- Dr. Britte Cheng

Dr. Britte Cheng: 90% of the 206 educators who responded to the survey talked about having experiences that they associated with racist beliefs on the part of their colleagues. 84% said that they felt isolated in the workplace because of their race. 83% said that they had had experiences of their colleagues demonstrating fear of them based on their race. And I should just remind everyone that what we asked folks was what experiences they'd had in the past two years. So this is not in their lifetime. This is not over their long careers. This was in the past two years. 82% said that they had experienced racism in the form of being alienated and ignored in the workplace, or having someone make a comment about who they are based on their perceived intellectual capacity as in relation to their race. And then 63% of the respondents reported an experience of racism that was connected to sexual stereotypes and inappropriate sexual behaviors that they perceived as being connected to their race. 52% of the folks who said that they had experienced this kind of racism were female, and 74% were male. And 70% of male respondents said that they had experienced some sort of sexually inappropriate behavior or some sort of comment related to a sexual stereotype. 

We were trying to capture the stories and the sense of what had gone on during COVID, at that point, and how intersectional and how prevalent it is. And it's something everyone I think knows, but to really see it in the numbers never ceases to take my breath away. We compared these numbers to the experiences of racism and oppression that others had reported in other labor sectors. In our survey, the experiences were double what we'd seen in other research of folks in other sectors. We're acknowledging the experience that the participants are having, and the breadth of experiences, the range and the frequency and the everyday nature of these experiences that are really creating deep exhaustion for Black educators.