A professor at Southern Illinois University is pushing for bereavement leave for black educators to address their trauma and grieve over racist news and confrontations.

Angel Jones is a visiting professor at the school's department of educational leadership and said black faculty members should not be expected to return to work immediately after enduring racism.

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"I am a proud educator who loves what I do," Jones wrote in an article pushing for bereavement leave following the death of Tyre Nichols. "But before that, I am a Black woman. A Black woman who is expected to return to 'business as usual' on Monday after seeing a member of my community murdered on Friday."

It is difficult for students to cope with external factors impacting their internal being, and it is important to recognize that baggage and work to affirm the "importance of students' whole selves," according to Jones.

While she and other black educators are there for the students, Jones asked who there is for the black educators who have to live with and cope with racist experiences.

History "has shown us that Black educators often have to exert additional emotional energy to pick up the slack the academy leaves behind after it sends its obligatory, and often performative, statement to the campus community," she wrote. "But while those obviously copy-pasted, campus-wide emails are the bare minimum, Black faculty and staff don't even get that."

"Where is the acknowledgment of our pain? Where are our [counseling] services? Where is our grace for missed meetings and deadlines while we mourn?" she asked. "Yes, we have jobs to do and students to support, but we also have trauma to process."

Jones compared the need for bereavement leave for black educators to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" sermon.

In the sermon, King discussed how it is cruel to tell a man without boots to lift himself up by his bootstraps.

"Pulling oneself up by the bootstraps is a privilege similar to the ability to put on one's own mask. If cabin pressure changes on an aeroplane, oxygen masks drop from above and passengers are instructed to put them on — with a reminder to put on their own mask first before helping others," Jones wrote.

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"As a grieving Black educator, I would love to put on my metaphorical mask first before helping my students, but that is hard when the academy continues to leave us maskless," she said.

If institutions want to support their black educators, they must offer counseling and time to grieve, according to Jones.