that white professionals and administrators should dictate or preside over such spaces. Instead, (en)counterspaces should be participatory in nature and should include localized insider knowledge for locally tailored solutions. White professionals and administrators should play an active role in recognizing opportunities for (en)counterspaces, help normalize the need for such spaces, and allocate resources such as physical meeting spaces and financial support for these opportunities and the resulting policy and practice efforts. In the following sections we describe ways each constituent group may begin constructing (en)counterspaces.
Graduate preparation faculty in higher education and student affairs programs have the potential to be powerful influencers in how graduate students and new professionals understand and engage in the field. As such, there is great responsibility in helping emerging professionals understand how ideal worker norms may impact emerging professionals’ future work.
Graduate preparation faculty should represent the diversity of ideas and experiences present in student affairs practice. It is important that hiring practices for preparation faculty are intersectional through the recruiting and vetting process. While faculty of color may be able to provide support and mentorship for emerging professionals of color, it should not be assumed that they have the capacity to do so. Similarly, even when faculty of color have race as a focus of their work, they should not be expected to take up full responsibility for supporting emerging professionals of color. All preparation faculty should gain awareness of the raced aspects of ideal worker norms that professionals of color may experience. These faculty members may begin by gaining greater awareness of the experiences of student affairs professionals of color, including but not limited to reading literature that details the experiences of professionals of color, particularly literature written by these professionals, or connecting with alumni of color and soliciting narratives of their experiences. Similarly, faculty looking to move from awareness to knowledge building can gather data, including narratives and artifacts, from alums and other professionals of color.
In an effort to challenge ideal worker norms, specifically raced aspects of these norms, faculty may benefit from learning about critical and race theories as well as critical, antiracist pedagogical approaches in the classroom. A revision of practice for some faculty would involve taking up critical pedagogies. Taking up critical pedagogies is not simply an urging for faculty to address the needs of graduate students of color. Indeed, if faculty want to improve conditions for professionals of color, they must acknowledge their complicity in ideal worker norms and the raced nature of those norms. In addition to listening to the narratives of professionals of color, they must challenge white students to recognize and respond to racism in the academy. In this way, white faculty have a particular opportunity to model the way for white students and the program’s constituent partners.
In further acknowledging their complicity in perpetuating ideal worker norms, faculty can examine the ways they encourage students to engage in their preparation work. Whether through classroom assignments, cohort dynamics, or practical experiences, faculty should learn to name expectations to conform to the ideal worker norm and the inequality regimes that result from these expectations. Given this chapter’s explicit focus on professionals of color, it is important for faculty to not only address and have students work through macro-level instances of racism but also micro-level instances of racism that are more subtle and difficult to challenge. Policies for addressing racialized incidents should be included in graduate student handbooks. The recommendations mentioned here extend to the partnerships many higher education and student affairs programs engage in with practical experience providers. Faculty have great opportunity to work with those providers to ensure that students learn about ideal worker norms and racial dynamics in the academy and how to contextualize the labor that professionals of color often take up in support of students.
Graduate students and new professionals make up the most vulnerable groups within the field. Graduate students may enter programs with little or no awareness of how racism operates in the academy and the field of student affairs. Similarly, even after completing graduate programs, new professionals may not have enough professional experience or context to prepare themselves for the realities they will face once they enter the field full time. Graduate students and new professionals can gain awareness of what to expect by seeking meaningful connections with other professionals of color. With a greater understanding of what awaits them after graduation, emerging professionals of color will be better prepared to recognize and challenge ideal worker norms. Support can be established within graduate programs, institutions, regions, and even through social media and professional organizations. The joining of and formation of these communities can create opportunities for self-care and community support, which can be protective factors against the mental and emotional traumas graduate students and new professionals can experience as a result of ideal worker norms.
It is also helpful for graduate students and new professionals to have a thorough knowledge of how structural racism operates in the academy. Graduate students should read relevant literature to increase their knowledge in this area; the literature presented and cited in this chapter is a good place to start. Being aware of how racism pervades institutions of higher education may help mitigate feelings of imposter syndrome, because individuals may be better able to identify how white supremacy and harmful ideal worker norms contribute to feelings of burnout, inadequacy, and insecurity.
Lastly, in order to subvert the invisibility and disembodiment that professionals of color so often experience, graduate students and new professionals should actively build coalitions within and across identity groups. Establishing communities and collaborating with trusted advocates can help graduate students and new professionals of color create spaces of activism and resistance. Building coalitions and identifying advocates surpasses simply networking with others of shared identities and moves into executing tangible efforts to work with and for each other to promote racial justice and social justice. Student affairs professionals of color and graduate students can form bonds not only with their peers but also with professors, supervisors, and mid- and upper-level administrators in order to establish networks of affinity and shared purpose. Coalitions provide opportunities to collaborate on social justice and identity work. Doing so can take the burden off of someone who previously felt as if they must shoulder the work themselves. Mentorship should also play a role in this endeavor. Professionals should make concerted efforts to reach out to and include newer professionals in their efforts to increase equity and provide identity support.
Given the field’s attrition rates, midcareer student affairs professionals can offer much from their experiences and institutional knowledge. Midcareer professionals of color may be in the precarious position of needing to advocate for themselves and on behalf of their supervisees, while finding fewer colleagues of color at their career level in the field. Similar to the recommendations we have put forth for graduate students and new professionals, midcareer professionals of color could benefit from coalition building and allyship to mitigate compassion fatigue and RBF. For all midcareer professionals, there is a need to gain awareness of how hegemonic whiteness presents added stress and labor for student affairs professionals of color in ways that differ from that for white professionals. These professionals can begin by listening to the stories of student affairs professionals of color. They can do so by reading the literature cited here or engaging in conversation with their peers and supervisees of color. Midcareer professionals can also begin to increase their knowledge through the aforementioned methods. These professionals increase their knowledge by learning and understanding critical and race theories. Such an understanding can illuminate the need of student affairs professionals of color to tell their stories and to have spaces in which their identities are affirmed. Relatedly, increasing knowledge can aid midcareer professionals in managing feelings of defensiveness and fragility (their own or others’) that can occur when confronted with concerns about racism and whiteness. Midcareer professionals can disrupt hegemonic whiteness and the notion of the ideal worker by challenging policies and practices that do not account for the intersected nature of professionals’ identities and the labor taken up by student affairs professionals of color, examining themselves for tendencies toward placing student affairs professionals of color in the bind of invisibility and hypervisibility, and unpacking their conceptions of what constitutes professionalism or an ideal worker and make efforts toward a supervisory style that is more racially inclusive and antihegemonic. While all midcareer professionals can benefit from the awareness, knowledge, and policy and practice recommendations offered here, considerations of workload can be a double-edged sword for midcareer professionals of color who are navigating positions of power while themselves feeling disempowered. In such cases, midcareer professionals of color may also benefit from participation in affinity groups and building coalitions and identifying advocates within regional and national professional development venues.
As leaders of their divisions on campuses, senior student affairs officers have the opportunity to set the tone for everyday practices. Given the complexity and intersectional nature of identity, both white and senior student affairs officers of color should be proactive in gaining awareness about issues impacting student affairs professionals of color. Attending professional development sessions in which student affairs professionals of color discuss their experiences and soliciting stories from the midcareer and entry-level professionals on their campus can provide a foundational understanding of how student affairs professionals of color experience the field and their work on campus. While local insider knowledge will be helpful for crafting local solutions for professionals of color, awareness of the broader experiences of professionals of color may aid in effective recruitment and retention of talented professionals. In seeking out this information, senior student affairs officers must also recognize that their position may make student affairs professionals of color reticent to share their experiences. One solution would be to conduct a climate study and focus in on data shared by professionals of color and inviting and compensating professionals of color in the meaning-making process of the data produced. Moving into action, senior student affairs officers can speak out against and change policies and practices that marginalize professionals of color. This would include a critical examination of their campus’s workload requirements for student affairs professionals and accounting for the invisible labor often taken up by student affairs professionals of color. The senior student affairs officer’s role in bringing attention to systemic and structural inequities is rife with complexity and necessitates an intersectional approach and engagement of critical leadership.
When it comes to ideal worker norms, the experiences and expectations of student affairs professionals of color are made more complex by the racialized nature of their work and evaluations of their work. Inequality regimes in higher education are felt by professionals of color when they are held to ideal worker norms connected to disembodied workers who work tirelessly and unemotionally to maintain the status quo. Due to inequality regimes, professionals of color may be seen as ideal workers, based upon assumptions of compliance and acceptance of low wages without regard to either’s impact on working conditions. We need to better understand the ways in which ideal worker norms are communicated to and internalized by student affairs professionals of color. We must continue to explore the disjuncture in policy and practice that perpetuates ideal worker norms for professionals of color. Most importantly, we must take an intersectional approach that recognizes the embeddedness of not only racism but also other oppressive ideologies, such as sexism and classism. In doing so, ideal worker norms can be challenged on the varied ways they impact those with subordinated identities.
Ginny Jones Boss is an assistant professor of leadership studies at the University of Georgia. Her research explores graduate preparation and professional outcomes for higher education and student affairs as well as faculty development and support. Nicole Bravo is an accommodations counselor and coordinator for the Accessible Education Center at San José State University. She is interested in LGBTQ and multicultural student support.
