“We Wear the Mask”: Self-Definition as an Approach to Healing From Racial Battle Fatigue

Bell’s (1992) thesis of racial realism, in con cert with the work of Wilderson (2007), Hartman (1997), and Sharpe (2016), positions the afterlife of slavery as an irreconciled event that is ongoing and perma nent. If the assumption is that racism exists and, subsequently, racial battle fatigue is and will be an enduring embodied experience that results from it, what possibilities exist for Black students, faculty, and practitioners to heal? We trouble the notion of self-care, high-light ing the rationality-laced logics (Feagin, 2010) that inform how student affairs educators survive racial battle fatigue and we look more closely at the terrains of healing. We propose that the achieve ment of such a place requires an alternative theoretical ground that is made possible in and through self-definition.