A Critical Race Case Study on Higher Education Racism

This narrative-based study highlights how tenure at U.S.-based historically white universities normalizes anti-Black racism. Centering storytelling approaches, the article situates the author’s positionality and critical race theory-informed methods. After clarifying anti-Blackness across higher education institutions, a non-binary Black academic’s tenure narratives are presented. Critical race theory’s tenets of the permanence of racism and interest convergence guide analyses, clarifying how tenure represented rejections of race-forward teaching and race-focused, arts-based, community-centric scholarship, despite how colleagues—and the institution more broadly—consistently celebrated such work. Findings reinforce how anti-Black racism are structured into the very definitions of academia, thereby normalizing intersectional racism and the systemic exclusion of creative, community-centric Black academics. An additional finding challenges the extractive nature of historically white universities’ false celebrations of diversity as reinforcing white interests. The article concludes with hopes for a systems-wide transformation of higher education towards Black affirming spaces and processes.