Killing My Spirit, Renewing My Soul: Black Female Professors’ Critical Reflections on Spirit Killings While Teaching

In 2016, during a traffic stop in Cobb County, Atlanta, Georgia, dashcam video showed a police lieutenant informing a female passenger, “We only kill black people.” Public outcry against the officer’s remarks ultimately led to his resignation and retirement to avoid disciplinary action. The horrendous mistreatment of black people and black bodies by law enforcement has led to grassroots organizing so that we will never forget to #SayHerName (Crenshaw et al. 2015). The #SayHerName movement has illuminated racial injustices that many black women and girls have long experienced since the institution of slavery and within our present-day Jim Crow system. For centuries, black girls have been characterized as Sapphires, adultified, and dangerous, or viewed as assailants (Epstein, Blake, and González 2017; Morris 2016; Townsend et al. 2010; Young 1994). The notion that “we only kill black people” simply reinforces the justification of black death. It also espouses the fabric of our American racial caste system (Alexander 2012) that continues to enslave black women in society and rationalizes the benign neglect of black girls in education.

Before and after black girls transition through school, they are criminalized by the prison system and are 2.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than white females (Fasching-Varner et al. 2014). In addition, black women are often stereotyped as welfare queens, and white logic has placed them within a constant state of defeminization that is contrasted to the image of the innocent and domesticated white woman or white girl (Dow 2015; Hines-Datiri and Carter Andrews 2017). Despite these racialized and sexist realities that the black female body encounters on a global scale, we contend that black women in higher education are not exempt from racialized and gendered violence even if they have a PhD behind their name.

Black female faculty account for 3.1 percent of all faculty in higher education (U.S. Department of Education 2016); consequently, although small in number, they are often placed into racially toxic classrooms and are forced to navigate potentially life-threatening situations in the classroom. For instance, Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University, received death threats and hate emails after she criticized President Trump and called him a racist and sexist (Savali 2017). After her speech, Dr. Taylor cited that she received hate messages, anonymous and otherwise, and “some emails have contained specific threats of violence, including murder” (Flaherty 2017). Dr. Taylor’s experiences as a black woman in America have become normalized to the point that death threats and maliciously motivated acts of violence are not met with punishment for the assailants but further retribution against black female bodies.

In the heightened social and political context of the Trump era, we contend that black women faculty at predominantly white institutions (PWI), or what Durant (1999) refers to as a slave plantation, are more at-risk of experiencing racism and racialized criminalization. Durant refers to the slave plantation as a relationship in which there are “defined roles, social positions, norms, and relationships among slaves and non-slaves within a social hierarchy based on race and class” (7). Drawing from research on spirit-murdering of black male professors in higher education (Johnson and Bryan 2017), we use the slave plantation as a metaphor to describe how black women professors who are instructing courses in cultural diversity experience spirit-murdering, or how “racism is considered a crime” (Williams 1987, 129) that is predicated against the black female body. We focus on the ways that white students and white faculty attempt to spirit-murder black female professors as an analogy to the killings of black women by police.

Spirit-Murdering on the Plantation

Rising incidents and hate crimes on college campuses across the country have shown that black women’s safety, sanity, research scholarship, and socioemotional health will not be valued or saved. Black faculty who speak against the Trump agenda or who condemn white supremacy are witnessing their integrity, careers, and scholarship being questioned, while they are simultaneously...