On Being Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired

Because Black Women are Overqualified, Underpaid, and Undervalued

Posted on April 30, 2025 in Blog Posts

Authors:

Shari Lynn Robinson
An illustrated Black woman leans her head into her hands, representative of the anxiety and difficulties Black women leaders face and how they feel sick and tired from burnout.

To put it not-so-mildly, and to reiterate one of my academic and intellectual sheroes and ancestors, I, along with all marginalized, primarily Black, women, am “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”1

Immediately following the publication of my first-ever blog post, “In Search of Rest and Resistance between Dwindling Strength and Vulnerability,” I received several congratulatory texts and a few phone calls. I also received repeated encouragement to explore this off-hand comment included in that post:

I hold conflicting thoughts on why the practice of hiring primarily BIPOC women, and others with marginalized identities to lead these efforts should be interrogated, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

I made the comment based on years of observing the large and steadily growing (for now!) number of BIPOC women (primarily) and others with marginalized identities leading diversity efforts. This is true not only at the university where I work but across higher education. For the sake of my own healing process, I am embracing this encouragement and will share some more about why I believe my comment is accurate and why I believe it should not be the case.

In higher education, white supremacist ideologies value and uphold white, Western epistemologies over ideas that address the lived experiences of marginalized individuals, chiefly Black women. Although Black women are some of the most highly educated people in the nation, and we routinely contribute our collective knowledge to higher education through our scholarship, teaching, and leadership, we are still underpaid and undervalued. We have not always been deemed worthy in the halls of the academy. However, theories produced by Black women, which center our lived experiences, are sometimes valued by others.

It is important to remember and recenter here the collective wisdom and strengths of some of my Black scholar-foremothers such as those in the Combahee River Collective; Patricia Hill Collins, author of the seminal Black Feminist Thought (1990); Kimberlé Crenshaw; Angela Davis; bell hooks; and Alice Walker, who coined the term womanist.

Since my first post, I have been inspired by the work of several scholars who are new to me and who have expanded upon the ideas set forth by these earlier thinkers in examining what Black women lose while we labor. One such person is Sara Ahmed, who excellently articulates my feeling of being sick and tired of being sick and tired in her article “Embodying Diversity”(2009) and her book chapter “Diversity: Problems and Paradoxes for Black Feminism.”2 Ahmed contends, and I wholeheartedly agree, that Black women not only enhance institutions by bringing our valuable personal lived experiences to these professional roles, but that we“do” diversity by “embodying” it. This of course inevitably feeds into feeling sick and tired. As Black women (myself included) continue to risk and sacrifice the most, I continue to ask, who will join us?

The reality that Black women make up a large percentage of those in “DEI” roles—which should not just focus on race but often do!—is a phenomenon that has been well researched, including by M. Yvonne Taylor, whose Medium piece “What Higher Ed Can Do to Repair What’s Being Broken for Black Women” explores possible solutions.

The year 2020 saw a tidal wave of higher education institutions responding to racial injustice prompted by the murder of George Floyd. This is especially true in Minnesota, where I have resided since then and where Floyd was murdered. The deeply systemic, high-level changes that need to occur, such as strategic plans, dedicated funding, and people support for the many inaugural roles that have since emerged, have been discussed ad nauseam without much action. Instead, necessary but sometimes performative examples of low-level changes, which lack systemic action—e.g., book clubs; workshops designed to learn about others’ marginalized experiences but not to explore the learning, un-learning, and re-learning necessary for healing; hosting a few events for Black History Month; inviting a national speaker to commemorate MLK, Jr.; making Juneteenth a holiday; and more surveys to tell us what we already know—continue to flourish. And, still, Black women, including yours truly, continue to lead this work. As I said in my first blog post, we do so because we feel called to this “soul-feeding” and “generationally sustaining” work.

Even so, for this work to have a deeper impact, many institutional and systemic challenges must be addressed and eventually dismantled to be replaced by more revolutionary and liberatory systems advocating for more equitable practices. We have boundless scholarship from which to draw the theories and praxis needed to do the work. We have all the necessary data we need to support the reasons why we need to do the work. We also have Black women and other minoritized groups leading the work. What is needed now are those with multiple majoritized and privileged (i.e., able-bodied, Christian, heterosexual, male, white, wealthy) identities to use their positions of power and join us as allies, accomplices, and eventually co-conspirators toward our collective solidarity and liberation, and not just when it’s convenient. Won’t you join me?

Resources for Further Learning:

Notes

1. Fannie Lou Hammer stated this on December 20, 1964, at the Williams Institutional Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church in Harlem, New York, at a fundraiser organized to support the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s Congressional Challenge.

2. Published in: Educational Diversity: The Study of Difference and Different Subjects (2012), edited by Yvette Taylor.

Headshot of Shari Lynn Robinson

About the author:

Shari Lynn Robinson (she/her) is the sole proprietor for The Traveling Diversity Professor which, for nearly three decades, has developed and provided strategic and equity-based knowledge and skill-building educational opportunities for institutions and nonprofit organizations across the United States. With educational training in social work and anthropology, she also has decades of experience in higher education, which includes full-time and adjunct faculty roles developing and teaching social work and anthropology-focused courses on anti-oppressive clinical practices, TBLGQIA+, and older adults. Additionally, she has held positions in faculty development, curriculum design, critical community service-learning, diversity, equity and inclusion, and inclusive excellence at universities and colleges across Michigan, Massachusetts, and Minnesota where she now resides. In her spare but rare time, Shari enjoys cooking and eating spicy dishes followed by ice cream, though she often enjoys dessert first. She also enjoys growing plants and vegetables, watching British detective mysteries, reading, traveling, and consuming all things Star Trek and Afrofuturism. She can be reached at diversityprof@gmail.com.

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Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.

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