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Renata had similar experiences.
Incidents are exhausting without a doubt. They take a lot out of you, not only time wise,
but also mentally. A couple of my incidents, I've had to ride in the back of a police car.
That's something I didn't think would happen. Those times are physically and mentally
exhausting. Then, navigating the idea that I'm affected by the incident, but I'm also not
the victim. . . . It's very time consuming . . . and has . . . a trickle down effect that has kind
of lasted for almost an entire semester.
In these situations, RAs had not been prepared by their residence life units about
the possibility of secondary trauma, which resulted in exhaustion that unbalanced multiple
areas of their well-being for stretches of time. Both Emere and Renata were RAs of
color, who had to navigate localized incidents as additional stressors were placed upon
them by turmoil from national incidents, such as the ongoing tensions around police
brutality in minoritized communities.
Supervisors' identity-based expectations. While all participants viewed their minoritized
social identities positively, a few described their supervisors as a force that disrupted
the sense of well-being connected to their identity by layering raced or gendered
stereotypes on top of job performance expectations. In this study, LGBTQ+ identities
were ignored by most supervisors, who reinforced heterosexist presumptions of gender.
Such experiences were a source of stress, anxiety, and exhaustion for RAs with minoritized
identities, who resisted these unbalanced expectations in addition to managing
their day-to-day duties. After serving as an RA for two years, Tau decided to leave the job
because of his supervisor's race-based expectations:
[My resident director] pinpointed certain people . . . very obviously along color lines . . .
me and someone else, we literally got the stereotypes of angry Black male and female
as our staff evals . . . I feel like my mental health has definitely waned because of the fact
that I have to constantly code switch between so many different spheres. . . . As an RA,
that goes back to double consciousness. Being a Black RA, any time I say something
it's kind of taken as political. . . . It's just tiring . . . just exhausting . . . and I don't really
feel like I belong.
Similarly, Tomas's minoritized racial and ethnic identities were implicitly used as rationales
to assign him more responsibilities that he did not ask for and for which he
was not compensated:
[Residence life leaders] will kind of volunteer me just because I'm one of those few
minorities that's an RA. . . . When I applied to be an RA, there was this [application]
question saying if we've ever had any experience in a learning community. I put down
that yes, I have previously been in [the Latinx learning community]. One of the things they
hadn't told us was that question would be taken as a request to work in that dorm and be
in charge of a certain learning community. I didn't expect to be put in charge of [the Latinx
learning community]. . . . It's a lot of work.
Volume 49, No. 3 * 2023 135

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