Microaggressions in the Accounting Academy: The Black Experience

Black Americans are underrepresented members of the US accounting academy (Brown-Liburd and Joe 2020). By interviewing Black faculty about their experiences during their doctoral education and institutional hiring and promotion processes, we discover stories of microaggressions that the participants report negatively impact their views about the accounting academic profession and increase their turnover intentions. Our findings are important as they support the results of related quantitative research (e.g., Brown-Liburd and Joe 2020), contribute to related extant literature in other fields (e.g., McGee and Kazembe 2016; Robinson-Wood et al. 2020), enlighten the accounting profession, and provide an impetus for improving the diversity of accounting faculty. Although our focus is on the disparate treatment of Black accounting academics, many of the stories and our conclusions are applicable to other underrepresented groups and academic disciplines.