Disposable Black excellence: A book review of Sekile M. Nzinga’s Lean semesters: How Higher Education Reproduces Inequity

Abstract

Although Black women’s graduate degree attainment has nearly doubled since 2000, Sekile M. Nzinga’s Lean Semesters provides a complex picture into this social reality in academia, with the central argument that American higher education operates as a hyper-producer of inequity for marginalized populations, particularly academic women of color. Additionally, since Black women are overrepresented both as adjunct faculty and as Black academics in the south, the author utilizes faculty interview data and national survey data to frame this issue as not only shaped by race, class, and gender but also a regional problem. Lean Semesters is a unique contribution to the critical university studies literature that reveals how Black excellence and Black education are also conceptions through which we understand Black labor.