KOLUMN Magazine
The Only
One in the Building
For many Black educators, being the lone Black teacher means carrying a school’s conscience on their backs—with little pay, and less protection.
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The first knock on her classroom door came before the first bell.
It was barely 7:45 a.m., and Sarah Wright was still peeling off her winter coat, balancing a to-go coffee in one hand and a stack of ungraded essays in the other, when a colleague appeared in the doorway of her middle school English room.
“Sorry,” the colleague said, already stepping inside. “But can you… talk to Jaylen? He’s upset again. I figured he might listen to you.”
Wright, a Black woman and longtime educator in the Midwest, was not Jaylen’s teacher. She wasn’t his counselor or dean. But she was the only Black teacher on staff that year. That, her colleagues made clear, was qualification enough.
She set the essays down and followed her colleague into the hallway.
Later, in an essay for EdSurge, Wright would recall that year as one of the hardest of her career: the year a family questioned her ability to teach English; the year she sat in her car before school, fighting anxiety; the year she began to understand how race, gender, and trauma stack up on Black women educators until they spill into their bodies.
She loved her students. She loved teaching. But increasingly, the job felt like something else—something heavier, less visible, and almost impossible to explain to people who did not live inside it.
Black educators have a name for it now: the invisible labor of being “the only one.” Or, as one widely shared article for Word In Black and The Washington Informer put it, “the invisible tax” on Black teachers—the accumulation of extra tasks, expectations, and emotional burdens assigned because of race, not job title.
It is the labor of showing up as a teacher and unofficial counselor, cultural translator, equity consultant, disciplinarian, and community liaison—often all in the same day, almost always without extra pay.
It is also one of the reasons many Black teachers leave.
What the Job Description Doesn’t Say
Officially, the responsibilities of a teacher are straightforward: plan lessons; deliver instruction; assess student learning; attend meetings; communicate with families.
Ask Black teachers what they actually do, and the list grows.
In a 2022 story on the “invisible tax,” The Washington Informer reported that Black teachers are routinely tapped to organize Black History Month programming, lead equity initiatives, manage conflicts involving Black students, and act as “the Black whisperer” for colleagues and administrators who feel uneasy engaging with Black families.
One California educator, LaToya Flowers, told the reporter that on top of her regular workload, she was put in charge of the school’s African American Parent Advisory Council largely because she was Black. She writes the agendas, leads the meetings, and even makes sure non-Black staff feel comfortable attending, she said. “Sometimes I get tired of always having to explain Blackness to everyone,” Flowers admitted. “It’s different for each Black person.”
The extra tasks don’t just cost time; they shape careers.
Early in his career, Harrison Peters, now the CEO of Men of Color in Educational Leadership, was praised for his performance. When a promotion went to a white colleague instead, he was told he lacked “the right experience.” The problem, Peters later realized, was not effort but assignment: his extra duties included co-leading Black History Month and monitoring detention, while his white colleague’s extras—literacy leadership, school improvement committees, academic enrichment—mapped neatly onto promotion criteria.
“That’s how the invisible tax works,” The Washington Informer article noted. “Black teachers are praised for their service but positioned away from the pathways that lead to power.”
Meanwhile, a RAND poll of more than 1,500 educators found that Black teachers were significantly more likely than other teachers of color to say they were given extra work or held to different expectations because of their race. Many said that if they could spend less time on non-teaching duties, they would be more likely to stay in the profession.
The extra work is rarely written down. But in building after building, Black teachers learn it by heart.
“Can You Talk to Him?”: A Day in the Life
In Chicago, fourth-grade teacher Dwayne Reed became a minor celebrity after he wrote a back-to-school rap to welcome his students—“Welcome to the 4th Grade,” a song and video that went viral and landed him on national newscasts.
The coverage focused on his joy: the dancing kids, the rhymed lesson plans, the way he turned a boilerplate welcome letter into something that actually made children excited to show up.
What those stories touched on only briefly was the other side of Reed’s work—the role he plays as one of the few Black male teachers in his school.
Because he is visible, he is called.
A student melts down in the hallway? “Mr. Reed, can you talk to him?”
Parents are upset about a discipline decision? “Maybe they’ll listen if you’re in the meeting.”
The school wants to rethink its approach to students of color? “We’d love to hear the ‘Black perspective.’”
In interviews with outlets like ABC News and the National Education Association, Reed has talked about the joy of teaching and the commitment he feels to his students. But he’s also described the unspoken expectation that he will bridge every cultural gap—while still maintaining his own classroom, grading, and family life.
He is not unique.
In that same The Washington Informer piece, the “invisible tax” shows up in unpaid mentoring hours: a DonorsChoose poll cited in the story found that Black male teachers, particularly those who graduated from HBCUs, spend an average of 11 hours per week mentoring or counseling students outside regular class time—far more than their white peers.
It shows up in discipline data: Black teachers in the survey were more than twice as likely to say they are expected to discipline students of color because of their race.
And it shows up in the stories teachers tell each other in private: the extra committees, the late-night calls from families, the informal “Can you just…?” requests that cluster around the only Black face at the staff table.
Each request may be reasonable on its own. Together, they form a parallel job—one that rarely appears in job postings, but frequently appears in burnout statistics.
The Toll of Carrying It Home
When Wright—the educator whose account anchors the EdSurge article “How Trauma Impacts the Well-Being of Black Women Educators”—looks back on her career, she can name the year her body started keeping the score.
She remembers driving to school and sitting in the parking lot, heart pounding, rehearsing conversations she might have to have: the parent who doubted her credentials, the colleague who pulled her aside to “just check” whether a lesson plan was “too political,” the administrator who praised her rapport with students but seemed uninterested in promoting her.
She remembers leaving school drained—then showing up again, because her students needed her.
“I discovered that loving children isn’t always enough to keep someone in the classroom,” she writes. “If a community hasn’t cultivated a space where people feel seen, heard, and valued, it will cultivate dissatisfaction.”
In a series of healing circles organized by EdSurge Research and the Abolitionist Teaching Network, Black women educators described similar patterns: racing from hallway conferences with crying students to evening grading sessions at home; absorbing microaggressions about their tone, dress, or “professionalism”; serving as “othermothers” to Black children while struggling to be emotionally present for their own.
One middle-school teacher from Georgia, quoted in the piece, captured the tension:
“I’m that teacher that’s always having hallway chats with somebody. Somebody’s crying on my shoulder… But it takes a lot out of you. And I still have to have some left when I come home for my own child.”
Another educator described ignoring her own need for rest until her body intervened; she broke her foot and wound up forced into a months-long break she’d never felt, professionally, allowed to take.
Public health research has long linked racism to chronic stress and adverse health outcomes for Black Americans. For Black educators, that stress is compounded by the expectation of endless emotional labor: to be calm, nurturing, and unshakeable even as they navigate systems that are, in Wright’s words, “subtly and overtly discriminatory” toward them and their students.
The invisible labor of being “the only one” is not just a workplace issue. It is a health issue.
Stalled at the Bottom Rung
Even when Black teachers manage the extra labor, it does not always translate into advancement.
In many schools, the tasks that fall to Black teachers—leading affinity groups, coordinating cultural events, managing discipline, serving as interpreters in parent meetings—are treated as add-ons, not leadership experiences.
In the Washington Informer/Word In Black story, Peters’ stalled promotion isn’t simply a case of bias in evaluation; it’s a case study in how institutions define “leadership.” The work he did with Black students and families, while essential to the school’s functioning, was invisible when promotion time came. The work his colleague did—running academic programs, sitting on improvement committees—was legible as leadership.
A similar pattern appears in a 2023 Word In Black report on mentorship: although Black teachers strongly support mentor programs and want mentors who share their racial identity, they are often left out of formal leadership pathways that would allow them to shape policy or mentor at scale. Instead, their “leadership” is informal, contained within classrooms and after-school hours.
The result is a pipeline that leaks from both ends: fewer Black teachers coming in, and too many leaving early because they see no sustainable path forward.
In Pennsylvania, for example, Education Trust data cited by the Center for Black Educator Development show that Black students make up about 14.5 percent of enrollment, but only 3.8 percent of the state’s teachers are Black. In Philadelphia, a majority-Black city, just 24 percent of teachers are Black—and only 4 percent are Black men.
Sharif El-Mekki, CBED’s founding CEO, told one reporter that at national convenings, he meets educators who are not just the only Black teacher in their school, but “the only Black teacher in their district,” a reality he still finds “mind-boggling.”
To be the only one is to be perpetually visible and professionally invisible at the same time.
What Community Does That a Contract Can’t
If the invisible labor of being “the only one” drives many Black teachers out, what helps them stay?
One answer, they say, is community—spaces where they are not the only one, even if their day-to-day job still requires it.
El-Mekki’s Center for Black Educator Development runs a range of programs dedicated to that idea: Black male engagement networks, Black male educator convenings, and fellowships that combine professional development with wellness and political education. The goal is not simply technical training but what he calls “an intergenerational brother- and sisterhood” of educators who can share strategies, vent, and plan.
The Black Teacher Project, based in the Bay Area and Atlanta, hosts wellness retreats, leadership institutes, and “sustainability” programs that include stipends for therapy or rest. Its executive director, Micia Mosely, told CBED that teachers in her fellowship often say they might have left the classroom without that support.
Meanwhile, the National Center for Teacher Residencies and Word In Black’s Black Educators Initiative have built residency models that wrap new Black teachers in targeted mentorship and financial support. Among one recent cohort, 94 percent of Black participants stayed in the profession—a retention rate that dwarfs national averages.
“Schools are microcosms of the larger world,” NCTR’s Tabitha Grossman told Word In Black. “Navigating the profession as a person of color is different—so the support has to be different, too.”
These efforts don’t erase the invisible tax, but they spread its weight across a broader network. Instead of carrying their frustrations alone, teachers can name them, study them, and push back collectively.
What It Would Take to Make “The Only One” Obsolete
In interviews, surveys, and essays, Black educators rarely talk about wanting less responsibility. They talk about wanting shared responsibility—for school culture, for student well-being, for confronting racism.
That would require several things:
Changing what counts as leadership. Schools would have to recognize relationship-building, cultural bridging, and community liaison work as leadership competencies, not “extra” labor—then align evaluations, promotions, and pay accordingly.
Distributing equity work across all staff. Diversity training, conflict mediation, and relationships with families of color cannot be outsourced to the Black teachers in the building. Every adult must build those skills.
Reducing non-teaching load. Districts could use RAND’s findings as a baseline, formally capping non-instructional tasks and tracking whether certain groups are saddled with more.
Investing in mentorship and affinity spaces. The success of initiatives like the Black Educators Initiative and Black Teacher Project suggests that targeted mentorship and wellness supports pay off—with higher retention and stronger instructional practice.
Tracking the “invisible tax.” Just as districts track test scores and discipline, they could track who organizes certain events, who leads equity work, who makes home visits, who takes on extra students during coverage. If the same names appear again and again, leaders would have to ask why—and respond.
Until then, teachers like Wright, Reed, Flowers, and thousands of others will keep improvising.
They will keep stepping into hallways to talk students down from crises, drafting equity plans after midnight, translating institutional language for families, and trying to figure out where their own needs fit in a day that belongs to everyone else.
They will keep doing the math: how long they can afford to stay; how much of themselves they can keep giving.
In the EdSurge essay, Wright ends with a question for school leaders, borrowed from diversity educator Rosetta Lee but reframed for adults as well as children:
Do you see me?
Do you hear me?
Will you treat me fairly?
Will you protect me?
For Black teachers who are “the only one,” the answer to those questions may determine not just whether they make it through another school year, but whether they remain in the profession at all.