No More Supertoken: What Does Support for a Black Woman Leader Look Like?

The resignation of Dr. Claudine Gay and the death of Dr. Antoinette Candia-Bailey has highlighted the lack of support for Black women leaders in especially Higher Education. The call to #supportBlackwomen and the efforts of people like Gillian Marcelle, PhD to create a list of what it takes to support us is important.

I write from the perspective of a Black woman leader who experienced enough support to be able to make a difference in their institution. I share my story, partially covered in my book, Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook (MIT Press 2023), of what support actually looks like because it provides a model of possibility for institutions and guidance of other "supertoken" leaders.

To succeed as a "supertoken" leader, one requires three kinds of support: (1) personal support, (2) community support, and (3) institutional support. The most important is institutional support because, especially as a leader, it is the lack of it that requires that your personal and community support systems are strongly activated.

PERSONAL SUPPORT

When I came in 2016 to OCAD University to become the first Black and Black female dean of a faculty of design anywhere, I did not know anyone in Toronto. Other racialized leaders who I served as an early "counsel of elders" told me that it was crucial to get a professional therapist. It was necessary personal support because confidentiality agreements limited what you could tell your friends or family about the stressful, frustrating, and often times toxic experiences that you would both witness and suffer. The risks for harm were especially high because OCADU's call for a Dean was looking for someone who could help the institution engage in processes of "decolonization and Indigenous revitalization."

I found an Indigenous therapist, because the few local Black therapists were overbooked with clients. Having an Indigenous therapist became a bonus because they helped me to navigate Indigeneity in the Canadian context. To counter the daily gaslighting that comes from working within institutions, they provided a deep intersectional perspective on the racism, sexism, classism, and all the other isms that I was facing as a leader with the added responsibility to dismantle those isms.

When they asked me why I felt I needed a therapist. I told them that I needed tools and guidance on how to engage in "the toxicity of the position I was in without dissassociating," which in the beginning I felt myself doing. The work of facilitating "decolonization and Indigenous revitalization" in an institution requires that you stand the very heart of an institution's toxicity. People would call me an angel for doing the work, but I would remember the quote from Walter Mosley's novel RL's Dream "Angels draw up all the evil and all the hurt in the world...Murderers and thieves and times so hard that you cry blood. That's where you find angels." To reinforce the internal strength to do the work, I could rely upon my therapist, a couple of Black faculty at OCAD U who made a point of checking in with me, a family that loved me in the United States, and eventually chosen family in Toronto, to support me personally as a whole person and not just a role.

COMMUNITY SUPPORT

As a "first" Black dean, I understood that my success was determined by how I could build relationships with communities neglected by the institution. There are three things that most communities tell all institutions on what is required to build good relations with them. I followed their guidance. First, be present. I attended major networking forums, like the Black community's First Fridays, and prominent events in especially Indigenous and Black communities, to be present in the community. To show up, not as just an individual, but as an institution. Second, share resources. When community asked for space, money, access to students, if it was within my institutional power, I sought to provide it to them with the explicit goal of having them feeling entitled to the institution as a community resource. Institutional departments, such as the Centre for Emerging Artists and Designers and Admissions & Recruiting, were crucial partners. Third, keep information flowing. I established an active Instagram presence with the hashtag #deandrag, joined online community listserves, hired my own PR person who was separate from the institution, and learned who the main community connectors were, so that the community knew what the institution was doing with them. Active and willing-to-be-activated community support was always the balancing pressure point when faced with the lack of institutional support.

INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT

The heart of this article is what did institutional support actually look like for a Black woman leader, so that it opens up possibilities for what other institutions can do. OCAD University had already declared a commitment to Decolonization and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Academic Plan. My job was to support the implementation of that plan for the Faculty of Design. I entered understanding that there are always competing forces within the institution. Some people would support me in doing that and some people would not. My second and third year of leadership were especially difficult, when the faculty and administration began to understand what decolonizing and Indigenous revitalization looked like in practice, not just as an aspirational idea. In that moment in time, it meant Indigenous and Black folks being hired instead of those [mostly white and mostly female precarious faculty] who felt entitled to their positions because they held them so long in the institution. I recognize how hard it was for them to face the conflict between their values as liberal and progressive people and the loss of entitlement to livelihood. And yet, there was a coordinated effort by some faculty to get rid of me in my third year of leadership.

This is where institutional leadership actually showed direct support for the Black woman leader they had brought into the institution to be a catalyst to their transformation. The Office for Diversity, Inclusion, and Sustainability [ODESI] Initiatives and other faculty, went into action to explain to anyone who asked how I was doing what the University was asking me to do. ODESI works as an arms-length body to educate and investigate from human rights, social justice, and decolonization lenses the institutional body. Having an outside body consistently reinforce the alignment of my actions with both governmental policy frameworks and the institution's own mandate was crucial support.

As articulated by God-Is Rivera in their Jan 12, 2024 Essence article, "empathetic leadership" was also a matter of life and death. I had the support of my supervisor at the time, the Provost, who actively took on the heat I had been receiving. To keep the momentum going, they learned to say the things that I were articulating, but could not be heard if I were the Black and female face of the message. It was hard for my ego to hear my ideas having to be spoken by another, but I recognized the care in the action of my supervisor and it helped in creating space for the success of the first Indigenous Cluster Hire, after which the heat on me cooled down. NOTE: I did write the book, Decolonizing Design, to make sure that I could tell my story and it not get lost.

Before the institution reached a critical mass of Indigenous, Black, and POC faculty and administration, which is how I left OCADU in 2023, institutional support came from all the white folks at OCAD University who cared enough about their diverse students to make the change. The ones who were the true stewards of institutional support were those set up faculty reading groups, attended anti-racism and anti-oppression workshops, adapted their curriculum, and generally believed that the change towards decolonization and DEI would benefit them. The addition of a critical mass of Indigenous, Black, and POC faculty, administration, and staff makes it harder for the institution to go back.

Again, I share this story as a possibility model of what other institutions could be doing to support their Black woman leadership. This does not mean that I do not have scars from my experiences. And having left OCADU, I do still worry about the diverse leaders who have taken up the work. Yet, I deeply appreciate the people at OCAD U who supported their Black woman leader and made sure that she had better conditions to flourish, so that the institution could flourish.