Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

My Call to Be Heard: A Letter from the Lonely Only

Dawn Brown

Northwestern University

Abstract

This letter centers the theme “Being the Outsider Who Stays and Is Heard” through my lived experience as a Black woman educator, physical therapist, researcher, and leader in a profession where Black representation remains exceedingly rare. Framed through the lens of the “Lonely Only,” my narrative traces the emotional and professional cost of working in spaces not designed for Black women’s (or any woman of color) full presence – spaces where visibility can be hyper-surveilled while belonging remains conditional. Moving beyond the familiar rhetoric of resilience, this letter asserts that resilience alone is insufficient when higher education continues to reproduce isolation. Instead, it offers belonging as a deliberate practice that is claimed, constructed, and defended through community-building and the refusal to shrink to fit. The letter argues that the voices of women of color in academia must be heard because they matter to students who share similar intersecting identities and seek proof that they, too, can thrive. It highlights how representation is not symbolic but transformative to expand possibility, interrupt inherited narratives of exclusion, and create pathways for those entering the academy “yet again” as outsiders. Drawing on intersectionality, this letter names how race and gender converge to shape experiences of marginalization and power, and it calls on higher education to shift from performative diversity to structural and systemic change. Ultimately, this letter insists that when Black women and women of color are no longer the “Lonely Only,” the higher education becomes better equipped to fulfill its true educational mission.