The invisible struggle: An exploration of Black teachers’ experiences with racial microaggressions

Abstract

While anti-discrimination laws and policies have existed for decades, they have not been clearly proven to detect, prevent, or eliminate implicit acts of racism in the workplace. Using the Critical Race Theory and a Narrative Inquiry methodology, this study focused on the workplace experiences of six Black educators to explore how they describe racism manifesting as racial microaggressions and how it is allowed to persist in the workplace. The six study participants shared their counternarratives, which contributed to this study’s findings. The participants, for example, reported racism as being a normalized part of their work environment’s culture and resulted in them feeling excluded, devalued, and isolated. Their experiential reality with racial microaggressions was often rejected leaving the professionals silenced or to challenge the status quo alone. The study’s discussion and implications can support the need to better understand how racism manifests as racial microaggressions and how it affects Black professionals’ experiences and perceptions of their workplaces. Keywords: Black teachers, Black educators, Black professionals, racial microaggressions, workplace microaggressions, racism in the workplace, diversity, qualitative research