‘Strange faces’ in the academy: experiences of racialized and Indigenous faculty in Canadian universities

Abstract

This paper is based on a larger qualitative study of exclusion and belonging as experienced by members of marginalized groups in the professions. The current analysis draws on a subsample of 13 racialized and Indigenous academics at Canadian universities to examine their experiences of both everyday racism – subtle, almost intangible micro-level interactions that convey messages of not fully belonging – and overt racism and colonialism. Overt experiences were less common, though intensely painful. Though in some ways they are more straightforward to address, as they are more obvious, they also consume considerable time and energy. Instances of everyday racism and colonialism were more common, often intricately interwoven with the very fabric of the institutional culture. Their cumulative nature is exhausting. Diversity initiatives, while popular in contemporary universities, are failing to approach equity, in that they deny the need for change in institutional cultures.

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Race Ethnicity and Education
ISSN: 1361-3324 (Print) 1470-109X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cree20
‘Strange faces’ in the academy: experiences of
racialized and Indigenous faculty in Canadian
universities
Tameera Mohamed & Brenda L. Beagan
To cite this article: Tameera Mohamed & Brenda L. Beagan (2019) ‘Strange faces’ in the
academy: experiences of racialized and Indigenous faculty in Canadian universities, Race Ethnicity
and Education, 22:3, 338-354, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2018.1511532
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2018.1511532
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‘Strange faces’in the academy: experiences of racialized and
Indigenous faculty in Canadian universities
Tameera Mohamed
a
and Brenda L. Beagan
b
a
Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada;
b
School of Occupational
Therapy, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
ABSTRACT
This paper is based on a larger qualitative study of exclusion and
belonging as experienced by members of marginalized groups in the
professions. The current analysis draws on a subsample of 13 racialized
and Indigenous academics at Canadian universities to examine their
experiences of both everyday racism –subtle, almost intangible micro-
level interactions that convey messages of not fully belonging –and
overt racism and colonialism. Overt experiences were less common,
though intensely painful. Though in some ways they are more straight-
forward to address, as they are more obvious, they also consume
considerable time and energy. Instances of everyday racism and colo-
nialism were more common, often intricately interwoven with the very
fabric of the institutional culture. Their cumulative nature is exhausting.
Diversity initiatives, while popular in contemporary universities, are
failing to approach equity, in that they deny the need for change in
institutional cultures.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 17 August 2017
Accepted 5 June 2018
KEYWORDS
Racism; colonialism;
academia; microaggressions;
faculty; higher education
Introduction
Despite institutional commitments to equity in Canadian universities, racism and
colonialism continue to have profound impacts on the daily work lives of racialized
and Indigenous academics. In fact, the routine implementation of equity and diversity
policies in universities can actually veil the everyday processes of exclusion that faculty
continue to face (Ahmed 2012; Henry et al. 2017a). Gillborn writes that ‘far from being
immune to the wider forces that create and sustain race inequalities in society, institu-
tions of higher education are especially prone to reproducing those inequalities beneath
a façade of meritocracy and color blindness’(2012, 1742). Similarly, Ahmed suggests ‘an
equality regime can be an inequality regime given new form, a set of processes that
maintain what is supposedly being redressed’(2012, 8). Though there is a significant
body of literature on racism in the academy, faculty experiences in Canada are under-
researched. Recent investigations demonstrate that faculty face racism at many levels,
including micro-level interactions, systemic disadvantages, and overt instances of hos-
tility and exclusion (Henry and Tator 2009; Henry et al. 2017b,2017a).
Drawing on 13 interviews from a larger Canada-wide study exploring the experiences of
‘minority’faculty, this paper presents the everyday experiences of belonging and exclusion for
CONTACT Tameera Mohamed tameera.mohamed@dal.ca
RACE ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION
2019, VOL. 22, NO. 3, 338–354
https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2018.1511532
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

racialized and Indigenous faculty members. All participants described everyday racism,
including experiences of microaggressions –interactions generally not intended to be racist
or colonialist, but which nonetheless convey subtle messages of not-quite-belonging (Wing-
Sue 2010). Participants also described routine systems and academic cultural norms, includ-
ing institutional and epistemological racism, which affected their experiences within the
profession. Institutionalized whiteness, along with neoliberalism and an ‘audit culture’
(Ahmed 2012), coalesce to entrench a toxic culture in which racism is subsumed into
normalized practices and performance measures. These routinized expectations demand
that racialized and Indigenous faculty do extra, invisible work in order to prove ‘legitimate’
academics in both research and teaching, also in addition to meeting scholarly expectations.
Instances of overt hostility were more common than might be expected, suggesting current
equity policies are ineffective in addressing even explicit forms of racism in the academy.
Literature review
Everyday racism: microaggressions and impacts
Many scholars argue that racism has not so much diminished as changed form, with
less overt processes dominating (Bonilla-Silva 2010; Essed 1991; Sue 2010). Philomena
Essed (1991) coined the term ‘everyday racism’to describe the ways in which con-
temporary racism has been integrated ‘into everyday situations through practices. . .that
activate underlying power relations’(50). Everyday racism manifests in a multitude of
subtle ways, including behaviours, humour, ways of speaking, and body language,
leaving it often unnoticed and difficult to challenge. Everyday interactions between
members of marginalized groups and dominant groups are micro-level instantiations of
macro-level power relations, ‘practices that infiltrate everyday life and become part of
what is seen as “normal”by the dominant group’(288).
In psychology the term ‘microaggressions’has been advanced by scholars like Wing Sue to
define the ‘brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioural, and environmental indignities,
whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative. . .
slights to the target person or group’(2010, 7). What makes these experiences significant is
that they are part of the everyday fabric of racism; while one microaggression seems insignif-
icant, they are an everyday reality for racialized people with detrimental cumulative con-
sequences. Some argue that these subtler forms of racism have a greater impact than overt
racism, in which ‘no guesswork is involved’in deciphering the intention behind and meaning
of an incident (Wing-Sue 2010, 23). Since racial microaggressions are repetitive, those on the
receiving end are often especially attuned to their presence and ‘have a more accurate
assessment’of their occurrence and meaning than dominant group members (Wing-Sue
2010, 47). The subtlety of microaggressions means that those on the receiving end may
experience self-doubt in their analysis, relying on each other to ‘sanity-check’their interpreta-
tions (Wing-Sue 2010,74–75).
Racism and colonialism in the academy
In higher education, everyday racism can occur not only in individual interactions, but also
through the structure of the institution itself; the lack of administrators and tenured
RACE ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 339

professors of colour tell students and faculty of colour that they do not belong and their
likelihood of advancing in the academy is low (Huber and Solozano 2015;Wing-Sue2010).
Likewise, the language of the academy itself is a microaggression: meritocracy, ‘colour
blindness’, and insistence that the academy is an equitable institution committed to diversity
all deny the reality experienced by faculty of colour (Ahmed 2012; Henry et al. 2017a).
Scholarship on racism and colonialism in Canadian universities is growing,
though to date only a few major studies exist (Henry and Tator 2009; Henry
et al. 2017a). These and similar studies in the United States and the United
Kingdom (e.g. Ahmed 2012;RossandEdwards2016) demonstrate that formal
commitments to equality and ‘the language of diversity in academic institutions is
often more about changing only the perception of whiteness than it is about
changing the culture and organization of the institution’(Ahmed 2012, 34). Thus,
even as increasing numbers of racialized and Indigenous faculty and students
participate in higher education, universities maintain and perpetuate racist and
colonialist systems that make such participation a daily struggle and actually serve
to hinder or minimize change. Ramos and Li (2017) show that in Canada the
relative representation of racialized and Indigenous faculty is actually worsening
overtime. Moreover, when age, degree, province, immigrant status, and discipline
are taken into account, visible minority faculty earn substantially less than white
faculty, despite performing as well or better in terms of productivity measures.
Despite increases in relative numbers of ‘minority’faculty, racialized and
Indigenous faculty frequently report being the only such individuals in their
department or university as a whole (Henry and Tator 2012;James2012). Such
‘institutional isolation’(Smith and Calasanti 2005) may leave them feeling isolated
and alienated, lacking important information networks without which they are less
able to participate in decisions and policy-making (Ross and Edwards 2016).
Tenure and promotion processes are particularly difficult when role models are
lacking (Henry and Tator 2012).
The challenges of tenure and promotion review are exacerbated by the fact that academic
norms are decidedly Eurocentric. When only certain types of knowledge are seen as legit-
imate, only certain types of research questions and methods ‘count’, only certain journals are
recognized, and only certain knowledges enter into curricula (Henry and Tator 2012;Ross
and Edwards 2016), this constitutes epistemological racism, a form of racism that effectively
renders the ways of knowing of some groups as lesser, unauthoritative. The kinds of research
many racialized and Indigenous faculty engage in may be deemed less scholarly than ‘main-
stream’research (Henry and Tator 2012;RossandEdwards2016). Moreover, they may need
to publish in ‘lesser’journals that are more open to critical perspectives. These norms render
racialized and Indigenous faculty as ‘illegitimate’.
Hesitance to see racialized and Indigenous faculty as legitimate is also evident in student
evaluations of teaching, wherein racialized faculty are rated less favourably than white
colleagues (Ross and Edwards 2016). Proving themselves authoritative experts in the
classroom expends untold energy (e.g. Mayuzumi 2015). At the same time, alongside
their regular faculty duties, racialized and Indigenous faculty are disproportionately likely
to be involved in equity and diversity initiatives and mentoring minority students, often
experiencing futility in those endeavours (Henry and Tator 2012;RossandEdwards2016).
They may be essentialized –invited to work on diversity concerns simply because of their
340 T. MOHAMED AND B. L. BEAGAN

race –even as their involvement in such work confirms stereotypes of narrow self-interest,
resulting in potential career harm. As James (2012) reports, racialized faculty face negative
repercussions whether they raise issues of equity or not.
The impacts of racism are significant: Henry and Tator (2012) found that
racialized and Indigenous faculty report low self-esteem, physical and mental health
impacts, and serious considerations of leaving academia, demonstrating that these
‘daily small events and incidents’have the potential to severely affect career trajec-
tory and engagement (78–79). The current study builds on the recent work of
Frances Henry and her colleagues (2017a,2017b), exploring the experiences of
racialized and Indigenous academics in Canadian universities. Here, we explicitly
tease apart instances of everyday racism and instances of more overt hostility, the
kind of thing typically understood as racism.Wehighlighttheextraworkdemanded
of racialized and Indigenous faculty in order to navigate the institutional whiteness
of academia and examine how the culture of academia perpetuates racism in the
lives of racialized and Indigenous faculty.
Methods
Our analysis draws on data from a larger study of faculty at Canadian universities who
self-identify as members of groups traditionally under-represented due to race,
Indigeneity, ethnicity, gender and sexual identity, working class background, and/or
disability. Participants were recruited through researchers’professional networks and
snowball sampling. Letters of invitation were sent to potential participants, who in turn
forwarded them to their networks. Thirty participants volunteered, from a range of
academic fields and a range of intersecting social locations. All processes were approved
by the university research ethics board.
Following discussion of informed consent, semi-structured qualitative interviews
grounded in critical theory explored everyday experiences of belonging and margin-
ality, inclusion, and exclusion. Each participant was interviewed once, for 60–120 min.
Some interviews were conducted face-to-face, some by telephone; all were recorded,
transcribed verbatim, and assigned pseudonyms. Using consensus building through
weekly team meetings, data were coded by two research assistants using Atlas/ti data
analysis software. Iterative analysis involved the authors and members of the larger
team to enhance rigor. Transcripts were read repeatedly, attending to meaning
passages, moving back and forth between individual transcripts and cross-
participant comparisons. A summary narrative was returned to each participant for
feedback, as a form of member-checking.
The current paper draws on data from a subsample of 13 participants who
identified as racialized and/or Indigenous. Participants taught at universities across
Canada, in fields that include business/management/economics, law/social work/edu-
cation, arts and humanities, health/medicine, and social sciences/gender studies. Ten
of the 13 participants identified as women. The team included researchers who
identify as racialized and ethnic minority, and those who do not. Collective inter-
rogation of emerging analyses helped ensure reflexivity and provided a form of
researcher triangulation to enhance credibility.
RACE ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 341

Results
Everyday exclusion
Lack of representation
Many participants described working in departments and faculties where they were
among very few racialized faculty members; some were the only Indigenous professors
at their universities. In her department, Laurie said, ‘I am it for diversity. . .I’m the only
one in terms of ethnocultural diversity, I am the only non-white’. Robert had been the
sole Indigenous faculty member at several universities, positioning him as the singular
voice for Aboriginal issues on campus:
Someone called me up and said, ‘I’m consulting with the Aboriginal community on
campus, about how they’re doing in their faculty and staffpositions’. . .. So, we had a
nice conversation and then at the end I said, ‘Can you tell me who else at the university
you’ve been talking to?’And he said, ‘You’re it’. So, I was the Aboriginal community at the
time. . .. That’s happened two or three times in my career.
Rachel was not only the sole racialized faculty member in her department, but remains
the only one in her entire field in the country: ‘Still today, I’m the first and only Black
professor [in my field] teaching at a Canadian university’. As Henry et al. note, under-
representation ‘underpins, loneliness, isolation, and tokenism. Everyday racism thrives
in an atmosphere of nonrepresentation’(2017a, 127).
As discussed more below, many participants were asked to participate in adminis-
trative or academic service work representing racialization or Indigeneity. While many
enjoyed this work, it was also experienced as tokenizing, especially when the work was
unconnected to academic expertise:
From the time I was hired, people started asking me to talk about women and science or
racialized minorities in science or under-represented groups in science, or bias in science.
When I started, I knew nothing about any of that, other than my personal experience. So,
the feeling that having been hired into this role, in addition to my day job, I have this other
responsibility, to represent for my race, was kind of odious, really. (Marianna)
Participants often struggled to know whether they were asked to engage in service work
for their abilities or their identity. Tokenism ‘goes to the heart of how racialized (and
Indigenous) faculty are perceived and evaluated. Their presence is required not because
of their special abilities, aptitude or knowledge, but because of their essential nature as
members of particular groups’(Henry et al. 2017a, 125). Moreover, they felt invited to
represent difference, disguising the fact that nothing at the university really changed.
Being often the only non-white person in the room may make explicit a sense of ‘not
belonging’. As Janet described, this increases with career advancement:
I can’t pretend to be surprised when I walk into a space and I’m the only person of colour.
I sort of scan the room, ‘Are there any other people of colour here?’I’m not even going to
think about are there any other Black people here. That’s just not going to happen, there
aren’t going to be any other Black people. Or that will be very rare. So now I’m looking for
people of colour, or any of my Indigenous brothers and sisters. . .. And certainly, the
further you go up, like, from pre-tenure to tenure, to then as a tenured faculty member in
an administrative position, this gets more and more sort of rare.
342 T. MOHAMED AND B. L. BEAGAN

She later commented, that at ‘every level, it becomes a little, (sigh) there’s more of a
sense that you’re not supposed to be there. The “What are you doing here?”’ Matt also
commented that at his university the senior administrators are ‘still all white men’.
Such experiences of not-fitting make apparent the institutionalized whiteness that is the
norm in Canadian universities (Henry et al. 2017a). Racialized Others may be welcomed to
the university, but they are invited to inhabit a preexisting whiteness, a taken-for-granted
assumption that the bodies occupying that space are white bodies. As Ahmed states, ‘To
inhabit whiteness as a nonwhite body can be uncomfortable’(2012, 40). Racialized and
Indigenous faculty are present as unexpected guests, explicitly not in the position of hosts
who already occupy the space.
One way that participants dealt with lack of representation was by connecting with
other racialized and Indigenous faculty across departments and universities, often
across disciplines. Nonetheless, many participants felt isolated. When they felt a sense
of belonging in their academic positions, it was often due to other racialized colleagues
in the department or even the discipline.
Whiteness and the culture of academia
Many participants reflected on the Eurocentric culture of academia, describing inten-
tional shifts and sacrifices they have made to ‘fit’within it, learning academic cultural
norms and sometimes relinquishing elements of their own culture. For example, Rachel
described academic culture as ‘ways of mainstream, coded Euro-Canadian engagement
that are not universal, [but] that all the white people who might be your colleagues
think are universal’. She referred to the use of Robert’s Rules in department meetings as
one example of an intensely culture-bound system that professes universality and
impartiality. This is a ubiquitous example of the way whiteness is institutionalized
(Ahmed 2012; Henry et al. 2017a), built into the taken-for-granted ways of doing that
become normalized and normative within academia.
As Ahmed notes, the informal conversations conducted in ‘conversational spaces’of
meetings and committees also establish who is expected to be present (2012, 122). Such
expectations are grounded in, and in turn ground, a culture of whiteness. Rachel
described a version of whiteness inextricably bound up with academic elitism, conveyed
through rejection of popular culture from a stance of superiority:
There’s a certain type of white professor who has totally forsaken any pop culture. . .. I think
that’s racially specific. I don’tfind a lot of black professors who do that, or are that unplugged
and detached from pop culture. And so the kind of jokes and conversations you can have with
people, their idea of assumed knowledge is not universal knowledge. And that really pisses me
off....’You guys are so in your own world of whatever you think is universal that you don’tget
that when you’re citing this play and this [classical music], that not everybody knows what the
hell you’re talking about’. But why do I know that I have to explain to you who Beyoncé is?. . .
it’s still a kind of white cultural supremacy, like a certain type of white culture too, that passes
as universal and what you should know because you have a PhD.
This is precisely the way whiteness places ‘the interests and perspectives of white people at
the centre of what is considered normal and everyday’(Gillborn 2015, 278). Ahmed
describes the too-frequent experience of being the only person of colour in an academic
setting as being like ‘walking into a sea of whiteness’(2012,35).Thepresenceofafew
racialized and Indigenous faculty confirms the norm of whiteness. One of our participants
RACE ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 343

described an ‘unpredictable’but profound sense of not-fitting in the context of whiteness:
‘Sometimes you’ll be having a discussion in a faculty meeting and suddenly, in my head it
feels like a chasm opens up between me and the rest of the faculty’(Marianna).
In the context of routine denial (even concealment) of systemic racism and coloni-
alism, faculty are required to engage in self-censorship (Ahmed 2012, 161), or ‘passing
as the “right kind”of minority, the one who aims not to cause unhappiness or trouble’
(157). Robert, an Indigenous scholar, described academia as requiring cultural perfor-
mance: ‘There’s a lot of having to “play the part”of what people perceive as conven-
tional in terms of being a teacher. There’s a lot of early self-censorship that happens,
until you realize maybe you don’t always have to play that part’. Indigenous participants
described themselves as cultural translators within academic whiteness. Eva translated
in hiring committees, intervening to ensure Indigenous applicants were not misinter-
preted. Janine helped Indigenous students learn to perform academic culture: ‘We have
to learn how to do that, within a context that’s so culturally different than what we’re
used to. . .so that we can make ourselves understood within that academic context’.
Lauren described herself as always ‘translating’between the culture of academia and
the cultures of Indigenous communities where she does her research. She struggled with
faculty meetings that felt culturally irrelevant:
I just don’t feel part of the conversation, generally. I think the topics that we’re talking
about are not necessarily ones that I think are the most important things to be talking
about. You know? A lot of meetings are like that. I feel like they’re just air.
Community meetings Lauren attends start with a teaching from an elder to create an
‘atmosphere of presence and humility’and respect for each person’s story. She had
attempted to bring this to academic meetings, asking colleagues to start with a few
minutes of ‘talking about things that have happened over the past month, so we get to
know one another and just foster an atmosphere of respect’. It was maintained briefly
then fell away, sacrificed to busy agendas: ‘Like, that’s just sort of not important. . .it just
falls offthe radar, or people just do it as a token’. Not only does this highlight the
emphasis on efficiency that dominates the neoliberal academic context, but at the same
time, stretching beyond business-as-usual in institutionalized whiteness requires racia-
lized and Indigenous faculty to be insistent, persistent, keeping issues of equity on the
agenda (Ahmed 2012). Such insistence is risky, positioning the individual –already an
interloper –as pushy, a problem, disruptive. It is also simply exhausting.
Not belonging: ‘there’sthis strange face that shouldn’t be in that hallway’
Participants routinely described feeling that they did not belong in academia, most
often as a result of micro-level interactions that positioned them as outsiders. Such
instances of everyday racism (Essed 1991) frequently began in graduate school, where
several participants had been discouraged from continuing their studies, regardless of
excellent performance. Participants interpreted these experiences as reflecting an unac-
knowledged belief that racialized and Indigenous people do not belong in academia.
The power of everyday racism lies in its repetition, the accumulation of messages of not
belonging, which participants described as occurring consistently throughout their
academic careers.
344 T. MOHAMED AND B. L. BEAGAN

Terms of address can be an everyday means of conveying that you are an unexpected
body in the halls of academe. Sara Ahmed (2012) described being the only person of
colour and the only woman at an academic event; while others were introduced by title
and last name, she was introduced as Sara. To insist on the proper title means
demanding ‘what is simply given to others. . .. [Yet] your insistence confirms the
improper nature of your residence’(Ahmed 2012, 177). Interestingly, our participants
reported being addressed by students both overly formally and overly informally –
whichever differed from the forms of address used for their colleagues. For example,
Aafiya’s students refused to call her by her first name, though that was the norm in her
department. In contrast, Rachel’s students consistently called her by her first name
despite her requests for more formal address, and despite addressing her colleagues by
title. She interpreted this as not seeing Black women as legitimate academics: ‘Part of
that is the disrespect and the unfamiliarity, in terms of how they read [me] and what
they think is possible in terms of Black femaleness’.
Rachel suggested it was more than being unfamiliar with Black people as professors,
but actual discomfort with Black authority and expertise: ‘White students are uncom-
fortable with someone that they don’t identify with being the purveyor of knowledge at
the front of the class’. The normative whiteness that attaches to the role of professor
meant that some racialized and Indigenous faculty were mistaken for students, as
Marianna described: ‘When I first started here, they would knock on the door and
say “Oh, is Professor [name] here?”They’d look over my shoulder (laugh)’. Similarly,
Janet described, ‘People thinking “Well, you must be a student. You can’t be a faculty
member”’. Both Marianna and Janet interpreted being misread as students as revealing
an institutional given that a professor will/should be white. As Ahmed argues, ‘Being
asked whether you are the professor is a way of being made into a stranger, of not being
at home in a category that gives residence to others’(2012, 177).
The most explicit instance of ‘being made into a stranger’was described by Laurie.
After completing multiple degrees and moving into a teaching position at the same
university, she had spent many years on campus, in the same buildings. Yet, she was
stopped one day by security and asked for ID, while three white colleagues (all new to
campus) proceeded unquestioned:
Ithought‘That’s strange’.Andtheydidn’t even notice. We were all chatting, all of us,
chatting. And they continue chatting, and I’m stopped.. .. You begin to question yourself,
when you get these things all the time. So I went home that evening and it was still bothering
me. But I didn’t want to overreact to it. And so the next day I asked my colleagues, Did you
notice what happened? Did you see that I was stopped there? And they were like, ‘Oh yeah,
yeah. I think you were’. But they didn’t really even make anything of it.
Laurie was frustrated that her colleagues did not see this as problematic. She later
encountered the security person who explained that Laurie had not looked familiar,
while the white faculty members were recognized: ‘Me not looking familiar. I’m the one
Black face that is around the building all the time. . .I didn’t look familiar because I
don’t belong there. There’s this strange face that shouldn’t be in that hallway’.
In a context of institutionalized whiteness, non-white bodies are rendered both
invisible and hyper-visible: ‘Bodies stick out when they are out of place’(Ahmed
2012, 41). Laurie was seen in a way her white colleagues were not, yet unseen in that
RACE ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 345

she remained unfamiliar. The ability of white bodies to move about institutional spaces
with ease, not noticing who is or is not present, confirms the normative expectation of
whiteness. Our participant Rachel suggested she is visible as a Black woman because she
is in the position of professor –beyond her station:
There’s a certain kind of white person who. . .would be more comfortable with me as a
janitor, because that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. But as a professor, it’s like, ‘No,
you’re supposed to be in your place’, which is always already beneath me. So, there’sa
certain type of racism that’s reserved for so called over-achieving blacks.
Experiences of everyday racism in academia –from being misread as a student to being
treated as an interloper –send a message to racialized and Indigenous faculty that they
do not fully belong, that they remain a ‘strange face’in the academy. Yet, each
individual instantiation of power relations, each incident, is subtle and open to inter-
pretation. As Laurie said, ‘you begin to question yourself’. This uncertainty, this ‘guess-
work’(Wing-Sue 2010, 23) attached to everyday racism takes its own emotional toll.
Marianna described a powerful member on a committee ignoring everything she said.
When two trusted colleagues later confirmed, ‘That guy didn’t listen to anything you
said!’she felt ‘vindicated’:‘“I’m not just imagining it. It’s not just that I made weak
points.”And that’s the problem with all of it, is that it can just erode your confidence if
you’re not careful’. Though those on the receiving end of microaggressions are often
attuned to these experiences and have a more accurate assessment of their meaning, the
failure of others to recognize it can raise self-doubt and uncertainty. Thus, everyday
racism may contribute to low self-esteem, low self-confidence, hopelessness, and poorer
physical, emotional, and mental health (Henry et al. 2017a,2017b).
Overt racism: the ‘illegitimate’academic
Though universities may overtly commit to diversity and inclusion (Universities
Canada 2017), and to challenging the existence of racism and colonialism in the
institution (Ahmed 2012), the racialized and Indigenous faculty we interviewed
reported numerous instances of overt racism, such as ignorant or hostile comments
from colleagues and students. These definitely contributed to a climate in which many
of our participants stated that they saw colleagues as acquaintances but not as friends,
and spent as little time on campus as possible. Some instances of overt racism
detrimentally affected tenure and promotion.
Racialized and Indigenous faculty described having course evaluations and positive
feedback removed from their files, making this information unavailable during tenure
and promotion considerations. For example, Rachel’s department chair received a
sudden influx of positive emails from community members about an event Rachel
had organized; they later disappeared:
She was actually upset with me. . . She was getting all of these letters about how wonderful
the event was and how I should be tenured immediately. And said if I had put these people
up to this, it wasn’t going to do me any good. So, that taught me a lesson in –You know, I
was aware that if I failed, there would be repercussions, but succeeding could be punished
as well. But when I went up for tenure then, a couple years later, I wrote to her and said
346 T. MOHAMED AND B. L. BEAGAN

‘Can I get the letters? They’re not in my file’. And she claimed to not know that the letters
existed. So, she destroyed them.
Similarly, Janine received almost-perfect evaluations for a course she taught, only to
have the student comments ‘lost’by the department secretary:
When they did the student evaluations at the end of the year, the secretary told me, ‘Oh
yeah, you got really good marks in your [Indigenous content] course, but what’s the point?
They were all Indians in your class, weren’t they?’‘So, where are my comments?’‘Oh, they
got lost’. And I had, like, a 4.8 out of 5.
In both cases, the assumption seemed to be that racialized and Indigenous faculty members
could not possibly be performing well enough to receive legitimate positive feedback, and any
such feedback is either coerced or evidence of intra-racial favouritism –acritiquenot
typically levelled against white faculty who receive evaluations from majority white students.
Participant credibility was also questioned in relation to employment equity hiring.
Many people were accused of being unqualified, hired only for their race rather than their
qualifications or performance. Janet was constantly undermined despite knowing that she
‘was an exceptional candidate’when she was hired: ‘I knew I was a strong candidate.
Which didn’t stop people from implying, at the same time. . .“Oh, you know, they just
hired her, because they had to get a Black woman in the department”’. For Janet, the
repeated message was, ‘You’re here under false pretenses’. Employing the myth of
colour-blind meritocracy, preferential hiring becomes cast as a threat to potential excel-
lence, which is understood to rely on hiring the best candidate (Henry et al. 2017a). The
structural advantages of white privilege are invisible in the context of institutionalized
whiteness, rendering visible only the advantages experienced by those who arrive through
employment equity, which are perceived as unfair (Ahmed 2012, 157). As Janine said,
‘Students would write things in my student evaluations, saying “Why do we have an
unqualified affirmative action person teaching us?”and “Why is this Indian here?”’
Challenges to the legitimacy of racialized and Indigenous academics came from
faculty, staff, and students. Janine had been facing such overt challenges since she
was a student; when she performed well on assignments, she was told ‘the professor’s
an Indian lover’or was accused of plagiarism: ‘. . .but they wouldn’t make a formal
[accusation], so it got read by different people and the grade went from 95% to 90% to
85% to 80%, (laugh) to 75%’. The underlying message Janine interpreted was, ‘You’re
not smart enough to be here’. Later, as a programme coordinator, Janine faced overt
racism from a staffmember who joked and scoffed about Indigenous spiritual rituals,
and refused to do things Janine asked her to do.
Students commonly demonstrated overt racism, often in anonymous course evalua-
tions –though a few people had experienced ‘outright, hostile, racist attacks in class’.
Course evaluations hold serious ramifications for faculty and are problematic for racialized
and Indigenous professors (Henry et al. 2017a). As Rachel noted, ‘there is stuffthat people
will say, do, and put on women of colour faculty that I know they would never do to a white
guy’. Some participants received course evaluations attacking their qualifications, but
equally common were comments about appearance and accent. For Laurie and Fathima,
accents were repeatedly raised as shortcomings in course evaluations. Even though she
adjusts her teaching to account for her accent, Azedeh reported, ‘Students seem to associate
not doing well in a course with the accent of the professor, or any other shortcoming of the
RACE ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 347

professor that they can find’. Janine noted that Indigenous colleagues received evaluations
asking why they ‘wear beads and feathers to class?’As Rachel said, there are ‘too many ways
in which students who don’t like your identity will attack you through an evaluation’.
Again, this may stem from racialized and Indigenous faculty being ‘unexpected occupants’
of the professor position, presumed less competent, but also the target of hostility for
having moved beyond their expected station in life.
Administrators were also known to engage in systematically disadvantaging specific
faculty, particularly through course assignments. Several participants noted that racia-
lized and Indigenous professors are disproportionately assigned courses that students
dislike, consequently receiving poorer evaluations. Rachel was assigned multiple unpop-
ular research methods courses at once, which she argued tend to get assigned to white
women and people of colour: ‘Students often resent methods courses because they’re
required, and then white women and people of colour get marked down on their
teaching evaluations, which then adversely impacts us when we come up for tenure’.
Fathima’s courses were ‘pushed to the spring/summer session’which lowers enrolment;
she was rarely assigned courses in her area of expertise. According to participants,
Indigenous faculty are routinely assigned courses that conflict with Indigenous ways of
knowing; if they choose to incorporate Indigenous perspectives into their teaching, they
face student resistance, harsh criticism, and poor evaluations:
Students really resisted hearing about Aboriginal [perspectives]. . .. And [instructors] got
really poor teaching evaluations from their students. And I know they’re good teachers
because I’ve watched them teach and known other classes they’ve done better. And they’re
really ridden hard by the students in those settings, to not vary from the norm of what
[students] perceive as the conventional type of [content]. (Robert)
The absence of courses that reflect Indigenous perspectives illustrates the institutionalized
whiteness of the university through what is deemed legitimate academic material.
Students perpetuate this view through teaching evaluations that punish faculty who
attempt to incorporate alternative perspectives into the canon. Indigenous faculty are
often caught in a double bind, forced to choose between teaching material that conflicts
with Indigenous ways of knowing or risking career consequences from unfavourable
course evaluations. Course assignments and evaluations are understood as routine,
normalized components of business-as-usual for university professors –objective, neutral,
and fair (Gillborn 2015). Yet, these ostensibly egalitarian ‘colour-blind’practices camou-
flage the distinct and detrimental impact they have on racialized and Indigenous faculty.
Additional work: ‘we get pulled too many ways’
In addition to their regular teaching and research duties, many participants were
involved in unusually high levels of service work, often involving equity and diversity
initiatives. This meant hours of additional work each week that significantly detracted
from their research. Eva pointed out that lack of representation of Indigenous faculty
means ‘everybody wants us to be on their committees’with the weight of equity issues
falling on very few shoulders. Marianna noted this means racialized faculty ‘get offered
interesting service’, but it also means they ‘get offered every bit of service that comes
along’. While Indigenous and racialized academics often agree to sit on committees
348 T. MOHAMED AND B. L. BEAGAN

where ‘diversity’is sought, this may be highly strategic, as noted by Laurie: ‘If you’re not
at the table, then where are you? Probably on the menu, where you’ll be eaten up’.
Many people participated willingly, even eagerly, in equity-related work, finding passion
and sense of value there.
At the same time, however, the burden is high. Some have called this a ‘race tax’or
‘cultural taxation’(Henry et al. 2017a), extra service work that contributes to exhaustion
and burnout. Lauren described routinely ‘being asked to, or being told that you’re going
to sit on things because they need someone who’s Aboriginal’. This seemed especially true
for the Indigenous scholars, who all agreed, ‘We get pulled too many ways.. .you have to
be really alert about not wearing yourself out’(Eva). Robert saw junior scholars being
given administrative roles more suited to ‘people 20 years in’and not having mentorship
to negotiate equitable workloads. Moreover, that extra service work is not ‘counted’:
There’s a lot of things that I’m asked to do over and above what others in the academy
would be asked to do, just by nature of the fact that I identify as Aboriginal. And I don’t
think that that’s acknowledged. And they don’t measure that when you’re thinking about
tenure and promotion. . . (Lauren)
Eva attempted to account for the ‘race tax’, the toll on productivity:
Let’s say I have six or seven hours more a week than other people, for things [service
work]. So what, that’s almost a day a week I lose, that you know, that’s probably three or
four weeks of extra stuffa year, which every two years, that would be an article.
Service work is essential to a university, yet not necessarily highly valued (Henry et al.
2017a, 289). This may be particularly true for service regarding equity issues, despite
university proclamations regarding the importance of diversity: ‘If diversity and equity
work is less valued by organizations than other kinds of work, then the commitment of
some staffto diversity might reproduce their place as “beneath”other staffwithin the
hierarchies of organizations’(Ahmed 2012, 135).
Some of the extra work –particularly mentoring and supporting racialized and
Indigenous students –felt meaningful and rewarding, even if it also felt like a duty
and additional work. Laurie’s experience as a student of ‘not seeing any Black professors
you can go to and talk to’informs her own approach to mentoring students:
Even when you have your own quota of students that you can supervise, you see a student,
a Black student in my case, who is struggling and you want to be on their committee so
you can help. That is an additional burden that you take on.
Similarly, when Janine was a graduate student, an Indigenous mentor was critical to her
success: from guidance in applying to graduate schools, to sharing childcare, to seeking
out spiritual healing ceremonies when needed. For Eva, mentoring Indigenous students –
even on matters unrelated to their academic work –was a professional responsibility, a
duty to her home community. As Henry et al. (2017a, 164) point out, ‘despite the
difficulties, the exhaustion. . .racialized faculty will continue to put in the extra time
because we feel that we cannot refuse’, not only due to moral commitment to commu-
nities but also due to a (stated or unstated) sense that this is why they were hired.
Given the experiences of being cast as ‘illegitimate academics’, it is not surprising
that many participants perceived they needed to work harder than their white collea-
gues to be seen as equally good:
RACE ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 349

If my colleagues were publishing two articles a year, I have to publish three. So at least I
know when they’re looking at my file, they’re not going to find something that is not equal
to what other people have. They should always find something that’s more. (Laurie)
Yusuf described colleagues routinely asking why he works so much, despite being a full
professor: ‘The glass ceiling is there, very clear, but you also need to work harder than
your colleagues, at least you feel, maybe you feel that you have to work harder’.
Part of that extra work entailed defending their scholarship. Community-engaged
research was devalued, seen as not meeting ‘expectations in terms of what counts as
scientific knowledge. . .the work that is valued’(Laurie). Several people found their research
on issues concerning race or Indigeneity was dismissed as ‘biased’and lacking rigor. Janet
said, ‘If you’re a Black woman doing research on Black issues, there’ssomethingfishy about
that. . .doing research that’s not considered sort of the important research questions’.
Janine’s research on an aspect of colonialism was dismissed: ‘People didn’t really consider
it a relevant topic’. She went on to say, ‘[long pause] It wasn’t really important. It wasn’t. I
mean, it was only important to me. Right?. ..I wanted to contribute something. And then it
just ended up being trashed.. ..Maybe it was too personal. It was too [pause]–’ This final ‘it
was too–’ is painful. It suggests the kind of low self-confidence, hopelessness, and inter-
nalized doubt that others have noted among racialized and Indigenous faculty (Henry et al.
2017b). It speaks of a distressing sense of ‘failure to fit’within the overwhelming whiteness
of academia (Ahmed 2012). Janine said elsewhere in her interview, ‘I’m really, in terms of
my professional development, a failure. Like, I have failed. I don’t know why. I don’tknow
how. I don’tknowifI’m not smart enough, if I’m not good enough, if–’
Finally, the extra work of challenging discrimination and racism through human rights
and equity processes cannot be underestimated. Four people had been involved with such
complaints, some more than once. Fathima said ‘everything is a fight for me’, describing
repeated conflicts with her department head. She had had to bring complaints to the
harassment office: ‘Idon’t want to make a harassment complaint. I don’t want this. But,
this is not fair. It should not happen’. Battles over discrimination took a high emotional toll,
but also had career impacts. Rachel described to her chair the impacts of having to fight a
discrimination case: ‘What I said was I want on the record that I’ve lost months of my
research. . . [When] I come up for tenure, and you’re going “Where’s your seventeen
books?”I just lost a couple in the battle’. In that instance the discrimination complaint
was levelled by white students but supported by her department chair. Others have noted
the ineffectiveness of existing processes for addressing equity matters, to the point where
many faculty see no point pursuing claims (Henry et al. 2017a). Not surprisingly, several
participants said racialized and Indigenous faculty need to ‘choose their battles’.
There is labour involved in being racialized and Indigenous faculty in institutions
infused with whiteness. Racialized and Indigenous faculty are ‘unexpected bodies’in
academia, requiring they work to ease the tensions of their presence: ‘The body that causes
their discomfort (by not fulfilling an expectation of whiteness) is the one that must work
hard to make others comfortable’(Ahmed 2012, 41). There is work in challenging –or
deciding not to challenge –preconceptions. There is work in building connection across
not belonging. There is work in being different enough to represent diversity yet not so
much so as to embody the negative perceptions of your group. There is work in making
space for others. There is work in deciding whether and how to respond to racism, and in
350 T. MOHAMED AND B. L. BEAGAN

the responding itself. As Ahmed (2012, 174) notes, only the continual ‘practical labour of
“coming up against”the institution’allows its whiteness to become apparent’. She describes
this as going against the flow, akin to ‘the experience of going the wrong way in a crowd’,
requiring great effort (Ahmed 2012,186).
Conclusion
Assumptions of whiteness have exacted an incalculable cost for many racialized and
Indigenous scholars. They rob the academy and the broader society of a wealth of talent
and the invaluable heterogeneity of people, their knowledge, and the perspectives that
could make universities more equitable, diverse, and excellent (Henry et al. 2017b, 311).
Equality regimes and diversity policies have become the standard, officially endorsed
by university presidents in Canada (Universities Canada 2017) and usually touted most
volubly in response to a crisis or public scandal. Yet, our results suggest racism and
colonialism continue to have a profound impact on racialized and Indigenous faculty at
Canadian universities across disciplines and geographic regions. Here, we echo the
conclusions of a recent Canadian study (Henry et al. 2017a,2017b), and point to the
argument of Ahmed (2012) in the UK, that diversity measures are ‘non-
performatives’, ineffective at best and hindering effect at worst. Not only is racism
not ameliorated by income and social status in the professoriate, but in fact is compli-
cated by hierarchy, neoliberal managerialism, and institutionalized whiteness.
Our participants were isolated, few in number with increasing scarcity as people
moved up the hierarchy. This under-representation fuels both tokenism and the burden
of extra service demands. Both informal conversations rife with culture-bound elitism,
and the structure of meetings conveyed messages of not belonging. Faculty were
undermined by students and sabotaged by colleagues and staffseemingly uncomfortable
with racialized and Indigenous people in positions of authority. Contemporary uni-
versities are simultaneously neoliberal and archaic, emphasizing entrepreneurial inno-
vation and productivity alongside conventional modes of hierarchy that stretch back
centuries. This is a perfect context for competition, rivalry, distrust, isolation, super-
iority, and egoism, all of which exacerbate the power imbalances of racism while
making them even harder to see. While all faculty are affected by power relationships
with more senior colleagues and administrators, it is notable that racialized and
Indigenous faculty are also vulnerable to power plays by students and staff. Moreover,
the potential critiques of and challenges to business-as-usual are silenced when toxic
power hierarchies leave them unsafe to speak out.
Individualist meritocracy –believed to be objective, neutral, and egalitarian –has
long been a mainstay of university hierarchy. This has increased exponentially with the
promulgation of neoliberal ‘regimes of performance’(Morrissey 2015) and an ‘audit
culture’(Ahmed 2012). In the university-as-corporation, the value of academics is
measured through performance indicators: grant funding, patents, journal impact
factors, citation indices, social media ‘likes’, and ‘shares’. These ostensibly universal,
colour-blind measures leave most faculty feeling they are never good enough
(Waterfield, Beagan, and Weinberg 2018), but when standards of academic excellence
are encoded with white settler cultural norms and expectations they are particularly
destructive to racialized and Indigenous faculty. All knowledge claims, and all
RACE ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 351

evaluations of knowledge claims, bear the fingerprints of the social communities that
produce them (Harding 1991). Academic performance standards devalue the potentially
transformative knowledges and practices racialized and Indigenous faculty bring to
universities, which could enhance excellence (Henry et al. 2017a; Ross and Edwards
2016). Instead faculty must fight for recognition of their research, teaching, and
administrative service, particularly when they face epistemological racism in challenging
the canon or employ decolonizing research methods. Excellence –the coveted status of
each university –is seen as undermined by attending to equity, broadening under-
standings of quality performance (Ahmed 2012).
As Ahmed argues, adding people to the university who look different, adding in colour
and cultural difference, ‘confirms the whiteness of what was already in place’(2012,33).In
the context of institutionalized whiteness, racialized and Indigenous academics are unex-
pected guests, occupants who do not meet the expectations of whiteness. Institutionalized
whiteness is preserved when they ‘are expected to fit with little to no attempts made to
accommodate, respect or encourage their presence and differences in interests, scholar-
ships, ways of knowing and understanding the world’(James 2012, 135). Our participants
described numerous ways institutional whiteness positions them as ‘illegitimate academics’;
their work is devalued and their qualifications questioned, affecting considerations for
promotion and tenure, but also engendering a profound sense of failure for some.
Yet belief in meritocracy, earned advantage, feeds a wilful blindness to the pernicious
entrenchment of whiteness throughout academia. It is hard to see and hard to name.
Silence is soul-destroying to those experiencing oppression, while speaking out casts
them as the ‘problem’(Ahmed 2012), over-reacting or wrong-headed, disturbing the
comforts of business-as-usual. Racialized and Indigenous ‘interlopers’in academia are
faced with negative consequences whether they speak out or not (James 2012).
Attempting to address racism through equity processes that exist expressly for that
purpose takes an enormous toll of time and energy, on top of already-excessive service
work, student mentoring (Henry and Tator 2012; Ross and Edwards 2016) and striving
to produce even more than their white colleagues to ensure their place in the academy
is not open to question (James 2012). Until university cultures change, until institu-
tional whiteness is undermined, racialized and Indigenous faculty will remain ‘strange
faces’in the hallways of academia. This is unacceptable.
This study is limited by reliance on a small sample, which nonetheless included
considerable heterogeneity. There is a risk of essentializing race when experiences
across a wide range of racialized groups, including Indigenous scholars, are analysed
together. While there is value in seeing the similarities across groups, nuances of
different ways racism and colonialism play out may be lost. We have not here teased
apart the differences among disciplines, nor the inevitable intersections of race and
Indigeneity with other social identities, such as gender identity, sexuality, social class
background, disability, or immigration history. Continued attention to such nuances is
much needed in the Canadian context.
Acknowledgments
We want to thank participants as well as the rest of the research team: Kim Brooks, Merlinda
Weinberg, Bea Waterfield, and Brenda Hattie.
352 T. MOHAMED AND B. L. BEAGAN

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
[435-2014-0234].
ORCID
Tameera Mohamed http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1801-1720
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