Social Justice Field Observation Report

“Don’t go for something that sounds sexy on paper,” stated my professor as she poured my class a glass of her great wisdom at the end of the semester. Truer words never ringed so clear and I wished I heed her advice months prior. I thought I hit the gold mine when I found a high-paying graduate assistantship dedicated to social justice. Sadly, working there as a black cisgendered womyn was a great nightmare.
My first day should have set off an alarm: when I first walked in, I noticed that I was the only staff of any color, besides the student-staff. Perplexed because we were located in an urban neighborhood where we primarily served low-income people of color, I went home and talked to my partner about my first day at work. He rhetorically asked, “they must be aware of that the diversity is bad because why would they hire someone like you,
Social justice work requires one to challenge the status quo, especially those in power. I rationalized that there was always a con to everything, but it did not mean I should quit. My job needed me because who else was going to challenge these administrators on their privilege and their oblivious behaviors toward reinforcing unjust social relations. As the only staff of color, I served as a confidant for students, particularly the students of color. Since I was willing to stay and take on the challenge of pushing for a more inclusive environment, I developed several survival strategies overtime and told myself:
‘No, you are not delusional’: I had to remind myself that the racial microaggression that I was feeling at work was real. Racial microaggression, coined by Chester Pierce in the 1970s, is “the brief and everyday slights, insults, indignities and denigrating messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned white people who are unaware of the hidden messages being