Running Toward Reprieve: One Faculty Member’s Experience with Precarity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

It was a Tuesday morning in April of 2020, and I had just seen the news of Ahmaud Arbery, the young African-American male who was shot while jogging through a suburban neighborhood in Georgia.[1] I had been preparing to join my live virtual composition class, as I had every other Tuesday since in-person classes had shuttered and moved online in March. Only today, I struggled to find the words to begin class as usual, as I watched nervously to see whether my husband would make the bend to enter our cul-de-sac after his usual run. He had somehow been delayed, and I had to quickly find a distraction for my children as my class was soon to begin. With the thought of Ahmaud Arbery at the forefront of my mind, I struggled to get through that class. The unsettling reality of Arbery’s death consumed my thoughts and each sentence seemed to hang in mid-air waiting for my mind to catch up. I could hardly think. In the weeks that followed I continued to offer support for my students to get them successfully to the end of the semester, even as the challenges of the pandemic spilled over into their academic studies. What I realized then was the way in which, as a Black woman in academia, I had a far more complicated challenge of finding ways to administer care often when care for my own wellbeing and that of my family was lacking in various ways. The precarity of my own circumstances during the coronavirus pandemic illustrates the very real challenges that women of color in academia have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and that persist beyond it.

The past two years have been a time of reckoning, not only with a global pandemic, but also with the many ways in which the structure, policies, and practices of higher education are woefully ill-equipped in catering to the needs of diverse student populations, staff, and faculty.

For instructors of color, in particular, this has been a time in which a global health crisis and a national reckoning around race came to a head, colliding violently in ways that have been arguably catastrophic to the mental health and overall well being of this demographic, all while the expectation to show up and deliver exemplary instruction to our students never waned. For many Black female instructors, the mental strain of this peculiar moment has been compounded by the role of caregiver for students, my own children, and/or ailing family members, a reality I share and the perspective from which I write. Not only am I a Black woman in academia, working with approximately 150 students per semester at a community college in Texas, but I am a mother and an immigrant, and the intersectionality of all these identities is especially poignant in my understanding of the latent and undeniable expectations of care and emotional labor placed upon my racialized body in predominantly white classrooms and higher education spaces in the United States of America. Such expectations are at once pervasive and unsustainable, and the pandemic revealed the ways in which they helped catalyze a crisis of care.

The care that is expected of Black women in academia is well documented and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing disparities in care. As Anuli Njoko and Marian Evans maintain in “Black Women Faculty and Administrators Navigating COVID-19, Social Unrest, and Academia: Challenges and Strategies,” faculty members of color,

particularly Black faculty, and Black women, are more likely to be coping with family illness, homeschooling of children, unemployment, loss of loved ones, and caregiving while also providing emotional support to struggling students. This encourages the exploration into how Black women faculty and administrators can teach and work in higher education while dealing with this trauma and civil unrest, identify resources for support, and continue trauma-informed practices with their students.[2]

This article shares my experience navigating this dilemma in hopes that adding to the repertoire of the very real and lived experiences of Black faculty will not only encourage support for this vulnerable group, but will help to alter expectations surrounding care work and, ultimately, imagine different ways to care.

Caring for my students has always been central to what I do. After wrapping up the Spring 2020 semester, I continued to offer support for my students as the challenges of the pandemic spilled over into their academic studies well into the summer. This included ensuring students followed through and completed remaining assignments to be able to convert Incompletes; referring students to the right resources through our college’s early alert referral system; and making myself available to validate their concerns and encourage them of their capabilities. Many instructors do this, but as a Black faculty member, I began feeling that this was an inextricable part of my identity as an instructor and what came to be expected of me. Such expectations are hardly ever explicit, though, a point Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha makes in arguing for what they call “fair trade emotional labor economy” in our communities that center disabled, femme of color and working-class.[3] Piepzna-Samarasinha opines that the expectation of femme, Black and brown people to provide emotional labor “can be voiced as a veiled or direct compliment—You’re so competent, right? You’re so good at this, of course we wanted to ask you—but it doesn’t make the work itself less, well, a gendered demand to work a whole lot. When you’re in this gendered situation, you’re also presumed to be endlessly available and interruptible” (Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, 139). Piepzna-Samarasinha’s argument resonates with me because the weight of this unspoken expectation permeates all my yeses even in a time when an occasional “no” was needed. As they assert, “People ask you labor, and “no” is nowhere in their conception of what your response might be” (139).

This thinking informed my decision, a very calculated risk, to take a flight with my then seven-year-old daughter and my two-year-old son in August of 2020, to my home country of Jamaica while virtually everyone I knew was avoiding any kind of travel. Admittedly, as the spring semester of 2020 had come to a close, and with the weight of deaths of both Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor still heavy in my mind and psyche, the news of the violent death of George Floyd broke me. I found myself reeling with immense grief and rage on an even greater scale than ever before. I could not function normally, let alone optimally. And I am not alone. In a “population-based, quasi-experimental study” using “individual-level data from the nationally representative 2013–15 US Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to estimate the causal impact of police killings of unarmed Black Americans on self-reported mental health of other Black American adults in the US general population” researchers found that “Police killings of unarmed Black Americans have adverse effects on mental health among Black American adults in the general population.”[4] My experience confirms this, and the implications are both personal, communal, immediate, and far-reaching. As I plan my lessons, and sign into Zoom, I am plagued with the very real concern that my husband may not survive his morning run or a chance encounter with law enforcement. Every time there is another news story like this, I am impacted. I feel the physical and emotional stress permeate my entire being and I feel myself needing to make an even greater effort to be productive. This impacts my teaching in more ways than I care to imagine. I also worry about the impact on my husband’s and children’s mental health as I invariably carry the weight of my household’s physical and emotional wellbeing with me. There is no compartmentalizing that seems sustainable enough to combat this.

While the various statements from businesses, organizations, and my own institution came pouring into my inbox, I grappled with not having a safe space to grieve. Messages from the college’s president and the dean of my faculty were empathetic and kind, even, but segued into how we could better cater to, and care for, students of color, in particular. I was being asked to care for my students in this moment, but I am not sure I had the right kind of care for myself and my family.

Quite literally, I did not have a way to care for my children physically and emotionally and teach and provide care for my students online. I felt caught in the midst of a multipronged dilemma as my daughter began internalizing the racial turmoil that was fast sweeping the nation. Despite our best attempts to shield her from the graphic video of the law enforcement officer kneeling in Floyd’s neck, she had somehow caught wind of what happened, and of the words he repeated, “I can’t breathe.” My heart broke when she asked me, “What is so wrong with being Black?” and started pleading with me to have us go to my home country of Jamaica, where she says, even now, “she feels safe,” an irony not lost on me since Jamaica continues to be plagued with its own problems controlling crime and violence, though not racially motivated. She had begun experiencing anxiety, having nightmares, and started becoming extremely conscious of her race as a visible marker of difference and inferiority. Indeed, as Jacob Bor et al. found in the same study of the impact of police killings on the mental health of Black Americans, the trauma of police killings not only affects those with direct connections to the victims or those involved in the crime, but extends vicariously as well (“Police killings,” 302). The mental health of other Black Americans, like my daughter, is also compromised. The trauma of radicalized violence is generational.

And so with the fall semester looming, both children at home full-time, and their father returning to work, we made the tough decision for me to book a one-way ticket to fly internationally during a pandemic with two children, get tested for COVID-19 and pray the results returned in time to make our flight, quarantine for the government-mandated fourteen days, and spend the better part of the fall semester with family in Jamaica, which had only just opened its borders at the end of June. For me, the care I needed to provide as a mother was paramount to my professional responsibilities to my students, who also needed care. Further, the emotional labor I was expected to provide my students could not possibly be sustained as we experienced the vicarious trauma of seeing the violence that was being meted out on Black bodies in the United States. Leaving the country was essential to my mental wellbeing and that of my daughter and family, by extension. I’d searched in futility for a place I could talk about my emotions with others in academia who shared similar challenges juggling motherhood, teaching, and the weight of caring while Black. It was not that they did not exist, but there needed to be a well-conceptualized “careweb,” to borrow Piepzna-Samarasinha’s term, that we could access in times like this, however unprecedented—a kind of “responsive ecosystem, where what is grown responds to need” (Care Work, 147). As Piepzna-Samarasinha further contends, carewebs need to be sustainable so they function beyond moments of crises, like in a pandemic that seems to be going on indefinitely at this point (147).

Though the college at which I work reminded employees of counseling services through the Employee Assistance Program, I still felt isolated. Jamaica provided me with the love and safety of family and of a place not plagued, at least in that moment, with quite the same maladies as the U.S. It helped me care for myself and my children so I could be present in mind and body for the 150 students I taught online. It was the reprieve I so desperately needed to survive, if not thrive, during that first full semester online. Indeed, it allowed me to have “limits to my hyper-responsibility,” something Piepzna-Samarasinha further contends is essential to envisioning a fair trade emotional labor economy (Care Work, 147). In the absence of a care web, I left the country to go to where I knew one existed. But this act also betrays my privilege. For a variety of reasons, not all are able to simply take off to an international destination. To quote Jamaican reggae singer Buju Banton: “Who can afford to run will run, but what about those who can't? They will have to stay.”[5] I welcome weaving collective, loving, care into the fabric of our professional lives, but I do not have the blueprint for this. What, as Piepzna-Samarasinha asks, might a community of care look like within our institutions? Might we dream with Piepzna-Samarasinha of ways to access care deeply so we help each other unravel our various precarious situations instead of individually pushing them to the periphery of our professional lives in order to be, ironically, “fully present” within them?

Being present as a Black professor in higher education has always meant showing care and being excellent at it, ALL. THE. TIME. And it is not imagined. On the contrary, it is incentivized, especially at the community college level. As it stands, student engagement continues to be a challenge for community colleges across the United States. A 2005 Community College Survey on Student Engagement confirms, “community college students are more likely than their four-year counterparts to need remediation, to be single parents, to have children, to work more than thirty hours a week, and to be the first in their families to attend college—factors, among others, that make them “high risk.”[6] Almost two decades later, these realities remain true particularly among Black and hispanic students, prompting programs like the Ascender and Black Representation of Achievement through Student Support (BRASS) programs at Austin Community College that serve to provide support and mentorship for hispanic and Black students respectively.[7] As a Black faculty member, I am acutely aware that the very fact of my being and the ways that I show up and show care for my students can directly impact their sense of belonging and the likelihood that they will complete my course and stay the course to complete community college and/or transfer to a four-year university.

In community colleges especially, student persistence and faculty engagement are intricately intertwined and studies on persistence among community college students consistently make this connection, perhaps more so now than prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Increased efforts that many community colleges are making to enrich student learning consistently highlight, among other recommendations for increasing persistence among students, “high-impact teaching practices” and “intentional student engagement.”[8] In longitudinal focus groups with students that the Community College Survey for Student Engagement conducted during the fall of 2021 and spring of 2022, interviewed students’ stories revealed that “staying enrolled in college is akin to walking a tightrope on a daily basis,” with recommendations offered for what might help them persist despite the obstacles they face in completing college (“Listen to Me”). Among the recommendations were increased registration, integrated academic support, and a desire for supportive instructors who made the classroom an engaging space. Importantly, “students were in agreement that they want their instructors to engage with them more— both in and out of the classroom” (“Listen to Me”). One student notes, “I feel like it would really help ease my anxiety about exams, specifically, or big assignments if a professor would reach out to their students more often because a majority of my professors don’t really reach out at all. If they could send out a mass email saying, ‘If you guys are anxious about the test or you need extra help, don’t be shy and come to my office during my office hours.’ I do have one professor who does do that [sic], which makes me feel comfortable enough to do that” (“Listen to Me”). The advice these students give to professors is to engage more, to be more present and available to meet their needs inside and outside of the classroom. This is care work, albeit thinly veiled as faculty support. This expectation also erroneously assumes that faculty somehow has the capacity to truly help those at risk through providing more care, and that this capacity remains stable even in times of instability—but what happens when the profile of faculty members begins to resemble the student at risk, what with caring for children, working, and having no access to child care? My caregiving—my caring for the whole person that is each student—is itself contingent on exactly the kind of support I do not have in both the professional and social systems in which I operate when macro-level events catalyze my need for it. Perhaps another way is possible.

Institutions of higher education are beginning to reimagine ways to better support students and faculty in times that demand more care. Many have made structural changes and have allowed for shifting policies around teaching, engagement, and evaluation.[9] But we must move toward imagining and implementing sustainable systems of care for those most vulnerable in the emotional care economy that is higher education. As the dean of the Liberal Arts: Humanities and Communications school at the college at which I teach knowingly expressed the week following George Floyd’s death, “our mission depends on being genuinely present in our roles and relationships as educators and scholars. No knowledge is disembodied; When the classroom goes dark and the library closes, we and our students have lives to live—or lose.”[10]

I believe narratives like mine are crucial to do some of the very necessary reckoning and reflecting work among faculty members within our institutions. We must think of how to create and engender safe spaces within which we may center such narratives as part of our departmental and institutional lives. At the community college at which I teach, the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Center seeks to do just that. Launched in 2022, the center offers a safe space for students, community members, and faculty to share their stories to “unearth and jettison the deeply held, and often unconscious beliefs created by racism.”[11] The creation of racial healing circles has been especially impactful as it provides “a caring environment where empathy is allowed to flourish and people from all walks of life can engage in courageous conversations about race and personal experience.”[12] Anyone may request a racial healing circle to connect with others and share their lived experiences in an environment that both heals and educates.  

Indeed, instructors need care too. Perhaps placing less emphasis on student evaluations is one way to disincentivize emotional labor in ways that threaten the emotional wellbeing of the one offering care. At the community college level, in particular, evaluations matter a great deal because more emphasis is placed on teaching, say over research and publishing requirements of faculty, when compared with four-year higher education institutions. In their stead, course and faculty reflections may paint a more nuanced picture of the student’s and faculty member’s experience in the course, particularly in moments of crisis, like a global pandemic, or during periods of increased racial violence and political unrest. The Faculty Evaluations Committee on which I have served for the past few years is now piloting the idea of faculty reflections as part of the faculty input form instructors submit in response to, among other things, student evaluations. The new model allows for the unpacking of some of the emotional labor that goes largely unseen and helps offer a way to balance the narrative of the course experience and to better account for the exchange of care between faculty and students. It has the potential to provide a safe space for faculty members to share their own precarious experiences that may have impeded course delivery in some ways. There is a section, for example, that asks the faculty member to discuss whether an approach or activity did not go as planned and why that might have been, encouraging faculty to “report freely on both [their] successful and less successful outcomes,” as “missteps and the changes they inspire for growth are equally important to faculty evaluation.” It also encourages faculty to include “interactions outside of class, during office hours, and through emails” and other “unique circumstances” that might have impacted students’ engagement and overall experience in the class. The tone of such wording is non-threatening and allows for the inclusion of those areas in which care is often given but almost always overlooked. It offers faculty members grace as they share where an absence of care might have impacted performance in pedagogy and in their own ability to care for their students. The insight their responses provide may help administrators better understand the emotional needs of faculty and imagine the right kinds of sustainable carewebs to meet them.

Caring for vulnerable groups in moments of crisis must begin with the acknowledgment that their experiences are differently colored even when such crises—like a global pandemic—are shared. We acknowledge this in relation to our students, but a similar conversation for faculty must be had more robustly. There must also be the understanding that events at the group, community, national, and global levels are impacted and often exacerbated by factors like race, gender, sexuality, and able-bodiedness. Perhaps asking vulnerable groups what they need in such times is something else to consider. In an ideal world, what would care look like for you in the aftermath of a killing of a Black person, in a time of civil unrest? Understanding that the trauma such events cause is, in fact, vicariously spread through our communities, can we offer time to grieve as we would the loss of a family member? How can resources be mobilized for faculty to be able to replenish their emotional well when it has been depleted? What might allyship look like among colleagues and those in leadership? How might we build trust so that such questions may yield honest answers? The excellence that is expected of me as a Black female faculty member, that manifests itself in everything from seemingly inconsequential things like how I dress to greater considerations like how I plan for and deliver my classes, and show up emotionally equipped and available for my students, all rely on things like access to good healthcare and reliable childcare, on feeling supported, cared for, and importantly, on not having to worry whether my husband will go for a run and make it back home alive. Being emotionally present for my students requires that all these pieces remain stable and intact. In this moment and beyond, caring for our students now imbricates other caregiving roles we must also fulfill to children, ailing spouses or parents, and to ourselves. It is imperative that we understand the multifaceted, intersectional and intertwined nature of our experiences, including the unique and often precarious challenges and opportunities they present, so we may best know how to address them.