Invisible Until Needed: One Woman's Journey Navigating Racism and Sexism in Higher Education on Two Continents

I was spurred to write this book while witnessing the insurrection of January 6, 2021, at the US Capitol Building. As an immigrant who came from a developing country that had been wrecked by a series of civil wars, I was shocked by what I saw on the television screen because not in my wildest dream had I ever envisioned something of this magnitude occurring in the USA.

Having seen the destruction that civil wars had wrecked on not only the infrastructure but the minds of people, where children were turned into vicious killers and ordered to kill their parents, and rape of women was used to terrorize villagers into submission. I had often boasted that, as Americans, we should be grateful that war had not occurred on our soil in our lifetime. What I witnessed on the television screen on January 6, 2021, violated every tenet of democracy. It was what America had often used to describe what happens in "third world" countries, "banana republics." But here it was in living color for the world to see occurring in the "beacon of hope," "the shining city on the hill," the "bastion of democracy." As an immigrant who came to the United States of America from one of the "s----hole countries," I felt a sense of utter betrayal more compounded than the sense I experience every day as a Black woman navigating the minefields of racism and sexism.

This book traces my journey of more than thirty-five years in predominantly White colleges and universities where Black women constituted a small segment of the population, making me very much a minority in majority institutions. As a Black woman, I was often "the only one" or the "obligatory second." And as Black women in higher education attest, we are often invisible to our colleagues during critical decisions or social events but visible to fill two boxes on necessary forms: race and gender.

As Black women, in many of those institutions, we encounter the illusion of inclusion but are jettisoned into reality when we find we are left out of the meetings before and after the formal regularly scheduled meetings and lunches, where plans are hatched and important decisions made. During formal meetings, we may naively think that discussions are imminent and that our input is important, only to realize that the decisions have been made and that the discussion is a sham.