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After I received word of my promotion to full professor this past June — a day after my 39th birthday — I decided to text my friends rather than post the news on Twitter. One of them asked how I was celebrating. I told her that I wasn’t yet. Instead I was making a list of all the people who had tried to destroy my career.
“Wow, that’s heavy,” she said. It was.
But it was also cathartic. Writing the list helped me realize something. From the outside, being a mother probably seemed like the greatest challenge on my path to full professor (the most common reply to my text was some version of “I can’t believe you did that with two kids!”). In fact, the biggest obstacle was actually race.
That’s because becoming a parent on the tenure track (even a single parent) can be managed — with both institutional and social support systems — in a way that racism in academe cannot. In my own case, as a mother with an often-traveling partner, I was fortunate enough to not only be at an institution with a family-friendly leave policy, but also to live in California, a state with its own parental-leave policy. Likewise, I lived close to family and had the necessary funds for child care and other household assistance.
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