Faculty of Color: Teaching in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities (review)

We like to think that one lone complainant voice signals individual discontent. Such discontent we can summarily dismiss and hope that the individual will conform to institutional and organizational expectations. If the latter expectation is not quickly realized, we are quick to blame the complainant rather than assess the organization and its historical and contemporary practices.

This, unfortunately, has been and remains the plight too often of faculty of color when they point out the systemic institutional and organizational factors that negatively affect their productivity and well-being in predominantly White institutions of higher education. They can be dismissed because the complaints come from lone individuals who are perceived as not meeting organizational and institutional expectations. The question is never asked why this may be the case, or what factors repeatedly appear to contribute to this state of affairs, irrespective of academic field, institutional setting, or career achievement when it comes to faculty of color.

Caroline Turner (2002) has observed that "efforts to diversify the faculty continue to be among the least successful elements of campus commitments to diversity" (p. 14). In Faculty of Color Christine Stanley, the editor, and her contributors unearth what lies at the core of this unsuccessful effort at countless numbers of predominantly White colleges and universities. And, unsurprisingly, it has to do with the historical and continuing understandings of what it means, explicitly and implicitly, to be a person of color in America and the reaction that is accorded to that status. This realization is key to understanding the discourses of the contributors to this volume despite the fact that they also identify themselves in terms of "race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, nationality, culture, class, and age, among others" (p. 369).

Make no mistake about it. Faculty of Color is no "pity the victim" read; far from it. It is a masterfully organized volume that provides rationality and meaning for the phenomenological experiences of diverse faculty and administrators who are and remain successful in teaching and administrative roles in predominantly White colleges and universities throughout the United States.

In Chapter 1, Stanley provides an impressive and comprehensive overview of the research literature and educational statistics relevant to faculty of color and their experiences in predominantly White institutions in the United States. The literature becomes a theoretical lens for analyzing the 23 faculty narratives that follow. It's almost scary—no, it is scary—how the experiences of each contributor weave a familiar tapestry because of the overarching knowledge base presented in Chapter 1. Each narrative has a formulaic character to it that makes for easy reading and understanding. The formula includes a framing of past and ongoing individual experiences; a reflection on and analysis of the import of the individual experiences to the success, well-being, and on-going concerns and issues of the individual; and strategies and recommendations that the authors offer to others who find themselves in similar situations.

Besides the usual groups (African American, Latino/Hispanic, Native American, Asian, and Pacific Islanders), the reader is privy to the faculty experiences of individuals who are lumped under the mantle of "faculty of color" because of the hue of their skin (or, in one instance, the lack of color which is presumed) and then vilified. There is the professor from India who does not identify as faculty of color but as a member of a cultural group who, nonetheless, has "found that on coming to the U.S., a skin color identity is forced upon one by the racial categorizations prevalent here" (p. 183). There is the professor who is a Pacific Islander and Chamorrow who has attempted to clarify his ancestral origins but becomes conscious of his "combined invisibility and otherness as an 'honorary Latino and Asian' with a Spanish surname" (p. 248). There are African and Jamaican professors whose skin color belie an African American origin but whose cultural and identity benchmarks are...