Find Your Way Back: Black Colleagues Return to the Erotic

This paper provides an analysis of the effects anti-Black violence have had on return Black colleagues (administrators, faculty, and staff) to higher education after 2020 murder African American citizen George Floyd at hands now former Minneapolis police officers. Riffing off R&B singer Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s song return, “Find Your Way Back” using it as a loose organizational rubric—each section is titled from song’s lyrics—I ask what answers we might find between resignation. The starts with question return: How in hell do university collective trauma? essay centralizes concerns education, positioning us resignation return. It seeks consider (pending return) are returning. To explore this liminal dilemma—resignation or return—the will trace lineage racism located slavery violent exclusion Americans gaining access knowledge. Briefly tracing education’s White supremacy, I aim frame our possible against institution that parodies its paternal line. show characteristic history morphed into insidious, invisible source oppression termed microaggressions. address consequences racial microaggressions, draw psychotherapeutic clinical research microaggressions workers. Mirroring clinicians’ approach addressing race-based problems call feminist scholar Audre Lorde’s notion “the erotic” spiritual power source. look how Lorde explored psychology trauma within her poem “Blackstudies.” Mining other triumphant “Uses Erotic: Erotic Power,” establish comparable counterpunch education.