Crooked Sticks and Straight Licks: Strategies for Womanist Resistance and Resilience in the Dirty South

For many Black women scholars who are committed to social justice, the geographic and symbolic spaces of academia are not experienced as safe spaces, but as spaces of uncertainty and vulnerability. Black women scholars, for example, have referred to the landscapes of higher education as dangerous terrain (Henry, 1993), and have likened predominantly White higher education institutions to slave plantations (Paul, 2001; Ladson-Billings, 2005; Williams & Evans-Winters, 2005). Metaphors such as these speak to the challenges Black women face in academia. For Black women and other women of color, one of the challenges of engaging social justice work in higher education institutions is that such work is often at odds with practices and politics needed for promotion and tenure within institutions that uphold the very racist and sexist epistemologies that social justice workers seek to dismantle (Baszile, 2006). Patricia Hill Collins (2000) succinctly captures the contradictory goals of social justice work and career success for Black women in academia in the following passage. She writes.