“Damned if Ya Do, Damned if Ya Don’t”: A Critical Narrative Inquiry Exploring the Gendered Racism Experienced by Black Women Housing Professionals in Higher Education

Between 1999 and 2018, there was an 11% decrease in Black women staff and administrators at post-secondary institutions. This study utilized Black Feminist Thought and Sista Circle Methodology to uncover how Black women reflected on experiences of and coped with gendered racism at PWIs. Participants offered reflections on their relationships with Black women and men, white men and women, and students. Black women shared their reflections with discrimination and a deceptive institutional culture. Black women also discussed utilizing several coping strategies such as hyper-awareness, hypervigilance, enacting personal and professional boundaries, avoiding hypervisibility and engaging in personal and familial connections with the greater Black community. Lastly, Black women discussed utilizing resilience as an unconscious and omnipresent coping strategy. I offer several recommendations encouraging institutions to enact system change and calling for those that harm Black women, specifically Black men, and white women, to reconsider the hypocrisy in their support of Black women. I present a narrative of critical pessimism relating to institutional inaction regarding the mistreatment of Black women housing professionals at predominantly white institutions