Community as a Survival Strategy

From Letters from the Lab

When I asked Dr. Nadia A. Bennett what advice she would give Black women moving into educational leadership, she did not begin with certification, strategy, or a five-year plan.

She said, “Find and keep community.”

That answer has stayed with me because it was not just advice about leadership. It was advice about survival.

Dr. Bennett named what many Black women and Black educators already know in our bodies: leadership can be isolating. Education can be isolating. Being the only Black educator in a school, on a team, in a department, or around a decision-making table can slowly wear away at your ability to trust your own voice. Navigating white rage, misogyny, patriarchy, anti-Blackness, and institutional harm requires more than individual strength.

Community is not a luxury. It is not extra. It is not something cute to add to your calendar when you have time.

Community is a survival strategy.

If isolation is one way systems maintain power, then community is one way Black educators refuse to surrender ours.

For Black educators, community is part of how we stay anchored. It helps us find language, remember we are not imagining things, celebrate when no one else in the building celebrates us, receive correction in love, get believed without overexplaining, laugh, tell the truth, and heal.

A major part of self-care is community care.

The version of self-care often marketed to educators is individual. Breathe. Take a bath. Go on vacation. Download the wellness app. Light the candle. Take the day off. Stretch. Meditate. Book the massage.

And let me be clear: all of those things can matter.

But a massage cannot believe you.

A bubble bath cannot help you write the email. A wellness app cannot say, “That was anti-Black.” A vacation cannot go with you to the meeting. A candle cannot help you decide whether to stay, leave, rest, speak up, or protect your peace.

Black people have historically thrived in community with people who see us, root for us, want the best for us, and understand parts of our lived experiences without requiring a dissertation every time we speak. Community does not replace individual care, but individual care is not enough when the harm is systemic.

You cannot self-care your way out of racism. Breathing alone will not carry you through anti-Blackness without people who can help you name it. Racial battle fatigue cannot be survived on silence, solitude, and a school district wellness newsletter alone.

Community gives us something different.

It gives us people who can say, “Write that down.” “Take someone with you.” “Do not meet with them alone.” “Send me the email before you respond.” “That is not feedback. That is harm.” “That happened to me too.” “I believe you.”

Community may look like a scheduled gathering, a group chat, a cohort, a podcast audience, a monthly Zoom room, or two people who check on each other after staff meetings. It might also be the person who reviews your resume, brings you food, watches your child, writes a reference letter, or reminds you that your gifts are still valuable even if your school refuses to honor them.

Community does not have to be in person every day to be real. Even virtual community can interrupt isolation when the people in the room understand the language of the harm.

But community is more than proximity.

Being around other Black people does not automatically mean community exists. Black people are not a monolith. We do not all have the same lived experiences, politics, values, beliefs, boundaries, or needs. A group of Black people can be in the same school, the same affinity space, the same organization, or the same room and still not be in community with one another.

Community requires vulnerability, shared purpose, honesty, listening, care, and safety. That safety cannot be defined by people outside of the community. For some Black educators, safety might come through shared geography. For others, it may come through shared gender, role, faith, experience, struggle, humor, or understanding.

The people inside the community must define what safety means for them.

Community is also not the same as a professional network. A professional network is often about advancement, jobs, visibility, titles, opportunities, awards, salary, and career growth. Community can support those things, but that is not its primary purpose. Community is about the growth of the self, the spirit, the voice, the capacity to heal, the capacity to discern, and the ability to feel seen and heard.

Friendship may grow from community, but they are not always the same. Friendship often begins with personal history or closeness. Community may begin with a common cause, a shared identity, or a shared need, and deepen over time.

It can also be temporary, seasonal, or virtual and still be meaningful.

A six-week space can change someone’s life. A year-long cohort can build relationships that continue long after the formal programming ends. A podcast episode can help someone realize that the thing they thought was only happening to them is actually happening to Black educators across the country.

This happened recently when I spoke with a Black woman who shared that listening to The Exit Interview helped her understand that the experiences she and her friend group were having in Atlanta were not isolated to the South. Because she had been taught in the South, taught in the South, and was surrounded by friends who had similar experiences, she assumed the racism and anti-Blackness they were navigating was a Southern Black educator experience.

Then she listened to Black educators from across the country tell their stories.

California. Colorado. Pennsylvania. New York. The Midwest. The South. Educators with ten years in the field. Educators with twenty. Teachers. Leaders. Superintendents. People who left. People who stayed. People who were pushed. People who walked away.

Hearing those stories helped her realize: it was not just her. It was not just her friends. It was not just the South.

That is one of the powers of storytelling. It allows the truth to travel. Someone who feels alone in one school building can hear a voice from somewhere else and say, “I thought I was the only one.”

That sentence comes up often in my work.

“I thought I was the only one.”

“I thought that was just me.”

“I have never heard anyone else admit that.”

“Thank you for being brave enough to share your story.”

Isolation convinces us that our experiences are personal failures instead of patterned harm.

And isolation benefits systems.

Without community, Black educators have fewer people to help name what is happening. There may be no one to help find language for advocacy, prepare for the meeting, look over the email, document the harm, compare notes, or remind us that our voice matters.

That makes isolation useful. It makes us easier to silence.

There is strength in numbers. There is no strength in isolation.

Disconnected Black educators give systems our labor without our collective power. They get our presence without our organized voice. They get to count us in their diversity numbers while keeping us away from the people who might help us tell the truth.

Exhaustion, gaslighting, and lack of support often leave us with three choices: silence, compliance, or exit.

That is why isolation is a strategy.

And community is a refusal.

The best-case scenario for being the only Black educator in a school, department, grade level, district office, nonprofit, or leadership team is that you thrive. You experience joy. Your expertise is valued. Your leadership is respected. Your presence is not tokenized.

But that is not always what happens.

More often, Black educators in isolation experience not being heard. Expertise gets downplayed. Ideas are ignored until someone else repeats them. Leadership is questioned. Advocacy is labeled difficult. Clarity is treated as aggression. Refusing to shrink becomes a problem.

Over time, these patterns can make Black educators begin to question themselves.

Maybe I am not saying it the right way. Maybe my idea was not that strong. Maybe they know something I do not. Maybe I am too sensitive. Maybe I am not ready. Maybe I am the problem.

That is where harm begins to move from the institution into the body.

Racial battle fatigue is not just a concept. It lives in the body. It can show up as resentment, panic attacks, hives, exhaustion, increased drinking or smoking, hair loss, isolation from family, shifts in spirituality, and the slow disconnection from joy. Its impact can be emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, and behavioral.

Relief often enters the room when Black educators finally find a space where they can say what they have been carrying.

Heads nod.

Breath returns.

Someone says, “Yes, that happened to me too.”

Yet the point of community is not only to vent.

Venting may feel good. It may release pressure. It may create a moment of relief. But venting alone does not move us toward wellness.

Healing asks, “Now what?”

Once the harm has been named, the community has to help us consider what comes next. Rest may be the next step. A plan may be the next step. Documentation, advocacy, exit, organizing, grief, joy, or the simple act of no longer blaming ourselves may be the next step.

Community should not become a place where trauma is piled on top of trauma. It should be a space where Black educators can tell the truth and then move toward healing, clarity, strategy, advocacy, rest, laughter, or action.

Because joy is part of the work too.

Racism is real. Racial battle fatigue is real. And joy is real.

Laughter belongs here. So do jokes, music, food, celebration, dancing, storytelling, and magic. Everything cannot be serious all the time. A community that only knows how to hold pain is incomplete.

Black educator community must be able to hold both grief and joy.

It must be able to say, “That harmed you,” and also, “Come eat.” It must be able to say, “That was anti-Black,” and also, “Let’s celebrate your new grant, your new job, your new baby, your new peace, your new no.” It must be able to help us cry and help us laugh until our stomachs hurt.

That kind of community is not new for us.

We were not always this isolated.

Before desegregation, many Black educators worked inside Black educational ecosystems. That does not mean everyone got along. Black schools were not flawless or romantic spaces without conflict. But there was community. Black educators worked with other Black educators. They often lived in the same neighborhoods as their students, coworkers, principals, office staff, janitors, cafeteria workers, and families.

The community was inside the school building and outside of it.

Children were taught by people who knew their families, churches, food, language, neighborhoods, histories, and whys. Black teachers carried more than lesson plans. They carried stories, warnings, wisdom, books, cultural knowledge, and a belief in Black children’s brilliance that did not begin with enslavement and did not depend on white approval.

Black schools were academic spaces, but they were also community spaces. Families could send their children to school knowing the neighborhood was teaching them. Children could learn that they had value, carry knowledge home to elders and family members who had been denied formal schooling, and participate in a larger vision where the whole community learning mattered. The whole community thriving mattered. The whole community having joy mattered.

Desegregation disrupted those ecosystems.

Brown v. Board gave Black children legal access to white schools, but the way desegregation unfolded often separated Black educators from Black students, Black colleagues, Black administrators, and Black educational communities.

Black educators were pushed out. Black schools were closed or merged. Black principals lost positions. Black students entered buildings where they were watched, targeted, underestimated, and harmed. Black teachers who remained in education often found themselves isolated inside white institutions and under the white gaze.

It was not just being left alone to teach.

It was teaching while being watched, questioned, and harmed. It was teaching while separated from the community that once helped protect, affirm, and sustain you.

That historical separation still matters.

Generations of Black people were told not to become educators because their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents experienced harm in schools. Families that once saw teaching as sacred and respected began warning their children away from it.

No Black teachers, no pipeline.

More specifically: no healthy, mentally well, happy, thriving Black educators, no pipeline.

Future generations notice when Black educators are isolated, harmed, and pushed out. They hear the stories. They see the exhaustion. They watch what education does to the people they love. Then they make decisions accordingly.

This is why today’s Black educator communities matter so much.

Wellness cohorts, podcasts, group chats, Black Teacher Recess, Podcast and Pause, community gatherings, storytelling spaces, and independent Black educator-led initiatives are helping us rebuild something. These spaces are part of a larger effort to reclaim what was disrupted and create places where Black educators can be psychologically, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually safer with one another.

I also want to be clear: district-created affinity groups are not the same as Black educator-created community spaces.

Affinity groups can be meaningful. They can provide connection. They can give Black educators a place to see each other inside a system.

Institutions need to stop thinking that creating affinity groups will repair the daily harm Black educators are experiencing.

Affinity groups do not fix racism. They do not undo anti-Black leadership, repair retaliation, or make up for years of isolation, tokenization, silencing, and racial battle fatigue. This is especially true when those spaces are created, monitored, limited, or controlled by the same systems causing harm.

Institutions need to fund wellness spaces they do not control.

Resource Black educator-led spaces without managing them into compliance. Trust the people closest to the harm to design what healing, belonging, joy, and community can look like. Stop treating community as a diversity initiative and start understanding it as part of Black educator wellness.

In my own work with The Exit Interview, Black Educator Wellness Cohort, Black Teacher Recess, and Podcast and Pause, I have seen what happens when Black educators finally enter spaces where they do not have to explain everything from the beginning.

They breathe differently.

They laugh differently.

They tell the truth faster.

They stop apologizing for what they know.

They stop pretending the harm is not harm.

They begin to understand that they are not the only one.

Even after formal programs end, the community often continues. People still call each other, eat together, check in, collaborate, and make sure each other is okay.

That matters.

The people who start a community do not always have to lead it forever. Sometimes the work is to get the ball rolling. Sometimes the work is to connect people and trust that they know how to care for one another. Sometimes the work is to build something that can live beyond one person’s capacity.

That is when community becomes inheritance.

Talking about inherited community means recognizing inheritance as a gift. Someone thought deeply about what they were leaving behind. They believed that what they prepared would make life better for those who came after them. Their sacrifice made room for the next generation to have more joy, support, wisdom, protection, and possibility.

When we inherit community, we inherit gold.

Not flawless gold. Not perfect gold. Something precious. Something refined over generations. Something cared for so that it could live on.

That inheritance includes stories, warnings, prayers, laughter, recipes, rituals, lesson plans, porch conversations, phone calls, songs, books, strategies, and ways of seeing the world that tell us we are not alone and were never meant to be.

Building community now is not only about meeting our own needs. It is about creating something worth inheriting.

It is about building spaces that can help future Black educators become stronger, more believed, more faithful, more loving, more caring, and more giving to themselves and others.

Community is survival because it helps us make it through.

Community is inheritance because it helps the next generation begin with more than we had.

So to the Black educator who is isolated right now, I want to say this: you are not weak for needing people. Wanting to be seen does not make you unprofessional. Feeling harm in your body does not make you too sensitive. Asking for support, affirmation, laughter, strategy, and care is not asking for too much.

You deserve community.

Seek it. Build it. Be selective about it. Leave the spaces that only drain you. Nurture the spaces that help you heal. Find the people who can celebrate you, listen to you, check you, believe you, feed you, laugh with you, and remind you who you are when the institution tries to make you forget.

Institutions must stop confusing representation with belonging, affinity groups with repair, and controlled meetings with community. Black educators cannot breathe in spaces that continue to harm them daily.

Fund Black educator wellness spaces. Trust Black educator-led communities. Stop monitoring the healing you are not equipped to lead.

Black educators do not need to be managed into community. We need to be supported in building the spaces that help us live, heal, laugh, tell the truth, and carry one another forward.

Isolation is what the system wants for us.

Community is how we refuse.

Parent Entitlement is a Black Educator Retention Issue

When Melissa Leonard-Goodlett, EdD. talked about working in a school run by parents, the first image that came to mind was a screenshot.

Screenshots from a group chat I was never supposed to see.

A Black mother let me know that White and Latino parents were organizing behind my back. Then, throughout the school year, she sent me screenshots of what they were saying. They were discussing who would come to my classroom to observe me. They were deciding what day they would show up. They were talking about emailing my principal and my principal’s boss until they got what they wanted. They were planning to go to the school board and make a case for why I should be fired.

By that point, their children were no longer even in my class.

That part matters.

This was not about a parent wanting a different option for their own child. Their children had already been pulled from my sixth-grade humanities elective. They had already been placed with another teacher, a white male colleague who was paid extra to teach those 17 students during his planning time.

But that was not enough.

They still wanted me gone.

They still wanted the curriculum changed for the students who remained.

They still wanted power over what other people’s children were allowed to learn.

The class I taught was a sixth-grade humanities elective required for one semester. Around 90 students were enrolled. This was my second year teaching it and my third semester with the course. I had written the curriculum from the ground up, and it had been approved by my principal.

The course was organized around one essential question:

What happens to society when humanity is lost?

We began with humanity. What does it mean to be humane? What does it mean to recognize the dignity of another person? From there, students named the issues they were hearing about in the world around them. They brought up race and racism, people experiencing homelessness, animal cruelty, women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ identity, and other topics connected to inhumanity in society.

I did not walk into the semester with a prewritten agenda. I built the curriculum based on what the students said they wanted to understand.

But once parents objected, the question was no longer about what students wanted to learn.

It became about what powerful parents did not want taught.

They did not offer another curriculum. They did not say, “Here is what we believe sixth graders should learn instead.” I was simply told what I could no longer teach.

No social justice.

No humanities.

No race.

No gender equality.

No LGBTQIA+ communities.

Something else. Anything else. Just not that.

That is when I understood the difference between parent choice and parent domination.

Parent choice would have been removing their own children from a class they did not want them to take. That had already happened. Parent domination was continuing to organize, surveil, pressure, and escalate until the curriculum was changed for everyone else’s children, too.

This article is not anti-parent.

It is a dream to have involved parents. Some of the best parent engagement I experienced in my 15 years of classroom teaching was simple. A parent attended at least one conference. A parent checked in because a pet had died over the weekend, or because there was a divorce happening at home, or because they wanted us to be on the same page in supporting their child. A parent asked how their child was doing. A parent let me know what their child might be carrying into the classroom.

That is partnership.

That is care.

That is not what I am talking about here.

An involved parent works with the teacher. A parent who is mobbing works against the teacher.

I am talking about the dog whistle. I am talking about the underlying harm that can be carried through the language of concern. I am talking about parents and caregivers who are steeped in white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and racialized control, then use the language of protection to harm Black educators.

They are not trying to support the child with the teacher.

They are trying to control the teacher.

At first, there was a form of protection. My principal responded to parents, and I was mostly in the background. I was not in all of the meetings. I did not know everything being said.

But that did not last.

Within about a month, the shift happened.

I was no longer protected from parents. I was managed for them.

I was told I had to change my curriculum. Not because the curriculum had not been approved. Not because students had not chosen the topics. Not because their children were still in the class.

I had to change it because the parents kept complaining.

No one handed me another curriculum. No one said, “Here is what we would like you to teach instead.” I was told to come up with something else from scratch or find something somewhere, as long as it had nothing to do with social justice or humanities.

Parents could come into my classroom. They could take pictures of my slides. They could email those pictures and their concerns to my principal. Then I would be pulled into the office and questioned about my teaching.

Parents surveilled.

Administrators questioned.

I was forced to answer.

Parents remained unchecked.

When I told the students who remained in my class that we had to change the curriculum, they protested against the principal. Instead of asking why students were upset that a curriculum they had chosen was being taken away, the district investigated whether I had told them to protest.

I was placed on leave for two weeks.

When the investigation ended, it was found that I had not told students to protest. But when I returned, I was told to get to my classroom and do what I was told.

I will never forget that day.

It helped me understand something I hadn’t wanted to understand so clearly: white supremacy in schools does not survive only because of white people. It survives because institutions train people across races to protect power, preserve order, and punish those who disrupt the arrangement.

When Dr. Melissa described a school run by parents, I knew exactly what she meant. Not because I had worked in her school, but because I had worked in the same kind of power structure.

In her episode, she talked about learning to inflate grades because parents challenged grades. She talked about parents pushing back when their children received grades they didn’t like. She talked about a school with status, reputation, and resources, but also a culture in which parent satisfaction exerted too much control over teacher practice.

That resonated with me.

In that same school where I worked, students could not receive lower than 50% on an assignment, even if they never turned it in. Teachers questioned how that was fair. If one student turned in an assignment and earned a 45%, but another student turned in nothing and received a 50%, what exactly were we saying about learning?

I also remember being called into an administrator’s office because quite a few students had C’s in my class. The expectation seemed to be that I would change the grades. I explained that students had opportunities to redo assignments and retake assessments, but because my class was considered an elective, many students chose to prioritize retakes in math, language arts, science, or social studies.

Still, there was this underlying question: Why do these students have C’s in your class?

Underneath that was another question: What is wrong with you as the teacher?

This is where Dr. Melissa’s story helps us see the larger pattern.

A school can be celebrated by parents and still be dangerous for Black educators.

A school can have a glowing reputation and still have a harmful internal culture.

We talk a lot about students being pushed through in underfunded schools. We need to talk more about students being polished through in affluent ones.

Parental power shapes how teachers are treated. It can distort what students are allowed to learn, what grades they receive, how schools protect their reputations, and how prepared students actually are.

For Black educators, that distortion is often carried in the body.

The 2017-2018 school year was when I came to understand racial battle fatigue not just as a concept but as an embodied experience.

I had hives. Anxiety attacks. Dread.

I did not want to open emails. I did not want to go to school. I did not want to hang out with my family. I was afraid all the time. Anxious all the time. Isolated all the time.

The school became a place to survive, not a place to belong.

I would arrive right before the first bell. If I did not have to leave my classroom, I would stay there. I closed the door. I sat in silence. I stopped visiting other teachers. I left as soon as I could.

And I documented everything.

I printed every email. I printed every screenshot from the group chat. I documented every conversation. I placed documents in my HR file at the school building and my HR file at the district level.

I was teaching children during the day and building an archive of my own harm after every interaction because I knew people might not believe me.

That is racial battle fatigue.

It was not burnout because the root of it was race-based.

Burnout is real. Black educators experience it, too. This was different. This was the mental, physical, emotional, and psychological impact of racialized experiences at the hands of parents, administrators, and the system itself.

And it did not stay at school.

My dissertation focuses on how racial battle fatigue impacts the families of Black educators. I did not choose that topic from a distance. I chose it because I lived it.

What happened at school came home with me.

It impacted my marriage. It impacted my friendships. It impacted my community activities. My husband saw that I was no longer interested in going out or hanging out. He saw me living in a constant state of sadness. He saw that I felt trapped.

The school lived in my body long after I left the building.

I left teaching in 2018. It took about four or five years to feel like I had fully healed from that experience.

That is what schools miss when they reduce racialized parent harm to a communication issue.

The harm does not end when the meeting ends. It does not end when the email thread stops. It does not end when the educator resigns.

It follows us home.

And still, I did not stop being an educator.

The parents did not make me doubt my gift. They made it dangerous to keep using it there.

By that point, I had been teaching for 12 years. I had strong evaluations. My students loved me. My community loved me. I knew my work was valuable.

This small group of parents in one semester at one school did not get to determine my worth.

Leaving the classroom did not make me less of an educator.

Finishing my dissertation helped me remember that. Every time I speak about racial battle fatigue in community, at conferences, or in professional spaces, I see educators recognize something in themselves. Some had experienced it but never had a name for it.

The podcast helped me remember, too.

So many of my guests on The Exit Interview: A Podcast for Black Educators have said some version of, “I’m still a teacher,” even after leaving a classroom, a principalship, a dean role, or a traditional school setting. Hearing them say that helped me understand it for myself.

Some people are born to teach.

The school building is just one medium.

I have been an educator since 2006. It is 2026. That is 20 years of teaching, even though I do not walk into a classroom every day.

When we talk about Black educator retention, we have to stop pretending the only question is how to recruit more Black educators into schools.

Recruitment matters. Pipeline work matters.

But hiring more Black educators does not automatically change the parent culture they are entering.

Parent entitlement is a retention issue.

Parent power is a retention issue.

Parent harm is a retention issue.

We cannot assume that because a school wants Black educators, that school is ready to protect them. We cannot assume that placing Black educators in predominantly White schools will work if the parent culture remains steeped in anti-Blackness and unchecked control. We also cannot assume that parents and families of Color will always be supportive of Black educators, because anti-Blackness exists across communities.

The parents who pressure principals are also the parents who vote for school boards, influence school funding, shape school reputations, and help define what districts believe they can risk.

Their power does not end at the classroom door.

So if districts are serious about Black educator retention, they have to ask harder questions.

• How many Black educators leave not because of students, but because parents made the job unsafe?

• What would it look like for schools to treat parent behavior as part of school culture?

• What policies or norms should schools have in place to protect educators from parent harassment, racialized complaints, or mobbing?

• How are school leaders trained to recognize the difference between parent advocacy and parent intimidation?

• What happens when parent voice becomes more protected than Black educator wellness?

• If you are doing pipeline work, what are you doing about the parent culture Black educators are being recruited into?

Because you cannot recruit Black educators into schools where parent culture is allowed to push them out.

If parent behavior is part of school culture, then parent harm must be part of the retention conversation.

To the parents and caregivers reading this, I want to say this plainly: you have power.

If harmful parents can organize to push Black educators out, then supportive parents can organize to protect them.

Parents who value Black educators cannot stay quiet while other parents tear them away from teaching. You have the power to change what is happening in your schools by showing up with the same energy, force, and love as those who show up to cause harm.

And to school leaders: stop closing your eyes to parents who wield their power.

Stop pretending you do not see what they are doing.

Stop forcing educators to change who they are to appease parents.

You will never satisfy parents who are committed to control. You will only teach them that control works.

When parents have all the power, Black educators are left to carry the harm. When school leaders refuse to intervene, they are not neutral. They are choosing who gets protected and who gets sacrificed.

And to the Black educator who was pushed out, worn down, or left alone with parent harm:

I see you.

I hear you.

I understand you.

You were not wrong.

They were wrong.

You should have been supported.

Your teaching was valuable then, and it is valuable now. Wherever you are, you are still an educator.

When the Harm Follows You: Black Educators, Nonprofits, and Racial Battle Fatigue

From Letters from the Lab

The morning before I was fired from my last job at a nonprofit organization, I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and asked myself a question:

Do you want to stay or do you want to go?

I remember looking at myself and answering honestly.

I want to leave.

At that point, I had already changed. I had become quieter. More detached. Less hopeful. I was spending more energy trying to survive the workplace than trying to help transform it.

What made that moment especially painful was that I had entered the nonprofit sector believing I was leaving harm behind.

After leaving teaching, nonprofit work felt like the natural next step. The organization I joined worked with youth. Its mission aligned with the same values that had drawn me into education in the first place. Like many Black educators, I still deeply wanted to serve community. I still wanted to support young people and families. I still wanted my work to matter.

And I think that is an important part of this conversation that often gets overlooked.

Many Black educators do not leave schools because they stop caring about community. In fact, many of us leave because we care so deeply that the harm becomes unbearable. So when we transition into nonprofit work, there is often hope attached to that decision. We believe we are moving toward something more aligned. More humane. More healing.

Listening to Kamye Hugley’s episode of The Exit Interview reminded me just how common that journey really is.

Black educators leave toxic school systems and move into nonprofit spaces, believing they will finally be able to continue mission-driven work without experiencing the same kind of racialized exhaustion they endured in education.

Only to discover the harm followed them there, too.

Different building. Different language. Different mission statement.

Same fatigue.

Kamye described what it felt like to slowly become detached at work after realizing leadership was going to do what they wanted anyway.

I knew exactly what she meant.

There comes a point in many harmful workplaces where Black women stop believing honesty will change anything. So we begin adapting ourselves to survive. We become quieter in meetings. We conserve energy. We stop volunteering certain truths. We do what needs to be done while privately planning our escape.

It's not due to weakness or disengagement; rather, survival demands careful calculation.

Bills still need to be paid. Families still rely on us. Children still need care. Health insurance still matters.

That tension is something my research continues to explore through the lens of racial battle fatigue and its spillover into family life. Racism-related stress does not simply stay at work. Over time, it spills into homes, relationships, parenting, emotional well-being, and physical health.

Kamye talked about discussing her decision to leave with her husband and having his support financially and emotionally. But many Black women do not have that kind of safety net. Some are supporting entire families. Some are staying because leaving feels financially impossible. Some are trying to survive workplaces that are harming them while simultaneously trying to protect the people they love from carrying the weight of that harm too.

And all the while, organizations continue expecting Black women to carry everything.

In our conversation, I said that Black women often become the emotional, operational, and racial infrastructure of organizations.

We are expected to fix things. Represent things. Absorb things. Carry things.

Our labor becomes infinite.

When Kamye shared that she was managing eleven priorities and was told that “everything is a priority,” I immediately recognized the assumption underneath that statement.

Figure it out. Work longer. Carry more. Stay later.

Because that is what Black women do.

Mission-driven organizations often publicly position themselves as progressive, community-centered, and equity-focused. But nonprofits are not exempt from white supremacy simply because they serve marginalized communities.

Over time, missions shift. Funding pressures grow. Leadership changes. Scope creep expands expectations. Organizations lose sight of the people doing the labor while continuing to demand more from them.

And eventually, something begins happening to the workers themselves.

The part of Kamye’s episode that stayed with me most was when she said:

“I was more afraid of who I would become working there than what would happen to me if I didn’t.”

I understood that immediately.

Because staying too long in harmful institutions can transform people.

You continue to compromise and look away from injustice. You act as if you don't notice. You keep accepting further harm and diminishing yourself just to get by..

And eventually, you look up and realize you are becoming someone you do not recognize.

I've observed this phenomenon in schools and nonprofits. I've seen Black individuals remain in organizations for so long that their survival gradually changed them into people they never originally aimed to become.

That is the part of racial battle fatigue we do not talk about enough.

Not just exhaustion. Transformation.

You just end up being a monster.

I did not mean that cruelly. I meant that prolonged harm changes people. Silence changes people. Constant compromise changes people. Existing inside systems that repeatedly ask you to betray yourself in order to survive changes people. I know for a fact if changed me.

And if we are honest, many of us have witnessed this transformation happen to people we once admired. Sometimes we have witnessed it happening in ourselves.

That is why this conversation matters.

Not because every Black educator or nonprofit worker should immediately quit their job. Survival is real. Financial obligations are real. Fear is real.

But because Black people deserve workplaces where surviving does not require disappearing.

If you left education and found yourself experiencing the same racialized exhaustion in nonprofit work, that does not mean you failed.

The education system includes the non-profit sector; it was designed that way.

And you deserve the opportunity to find work that allows you to remain whole. Not work that leaves you trying to gather the shreds of yourself after you finally leave.

Teacher Appreciation Week Isn't A Retention Strategy

This week, there will be messages, free meals, and moments meant to say thank you to educators. The question I continue to grapple with is this: How does Teacher Appreciation Week get us any closer to retaining Black educators?

Since I started The Exit Interview: A Podcast for Black Educators six years ago, I've been asking guests the same question: What do you believe schools, districts, and unions can do to retain Black educators?

The clips below have been dug out of our archives, some conversations more recent than others. Regardless of the year, the answers remain the same because the problem of Black educator retention persists, no matter how many gift cards and coffee cups are offered during Teacher Appreciation Week.

I begin with Kwame Sarfo-Mensah, whose words help us rethink what retention really requires.

From: Learning to Relearn with Kwame Sarfo-Mensah

Kwame invites us to think about retention through conditions. Jenna pushes us further, asking whether those conditions are even possible within the systems we currently have.

In the next clip, Jenna Greenwood names what Black educators are asking for: fair pay, space to exist beyond whiteness, and the ability to be human, while also holding a harder truth: many educators don’t believe institutions are built to offer it.

From: Finding Identity and Community with Jenna Greenwood

Jenna names a truth that’s hard to sit with: for many Black educators, the question isn’t just what would retain us, but whether the systems we’re in are built to support us at all. That kind of uncertainty shapes how Black educators move, what we expect, and what we believe is possible.

Within those conditions, something else begins to happen Black educators are left to navigate not just the system, but the impact it has on how we show up with and for one another.

Kelly Mitchell, in the next clip, speaks to what it means not to be alone, naming the roles of community and mentorship, and the ways isolation and even internalized racism can unknowingly undermine sustainability.

From: The Tax We Pay with Kelly Mitchell

Kelly names the importance of not being alone and how even our attempts to support one another can be shaped by the systems we’re trying to survive. Which brings us back to the system itself.

If isolation, pressure, and burnout are predictable outcomes, then retention requires more than mentorship; it requires fundamentally different conditions.

In the next clip, Kai-ama Hamer makes that plain, naming what Black educators have always needed: to be paid well, led by people who know how to lead, and supported as whole human beings in environments where their cups are not constantly running dry.

Her conversation about Human Development vs. Professional Development is one that we need to keep having in education.

From: A Love Letter to the Bronx with Kai-ama Hamer

Kai-ama makes clear what educators need to sustain themselves in the present. But retention is not only about the present, but it’s also about what we are able to build over time.

When Black educators are not retained, something larger is disrupted: the ability to pass down knowledge, navigate systems together, and shape environments for those who come next.

In the final clip, Langston K. Jacobs, MA speaks to that loss and possibility, reminding us that retention is not just about numbers, it’s about cultivating generations of Black educators who can support one another and turn lived experience into lasting change.

(Re)defining Me with Langston Jacobs

Across these reflections, a pattern becomes clear: retention cannot be reduced to appreciation.

It is shaped by pay, leadership, community, protection, and the ability to exist fully as a human being within the work. It is shaped by whether educators are isolated or supported, whether they are expected to endure or able to build.

Ultimately, it is shaped by whether systems are willing to move beyond gestures and toward transformation.

Teacher Appreciation Week may provide recognition, but retention requires something far more intentional that I know the education systems as a whole isn't willing to offer.

When Black Educators Lose the Fight

There’s a moment when a Black educator realizes they are not just tired… they have exhausted all of their options.

I heard that moment in real time during a recent conversation on The Exit Interview: A Podcast for Black Educators.

My guest Nye Trusty was describing an experience that felt familiar. Her principal and assistant principal walked into her classroom, scanned the walls, and later handed her a list of what needed to come down. Not just anything, specifically the images, symbols, and representations of Black identity, she had intentionally created for her students. Posters of Africa, Malcolm X, and more.

The reason?

They were concerned about whether White students and families would feel comfortable.

She told me what happened next.

She didn’t fight back.

When she said that, I didn’t feel surprised.

I understood.

It’s important to name that the administrators who made that request were also Black women. Because it challenges a common, and dangerous assumption in education: that shared identity automatically produces shared understanding or protection.

It doesn’t.

Representation alone does not interrupt systems that were never designed with us in mind. And without intentional disruption, those systems can be enforced by anyone positioned within them.

I’ve experienced that complexity firsthand.

In my case, my principal was a White woman married to a Black woman, and her boss was a Black woman. And still, the harm happened. Still, decisions were made that stripped away my autonomy, my safety, and my ability to do my work in a way that aligned with who I was.

So this isn’t about pointing fingers at individuals.

It’s about telling the truth about systems and how they move through people, regardless of who they are.

I understood because I’ve been there, and I carry these experiences with me in the work I do with educators now.

I’ve sat in that same space where you know something is unfair, and you also know you don’t have what it takes in that moment to push back.

Not because you don’t care. Not because you don’t know better.

But because something in you has already been worn down.

For me, that year looked like crying in my car before work. It felt like staring at my email inbox, with a pit in my stomach, anticipating the next message from a parent or a principal that would question my competence, professionalism, or my right to exist in that space.

If that wasn’t enough, it looked like therapy sessions where my nose started bleeding as I tried to explain what was happening to me.

My body was responding before I could even fully articulate the harm.

Hives across my back. Constant tension headaches. A nervous system that never got a break.

I know someone reading this understands exactly what I’m saying.

We have language for this.

It’s called Racial Battle Fatigue.

And it’s not just about one incident.

It’s about accumulation.

That’s the part people don’t understand when they ask:

“Why didn’t you say something?”

What they’re really asking is:

“Why didn’t you fight?”

But fighting in schools is not a one-time act of courage.

It is a sustained, strategic, exhausting effort that comes with real consequences.

You risk your job security.

You risk your reputation by being labeled “difficult,” “divisive,” or “not a team player.”

You risk isolation, colleagues distancing themselves, unions that don’t support you, and equity offices that admit, sometimes out loud, that they have no power to help.

I had the executive director of the district equity department once tell me after hearing what I was up against at my school:

“I’m just a token here.”

So when people say “just speak up,” I have to ask: To whom? And at what cost?

Many Black educators don’t leave when they want to.

They leave when they have to, after years of trying to make it work. After switching schools, districts, and roles, convincing themselves that the next place will be different.

In my work and through my research, I see this pattern over and over again.

By the time we reach the moment where we don’t have it in us to fight back anymore, it’s not the beginning of the story.

It’s the end.

And when that moment comes, the impact doesn’t stay at school.

It comes home.

I became a different person in my own house.

I didn’t want to go anywhere. I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to laugh or be in community. I wasn’t the person my husband had married; I was a shell of myself.

He tried to pull me back into joy, into connection, into life outside of that building.

And I couldn’t meet him there.

Not because I didn’t love him.

Because I didn’t have anything left to give.

That’s what happens when you are fighting all day.

Or worse, you’ve stopped fighting, but you’re still inside the system that caused the harm.

Families, partners, and children feel it. And they absorb it with you.

We don’t talk enough about how racial battle fatigue from education systems cross over into our homes, how it reshapes relationships, how it disconnects people from themselves and from each other.

And then we turn around and ask those same families to trust the very systems that harmed the person they love.

Students feel it too.

They sense it when we’re depleted.

They notice it when we don’t have the energy to push back.

They witness it when something shifts in us, when the joy, the advocacy, the resistance starts to fade.

And when we leave, we know they feel that too.

We often talk about the loss of Black educators in terms of the pipeline and representation. But what we don’t always name is that students sometimes lose us well before we physically leave the building.

They lose the version of us that had the capacity to fight.

And when we do leave, we carry something with us.

The guilt.

The wondering.

The question of whether we could have done more, stayed longer, fought harder.

Here’s the truth that we don’t say enough: this isn’t about resilience.

Let’s be real, it’s about abuse.

When the education system consistently tries to strip you of your identity, questions your legitimacy, isolates you from support, and punishes you for speaking up, that is not just a “challenging work environment”, nor are you simply experiencing burnout.

That’s trauma over time.

It erodes us slowly until what is left can sometimes be unrecognizable, even to ourselves.  Sound familiar?

It wears down your ability to respond and to resist.

By the time some Black educators stop fighting, it’s not because we’ve given up.

It’s because the system has taken everything it needed to continue functioning exactly as it is.

It gains compliance and  the appearance of diversity without the disruption of equity in exchange for a paycheck and retirement account.  It gains Black bodies in classrooms, front offices, and superintendent seats that signal inclusion, while silencing the very voices that could challenge the system.

It gains the ability to say, “See? They’re still here and they love it!”

When Nye and other Black educators admit that they didn’t fight back, I don’t hear a sign of weakness.

I hear evidence of structures that don’t just create harm, but depend on wearing people and their families down over time.

Education systems and those who support them from the outside need to reconsider asking Black educators to keep fighting and start asking systems why the fight exists in the first place.

In the end, until we acknowledge that this is not just about individual endurance but about collective harm that extends to families, communities, and generations, nothing will change.