• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

The Professor Is In

Guidance for all things PhD: Graduate School, Job Market and Careers

  • Home
  • Courses & Events
    • How To …
    • The Art of the Academic Cover Letter
    • The Art of the Article
    • Unstuck: The Art of Productivity
    • On Demand Courses
    • Upcoming Live Webinars
    • Free Productivity Webinars
    • Gift Certificates
  • Personalized Job Help
    • Document Editing
    • Quick Reviews
    • Specials
    • Interview Prep
    • Personal Negotiating Assistance
    • One on One Career Consults
    • Testimonials
    • Interview Testimonials
    • Graduate School Application Assistance
  • Productivity
  • Coaching
    • Productivity Coaching
    • Private Coaching
    • Pre-Tenure Coaching Group
    • Ex-Academics Support Community
  • The Professor Is Out
    • It’s OK to Quit
    • Ex-Academics: A TPIO Support Community
    • Our Art of Leaving Program
    • Our Prof Is OUT Team
    • Prof Is OUT Services
    • Prof is OUT Client Testimonials
  • Workshops
  • Blog

What Goes on Inside a Brown Woman’s Head When She Experiences Racism… WOC Guest Post

By Karen Kelsky | March 25, 2020

[This post was finalized prior to the COVID-19 outbreak]

I am delighted to offer another guest post in my series of contributed posts by black women and other women of color. These go up on Wednesday.

PLEASE submit a post or an idea for a post for consideration! Especially related to COVID19 issues, challenges, solutions.

I want to hear from you! Email me proposals or drafts at gettenure@gmail.com. I pay $150 for accepted posts. More information can be found here.

Today’s post is by Dr. Shahla Khan. Shahla Khan is a Ph.D. Fellow at Business School Lausanne in Corporate Political Correctness. She is also an author, blogger, and YouTuber when she isn’t teaching or researching. Life forced her to convert to feminism and she never looked back since. She tweets from @ShahlaSparkle. 

~~~~~

My blog has a heart chat section where I invite my readers to share their stories, experiences, questions and opinions with me. It’s like a millennial version of Agony Aunt.

One reader, an Indian woman of 30, recently wrote to me in a massively disturbed state of mind. So here’s what happened.

She and her husband work in a highly prestigious university in New Zealand. He works as a professor and she works as the IT assistance worker on the helpline.

In a team of 6, she is the only non white person.

Yesterday it happened to be that for sometime she was the only assistant on the helpline. She received a call from a woman who works in the university. Here’s how the conversation went-

“Hello, this is (her name) speaking from the IT help centre at the (university of name). How may I help you today?”

The lady on the other side responded: “oh I think I misdialed.”

And she hung up.

She then called again and again my reader the Indian woman picked up.

The lady repeated her lines and said she may have misdialed again.

This happened third time. Don’t pull your hair out yet, she called the fourth time and by then a white woman had returned to her desk and this Indian woman let her take the call.

From the computer system it was visible that the call came from the same person.

She then revealed her issue to the white woman and her issue was resolved.

My Indian reader was frantic.

Her first questions to me were not what most people would expect. She asked me “am I not worth working there? Am I not good enough to handle a forgotten password situation even though Iam a software engineer?”

I asked her again if she had even moved past the “may I help you” line in the 3 times she picked the call.

She said no.

I asked her why would she assume then that she wasn’t good enough at her job because she didn’t even get a chance to do the job!

She then asked about what we call ‘tone policing brown women’. She asked if her way of speaking was intimidating or lifeless or too loud?

It isn’t.

I then asked her about the general environment and work culture and she said things along these lines have happened before. Hence she is super cautious around her work to the extent of being called an OCD by the same white colleagues. She isn’t like that at home. But at work she is always walking on eggshells.

I informed her then that she didn’t want to hear  “it was plain and simple racism my dear”. It’s not about how competent she is at her job which was her initial worry. Or that her voice was intimidating or lifeless. She is actually a highly qualified software engineer but she is working at the IT help centre because her husband is a professor in that university and they thought it would be convenient for them to work at the same place.

So as usual the wife quits her highly paid job as an engineer and joins her husband at his place of work.

She was deeply hurt by this experience and she said she didn’t even know how to take this and what to do.

I advised her to visit the university website and look at their policy on racism. Whatever it suggests in terms of reporting or taking action, do so.

And guess what she said next. Yeah, the same thing that kept Ariana Grande shut her mouth at Aretha Franklin’s funeral when a pastor sexually assaulted her in front of a million people. She feared she would be ‘making a scene’ and be labelled as a ‘troublemaker’.

People often believe that women in general and specially women of colour are unnecessarily nagging and ranting about trivial issues. This creates a sense of hostility and social abandonment towards those who raise a voice. Others usually are silenced by this social pressure of being likeable and blending in. They give in to the fear of being labelled and oftentimes losing their jobs.

My current area of research is political correctness in the corporate world so I have been trying to understand why political correctness gets so much flack. A professor at a prestigious European university has written extensively against PC culture in his papers from the 2000s. So I decided to write to him and check if his views on political correctness and affirmative actions had changed in the last decade. 

He is now retired but he responded and gladly announced that he is now no more obliged to self censure and mind his language. In his papers he has consistently made generalizations about Muslim travellers should be racially profiled as terrorists or women when get liberated only think about themselves and do not participate in either home making or in the economy, sciences or advancement of human life in anyway. Those generalizations are fine but the generalization he has most trouble with is ‘white people’ or to be specific ‘straight white old men’, which is a demographic mostly used in the context of identifying systemic oppressions, institutionalised racism etc. 

He claims that race specific or gender specific movements harm genders and races. Any time a woman wants a job because of her gender or a person wants a job because of their race, it only makes them look bad. In one of his emails to me, he told me about two women of color that worked for him as secretaries. One Mexican and another from somewhere in the war zones of the Middle East. He said that both of them specifically told him that they don’t want to align to their cultural values and do not want their race or culture to be identified at work. 

While I absolutely believe that this professor was telling the truth and so were his secretaries, he failed to learn the reason ‘why’ those women of color who got a chance to work as secretaries for a white older man in a grand European university, were distancing themselves from their races so fiercely. That’s because they want to do their best to assimilate in the European culture so that they don’t face racism, so no one sees them as an outsider, the flag bearer of race issues, the troublemaker, and so on. 

Millions don’t utter a word when they encounter racism or assault. Whatever the reasons may be but this fear of being tagged is the worst fear and the first thing that a woman’s mind thinks of when she encounters racism.

Similar Posts:

  • Black Women Faculty at HBCUs – WOC Guest Post
  • Healing Racial Trauma in the Academy, Part I – WOC Guest Post
  • When a Cup of Coffee Means More Than a Cup of Coffee: Mentoring as a Woman of Color – WOC Guest Post
  • What Can You Do: Being Black and Tired in Academia – #BLM Guest Post
  • COVID19 and Racism with the PhDivas Podcast

Filed Under: Intersectional Analyses, Racism in the Academy, Strategizing Your Success in Academia, Women of Color in Academia

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Buy My Book!

4.8 stars on Amazon!

The_Professor_Is_In.indd

Get Immediate Help

In addition to our blog and book, we have upcoming live webinars, pre-recorded webinars and other programs that you can get started on right away:

The Art of the Academic Cover Letter
The Art of the Article
Unstuck: The Art of Productivity
Quick Reviews
Free Productivity Webinars

Categories

  • #MeTooPhD
  • Academic Job Search
    • How To Choose and Manage Recommenders
    • How to Interview
    • How To Write Academic Job Cover Letters
    • How To Write CVs
    • Landing Your Tenure Track Job
    • Major Job Market Mistakes
    • Negotiating Offers
  • Adjunct Issues
  • Advising Advice
  • Alt-University Critique
  • Black Lives Matter
  • COVID19
  • Dispatches
  • Goodbye Ivory Towers
  • Graduate Student Concerns
    • Bad Advisors and Good Mentors
  • How To Do Conferences
  • How to Get Grants and Fellowships
  • International Perspectives
  • Intersectional Analyses
  • Makeup
  • Marginalized Voices
  • Mental Health and Academia
  • Ph.D. Poverty
  • Podcast
  • Post-Ac Free-Lancing and Small Business
  • Post-Ac Job Search
    • Careers Outside
  • Postdoc Issues
  • Productivity
    • Book Proposals and Contracts
    • Publishing Issues
    • Writing
  • Promote Yourself!
  • Quitting–An Excellent Option
  • Racism in the Academy
  • Rearview Mirror
  • Resumes & Postac Docs
  • Sexual Harassment in the Academy
  • Shame
  • Stop.Acting.Like.A.Grad.Student
  • Strategizing Your Success in Academia
  • Teaching and Research Statements
  • Teaching Demos
  • Teaching Portfolios
  • Tenure–How To Get It
    • How To Build Your Tenure File
    • Surviving Assistant Professorhood
  • The Campus Visit
  • Unstuck
  • Webinars
  • What Not To Wear
  • Women of Color in Academia
  • Work/Life Balance in Academia
  • Yes, You Can: Women in Academia
  • Your Second and Third Jobs

Footer

About Us

  • Who Is Dr. Karen?
  • Who Is On the TPII Team?
  • In The News
  • Contact Me
  • FAQs
    • Why Trust Me?
  • Testimonials

Community

  • #MeTooPhD
  • Peer Editing
  • PhD Debt Survey
  • Support Fund
  • I Help With Custody Cases for Academics

Copyright © 2023 The Professor Is In·

We Are Redefining Academic Community

That’s why we upgraded our private
Mighty Network.

We are committed to building a community with a focus on productivity support. Every day, in a dedicated space, we offer free coaching advice and encouragement. And the couple thousand people who have already joined are steadily building a supportive and interactive community devoted to that elusive idea of work-life balance.

Learn More

Get on Dr. Karen's Schedule

Get on my schedule to work on your tenure track job cover letter, CV, grant applications, book proposals, interview preparation, and more.  [si-contact-form form=’2′]