We were working on a group assignment and I had already typed up and finished my part. It made sense and read how the professor preferred it to. It was clear and it followed the instructions. I went to sleep thinking it was done.
The next day I opened the document, only to find it had been submitted, but everything I wrote was changed. Not corrected but rewritten. The wording didn’t even make sense anymore. It was copied and pasted from AI.
Nobody said anything to me. Nobody asked. They just assumed it needed to be fixed.
A year later, the exact same thing happened to another Black woman. Same class. Same assignment. The only Black girl in her group.
This is what it feels like to be a Black woman at a predominately white institution (PWI). At some point, you can’t keep calling it coincidence. You have to take accountability for what is being perpetuated.
At PWI’s, Black women are consistently second-guessed. Their ideas are questioned, ignored and rewritten, all because the stereotypes about who is “smart” determines who gets to be taken seriously, and research shows that you don’t think it’s us.
Research shows that Black women received the lowest ratings in warmth and competence compared to every other race and gender group, so when our work gets rewritten, it follows the pattern of you already assuming our work is less credible.
This shows up most in group work when your grade is dependent on all members. You choose partners that you feel safe with, comfortable with — the “smart” kids — and most of the time we aren’t that for you. You don’t talk to us unless you have to, and when you do, it’s control. you question our work, bring it to the professor for validation, and use that authority to override us as if we weren’t capable of getting it right. So you rewrite, reword, and question everything but your own assumptions and move on like the decision was neutral.
But it’s not.
Engineering education research shows that peer evaluations—used to determine grades in group projects—are influenced by bias, not just the contribution. In other words, we are not just being graded on what we do but how our peers perceive what we do.So, if you already assume I am less capable or qualified, that assumption can and will change my grade, even if my work is correct.
This reflects a broader concept difference in power: who gets to be seen as credible without question and who must prove themselves first. Being one of the only Black women in a space changes how your work is read from the start. So you work twice as hard for the same level of credibility, and even then it’s still more likely to be questioned.
But the problem isn’t just that it happens. It’s that it’s also hard to challenge it when it does.
Research on self-silencing shows that when Black women speak up to question a decision, it can be seen as difficult, aggressive, or too much. And when you are already the minority that risk can have severe consequences. So, they self-silence which only perpetuates this problem.
To be clear, this is not about every white student being intentionally harmful. But intent doesn’t erase impact. And when the same things keep happening to the same groups of people across different classes and different years, then it’s no longer about the individual.
It is about the system of assumptions. It’s about power. It’s about normalization.
If you’ve ever rewritten someone’s work without asking why they wrote it that way or avoided working with someone because you didn’t feel “comfortable,” you should be asking yourself where that instinct comes from.
Comfort is not neutral. Familiarity is not objectivity. Who you trust is not random.
At some point it’s not enough to say you didn’t mean anything by it. You need to start paying attention to who you listen to, who you overlook, and what your assumptions are doing in real time. Just start taking some accountability and change.
