Chapter 5: In Fear of my Safety: Black Female Faculty Responding to Spirit-Murdering, Racism, and Healing on the Academic Plantation

Black women are not human, and we never have been deemed a person. We have been classified as property by slave-owners; we have been lawfully positioned as slaves and reproducers of white wealth, and we have been deemed executable under white patriarchy and white supremacy. But we have not been seen as human. Black women are situated within an American society that tells them that Blackness is to be criminalized and that Black womanhood is to be receded. We are forced to be a receptacle of Jane Crow policies, racism, and sexism on the bridge called our backs. We do not breathe. We are still waiting to exhale. We do not experience full humanity, and we are still demanding that Black…Lives…Matter. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1865 did not free us for Black women are still chained to higher rates of unemployment than all women at 10%, lower high school completion rates at 15% nationally, and Black females’ median income is lower than white women at $33,780 per year (Black Demographics, 2013). Black women have yet to experience full emancipation, and decades of research has shown that we are still being underrepresented in governance, but overrepresented in the criminal justice system. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington and the National Domestic Workers Alliance in New York 2017 report indicates that “Black women of all ages were twice as likely to be imprisoned as white females, and Black women aged 18 to 19 were four times more likely to be jailed than their white counterparts” (pp. 144–145). Black women live unhuman lives and are in a constant state of marginalization, criminality, and in fear of their safety.