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This chapter addresses the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s ethical principle of “First Do No Harm” from the perspective of racial equity issues that seemingly are not obvious to educators or often overlooked in the education of Black children. Two complementary points are made. First, many educators tend to view discrimination in terms of intentional and overt actions, but may not realize how they can and do inadvertently harm children during everyday classroom routines, instructional practices, policies, and curriculum that position African American culture invisible or abnormal. Second, even though teachers might not be cognizant or aware of institutional racism that is endemic in policies, instruction, curriculum, practices, and routines, their involvement in these practices represents an ethical problem and violates the “do no harm” principle. While most P-12 teachers and teacher educators agree in theory with the idea of valuing cultural and linguistic diversity, changing actions, and deeply-seated teaching practices and dispositions can only be accomplished by challenging and disrupting normalizing discourses in the policies that inform instructional practices, curriculum, and the pedagogies used in teacher education programs and in P-12 schools. This chapter suggests that teacher education programs use decolonizing frameworks for addressing equity academic and social issues for African American students. A discussion of institutional levels of oppression and praxis are included. Examples of barriers and promising practices are shared. An overarching theme is that early childhood teacher educators must unapologetically, thoughtfully, intentionally, and comprehensively advance issues concerning educational equity for African American students.

The author has the distinct pleasure of teaching her undergraduate alma mater, Kentucky State University (KYSU), a small Historically Black College and University (HBCU) located in central Kentucky. This university was integral to her development as a young black woman and scholar coming into her own in the early twenty-first century. The author believes HBCU undergraduate experience allowed her to consistently witness successful African Americans as professors, mentors, and leaders. She further believes those individual's high expectations and intense academic rigor prepared her for graduate school at a high research Carnegie doctoral granting institution, the University of Kentucky.

It was not a surprise when she experienced both racial micro- and macroaggressions during her matriculation at the University of Kentucky. She remembers being the only African American in her classes and the only one in the entire doctoral program at certain points. The author's experiences in her doctoral program helped her immensely appreciate the HBCU experience.

After her graduate school experience, the author dreamed of returning to her alma mater and serving students in ways in which my mentors and professors influenced her. However, the return to her HBCU as a tenure-track assistant professor was a culture shock because she was the only full-time African-American tenure-track teaching faculty in the division of social sciences.

This chapter is a reflection of this author's experiences as an unapologetically black woman, scholar, professor, mentor, HBCU advocate, wife, and mother while navigating the tenure and promotion process. The author also discusses how she often grapples with how to creatively and directly speak out against intentional and unintentional racism that is a commonplace in society and reflected on campus. The author recognizes that there are a certain political and social games played in academia, and she also recognizes sometimes the rules differ for black women, even at an HBCU.

This chapter provides an analysis of the plight of African American women leaders as they journey to the superintendency. African American women remain largely underrepresented in the superintendency. Although the number of women superintendents has increased over the years, the superintendency remains a male-dominated field and African American women remain in the minority. Consequently, African American female superintendents must overcome many obstacles such as racial and gender stereotypes, caustic work environments, and restricted access to opportunities. Critical to dismantling the underrepresentation of women superintendents is the role of mentorship and hiring practices on the recruitment and retention of Black women superintendents. Mentorship is an essential strategy in weathering these barriers. African American women also deserve a voice in the hiring practices of school districts. Further, when marginalized groups, such as Black women, are placed at the center of hiring discourses, hidden paradigms and vestiges of discrimination will be unearthed to unify efforts to provide increased opportunity and positive workplace environments. These efforts have implications for research and practice in the area of mentorship and hiring to amplify the voices of African American women superintendents and presence in the superintendency.

Managing differences is a difficult undertaking, especially considering the difficulties arising from the unconscious functions of our brains. Organisations should strive to counteract the potentially harmful effects of unconscious bias by implementing policies that support bias-aware management and decision-making. Although it is obvious that bias cannot be completely eliminated, there is enough data, as discussed in this work, to demonstrate that unconscious bias and stereotypes can be addressed and decreased with mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) to some extent. Mindfulness involves the process of bringing non-judgemental awareness to experience by striving for full attention in the present moment. In this context, including mindfulness practises into training programmes for equality, diversity, and inclusion may serve as an accelerator for recognising hidden biases, reducing stereotypes, eliminating discrimination, and encouraging cognitive changes. This chapter explains the ways in which MBIs can be used to promote cognitive changes and comprehend the automatic and unconscious nature of emotions and thoughts in order to remove barriers between all differences in the workplace.

African American males experience acute or chronic stress from discriminatory treatment and racial microaggressions, decreasing their biopsychosocial health. Racial microaggressions include but are not limited to merciless and mundane exclusionary messages, being treated as less than fully human, and civil and human rights violations. Racial microaggressions are key to understanding increases in racial battle fatigue (Smith, 2004) resulting from the psychological and physiological stress that racially marginalized individuals/groups experience in response to specific race-related interactions between them and the surrounding dominant environment. Race-related stress taxes and exceeds available resilient coping resources for people of color, while many whites easily build sociocultural and economic environments and resources that shield them from race-based stress and threats to their racial entitlements.

What is at stake, here, is the quest for equilibrium versus disequilibrium in a society that marginalizes human beings into substandard racial groups. Identifying and counteracting the biopsychosocial and behavioral consequences of actual or perceived racism, gendered racism, and racial battle fatigue is a premier challenge of the twenty-first century. The term “racial microaggressions” was introduced in the 1970s to help psychiatrists and psychologists understand the enormity and complications of the subtle but constant racial blows faced by African Americans. Today, racial microaggressions continue to contribute to the negative experiences of African American boys and men in schools, at work, and in society. This chapter will focus on the definition, identification, and long-term effects of racial microaggressions and the resultant racial battle fatigue in anti-black misandric environments.

Purpose – Are members of socially dominant groups aware of the privileges they enjoy? We address this question by applying the notion of hypocognition to social privilege. Hypocognition is defined as lacking a rich cognitive or linguistic representation (i.e., a schema) of a concept in question. By social privilege, we refer to advantages that members of dominant social groups enjoy because of their group membership. We argue that such group members are hypocognitive of the privilege they enjoy. They have little cognitive representation of it. As a consequence, their social advantage is invisible to them.

Approach – We provide a narrative review of recent empirical work demonstrating and explaining this lack of expertise and knowledge in socially dominant groups (e.g., White People, men) about discrimination and disadvantage encountered by other groups (e.g., Black People, Asian Americans, women), relative what members of those other groups know.

Findings – This lack of expertise or knowledge is revealed by classic cognitive psychological measures. Relative to members of other groups, social dominant group members generate fewer examples of discrimination that other groups confront, remember fewer instances after being presented a list of them, and are slower to respond when classifying whether these examples are discriminatory.

Social Implications – These classic measures of cognitive expertise about social privilege predict social attitude differences between social groups, specifically whether people perceive the existence of social privilege as well as believe discrimination still exists in contemporary society. Hypocognition of social privilege also carries implications for informal interventions (e.g., acting “colorblind”) that are popularly discussed.