Racial Battle Fatigue is described as the physical and psychological toll taken due to constant and unceasing discrimination, microagressions, and stereotype threat. The literature notes that individuals who work in environments with chronic exposure to discrimination and microaggressions are more likely to suffer from forms of generalized anxiety manifested by both physical and emotional syptoms. This edited volume looks at RBF from the perspectives of graduate students, middle level academics, and chief diversity officers at major institutions of learning. RBF takes up William A. Smith’s idea and extends it as a means of understanding how the “academy” or higher education operates. Through microagressions, stereotype threat, underfunding and defunding of initiatives/offices, expansive commitments to diversity related strategic plans with restrictive power and action, and departmental climates of exclusivity and inequity; diversity workers (faculty, staff, and administration of color along with white allies in like positions) find themselves in a badlands where identity difference is used to promote institutional values while at the same time creating unimaginable work spaces for these workers.

Racial Battle Fatigue in Faculty examines the challenges faced by diverse faculty members in colleges and universities. Highlighting the experiences of faculty of color—including African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Indigenous populations—in higher education across a range of institutional types, chapter authors employ an autoethnographic approach to the telling of their stories. Chapters illustrate on-the-ground experiences, elucidating the struggles and triumphs of faculty of color as they navigate the historically White setting of higher education, and provide actionable strategies to help faculty and administrators combat these issues. This book gives voice to faculty struggles and arms graduate students, faculty, and administrators committed to diversity in higher education with the specific tools needed to reduce Racial Battle Fatigue (RBF) and make lasting and impactful change.

Covering equity issues of sex, race, class, age, sexual orientation, and disability, this work presents creative, nontraditional narratives about performing social justice work, acknowledging the contributions of previous generations, describing current challenges, and appealing to readers to join the struggle toward a better world. Many would like to believe we are living as "post-racial" America, long past the days of discrimination and marginalization of people simply due to their race and minority status. However, editor Jennifer L. Martin and a breadth of expert contributors show that prejudice and discrimination are still very much alive in the United States. Sharing personal stories of challenges, aggressions, retaliations, and finally racial battle fatigue, these activists, practitioners, and scholars explain how they have been attacked—in subtle, shrouded, and sometimes outright ways—simply for whom and what they advocate: social justice. The stories within consist of discussions on the interconnections among equity issues: sex, race, class, age, sexual orientation, and disability. Furthermore, the work relates current events such as the banning of ethnic studies in Arizona and the shooting of Trayvon Martin to the battle for social justice. Other topics addressed include the ongoing problems of white supremacist beliefs, the challenges of teaching about the racist thinking that permeates our media and popular culture, and the harms of aggressions faced by minorities and those possessing multiple minority status. The unique narratives presented in this single-volume work combine the various approaches to answering questions about not only the necessity of fighting for social justice but also the impact of the struggle on its champions.

"Why is it that as we enter the twenty-first century, the nation's predominantly white colleges and universities continue to be settings where people of color feel unwelcome and marginalized? The contributors to this volume dissect a variety of structural and attitudinal factors that are prevalent in the higher education community, organizational constructs and value orientations which seem to hark more to the past than to the future. They comment on the political, social, and economic factors that have shaped academic culture, and buttressed its quietly efficient maintenance of racially discriminatory practices. "The American system of higher education is often regarded as the best in the world. Smith, Altbach, and Lomotey have edited a volume that implicitly asks how much better still it could be if it embraced people of color and provided them with a supportive and nurturing environment, one which encouraged them to reach their fullest creative and intellectual potential. Indeed, this will probably be the most significant challenge that the academy faces in the twenty-first century." — William B. Harvey, Vice President and Director, Office of Minorities in Higher Education American Council on Education, Washington, D.C.

With the goal of building more inclusive working, learning, and living environments in higher education, this book seeks to reframe understandings of forms of everyday exclusion that affect members of nondominant groups on predominantly white college campuses. The book contextualizes the need for a more robust analysis of persistent patterns of campus inequality by addressing key trends that have reshaped the landscape for diversity, including rapid demographic change, reduced public spending on higher education, and a polarized political climate. Specifically, it offers a critique of contemporary analytical ideas such as micro-aggressions and implicit and unconscious bias and underscores the impact of consequential discriminatory events (or macro-aggressions) and racial and gender-based inequalities (macro-inequities) on members of nondominant groups. The authors draw extensively upon interview studies and qualitative research findings to illustrate the reproduction of social inequality through behavioral and process-based outcomes in the higher education environment. They identify a more powerful systemic framework and conceptual vocabulary that can be used for meaningful change. In addition, the book highlights coping and resistance strategies that have regularly enabled members of nondominant groups to address, deflect, and counteract everyday forms of exclusion. The book offers concrete approaches, concepts, and tools that will enable higher education leaders to identify, address, and counteract persistent structural and behavioral barriers to inclusion. As such, it shares a series of practical recommendations that will assist presidents, provosts, executive officers, boards of trustees, faculty, administrators, diversity officers, human resource leaders, diversity taskforces, and researchers as they seek to implement comprehensive strategies that result in sustained diversity change.

A Long Way to Go: Conversations about Race by African American Faculty and Graduate Students highlights the experiences and coping strategies of faculty members and graduate students pursuing Ph.D.s who have successfully navigated the academy despite hostile environments and hurdles that cause many to avoid or leave the academy. African American students and faculty often face problems such as isolation within a white environment, the misinterpretation of confidence as aggressiveness, and the need to work twice as hard as white peers in order to be taken seriously in their chosen careers. This book will assist both doctoral students and junior faculty in successfully completing the graduate school experience and transitioning into tenure-track positions, and will be of great interest to all higher education faculty and administrators who must address the complex issues of diversity in recruiting and retaining graduate students and faculty.

This study looks into how children learn about the 'first R'—race—and challenges the current assumptions with case-study examples from three child-care centers. Parents and teachers will find this remarkable study reveals that the answer to how children learn about race might be more startling than could be imagined.