“If not us, then who?”: black faculty and staff experiencing racial equity trauma while doing diversity, equity and inclusion in the wake of the summer 2020 racial reckoning

ABSTRACT In the summer of 2020, the heightened visibility of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police catalyzed reform efforts in higher education. In an attempt to respond to this racial reckoning, colleges and universities turned to Black faculty and staff to lead the work on addressing anti-Black racism in their institutions. In this paper, I extend the burgeoning literature on racialized equity labor (REL), performative diversity work, and racial trauma to address the specific context around the racial reckoning of 2020. Drawing from 23 qualitative interviews with Black faculty and staff who engage in DEI across 12 community colleges and universities, I find that Black faculty and staff perceived this work to be performative and anti-Black because their institutions did not provide adequate resources and infrastructure to support their increased racialized equity labor. I argue that this increased demand for REL, coupled with the perception that the work was performative, had traumatic impacts on Black faculty and staff, leading to what I conceptualize as racial equity trauma, an intergenerational and collective manifestation of trauma that is experienced as a result of DEI work.