From classrooms to careers, Black women describe lasting effects of racialized bias

As a child, Nefatari excelled at advanced mathematics. But a teacher questioned her academic success in this area because the teacher believed Black girls were not good at math. Years later, as a research participant, Nefatari said the teacher’s influence steered her away from her preferred field.

Her narrative illustrates how racialized assumptions can have long-term consequences for Black girls’ confidence, opportunity, institutional support and talent development, according to new research led by University of Utah interdisciplinary scholar William A. Smith.

“It was her teacher who basically discouraged her and said, ‘You should do something that you can get a career in,’” said Smith, the chief executive administrator at Huntsman Mental Health Institute and an adjunct professor of psychiatry.  “But here’s the rub. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in music. So for most people, it looks like she succeeded. You reach the top. How many Black women have a Ph.D. in music? Well, she still dreams of what would've happened if she had continued to pursue her dreams and became a mathematician.”

Identified only by pseudonyms to protect their privacy, Nefatari is one of 25 Black women who participated in Smith’s research exploring anti-Black misogyny and its impact on the lived experiences of Black women from childhood through their professional careers.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with participants from across the United States, the study advances scholarship on gendered racism, education, health justice and institutional accountability by showing how early racialized experiences shape later vulnerability to stress injury. It also challenges assumptions that educational attainment or professional success shields Black women from racialized gender-based harm. Instead, the findings show that advancement can introduce new forms of scrutiny, emotional regulation and institutional navigation.

The findings further expand the concept of “racial battle fatigue,” a term Smith coined in 2003 to describe the psychophysiological symptoms—from high blood pressure to anxiety, frustration, shock, anger and depression—racially minoritized people may experience living in and navigating historically White spaces.

“Racial Battle Fatigue is not simply exhaustion. It is accumulated injury,” Smith said. “It is a systemic racism-related repetitive stress injury that develops when people are forced to encounter, anticipate, navigate and recover from racism again and again.”

Smith holds the Jon M. Huntsman Presidential Chair and is a distinguished professor in the Department of Culture, Education & Society and the Department of Ethnic, Gender & Disability Studies. He also co-founded and serves on the executive committee of the Center for Research on Race, Health Justice & Public Policy, launched at the university in 2024.

The new study defines anti-Black misogyny as a structural system through which people, institutions and environments interpret and regulate Black women’s bodies, emotions and intellectual contributions across a continuum ranging from apathy and indifference to hostility and overt hatred. Participants experienced patterned surveillance, disciplinary control, tone policing, academic misrecognition and intellectual devaluation across developmental stages.

 All 25 participants are college educated and 19 held graduate degrees at the time of the interviews. The researchers interviewed the women in 90-minute sessions, mostly by Zoom between March 2018 and December 2022.

 As a qualitative study, its purpose was not to estimate how frequently something occurs in a population or to statistically generalize the findings to all Black women, but rather to explore the participants’ experiences to identify patterns, processes, meanings and mechanisms that may be difficult to detect with a survey alone.

“The in-depth interviews allowed us to trace women’s experiences across multiple stages of their lives and to identify recurring patterns that ultimately helped us explain how racialized gender regulation operates and how it contributes to Racial Battle Fatigue,” Smith said. “The 25 participants therefore provided rich, detailed life course data rather than 25 brief survey responses.”

The researchers identified two mechanisms through which anti-Black misogyny plays out, called “conditional inclusion threshold” and “White racial homeostasis threat.”

“The Conditional Inclusion Threshold helps us understand that inclusion can come with an invisible boundary,” Smith explained. “A Black woman may be welcomed into a classroom, workplace, or leadership space, but that acceptance can change when her presence, success, racial identity, or influence becomes more visible.”

White racial homeostasis threat helps explain the reaction that can follow: increased scrutiny, criticism, exclusion, or attempts to restore the racial order people were accustomed to.

 “One mechanism tells us where the boundary of inclusion is,” Smith said. “The other tells us what can happen when that boundary is crossed.”

Smith’s team intends to continue releasing findings analyzing the qualitative data they have gathered, then move on to a quantitative stage of the research project surveying a much larger population to test how widely these processes occur and whether they vary among different populations, institutions, or contexts.

“In other words, qualitative research helps us understand what is happening and how it is happening,” Smith said. “Quantitative research can then help us examine how often, how much, and across how many people.”

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The article, titled “From Classrooms to Chaos: Racialized Institutional Environments, Anti-Black Misogyny, and Racial Battle Fatigue Across the Life Course,” was published July 4 in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. The co-authors Josephine Amoakoh, Angel Jones, Abena BakenRa and Glory Stanton, all affiliated with the U’s Center for Research on Race, Health Justice & Public Policy.