To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time…James Baldwin
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from lack of bread…Richard Wright
If you wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down…Toni Morrison
The past is never dead. It’s not even past…William Faulkner
All mesearch is research…Darnell Hawkins
Long before the rise of the Black Lives Matters movement, the mournful lyrics of the traditional African American folk song “No More Auction Block/Many Thousands Gone” served as a reminder of the ubiquity and non-exceptionalism of the loss of black life and liberties in the United States. It takes the listener on a musical journey that images the hellholes of the trans-Atlantic slave ships, the horrors of slavery, the brutal lynchings of the Jim Crow era, and the ravages of the prison industrial complex. As a protest anthem that dates back several centuries, it symbolizes black Americans’ collective memory of the brutalities of white racism and their steadfast resistance. Today, BLM serves as the latest iteration of that centuries-long resistance. The lyrics, alongside the quotes cited above, also remind us of the countless ways that racism maims. Its multipronged tentacles in the United States affect the aspirations, hopes and dreams, economic fortunes, health, and overall well-being of all who inhabit a black body. Both figuratively and literally, many of its living victims are also among the many thousands gone.
During the late-1990s, I experienced what would become an irrepressible urge to retire. It came after nearly 25 years of a quite productive academic career and was early by academy standards. I was in good physical health and still involved in research, writing, and consulting projects, some of which I would complete post-retirement. I persisted despite some initial reservations, and even after hearing the many puzzled reactions and words of caution from caring colleagues, close friends, family, and a retirement counselor. Many emotions drove my decision to retire. I considered how it would facilitate my passion for gardening, and enjoyment of the outdoors and nature. Particularly after my mother died in 1995, my lifelong love of gardening brought a needed solace and retreat. I also imagined having more time to travel.
Although these influences were at play, the urgency and rapidity of my push to retire suggested that other factors were operative. Gradually, I began to admit that perhaps the primary driver of my escapist urge was a delayed reaction to the many decades of racism that I had endured. Preparing for an uncharted future exposed the accumulated anger I had felt over the years in response to the many ways that race had affected my life as a black man in America and my academic career. Accompanying my repressed anger were feelings of disillusionment and frustration. I was a victim of racism burnout.
As a sociologist then working on public health matters, I was familiar with the many studies documenting the effects of institutional and interpersonal racism on black Americans’ physical and psychological health. That is a lesson we are relearning during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, my decision making was much more guttural and intuitive than an exercise in intellect and science. I realized that racism had already affected me and would have an even more significant impact the longer I remained. In that sense, I now view my decision to retire not merely as a reaction, but also as a preemptive move aimed at controlling the damage racism imparts.
I was slow to admit to my disillusionment and frustration because by the standards of the day and in my family’s eyes, I was a success story. The youngest of 11 children, I was the only one to graduate from college. Several siblings attended college but did not finish because of financial constraints. Hence, I was a first-generation college graduate within my family line. My father, a WWI veteran, violated the expectations for rural black males of his day by attending college and was only a few hours short of completing his undergraduate degree when family obligations took precedence. I was the recipient of several advanced degrees, including a post-Ph.D. law degree obtained during the years I was also pursuing tenure. Many sacrifices, hard work, and sweat had gone into a career soon to end.
My self-analysis also led me to second-guess some decisions made during my career, and I wondered whether I made a wrong move here and there. I concluded that, indeed, I had. Who has not? Nevertheless, looking back at more than 25 years, I was satisfied with the paths taken. Moreover, even after much introspection, I remained convinced that race and racism drove many of the negative emotions that l felt. So, in 2002, when I became eligible for my university’s early retirement package, I retired.
In this essay, I describe in very personalistic terms my damaging encounters with the nation’s legacy of racism and its impact on my life, but primarily how they shaped my career as an academic professional. I trace the sources of my own James Baldwinian rage, my Richard Wrightian quest for self-realization, and my Toni Morrisonian defiance and resolve. The story I tell is an unapologetic exercise in autoethnography and mesearch and has as its subtext a decidedly Faulknerian view of the American past. My recollection of past events is unavoidably and intentionally selective. As a story about my academic life, it centers on my educational experiences. I could write other stories about the phases and aspects of my life I have chosen to exclude. They were not devoid of the impacts of race and racism, and those encounters also contributed to my burnout.
They include my interactions as a 6’2” black male with America’s agents of social control, profiling, and surveillance, inside and outside law enforcement. Furthermore, while focusing on career matters, I do not discuss the disruptive white student versus black teacher classroom encounters that are the bane of university life for most black professors and were for me also. I also do not examine how race may have affected my pursuit of all academics’ chief objectives, including publications in the most highly rated journals and meaningful relationships with other scholars via professional organizations and consulting.
To the extent that racism affected my life, perhaps the most important lesson learned during my pre-retirement self-reflecting was an appreciation for its cumulative and additive effects. No one event was a tipping point, but some events are far more impactful than others. I also realized that many sources of my pre-retirement, Baldwinian rage can be traced to events that go back to the now-distant past.
The senior year at my all-black Arkansas high school was a period of much racial unrest and social protest. It was 1963, and nearly a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. It was 7 years after federal troops oversaw the forced desegregation of public schools in nearby Little Rock. On September 15, 1963, just as my senior year began, the nation witnessed the infamous and deadly Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing, raising fears of interracial violence across the South. When I graduated in May of 1964, the critical Civil Rights Act of 1964 was in the works but not yet passed. Even after its formal passage in July, few provisions banning state-sanctioned racial segregation had gone into effect. The Voting Rights Act was still pending.
Nevertheless, the South was experiencing a period of rapidly rising hopes attributable to the era’s courageous protests. My high school teachers and I were not immune to that newfound optimism. For example, in 1963, both the SAT and ACT admissions tests were beginning to be used for undergraduate admissions at U.S. colleges. In the South, they were still not universally required. Black students, even those planning to attend college, seldom had access to them. Following the dictates of Jim Crow, black students were not allowed to sit for them in the same settings as whites when they were administered.
Nevertheless, during the preceding 1962–1963 school year, my enterprising high school principal and my favorite French Language and English Literature teacher decided that I would benefit from taking one of the exams. They paid for and provided transportation to the site of the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT) at the all-white high school. I was seated in a separate room from the white test-takers.
Having scored, to my delight and surprise, in the 93rd percentile range on the non-quantitative portions of the exam, I was strongly encouraged to make plans to apply for college. Like all adolescents, I longed to leave home and explore the world beyond. However, my parents’ dire economic straits would affect my opportunity to attend two acclaimed undergraduate schools: Morehouse College and Middlebury College. In 1962, using his ties to Morehouse, my school principal secured admission to the college for myself and several other students. I planned to enter the school’s freshman class at the start of my senior year under Morehouse’s still-active early admissions program. Unfortunately, the amount of scholarship aid offered was far below the amount of money needed to cover my travel costs, tuition, and residence hall expenses.
Later, during the senior year, because of my interest in a foreign language major, and encouraged by my French teacher, I applied to the elite Middlebury College in Vermont. They had an excellent foreign language training reputation. To my surprise, I was accepted and offered a small scholarship. Diversity incentives were not yet commonplace. Like Morehouse, its tuition, travel and living costs were not affordable for my family. My high school principal then encouraged me to apply to the flagship University of Arkansas at Fayetteville (UA). He knew that my PSAT score made me competitive, and UA showed signs of more openness to admit black students. He was active in Republican party politics and had some inside ties to the school. In response to my PSAT test score, UA agreed via the principal to admit me to the entering class of 1964. UA also mentioned the possibility of scholarship aid.
However, it later became clear that a desegregated entering class of 1964, even at token levels, was not a top priority for UA. Further, once admitted, Jim Crow would have his way. Black students were not allowed to live on campus in the existing residence halls. Past and then enrolled black students, mostly graduate or law school attendees admitted after litigation, were required to live in the small back community in town. So, while leaving open the in-state option despite its restrictions, I continued to pursue out-of-state possibilities by applying to Iowa State and Kansas State.
These two schools were selected because they had already established pipelines and admissions protocols whereby black students from southern states were admitted. Students were able to take advantage of rules designed to circumvent desegregation in the South at the graduate and professional levels. Black graduate students admitted to programs not available to them in their southern home states could take advantage of existing separate-but-equal tuition stipends offered to those northern universities by their southern home states to pay their way. Because I was an undergraduate, such tuition exchange arrangements did not apply to me. Their willingness to admit black students was what drove my interest. I wrote to both schools, and each sent me their application materials. I completed the full application process only for K-State, where I was admitted. The university offered a token $100 scholarship covering only the first term but promised other financial aid in the form of loans and work-study jobs to cover my out-of-state tuition and living expenses.
Suddenly, it was college choice time, and the pickings were slim. UA remained a possibility. However, it was clear that Jim Crow would force me northward. So off I went to a state and school where I had never set foot. To add context to what I describe next, I must note that given the rigid segregation of the South, before my admission to K-State, I do not recall having any interpersonal interactions with a white person in my age range. Separate-but-equal rules made such interpersonal communications a rarity. I also traveled outside of Arkansas briefly over the years to my neighboring state of Tennessee.
In September 1964, after a long 24-hour Greyhound bus trip to Manhattan, Kansas, I would view a quaint, attractive town and a hilly, beautiful campus. It looked every bit as tranquil and peaceful as the catalog photos that lured me to it, sight unseen. The gardener in me, even at that age, was impressed. I loved the campus landscape and the naturalistic look of the campus buildings, most of which were constructed using the natural limestone from the region. I was impressed and excited. But what unfolded over the first days, weeks, and months of my 4-year stay at K-State marked the beginnings of my too often repeated, decades-long cycles of hope and optimism followed by anger and disillusionment resulting from encounters with racism in America. My first venture outside of my Arkansas separate-but-equal cocoon would begin a series of lessons about race and racism that would be learned and relearned throughout my life and career, and now far beyond.
Having taken a taxicab from the bus station with my footlocker of belongings, I arrived at a brand new high-rise undergraduate dormitory. In anticipation of a formal naming, it was dubbed the New Men’s Residence Hall. I was greeted by a residence hall assistant (RHA), who took me to the room assigned to me. A white male student who was also part of the entering freshman class was already in place. Upon seeing me, he left almost immediately, accompanied by the RHA. The student returned shortly after that to remove his belongings from the room. The assistant returned to tell me that the student wanted a place on a different floor, but the undertone of his statement and body language gave another message, namely that my race mattered. Even at the age of 17 and a bit naïve regarding the world’s ways, I did not miss the cruel irony. On day one of my 4-year stint at Kansas State, the racist sentiments and behavior I encountered were not unlike those that prohibited me from living on campus at the University of Arkansas. I recall seeing who I will call Roommate 1 in the common areas of the new dormitory on occasions during the week of orientation and registration that followed. He avoided any eye-to-eye contact with me for the most part.
Somewhat later during that first day, the resident assistant brought another student into the room, introduced us, and he became my roommate. Roommate 2 was from Olathe, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. He was friendly throughout our time spent together. We never developed a close relationship, but given the freshman year jitters we both experienced, we served as mutual sounding boards. We talked about our classes and other aspects of our newfound college lives. Over time, however, I would discover that he harbored many of the traditional American stereotypes of black people. He frequently mentioned a close relative who was a police officer in Kansas City. The stories that his relative shared about the blacks encountered on his job were used by my roommate to validate the accuracy of the stereotypes he harbored. Proneness to criminal behavior and illiteracy were among the attributes he attributed to African Americans. During such conversations, he always added a refrain familiar to all black Americans as part of their interracial interactions: “But you’re different.”
Unfortunately, the unexpected rejection I suffered during my first day and semester on campus was not limited to the just described events. In the large lecture halls that housed the introductory classes, white students often left vacant seats near the few other black students and me in the classroom while filling the rest of it. And then there was my memorable racial profiling-tinged “Did you write this?” meeting with my Freshman English Composition teacher, a youngish white male. After grading three essays written outside of class and for which I received “A” grades, he called me in for a talk. After confirming that I was the guy who wrote the essays, including the autobiographical essay required of each student in the class, we talked about Arkansas. He said that I wrote well and could go far, but I needed to get rid of the southern accent. I bristled. He gave me a “B” on my final essay and the same for the term. The four essays were the only evaluation instruments. This encounter was the first of many I experienced over the years that demonstrated how racism also reflects perceptions of cultural and regional differences in the U.S.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the world moved on. After one semester, Roommate 2 decided to leave K-State. I left the dormitory and moved to a scholarship house, a fraternity-like setting that offered lowered living expenses and onsite work-study opportunities. K-State had kept its promise of helping me reduce my living expenses. The dormitory was comparatively more expensive than the scholarship house.
Furthermore, all was not downhill emotions-wise after my first-semester introduction to a promised land of microaggressions. One of the consequences of my emotionally and racially charged introduction to campus life was a renewed sense of black pride and resistance that tied me firmly to the protest movements of the civil rights era. Despite my longstanding glossophobia, timidity, and shyness, I became involved in the student government. I also led the charge and completed the paperwork needed to establish a Black Student Union chapter. We students of color used both organizations to advocate for increases in the number of black students at K-State. During my first 2 years in residence, ours was a student body consisting primarily of black athletes and a smattering of black students in the graduate and professional schools.
I spent the remainder of my undergraduate years at the scholarship house. Both there and beyond, music became my emotional healer. In between classes, I would join fellow black students at the Student Union. On the jukebox was Sam Cooke’s recording “A Change’s Gonna Come.” I played it over and over each time I visited. Back at the scholarship house in the common area was a console record player and several albums. I was drawn to a multi-album set of folk music by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Odetta, and many others. Perhaps because of cultural affinities, I was immediately pulled emotionally to the music of Odetta. Her rendition of the song “The Foggy Dew,” which commemorates the Irish rebellion against England, became one of my favorites. On weekends when time allowed, I retreated to that room and listened.
After a rocky start emotionally and academically during the first year, I made the Dean’s Honor Roll on numerous occasions. I also managed my finances. With only modest help from my parents, I paid for my education through work-study, summer employment, and student loans. Upon graduation, I had borrowed $25,000 in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars. K-State became a university that I came to love genuinely. I am a donor and booster even today. I developed long-lasting within-race and across-race friendships in the flint hills of Kansas, some of which continue. K-State provided me with access and opportunities for learning that would only become available for black students at the University of Arkansas many years later.
This accounting here of my early years at K-State is undoubtedly about the feelings of surprise, confusion, and disillusionment I felt during the first days and months away from my Arkansas emotional safety net. My vivid recall of them provides evidence of their emotional impact. However, my retrospective contrasting of two roommates and the regional shift involved in my Arkansas-to-Kansas trek are instructive in other ways. They provide insights into the complexities involved in defining and labeling racism, whether interpersonal or systemic. In many ways, my Roommate 1 is an easy target for revulsion. The mass media are replete with stories of whites behaving in ways like his and those in my lecture classrooms. However, as I would soon discover, the world of academia is mostly populated by the likes of my Roommate 2 and my English Composition teacher. The harms and psychological damages resulting from racism arise result from actions and interactions that are ordinary and commonplace. However, they occur within the boundaries of well-defined and racialized social systems and organizational structures.
The years between 1968, when I left K-State, and the termination of my sociology Ph.D. in 1976 saw enormous change in American society and higher education. Many of those changes were in response to a period of racial unrest, not unlike what we see today. These changes would profoundly affect my career. I was a beneficiary of these social transformations, and as I would later learn, I was also a victim of sorts. Those changes included:
- Increases in the numbers of blacks and other students of color in colleges and universities, including graduate and professional programs,
- Stepped up faculty recruitment efforts and the establishment of programs designed to increase hiring opportunities for peoples of color and white women, and
- The establishment of university ethnic studies programs and departments aimed at the retention of students of color as well as the enhancement of faculty diversity
After K-State, I landed in Michigan, a state where I spent some of the most emotionally rewarding and satisfying years of my personal life and career. Motivated by the ongoing civil rights movement of the era and seeking to escape a Vietnam War call-up, I applied for an internship in the National Teacher Corps. It was part of the War on Poverty and designed to recruit and train young college graduates without education degrees for teaching careers in economically distressed urban and rural communities. I was assigned to the inner-city Detroit program.
I was part of an intern team that included another black male, a white female, and a white male, and our training site was at an elementary school on the city’s near east side. The school’s student body was about 99% black. The principal was white, and most of the teachers were black females. As part of our internship, we worked within the schools during the day and took night classes to pursue a graduate-level degree in Education at Wayne State University. Most interns lived in apartment complexes near the city’s campus. One of my first encounters with racism as the term began occurred within the context of campus life. For evening classes, interns were required to enter the campus through a staffed security gate, which likely became salient in response to the city’s race riots of 1967 and 1968. Our racially mixed teams often met as a large group in the parking lot outside the gate. On repeated occasions when I entered with white interns, I was asked to show my identification cards while the white females and males were not asked to do so. Welcome to Michigan, or was I in Arkansas or Kansas?
The onsite interactions with students and teachers at the school to which my team and I were assigned were the most satisfying part of the internship. However, one race-linked experience remains ensconced in my brain. It is one that illuminates in many ways the historical and psycho-emotional underpinnings of the current Black Lives Matter movement. My interns team was encouraged to expose students to materials outside the standard curriculum. As part of the social consciousness-raising efforts of the era, we prepared a series of lectures for fourth through sixth graders on African American history. I chose to lead a discussion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In rather detailed and graphic terms, I described the horrors of the Middle Passage. My discussion of the jampacked and inhuman living quarters on the ships caused quite a stir and a strong emotional response among the kids.
The pre-adolescent aggressive boys in the class quickly asked: Why didn’t they fight back? Other questions underscored their comprehension of the lessons we intended to impart. They asked: How did they get their food? How did they go to the bathroom? The latter became the subject of some laughter but also statements that reflected the kids’ understanding of the brutality and inhumaneness of the slave trade. As part of their reactions to the bathroom question, one kid used the S-word to describe human feces. Several days later, after a complaint from the parent of one of the few white students in the class, I was summoned to the principal’s office. He had been told that I had used the S-word. Even though convinced that I had not, he complained to our supervisor and began to monitor our team’s interactions with the students.
The white female parent who reported the incident was a frequent complainer, especially about race matters. She was a 1960s era version of today’s “Karen.” She later sought unsuccessfully to remove our team from the school. However, when she was joined by a few black parents in asking whether we were a bit too radical, we had to cancel our future student assembles on black history. Then, as now, this incident highlights Americans’ failure to come to grips with the savagery of past and present-day white racism in America.
Although race did not affect my overall learning experience at Wayne State, an intellectualized form of racism characterized some of my coursework. Particularly given the Teacher Corps’ intent and purpose, instructors used much course time to engage us in discussions of the causes of black-white and social class differences in educational attainment. I was appalled by the assumptions and assertions made within what had become known as the theory of cultural deprivation. As opposed to theories of inherent, biologically grounded race deficits, it proposed the existence of race-linked cultural deficits. In my Master’s Degree thesis, I offered a scathing attack on the notion and its utility for explaining race differences. This thesis was my way of taking a critical sociology of knowledge approach to the study of social problems long before becoming a sociologist.
After finishing the internship, I completed 2 years as a teacher in the same school. Interactions with my third and fourth-grade students were exhilarating and emotionally uplifting. During the internship, we were encouraged to get to know our students’ parents. During my 2 years of teaching, I met with most of my students’ parents and visited many in their homes. I spent many weekends taking my students on non-school sponsored field trips to places beyond their neighborhoods. However, my confrontations with an unimaginative school administration and inflexible teachers’ union bureaucracy took its toll. It was time to move on.
At that point, my interest had shifted squarely to the social sciences away from the humanities, my undergraduate major. Once again a standardized test score would pave the way forward. I decided to take the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and apply to graduate school. With numbers not being my forte, I scored at the 90 percentile on the non-quantitative part of the exam and even got a reasonably respectable score on the quantitative portion. I was admitted to the Anthropology graduate program at Columbia University and the Sociology program at Michigan. Because of proximity and familiarity with the state, I chose UM and entered the Fall of 1972.
What followed was indeed an exhilarating and rewarding educational experience. In response to the BLM-like protests of that era, Michigan was among those major research universities that had begun a full-fledged effort to diversify its student body and faculty. My fellow students and I joined effeorts aimed at promoting inclusion and diversity. With a university fellowship, teaching assistantship, and a Ford Foundation Fellows award, I avoided the accumulation of loan debt that funded my undergraduate years. Perhaps more importantly, the UM Department of Sociology had begun to recruit a genuinely diverse group of graduate students that included blacks, Latinx and Asian Americans, and many white females. The same eclectic mix was found in other graduate and professional school units across the campus and made for a period of learning and cultural enrichment I will never forget. Diversity matters.
One outcome of the trends I noted earlier was a very noticeable 1970s uptick in the numbers of black faculty at America’s colleges and universities. I was among them. Often gone unnoticed, however, in descriptions of the academy during this era of change are the beginnings of a concerted effort on the part of university faculty to increase their pay and compensation. The on-the-ground realities of university campus life meant that these dual objectives—attempts to achieve diversity and increased compensation for academic labor—often collided head-on to create a form of institutional/organizational racism that affected how faculty of color were recruited and placed. It has now persisted for decades in our universities. In many ways, academia entered a world of competing interests and demands that would result in what I will call the New Separate but Equal.
As course offerings and administrative structures bearing such monikers as African American, black, ethnic, and women’s studies appeared across the American university landscape, administrators initially saw these as appeasement mechanisms aimed at student activists. They were often severely underfunded, and their faculties were held in low esteem compared to those working in the traditional disciplines. Faculty members within them were often underpaid, and many were the equivalent of today’s growing ranks of untenured instructors and adjuncts. Nevertheless, they counted for advertising the universities’ diversity and affirmative action successes, often via offices and officers of Affirmative Action.
Over time, however, especially for African Americans, declines in the numbers of students enrolled in doctoral programs created a market scarcity as ethnic studies programs began to increase. Blacks were also more aggressively recruited for posts in traditional departments. In response to supply and demand considerations, newly hired black faculty coming into Black Studies programs demanded higher salaries, tenure clocks, and often a joint appointment with one of the traditional disciplines. These market forces also impacted the starting salaries of black faculty recruited for academic assignments entirely within the traditional disciplines. These same market forces also led to higher pay for white males. Universities increasingly showed a willingness to compete aggressively for cream-of-the-crop white scholars. Both trends set into motion the old-guard versus new-recruit resentments that still rattle the halls of academia. Nevertheless, given the nation’s legacy of racism, this collision of market forces within academia affected black faculty in ways that were different from the ways it affected white males and perhaps white women. Race mattered. We had entered an era of “presumed incompetence” and “unjust deserts.”
These social forces significantly impacted my academic career, particularly in the second half of it. However, there were signs of change even earlier. At the University of North Carolina, my first place of employment, I witnessed how resentments toward a highly recruited white male department head affected interpersonal interactions. The white male, a highly published, entrepreneurial, mid-career sociologist, was hired as department head in the late-1970s. He requested and obtained a salary that was in line with the upward drift and compensatory demands of the day, but one that far exceeded the salaries of most of the older, long-established, but still productive full professors that he would supervise.
Both before and after he arrived, the Department recruited a cohort of younger newly minted Ph.Ds. Given the diversity objectives of the day, these included several white males, white females, another black male, and me. We all were graduates of prestigious graduate programs and arrived with hopes of making a mark on the discipline. Almost immediately, the scuttlebutt among us junior faculty was a department head who had a salary more than four times ours. As expected, however, much attention was paid to comparing our salaries to each other as well. My fellow black male colleague had negotiated at his hiring a salary a bit above that of the entering white males and females, and mine as well. Some salary envy ensued, but nothing like what I would experience later. Gender mattered. My white female colleagues complained about their compensation in comparison to their male counterparts. The white males seemed to keep an eye on my black colleague’s salary. It was clear that in a new age of diversity, gender and racial identity differences would be added to the usual contentious salary squabbles that defined departmental politics.
By the time I began my pursuit of the university position from which I would eventually retire, the faculty recruitment and retention dynamics I just described had fully matured as a defining feature of university life. These changes would significantly affect the sense of unease that led to my retirement. The road I traveled to get to my pre-retirement academic position taught me a lot about academia’s inner workings, especially how it had been transformed during the preceding 30 years. The racialized underbelly of faculty life would become much more of a factor in my next job than in my first position in North Carolina.
In sum, by the middle 1980s, a separate-but-equal divide had emerged in academia in response to black faculty recruitment and placement. On one side were departments and programs organized under various ethnic studies rubrics, and on the other were the traditional academic disciplines. This divide would come to figure prominently in determining how and where black academics and others of color could find gainful employment. The second half of my academic career would be shaped by those new realities and would figure prominently in the reasoning for my decision to retire. In academia, as in the broader world of work, the highly structured post-1970 patterns of cross-race interactions that resulted from the unrest of the 1960s typically bore none of the markings of traditional racial animus or the de jure restrictions of the past. However, my K-State Roommates #1 and #2 were waiting in the sideline. They would ride in on the wings of white male backlash to inclusion and diversity.
In retrospect, I displayed during my search for a second academic position some of the same naïve optimism and raised expectations that characterized my move to Kansas decades earlier. I was no longer 17, but I was looking for a fresh start. My naivete regarding the new world of academia in this instance sprang partly from my decision to refrain from job searches during my 10 years in North Carolina. As noted, it also reflected the realities of a changing academic landscape. At the start of my career, I considered myself to be primarily a sociologist, but one with interest in the study of crime, justice, and race relations. However, nearing the middle of my career and based on my record of publications and then-current research interests, I considered myself a criminologist/sociologist/lawyer. Hence, I looked for jobs fitting those disciplinary labels. At the time of my application for the second and last academic appointment, I had obtained a law degree. I was the recipient of a major National Science Foundation research grant on North Carolina prison history.
After spending my formative years as a scholar in a sociology department, I was ready for a change. I wanted to hone my skills and conduct research in a setting that included like-minded researchers who studied crime and the administration of justice. For 2 years before I departed from North Carolina in 1986, I began to test the waters. Despite my credentials, I would receive very few follow-ups to my inquiries regarding jobs strictly in criminology and criminal justice. Moreover, consistent with the workings of the emerging trends I just described, when I did get a “bite,” it was usually in the ethnic studies arena.
Two interconnected sets of forces were at work. The first was the rise of ethnic studies, as earlier described. Also, there were the affirmative action and diversity goals and agendas of the period. Unlike during my North Carolina appointment in 1976, 10 years later, most major research universities had begun to view the hiring of black academics as “targeted” recruitment. Often such faculty hiring decisions were linked to designated monetary set-asides. In pursuit of an increase in faculty diversity, academic departments could target and hire black faculty without necessarily waiting for the usual placement of a call for applications. Thus, the hiring of people of color was, in many ways, not part of the formally advertised “mainstream” hiring processes. Increasingly, academic departments began to view the officially proclaimed open positions as opportunities for the hiring of whites, typically males. If the university simultaneously announced open positions in ethnic studies, this perception was heightened. Such was the new academic hiring landscape when I began my search for a second job around 1985.
Ethnic studies would rule the day. My first interview was for a job that appeared to be a targeted hire position. I was invited to visit a small town, southern, predominantly white state university that was seeking faculty who would serve as affiliates within a fledgling race studies institute. I wondered whether my credentials fit their needs but visited. The visit was pleasant. However, although they were prepared to formalize an offer, I chose not to pursue the opportunity because the university lacked colleagues who shared my crime studies interests.
My next interview was in response to a job opening at a large, northeastern state university. The advertised position matched my credentials perfectly—crime, law, history. Everyone was friendly, the mandatory lecture went well, and both students and faculty seemed to be impressed with my prison history research. However, during the meeting at day’s end with the department head and college Dean, it became clear that the latter wanted to pursue two hires. The Dean saw with me the opportunity to increase the faculty within his African American Studies program that they were just getting underway. Indeed, they asked if I might be willing to chair the program. After promising to get back, I chose not to pursue the opportunities because I did not want to be a department head. Such duties would take away the chance to extend and strengthen my work in criminology.
My final job application was in response to an advertised position in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). It, too, seemed like a perfect match for my training and research interests. Training in both law and the study of crime and justice were listed as qualifying assets. Because I had earned both a law degree and a doctorate, I thought I would be highly competitive. I applied but got no immediate response, even one indicating the receipt of an application. It was never responded to by the department. Instead, later I would hear from the newly appointed head of the Black Studies Department. He invited me to visit the campus and meet with his faculty and that of Sociology. After a pleasant visit with those two faculties, I was offered a position. The majority appointment would be in Black Studies (later, African American Studies) with only a quarter-time appointment in Sociology and no formal affiliation with the school’s Criminal Justice Department. After some initial hesitation, I accepted the position based partly on the idea that meaningful collaborations could occur with both sociologists and criminologists on campus once I was on board despite the actions of the Criminal Justice Department.
My 15-year stint within the Department of African American Studies would prove to be quite rewarding. Working within a racially and gender diverse faculty that included African and American History, Creative Writing, English Literature, Gender Studies, Political Science, and Psychology would significantly broaden my worldview and enrich my sociological and criminological research. Despite the often-onerous undergraduate level teaching demands and joint appointments held by me and most of the others in the department, we established and maintained very amicable collegial relationships.
On the other hand, the same could not be said of my ties to the two disciplines at the heart of my career, criminal justice, and sociology. Moreover, it would soon become quite evident that race and racism mattered immensely. These would contribute to what I now view as my mostly unsuccessful effort to establish meaningful and career-enhancing relationships with the faculties of those two departments. The difficulties involved in managing joint appointments and establishing truly collaborative relationships across the boundaries of academic hiring units are well known. Both require the management of competing allegiances and the management of egos.
On the other hand, once race enters the mix, the odds of success are insurmountable. That was the story of my academic life for 15 years. Race mattered, and its effects were evident from the start of my tenure at UIC.
For example, much circumstantial evidence supported the conclusion that race mattered in the criminal justice department’s failure to invite me in for an interview and their decision to forego a joint appointment once African American Studies showed interest. Once I was on the job, the head of the Criminal Justice Department never offered any explanation despite our person-to-person interactions. I considered the possibility that the Department had foregone my hiring as a gesture of support for the fledgling Black Studies program. However, subsequent actions and inactions by that Department seemed to rule out such non-racist intentions. For instance, the Department refused to offer me a no-cost courtesy appointment. Although many of my Black Studies courses with crime and justice content were cross-listed early on, a formal courtesy appointment only came after many years. Was a consideration underlying the failure to hire, and subsequent actions and inaction part of the new separate but equal dynamics described earlier? As a black scholar, was it perceived that my “place” was a Black Studies position?
Other events later reinforced my suspicion that race mattered in my hiring decision and subsequent treatment by the Criminal Justice Department. In the years shortly after my arrival, the Department was pressured by the university administration to increase its gender and racial diversity. At the time of my hiring, the department’s faculty consisted of white males only. Several were also hired after my arrival. The Department responded to the College a few years after I arrived by hiring a black female at the beginning assistant professor level. As a fellow criminologist, we talked often of our shared research interest, namely criminological theory. However, most of our conversations centered on the harsh treatment and microaggressions she experienced at her colleagues’ hands. She subsequently left, feeling quite angry after just a brief tenure in the Department. It would be nearly a decade after my arrival that the Department would hire a black female at more advanced stage of her career.
But, alas, things also did not go well from the start with the Department of Sociology. The Black Studies department head was able to negotiate a competitive entering salary that considered my salary at North Carolina, their counteroffer, and the research grant funds I would bring with me. Consequently, because my incoming salary exceeded those of some of the more senior faculty in Sociology, my time spent within that Department got off to a rocky start. Universities are well known for their petty politics, squabbles involving faculty salaries, the size and location of offices, access to student labor, and other perceived benefits. However, what ensued was a set of collegial relationships between my university associates and myself that were needlessly much more adversarial, combative, and competitive than usual. Furthermore, race seemed to matter, even if cloaked and concealed most of the time.
Almost immediately upon my arrival, a mid-career white male sociologist who was hired the same year that I arrived began a litany of complaints. He had received a lower salary and complained to the department head and college Dean that his credentials were superior to mine and that he should be paid more. This line of complaints was reinforced and extended when my Black Studies Department head kept his promise of a speedy promotion to a full professor just a few years after being hired. That event set the stage for another round of credential comparisons. Upon promotion to the higher rank, I was told that at least two white males at the associate level complained that their records were as good as mine and deserving of a promotion. Again, such complaints are par for the course in academia, but a significant undertone in both the salary and promotion complaints was the voicing of perceptions of race-linked unfairness and “unjust deserts.” The fact that these complaints coincided with O.J. Simpson trial was instructive.
Such complaints had consequences that would last for much of the duration of my tenure. For example, during each annual pay raise assessment for most of my working tenure, there was almost always a difference between what Black Studies wanted to give and what Sociology was willing to do. Despite some notable exceptions, my hopes for strong working relationships, research, and publishing collaborations with my colleagues in sociology and criminal justice never fully materialized. Nevertheless, in the end, no structural barrier is completely impenetrable. Over the years, I established friendships and working relationships with several faculty members from both departments. A research and publication venture with a white male sociology colleague went well. Furthermore, toward retirement, a criminal justice colleague and I obtained a significant research grant. But it came at the point when I was already planning retirement. Racism had taken its toll.
The fact that several of my colleagues in both departments would break through the iron curtains that separated the separate but equal enclaves that we inhabited gave me a reason to pause. I sought to determine what explained the persistent never-ending complaints of the not-so-silent majority? Using my decades of on-the-job training in racism detection and hearing similar complaints voiced concerning the salaries of newer, incoming younger black faculty arriving in the Department and across the university, their actions became more comprehensible. I realized that for some of our detractors, it was not about the money after all. Their complaints about salary were purely symbolic. They symbolized perceptions of “unjust deserts” and convictions regarding the intellectual inferiority of black people. I had come full circle back to Arkansas and Kansas.
Despite my forthrightness and honesty, my story is a plea for inclusion and diversity and not one written out of a sense of resentment, resignation, and regret. Despite the rage that prompted my retirement, I do not write out of bitterness or a desire to cast blame. I am only one among the “many thousands gone,” and those include the many black academics, past and present, who have their own stories to tell of racism burnout. Like similar movements before it, the Black Lives Matter movement has once again forced the nation to seek a better understanding of racism’s effect on American society and on the administration of justice. Sociologists and criminologists can and must begin to make meaningful contributions to improving our understanding of causes and remedies for its precipitating events.
Taking on this task requires that analysts within each discipline bring both their traditional research skills and culturally informed sensibilities to the job. Both are needed for a full intellectual engagement with the emotionally charged, sometimes nuanced, and volatile issues that BLM has brought to the fore. If the academy’s racial composition and the existing research found in each of my disciplines serve as indicators of readiness and preparedness to take on that task, much work lies ahead. Although the concept of “systemic racism” has become a catch-all descriptor of the nation’s past and present, it remains an under-conceptualized, under-theorized and concept. More importantly, however, much more on-the-ground research is needed to describe fully the many institutional and structural intersections that have given historical endurance and continuity to that which we now label “systemic racism.”
Moreover, to the extent that inclusion and diversity matter for the tasks ahead, much change is needed. For instance, in 2020, despite decades of affirmative action and diversity enhancement programs, the academic professoriate’s racial/ethnic/gender profile remains skewed toward white males. The number of black and other peoples of color, especially at the full professor level, remains abysmally small. The proportional share of positions that are held by African American and Latinx scholars remains at levels almost identical to those seen during the 1980s. Both sociology and criminology have numbers that mirror these national statistics. Does this limited range of diversity have implications for how these disciplines will or can respond to the challenges posed by current racial unrest? Do black academics matter? Do black sociologists and criminologists bring added value and insights to our understanding of, and solutions for, such phenomena as systemic racism, the buzz word of the BLM era?
I am convinced that black sociologists and criminologists offer unique insights and sensibilities that will help move forward the critical research and public policy setting agendas that the Black Lives Matter movement has brought to the fore. Indeed, the work that we do is only one slice of the panoply of responses to and solutions for the nation’s enduring and lethal legacy of racism. However, black academics do matter, even those of us who started as a naïve and untraveled kid from Arkansas who suffered a racism burnout.
But who knows? Help may be on the way. Somewhere in the Englewood community on the southside of Chicago, amid rampant joblessness, underemployment and disinvestment can be found my replacement a few years down the road. He comes from a poor black family and attends a modern-day separate but equal all-black high school. In response to periodic episodes of deadly internecine gang violence and constant police surveillance, he and his close friends spend most of their time in their immediate neighborhood. He seldom goes to downtown Chicago. He has excellent grades and has caught the eye of a caring teacher. Today, a nationwide protest movement has raised his hopes for a brighter future. He/she/they are now making plans to go to college and see the worlds that lie beyond their American Apartheid enclave.
The past is never dead, but future Black Academics Matter.
Darnell F. Hawkins is professor emeritus of African American Studies, Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research explores the extent of ethnic and racial differences in crime and punishment, and theories aimed at explaining those disparities.