Community as a Survival Strategy

From Letters from the Lab

When I asked Dr. Nadia A. Bennett what advice she would give Black women moving into educational leadership, she did not begin with certification, strategy, or a five-year plan.

She said, “Find and keep community.”

That answer has stayed with me because it was not just advice about leadership. It was advice about survival.

Dr. Bennett named what many Black women and Black educators already know in our bodies: leadership can be isolating. Education can be isolating. Being the only Black educator in a school, on a team, in a department, or around a decision-making table can slowly wear away at your ability to trust your own voice. Navigating white rage, misogyny, patriarchy, anti-Blackness, and institutional harm requires more than individual strength.

Community is not a luxury. It is not extra. It is not something cute to add to your calendar when you have time.

Community is a survival strategy.

If isolation is one way systems maintain power, then community is one way Black educators refuse to surrender ours.

For Black educators, community is part of how we stay anchored. It helps us find language, remember we are not imagining things, celebrate when no one else in the building celebrates us, receive correction in love, get believed without overexplaining, laugh, tell the truth, and heal.

A major part of self-care is community care.

The version of self-care often marketed to educators is individual. Breathe. Take a bath. Go on vacation. Download the wellness app. Light the candle. Take the day off. Stretch. Meditate. Book the massage.

And let me be clear: all of those things can matter.

But a massage cannot believe you.

A bubble bath cannot help you write the email. A wellness app cannot say, “That was anti-Black.” A vacation cannot go with you to the meeting. A candle cannot help you decide whether to stay, leave, rest, speak up, or protect your peace.

Black people have historically thrived in community with people who see us, root for us, want the best for us, and understand parts of our lived experiences without requiring a dissertation every time we speak. Community does not replace individual care, but individual care is not enough when the harm is systemic.

You cannot self-care your way out of racism. Breathing alone will not carry you through anti-Blackness without people who can help you name it. Racial battle fatigue cannot be survived on silence, solitude, and a school district wellness newsletter alone.

Community gives us something different.

It gives us people who can say, “Write that down.” “Take someone with you.” “Do not meet with them alone.” “Send me the email before you respond.” “That is not feedback. That is harm.” “That happened to me too.” “I believe you.”

Community may look like a scheduled gathering, a group chat, a cohort, a podcast audience, a monthly Zoom room, or two people who check on each other after staff meetings. It might also be the person who reviews your resume, brings you food, watches your child, writes a reference letter, or reminds you that your gifts are still valuable even if your school refuses to honor them.

Community does not have to be in person every day to be real. Even virtual community can interrupt isolation when the people in the room understand the language of the harm.

But community is more than proximity.

Being around other Black people does not automatically mean community exists. Black people are not a monolith. We do not all have the same lived experiences, politics, values, beliefs, boundaries, or needs. A group of Black people can be in the same school, the same affinity space, the same organization, or the same room and still not be in community with one another.

Community requires vulnerability, shared purpose, honesty, listening, care, and safety. That safety cannot be defined by people outside of the community. For some Black educators, safety might come through shared geography. For others, it may come through shared gender, role, faith, experience, struggle, humor, or understanding.

The people inside the community must define what safety means for them.

Community is also not the same as a professional network. A professional network is often about advancement, jobs, visibility, titles, opportunities, awards, salary, and career growth. Community can support those things, but that is not its primary purpose. Community is about the growth of the self, the spirit, the voice, the capacity to heal, the capacity to discern, and the ability to feel seen and heard.

Friendship may grow from community, but they are not always the same. Friendship often begins with personal history or closeness. Community may begin with a common cause, a shared identity, or a shared need, and deepen over time.

It can also be temporary, seasonal, or virtual and still be meaningful.

A six-week space can change someone’s life. A year-long cohort can build relationships that continue long after the formal programming ends. A podcast episode can help someone realize that the thing they thought was only happening to them is actually happening to Black educators across the country.

This happened recently when I spoke with a Black woman who shared that listening to The Exit Interview helped her understand that the experiences she and her friend group were having in Atlanta were not isolated to the South. Because she had been taught in the South, taught in the South, and was surrounded by friends who had similar experiences, she assumed the racism and anti-Blackness they were navigating was a Southern Black educator experience.

Then she listened to Black educators from across the country tell their stories.

California. Colorado. Pennsylvania. New York. The Midwest. The South. Educators with ten years in the field. Educators with twenty. Teachers. Leaders. Superintendents. People who left. People who stayed. People who were pushed. People who walked away.

Hearing those stories helped her realize: it was not just her. It was not just her friends. It was not just the South.

That is one of the powers of storytelling. It allows the truth to travel. Someone who feels alone in one school building can hear a voice from somewhere else and say, “I thought I was the only one.”

That sentence comes up often in my work.

“I thought I was the only one.”

“I thought that was just me.”

“I have never heard anyone else admit that.”

“Thank you for being brave enough to share your story.”

Isolation convinces us that our experiences are personal failures instead of patterned harm.

And isolation benefits systems.

Without community, Black educators have fewer people to help name what is happening. There may be no one to help find language for advocacy, prepare for the meeting, look over the email, document the harm, compare notes, or remind us that our voice matters.

That makes isolation useful. It makes us easier to silence.

There is strength in numbers. There is no strength in isolation.

Disconnected Black educators give systems our labor without our collective power. They get our presence without our organized voice. They get to count us in their diversity numbers while keeping us away from the people who might help us tell the truth.

Exhaustion, gaslighting, and lack of support often leave us with three choices: silence, compliance, or exit.

That is why isolation is a strategy.

And community is a refusal.

The best-case scenario for being the only Black educator in a school, department, grade level, district office, nonprofit, or leadership team is that you thrive. You experience joy. Your expertise is valued. Your leadership is respected. Your presence is not tokenized.

But that is not always what happens.

More often, Black educators in isolation experience not being heard. Expertise gets downplayed. Ideas are ignored until someone else repeats them. Leadership is questioned. Advocacy is labeled difficult. Clarity is treated as aggression. Refusing to shrink becomes a problem.

Over time, these patterns can make Black educators begin to question themselves.

Maybe I am not saying it the right way. Maybe my idea was not that strong. Maybe they know something I do not. Maybe I am too sensitive. Maybe I am not ready. Maybe I am the problem.

That is where harm begins to move from the institution into the body.

Racial battle fatigue is not just a concept. It lives in the body. It can show up as resentment, panic attacks, hives, exhaustion, increased drinking or smoking, hair loss, isolation from family, shifts in spirituality, and the slow disconnection from joy. Its impact can be emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, and behavioral.

Relief often enters the room when Black educators finally find a space where they can say what they have been carrying.

Heads nod.

Breath returns.

Someone says, “Yes, that happened to me too.”

Yet the point of community is not only to vent.

Venting may feel good. It may release pressure. It may create a moment of relief. But venting alone does not move us toward wellness.

Healing asks, “Now what?”

Once the harm has been named, the community has to help us consider what comes next. Rest may be the next step. A plan may be the next step. Documentation, advocacy, exit, organizing, grief, joy, or the simple act of no longer blaming ourselves may be the next step.

Community should not become a place where trauma is piled on top of trauma. It should be a space where Black educators can tell the truth and then move toward healing, clarity, strategy, advocacy, rest, laughter, or action.

Because joy is part of the work too.

Racism is real. Racial battle fatigue is real. And joy is real.

Laughter belongs here. So do jokes, music, food, celebration, dancing, storytelling, and magic. Everything cannot be serious all the time. A community that only knows how to hold pain is incomplete.

Black educator community must be able to hold both grief and joy.

It must be able to say, “That harmed you,” and also, “Come eat.” It must be able to say, “That was anti-Black,” and also, “Let’s celebrate your new grant, your new job, your new baby, your new peace, your new no.” It must be able to help us cry and help us laugh until our stomachs hurt.

That kind of community is not new for us.

We were not always this isolated.

Before desegregation, many Black educators worked inside Black educational ecosystems. That does not mean everyone got along. Black schools were not flawless or romantic spaces without conflict. But there was community. Black educators worked with other Black educators. They often lived in the same neighborhoods as their students, coworkers, principals, office staff, janitors, cafeteria workers, and families.

The community was inside the school building and outside of it.

Children were taught by people who knew their families, churches, food, language, neighborhoods, histories, and whys. Black teachers carried more than lesson plans. They carried stories, warnings, wisdom, books, cultural knowledge, and a belief in Black children’s brilliance that did not begin with enslavement and did not depend on white approval.

Black schools were academic spaces, but they were also community spaces. Families could send their children to school knowing the neighborhood was teaching them. Children could learn that they had value, carry knowledge home to elders and family members who had been denied formal schooling, and participate in a larger vision where the whole community learning mattered. The whole community thriving mattered. The whole community having joy mattered.

Desegregation disrupted those ecosystems.

Brown v. Board gave Black children legal access to white schools, but the way desegregation unfolded often separated Black educators from Black students, Black colleagues, Black administrators, and Black educational communities.

Black educators were pushed out. Black schools were closed or merged. Black principals lost positions. Black students entered buildings where they were watched, targeted, underestimated, and harmed. Black teachers who remained in education often found themselves isolated inside white institutions and under the white gaze.

It was not just being left alone to teach.

It was teaching while being watched, questioned, and harmed. It was teaching while separated from the community that once helped protect, affirm, and sustain you.

That historical separation still matters.

Generations of Black people were told not to become educators because their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents experienced harm in schools. Families that once saw teaching as sacred and respected began warning their children away from it.

No Black teachers, no pipeline.

More specifically: no healthy, mentally well, happy, thriving Black educators, no pipeline.

Future generations notice when Black educators are isolated, harmed, and pushed out. They hear the stories. They see the exhaustion. They watch what education does to the people they love. Then they make decisions accordingly.

This is why today’s Black educator communities matter so much.

Wellness cohorts, podcasts, group chats, Black Teacher Recess, Podcast and Pause, community gatherings, storytelling spaces, and independent Black educator-led initiatives are helping us rebuild something. These spaces are part of a larger effort to reclaim what was disrupted and create places where Black educators can be psychologically, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually safer with one another.

I also want to be clear: district-created affinity groups are not the same as Black educator-created community spaces.

Affinity groups can be meaningful. They can provide connection. They can give Black educators a place to see each other inside a system.

Institutions need to stop thinking that creating affinity groups will repair the daily harm Black educators are experiencing.

Affinity groups do not fix racism. They do not undo anti-Black leadership, repair retaliation, or make up for years of isolation, tokenization, silencing, and racial battle fatigue. This is especially true when those spaces are created, monitored, limited, or controlled by the same systems causing harm.

Institutions need to fund wellness spaces they do not control.

Resource Black educator-led spaces without managing them into compliance. Trust the people closest to the harm to design what healing, belonging, joy, and community can look like. Stop treating community as a diversity initiative and start understanding it as part of Black educator wellness.

In my own work with The Exit Interview, Black Educator Wellness Cohort, Black Teacher Recess, and Podcast and Pause, I have seen what happens when Black educators finally enter spaces where they do not have to explain everything from the beginning.

They breathe differently.

They laugh differently.

They tell the truth faster.

They stop apologizing for what they know.

They stop pretending the harm is not harm.

They begin to understand that they are not the only one.

Even after formal programs end, the community often continues. People still call each other, eat together, check in, collaborate, and make sure each other is okay.

That matters.

The people who start a community do not always have to lead it forever. Sometimes the work is to get the ball rolling. Sometimes the work is to connect people and trust that they know how to care for one another. Sometimes the work is to build something that can live beyond one person’s capacity.

That is when community becomes inheritance.

Talking about inherited community means recognizing inheritance as a gift. Someone thought deeply about what they were leaving behind. They believed that what they prepared would make life better for those who came after them. Their sacrifice made room for the next generation to have more joy, support, wisdom, protection, and possibility.

When we inherit community, we inherit gold.

Not flawless gold. Not perfect gold. Something precious. Something refined over generations. Something cared for so that it could live on.

That inheritance includes stories, warnings, prayers, laughter, recipes, rituals, lesson plans, porch conversations, phone calls, songs, books, strategies, and ways of seeing the world that tell us we are not alone and were never meant to be.

Building community now is not only about meeting our own needs. It is about creating something worth inheriting.

It is about building spaces that can help future Black educators become stronger, more believed, more faithful, more loving, more caring, and more giving to themselves and others.

Community is survival because it helps us make it through.

Community is inheritance because it helps the next generation begin with more than we had.

So to the Black educator who is isolated right now, I want to say this: you are not weak for needing people. Wanting to be seen does not make you unprofessional. Feeling harm in your body does not make you too sensitive. Asking for support, affirmation, laughter, strategy, and care is not asking for too much.

You deserve community.

Seek it. Build it. Be selective about it. Leave the spaces that only drain you. Nurture the spaces that help you heal. Find the people who can celebrate you, listen to you, check you, believe you, feed you, laugh with you, and remind you who you are when the institution tries to make you forget.

Institutions must stop confusing representation with belonging, affinity groups with repair, and controlled meetings with community. Black educators cannot breathe in spaces that continue to harm them daily.

Fund Black educator wellness spaces. Trust Black educator-led communities. Stop monitoring the healing you are not equipped to lead.

Black educators do not need to be managed into community. We need to be supported in building the spaces that help us live, heal, laugh, tell the truth, and carry one another forward.

Isolation is what the system wants for us.

Community is how we refuse.