On September 23, 2023, I saved these images*. Today I’m finally ready to write about them.
Do you know who they are?
On the top left, Joanne Epps, legal scholar and interim president at Temple University. To her right, Dr. Orinthia Montague, President of Volunteer State Community College. Below: Danielle Holley, President of Mount Holyoke College.
If you follow the news closely, you may know something about these women. Two of them are dead.
Two Black Women University Presidents Have Died, Spurring Heartrending Accounts of Workplace Discrimination, Numerous BIPOC Women Leaders in Higher Education Have Spoken Out - - Alexia Hudson-Ward, Choice 360
Epps died on September 19 after falling ill at a memorial service. Montague died on September 22nd.
On September 23rd Danielle Holley became first Black woman President of my alma mater. Her inauguration was celebrated in the wake of these two tragic deaths in academia. I admit to experiencing a feeling of dread when I saw each of these three photos of brilliant and accomplished Black women, all wearing the same radiant shade of blue. I hope she has a million guardian angels keeping watch over her.
Alexia, I can’t win. I’m often treated poorly by some of the white faculty and leaders I work with, and the people of color on campus treat me as if my ascension into leadership is somehow a betrayal of DEI or they expect me to be some kind of miracle worker that can immediately wave a wand to fix over a century’s worth of oppressive sub-systems and structural practices. Meanwhile, I’m advocating for everyone to be able to thrive in a just environment. I’m tired, and I don’t want to die from the stress and constant heartbreak of this job. - - Anonymous quote paraphrased with permission, Alexia Hudson Ward, Choice 360
In The Program Went On As Planned, (Diverse Issues in Higher Education) Crystal A. deGregory writes about a pattern of death amongst Black women in academia.
More than half a century earlier, in May 1955, Bethune-Cookman University founder Mary McLeod Bethune was found dead on the floor just steps away from the front door, alone in her own home. Yet, many biographies read that she died peacefully, as though she passed away in her sleep or surrounded by loved ones.
Many can be added to the list of those who died in campus offices or while sitting in their cars on campus parking lots.
We gotta stop glorifying the tragedies of Black women’s deaths while they were in service because they were in service to us.
This week we have witnessed the shameful conclusion to a weeks-long harassment of Claudine Gay, the first Black woman President of Harvard University. Gay resigned, not because accusations of antisemitism or plagiarism had any merit, but because the public attacks, meant to arouse anger against her and smear her good name, had become bigger than the job she was chosen to do.
If you want to know why Black women are dying in academe, you have only to look at what was unleashed on Claudine Gay.
From Erin Haines, Editor of the 19th:
Against Black women specifically, the conservative agenda is clear: minimize their excellence and exaggerate their mistakes. Their identities and leadership become weaponized and politicized. There is no room for error.
Conservatives - - largely white men - - seized the opportunity to take down a Black woman in power. Her resignation was dubbed gleefully to be a “scalp.” Their assumption is that a Black woman could not possibly be qualified and must be removed. Whatever tactics make that goal possible will be employed. The end justifies the means.
What happens to Black women in academia will never happen to me and probably not to you. But if you have ever been caught in an abusive and toxic relationship with a boss, coworker, or in a personal relationship, you may have felt a taste of the ongoing trauma they experience. Living day-to-day under intense scrutiny where it is clear that someone looks forward to your failure and is eager to create new and disproportionate punishments for minor or nonexistent infractions is exhausting and demeaning.
These experiences are not only emotionally damaging. The cumulative weight of them chips away at physical health as well. In a world where Black women must work twice as hard to be thought half as good, the price of excellence and success could very well be career assassination.
Or death.
The actions of these Conservative white men show them not as advocates for justice but as warriors in a battle to reclaim a total dominance in the public sphere which they believe is theirs by right.
Kyla Golding, a Black Harvard senior, wrote in an op-ed in the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, that “at the mountaintop for the Black woman, there is no promised land. No liberation, no forgiveness, no love, no protection.” - - Black women at Harvard say Claudine Gay’s ouster reflects a system that wasn’t built for them, Char Adams, NBC BLK
And so today I share the photos of three gifted and highly qualified women, resplendent in sky blue, to remind myself and everyone who reads this that their smiles and their aspirations are but nothing in the face of the ravenous maw of systemic racism.
For women like Claudine Gay and her sisters there is neither justice nor peace.
*Phot credit: top left: Michael Ares, Philadelphia Inquirer, top right: Volunteer State Vision, below: Mount Holyoke website
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