Black Engineering Faculty Speak: Silence is No Longer an Option
Black engineering faculty are tired of injustice. It is our turn to speak. We will not be silenced.
At pivotal points in my life, my research and scholarly focus has returned to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) despite my best efforts not to be pigeonholed into a DEI box. My goal was to be an assessment and evaluation expert or an engineering leader who didn’t focus on my Blackness. I was a scholar, doggone it, and I wasn’t going to let my race or gender overshadow my credibility. I was going to separate DEI from my research no matter what.
It wasn’t as easy as I thought to separate my work from my identity. The first time I realized this was when I transitioned from the all female, predominately Black, Spelman College with an undergraduate degree in mathematics to the very public, very large University of Alabama to pursue graduate studies in industrial engineering. I sat in my grad classes wondering how academic worlds could be so different. I went from classes with all women to classes that were predominately male. Sitting in my class one day, I realized that I was that woman, the one who challenged my male professors openly and asked aboout equities in engineering. I was reminded that the lessons I had learned at Spelman weren’t commonly taught everywhere. I did everything I could to expose my classmates to different cultures, however (e.g., I convinced my graduate seminar professor to give our international cohort of students opportunities to discuss their technical research and their cultures). When my Chinese classmate needed an interview suit, I drove her to the Galleria Mall in Birmingham where we selected a two-piece ensemble that would work well for her. This is what I expected of academia.
As I moved from graduate education to a tenure-track faculty position, I realized that there continued to be a pathway issue, such that there were fewer women and women of color (WoC) in engineering, especially at the faculty. In the almost 150 history of my institution, I would be the first Black woman to earn tenure in the College of Engineering. I got to that position by doing my work, but I was taught not to rock the boat, to keep my head down, and to play by the rules. Code-switching and assimilation were the norm. Be seen and not heard. Wait until you earn tenure to speak out.
This is how many faculty play the game, especially Black faculty. With little disclosure about the conversations that happen when promotion and tenure cases are discussed, Black faculty play it safe. For all many of them knew, one member of the P&T committee could walk in the room and influence everyone else to vote negatively on the cases of people who disrupt a system. When rules and norms are not explicit, people often must assume how decisions are made. In a world of secrecy where the process to be promoted is objective and subjective at the same time, many Black faculty have learned to stay in their place and to play nice in the academic sandbox.
On May 25, 2020, with the death of George Floyd, many Black people realized that without their professional attire and credibility, they could become murder victims as they drove, ran, or shopped. The world was shaken in ways that many of us have never seen, with entire cities mandating nightly curfews days at a time. Being silent about discrimination and injustice was no longer an option in the academy, because its bubble could not offer protection from random attacks that overwhelmingly ended the lives of Black people across all walks of life. Black faculty asked, “Will we earn tenure only to be killed in our neighborhoods and in our beds? What is the purpose of upward mobility if I can be struck down and become a hashtag overnight?”
My Black engineering faculty colleagues rallied together to create a video (see below) in solidarity and as a call to action against injustice in all spaces. Although Black engineering faculty represented only 2.4% of Black engineering faculty in 2018, our stories of oppression are common across all engineering disciplines. Sadly, the stories of today’s faculty are similar to stories that faculty shared years ago as the first or the only. Black women faculty experience sexism and racism to the extent that graduate students don’t want to follow in their footsteps. Those who make it to the highest ranks of the profession often do not advance at the same rate as their male counterparts.
I hope that we have reached a turning point in the academy. Instead of relying on social scientists, political scientists, policymakers, and legal experts to speak about injustices, it is time for engineers, doctors, and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals to speak out also. No matter how few of us there are, our lives depend on it.
