Best practices for addressing invisible labor among Black faculty at predominately white institutions

The focus of this research was on challenges impacting Black professors obtaining tenure, with the goal of establishing best practices aimed at preventing and addressing these challenges. The approach was conducting an assessment of race-related obstacles Black professors encountered at predominately White postsecondary colleges and universities. A review of the existing literature found that invisible labor, also known as cultural taxation, has long existed in the academy and has been documented in several studies. Cultural taxation is a term coined early in the 1990s to describe labor that is expected to be performed by someone because of their racial identity, usually without formal recognition or compensation (Padilla, 1994). While the existence of this labor has been well documented, an examination of the literature revealed that very little has been written about potential strategies or policies for addressing and preventing this labor on an institutional level. Through moderately structured interviews of Black American tenured and tenure track professors at various types of PWIs, data was gathered, organized, and analyzed. Themes which emerged out of the data are connected to challenges faced in attaining tenure, strategies currently employed to address or avoid invisible labor, measuring success, and perhaps most importantly- recommendations for addressing and preventing cultural taxation.