WE KNOW BLACK EXCELLENCE AIN’T NEVA FREED NOBODY: HOW BLACK WOMEN EDUCATION LEADERS EMBRACE A BLACK FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY TO INDICT WHITE-LED CHARTER SCHOOLS AND THEIR SPECIFIC ROLE IN INCUBATING RACIAL BATTLE FATIGUE

In this qualitative study, I examined how Black women education leaders (BWELs) not only experienced but critically recognized and resisted racial battle fatigue in white-led charter schools. Through visual-elicited culturally responsive focus groups, electronic surveys, and narrative interviews with nine BWELs, the research revealed how these women consciously identified these institutions as extreme environments that exact devastating tolls on Black women’s wellbeing while positioning themselves as saviors. Drawing on Black feminist epistemology, racial realism, and afropessimism, the study illuminated how BWELs employed critical consciousness to name and challenge how white-led charter schools perpetuate anti-Blackness through institutional practices that simultaneously demand BWELs’ labor while denying their humanity. The findings highlighted three critical dimensions: BWELs’ acute awareness of the emotional-psychological burden of navigating spaces where their expertise is simultaneously demanded and denied, BWELs’ recognition of the physiological manifestations of racial trauma, and the deliberate behavioral strategies BWELs employ not merely to survive but to bear witness in spaces never designed for their thriving. In this research, I assert that meaningful intervention cannot include reform, as these institutions require Black death, spiritual, mental, and often physical, to maintain their coherence. In the study, I celebrated how BWELs’ collective knowledge and naming of these conditions represented an act of resistance, concluding that their path forward required not better integration into white-led spaces, but their own vision and creation of educational environments where Black women could truly live.