I am the researcher and the research. I approached this research project with an awareness of my self as a subject in the process. As I engaged others in conversations about race, I knew that “I” was a part of the terms and methods of the conversation. I was not the neutral and invisible researcher. Instead I was very much the raced human being who belongs to the “raced people” (Dyer 1997, p.2) we call African-American or Black. Hence, I was always conscious of the fact that each of my informants was having a conversation about race with a Black man. I was aware that as a Black man, I might be perceived as threatening and dangerous
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or anti-intellectual or patriarchal (hooks, 2004; Hutchinson, 1996; Mudhabuti, 1990). I was also aware that African-American or Black informants might think that I already understood their perspectives because of our shared race while other informants might think that I was judging them because of our race difference. Whatever the perspective, race was present because we were present, even before we spoke the word- race. For example, I was particularly
conscientious about my first interview with a White male student. My strongest desire was to obtain useful descriptive data, so I wanted to negotiate my racial identity in a way that would allow my informants-- and especially non-Black ones-- to be comfortable enough to share openly.
This negotiation of my race presentation was important. I could not and would not change the color of my skin, but I could somehow portray some kind of neutrality. This meant wearing clothing that did not particularly reflect my culture. I did not wear t-shirts with political statements, of which I had many. I kept my clothing simple—a basic pair of blue jeans, khaki shorts, plain t-shirts, casual shirts, sneakers, and sandals. More than anything, my hair (in locs) seemed to make me “cool.” I kept a light tone of voice and was careful to present open and relaxed body language.
Yet, I was a part of their race talk. A section in the “Race Talk” chapter (5) describes how I was involved in the talk of a focus group with students of color. The shared sense of understanding about culture and our experiences with race/racism shaped our conversation. In that case, it was a matter of comfort. However, in another focus group where Nic and Tom shared lively discussion about racism, the shared understanding that caused Nic to exchange stares with me as he argued points with Tom was particularly uncomfortable for me as the researcher. As a Black man, I intuitively understood the stares to mean/communicate the
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following at different points of the conversation: (1) Can you believe this? (2) Say something! (3) Am I making sense? (4) Help me out here; (5) You understand what I’m saying, right? In return, I communicated nothing. Looking away to view the tape recorder or returning blank stares while allowing the exchanges between Nic and Tom to continue were likely unsettling to Nic, but helped me to obtain rich data for analysis. However, it also left me with a feeling that I had betrayed Nic in some way. This was the most unsettling feeling during my research
experience. I long for and resist the opportunity to share with Nic that I understood where he was coming from.
Additionally, there were other moments, especially during interview sessions with my informants individually, that I pondered how I might be perceived by every one of them. More than my attempts to suspend or play down my race, were my efforts to connect with my
informants as students. This was an important reason for utilizing participant observation as a research method also. I introduced myself to students (potential informants) as a “student” conducting research. I was a “grad student” or a “doctoral student.” I talked about the
dissertation as an “assignment” that I was required to complete to earn my “Ph.D.” This use of shared language (student, assignment) and the connotations I implied (that someone more powerful than I was making me do something to get my degree), seemed to resonate with my informants. Many of them wished me luck and cheered me on after our talks. I discussed the “hard work” involved in accomplishing this assignment and they engaged me in conversation about my educational journey. Yet, I wondered many times if my role as “doctoral student” and researcher, and the ways that I presented my self made me “conceptually white” (Ladson-
Billings, 1998, p.9) in their eyes. How might this conception impact the ways that students spoke with me? As some informants told me about their families and views their families held
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about race, I wondered how visible my race was to them. I wondered if my conceptual
whiteness had been at work or their use of “distancing strategies” to defend their own “antiracist self concepts” (Case & Hemmings, 2005, p.607). These considerations would direct my probing questions and add to the ongoing analysis within the process of the interviews themselves. This additional labor to understand how one is being raced within a research process about race is particularly significant to this work. It is what I call meta-race labor. This labor includes the work of analysis without offense, the ongoing work to suspend identifying with myself or seeing myself in relation to others. It is an interception of identity and individuality. It is placing a pause on my positionality, while considering its potential for prejudice. As a researcher who has had practice with this through other projects during my studies, this labor sometimes becomes less conscious and in that way less difficult. However, the labor of analyzing the analysis and the analyzer requires a particular kind of energy and multi-layered thinking. As I listened to informants, I considered their language, their positionality, my positionality, the interface of my race and theirs, the related discourses and narratives that contextualized their meaning, the response of my suspended yet un-dismissed racialized self, and what all of this meant for my research. Such labor continued throughout the duration of this project.
SUMMARY
This chapter described the methods and procedures I used for the research I conducted for this dissertation. It explained the two phases of my data collection during the Pre-First summer program and the junior year of my cohort of Findings University students. Utilizing qualitative research methods allowed me to collect descriptive data that exposed the meanings students
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make about race. My methodology also allowed me to offer critical insights as the ‘researcher and research’ in this process. This project draws from post-positivism, symbolic interactionism, feminist methodology, and Critical Race Theory.
76 CHAPTER 4 [DATA CHAPTER]