A newly released report amplifies the narratives of staff of color (SOC) in higher education, highlighting the impact of whiteness in the workplace on their experiences.
Reporting on data drawn from interviews with 50 full-time SOC at the University of Michigan, "Thriving Staff of Color: Imagining Higher Education Institutional Transformation" is the latest report from researchers on the CASCaDE Project (Change Agents Shaping Campus Diversity and Equity). CASCaDE, an initiative for enabling equity-minded transformation in higher education, is a part of the National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID) at the University of Michigan.
The early stages of the research project were inspired by Nichole Burnside, managing director of the University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center, whose experiences and conversations with other SOC brought up questions surrounding discrimination and toxicity in the workplace.
“We were hearing about the racism, anti-Blackness and misogynistic silencing of staff of color who when attempting to expose the toxicity experienced in departments and units were ignored or viewed as lacking professionalism or incompetent,” said Dr. Patricia Coleman-Burns, assistant professor emerita at the University of Michigan. 
Amber Williams
According to the report, higher education stakeholders, employers, and managers must examine how racialized structures directly impact practices, policies, and norms that affect SOC.
“While there has been significant growth in diversity scholarship about racial campus climate and equity issues, few studies focus on the experiences of staff of color,” said Angie Kim, a research associate at the NCID and co-author of the report. “Our report shows patterns around how promotional and leadership opportunities, relationships with supervisors and colleagues, and workplace policies either diminished or empowered [SOC] sense of professional agency and expertise.”
The narratives shared by women and non-binary SOC in the report, highlighted the ways the emotional labor and caretaking within a particular unit or department often fell on them disproportionately.
