This is a guest post by Cecil Canton, a professor of criminal justice at CSU Sacramento. He is also associate vice-president for affirmative action at the California Faculty Association and is on the executive committee of the AAUP-CBC.

Every tenure-track faculty member in the Academy, neophyte or seasoned veteran, is responsible for teaching courses, building a record of scholarship, and providing service to the institution to meet the standards of the retention, promotion, and tenure process.

These processes take on increased and amplified weight for underrepresented faculty and faculty of color in predominantly white institutions.

I am talking about the onerous concept of “cultural taxation” that is levied on underrepresented faculty, especially, faculty of color.

The term “cultural taxation,” coined by Amado Padilla in 1994, is a way to describe the unique burden placed on ethnic minority faculty in carrying out our responsibility for service to the university.

It is a stealth workload escalator for faculty of color. And like stress, it can be a silent killer of professional careers and aspirations.

Read more about it in an article in California Faculty magazine (http://www.calfac.org/magazine-article/cultural-taxation-faculty-color-academy).