Ayesha S. Chaudhry and Malinda S. Smith: The Extra Load that Professors of Colour Have to Bear

In Canadian universities, black, Indigenous, and other non-white students increasingly turn for support to faculty members of colour. These professors’ disproportionate – and unpaid – emotional labour often weighs on their prospects for promotion and tenure. In an article published on 3 June 2018 in The Globe and Mail, 2018 Foundation fellow Ayesha S. Chaudhry argued that recognizing racism as a fact would be a first step to improve university culture and the experiences of non-white faculty on the job. 2018 Foundation fellow Malinda S. Smith echoed Chaudhry’s remarks, emphasizing that non-white professors’ emotional labour also “tends to be highly gendered.” “The skills that go into performing this kind of work are undervalued,” she asserted, “in part because they’re invisible and ignored.” Chaudhry and Smith concluded that universities need to acknowledge the extra load that negatively impacts the career trajectories of non-white faculty – and of non-white women particularly.

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