Mentoring and Supervision for Women of Color Leaders in North American Higher Education

Reflecting on their mentoring and supervision experiences as Latina and Black women leaders in higher education, this article proposes that Women of Color employees are more effective when supervisors give them space to draw upon their own rich histories and cultural wealth in their professional lives. Viewed through the lens of Relational Cultural Theory, which grew out of the work of Jean Baker Miller and colleagues providing culturally relevant, affirmative supervision is a growth-fostering experience for both employee and supervisor. The tenants of RCT include authenticity, growth-fostering relationships, mutual empathy, and mutual empowerment as aspects of supervision that are particularly effective for employees with multiple intersected identities working in higher education spaces. The authors make recommendations for supervisor training that would allow supervisors to draw upon the cultural capital of their diverse employees to provide healing from oppression and build resilience through validation of cultural assets and approaches to leadership.

The Room Is Crooked AF

Societal perceptions of Black women are challenged by Black women's ability to survive in spaces that have historically been uninviting. Black women's leadership practice has developed in response to their racialized and gendered lived experiences. Through analyzing studies of Black women leaders, research suggests Black women have a strategic set of skills and practices that can be used to advance their leadership positionality. This chapter will describe the ways Black women operate at the intersection of resistance and leadership. Their leadership has become a skill, a practice, and a tool that creates space for themselves.

Politics and Policing in Pagedale

This chapter focuses on the City of Pagedale, which represents an extreme example of how discourses of race and space are deployed in North St. Louis County. City officials in Pagedale pass and enforce ordinances that promote “suburban aesthetics” and white cultural norms, as well as targeting circumstances of poverty and Black culture. They do so using a consistent rhetoric of public safety and property rights, which began soon after the first developments began to appear in this area. Whereas traffic violations make up the vast majority of policing-for-revenue practices in North St. Louis County, Pagedale has historically policed space and property. Pagedale, which made history as the first municipality in the United States to elect an all-Black, all-woman leadership in 1982, troubles many of the popular explanations for the “Ferguson uprisings” and complicates the idea that predatory policing by Black leadership is simply a result of power, greed, or corruption. As the chapter details, the Black women leaders who came into power in the 1980s used visibility to push back against the limits placed on their bodies—as Black and female—yet worked within the terms that had been set by previous administrations and the historical structures of racism and sexism that construct blackness-as-risk.

Mentoring and Supervision for Women of Color Leaders in North American Higher Education

Reflecting on their mentoring and supervision experiences as Latina and Black women leaders in higher education, this article proposes that Women of Color employees are more effective when supervisors give them space to draw upon their own rich histories and cultural wealth in their professional lives. Viewed through the lens of Relational Cultural Theory, which grew out of the work of Jean Baker Miller and colleagues providing culturally relevant, affirmative supervision is a growth-fostering experience for both employee and supervisor. The tenants of RCT include authenticity, growth-fostering relationships, mutual empathy, and mutual empowerment as aspects of supervision that are particularly effective for employees with multiple intersected identities working in higher education spaces. The authors make recommendations for supervisor training that would allow supervisors to draw upon the cultural capital of their diverse employees to provide healing from oppression and build resilience through validation of cultural assets and approaches to leadership.

Black Women: Perceptions and Enactments of Leadership

This critical in-depth interview study examined four Black women principals’ perceptions, descriptions, and enactments of school leadership as it relates to their intersectional identities as being both Black and women. The tenets of Black feminist epistemology and the theory of intersectionality form the conceptual framework of this study. Research demonstrates that Black women leaders’ multiplicative identity as Black and women influences their experiences and perceptions of leadership. The principals’ perceptions of school leadership developed into several categories and two themes: student-centered leadership and perceptions of racial stereotypes and deconstructing perceptions about Black women.

Losing Herself to Save Herself: Perspectives on Conservatism and Concepts of Self for Black Women Aspiring to the HBCU Presidency

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) often come under criticism for being havens of conservatism (Harper and Gasman 2008). This conservatism can be found intertwined in some HBCUs’ presidential hiring processes. Focusing on the lack of gender parity in the HBCU presidency, through a Black Feminist Theory lens, I argue that HBCUs using these practices for the selection of Black women presidents create a conflict of self for aspirants who do not authentically subscribe to or perform conservatism. The philosophical ideas of authenticity, self‐esteem, and self‐respect are explored to explain how these expectations create barriers to aspirants achieving their goals and their authentic selves. Subjecting Black women leaders to these practices oppresses aspirants’ need for authenticity and leads to the replication of these conservative ideologies. I conclude that these barriers, in turn, narrow the HBCU presidential pipeline and perpetuate a lack of gender parity in HBCU leadership.