This was a difficult article to write. I am uncomfortable examining the struggles of women of color in their academic lives because I am uncomfortable thinking through where I fit within the systems of advantage and structural disadvantage that women of color and black women in particular face in the academy. But I accepted the invitation to think about the ways social inequality is reproduced in our discipline, despite our collective support for diversity and inclusion, and in doing that I found it important to consider this issue as it relates to women of color in departments of sociology, and even within the American Sociological Association (ASA) itself. To address this question for the purposes of the town hall meeting at the 2016 Annual Meetings of the ASA in Seattle, Washington, I will consider the intersections of race, gender, and class among women of color faculty. I call attention to the hierarchies that sort scholars in academic institutions, while reflexively considering my own path and navigation as a professor.

My comments are not meant to be generalizable to the experiences of all women of color faculty, indeed I do not know that any one perspective can capture such a multitude of stories. Nevertheless, I can say what I have observed, and what I have found more generally, which is that the work of women of color, particularly when it focuses on marginalized groups, has a more difficult time achieving legitimacy through traditional channels when the gatekeepers of those channels are white men. The service that women of color are consistently asked to perform, and sometimes feel a personal obligation to participate in, tends to go unreported and unacknowledged, many times even to the individuals doing the work. These observations are consistent with what scholars long ago identified as the “double jeopardy” of race and sex for black women, more generally in larger society and specifically in the discipline of sociology (Andersen 1988; King 1988; Kulis and Miller 1988). In this article I consider the multiple levels on which hierarchies in our discipline operate, and black and brown women’s obstructed access to information about the informal barriers to and facilitators of tenure and professional success, even when their academic positions allow them to simultaneously occupy a place of privilege or high status in the more universal hierarchies that structure society. The construct of intersectionality provides a scaffold for which to develop an understanding of the complexities of women of color, who occupy a position in the academy that is simultaneously privileged and marginalized. It offers a structure to help visualize how that position may shift over the years, and a language to describe the connections and uniqueness of different transecting points. Intersectionality as an analytic tool allows us to understand the organization of power as being shaped