This study examines how tenured BAF experience and navigate institutional structures while advancing their careers. Leveraging a qualitative approach, we find BAF encounter recurring forms of marginalization embedded in organizational structures that lead to social identity threats that destabilize their identities as scholars and teachers. BAF respond to these threats by employing agentic and self-preserving coping responses designed to affirm identity and negotiate career advancement. Although coping responses can be effective on an individual level, they do not transform institutional structures and can provoke pushback that reinscribes marginalization. The findings unsettle common assumptions that effort in conditions marked by objectivity and neutrality drives career advancement and highlight the institutional structures and invisible labor that BAF navigate to achieve career advancement. We fill the void in the literature examining how career advancement unfolds within racialized conditions of academic institutions and advance research on minoritized group status in accounting academia.