Researcher Race : Social Constructions in the Research Process [1 ed.] 9781617357008, 9781617356995

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Researcher Race Social Constructions in the Research Process

A volume in: Cultural Psychology Jaan Valsiner, Series Editor

Cultural Psychology Jaan Valsiner, Editor Becoming Other: From Social Interaction to Self-Reflection (2006) edited by Alex Gillespie Transitions: Symbolic Resources in Development (2006) edited by Tania Zittoun Discovering Cultural Psychology: A Profile and Selected Readings of Ernest E. Boesch (2007) edited by Walter J. Lonner and Susanna A. Hayes Otherness in Question: Development of the Self (2007) edited by Livia Mathias Simão and Jaan Valsiner Semiotic Rotations: Modes of Meanings in Cultural Worlds (2007) edited by SunHee Kim Gertz, Jaan Valsiner, and Jean-Paul Breaux Trust and Distrust: Sociocultural perspectives (2007) edited by Ivana Markova and Alex Gillespie Innovating Genesis: Microgenesis and the Constructive Mind in Action (2008) edited by Emily Abbey and Rainer Diriwächter Challenges and Strategies for Studying Human Development in Cultural Contexts (2009) edited by Cynthia Lightfoot, Maria Lyra, and Jaan Valsiner Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically (2009) edited by Per Linell

Researcher Race Social Constructions in the Research Process

by

Lauren Mizock Boston University

Debra A. Harkins Suffolk University

Information Age Publishing, Inc. Charlotte, North Carolina • www.infoagepub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mizock, Lauren. Researcher race : social constructions in the research process / by Lauren Mizock, Debra A. Harkins and Renee Morant. p. cm. -- (Advances in cultural psychology) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-61735-698-8 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-61735-699-5 (hbk.) -ISBN 978-1-61735-700-8 (ebook) 1. Racism in psychology. 2. Racism in the social sciences. 3. Racism in medicine. 4. Psychology--Research--Moral and ethical aspects. 5. Social sciences-Research--Moral and ethical aspects. 6. Medicine--Research--Moral and ethical aspects. I. Harkins, Debra A. II. Morant, Renee. III. Title. BF76.45.M59 2011 150.72--dc23 2011045540

Copyright © 2012 IAP–Information Age Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or by photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS Foreword Jill Freedman and Gene Combs ............................................................... vii Preface Jaan Valsiner ......................................................................................... ix Introduction with Renee Morant ............................................................................... xiii PART I:

HISTORY, THEORY, AND METHOD

1. Participant Injuries: Historical Origins of Discriminatory Research ..................................................................... 3 2. Culturally Competent Methodology: Multicultural Research Theory ................................................................................15 3. Critical Narrative Method: The Researcher Race Study ....................23 PART II:

RESEARCHER RACE AND THE RESEARCH PROCESS

4. Does Researcher Race Matter? Participant Preferences for Researcher Race with Renee Morant................................................................................ 31 5. Going Off Script: The Researcher’s Position with Renee Morant................................................................................ 45 6. Critical Questioning: Racism Narratives in Research with Renee Morant................................................................................ 57 7. Complex Identities: Future Developments in Multicultural Research .......................................................................71 References ................................................................................................79 Appendix: Continuing the Work: Resources for Cultural Research ...................................................................................................89 Acknowledgments .................................................................................... 91 About the Authors ....................................................................................93 v

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FOREWORD Jill Freedman and Gene Combs

To many of us who came of age in the sixties, these 21st century times can be confusing and frustrating. On the one hand, much has changed for the good. If we still had drugstores with lunch counters, those lunch counters would be integrated. Women have a much greater voice in the workplace and in political office than they did in our youth. On the other hand, peace and love often seem farther away than they were in the 1960s. We are engaged in seemingly perpetual war on more than one front. The pendulum that we worked so hard to move in the direction of freedom and justice seems to be taking a hard swing in the opposite direction. The election of our first president of color has evoked a new wave of not-so-subtlydisguised racism. Religious intolerance and anti-immigrant bias seem to be on the rise. In the midst of this frustration and confusion, it is good to find the next generation still doing the hard work and asking the hard questions, and that is why it was such a joy to encounter this book. Somewhere in a drawer of our cluttered rolltop desk is a button from the sixties that says, “Question Authority.” This book puts that slogan into action. It questions the authority of voices that would say the election of Barack Obama proves we are living in a nation that has transcended its racist past. It questions the authority of an overly numbers-focused approach to research that acts as if it believes that all meaningful truth lies in statistics. Perhaps most importantly, it documents the questioning of their own research by the authors of this book. Readers will learn a lot from this book, but they won’t learn it from bar graphs and percentages. They will learn through being let in on the vii

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process as a team of people ask interesting questions and work to make sense of the answers and non-answers that they get. We admire the mature, responsible way the authors question the things that they question. During her graduate study, Lauren Mizock, a White researcher, had trouble getting African American women to participate in research. This was research that she hoped would be useful to African American women, so she questioned why they didn’t seem to share her hope. She didn’t just idly question it, she collaborated with an African American woman, Renee Morant, and a veteran White researcher of anti-racist work, Debra Harkins, to design and carry out the research that this book documents. The authors begin with a clear and heart-wrenching review of the history of “research” (a term they show to be “inextricably linked to European imperialism”) as it pertains to African Americans. Their review goes far beyond the well-known example of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Readers will learn and understand much about the generations of trauma and stress that the word “research” can evoke in people whose humanity was casually and systematically violated and ignored by researchers. The authors build a strong case for the existence of multi-generational race-based traumatic stress, and their later chapters show how that trauma, even though it is rarely explicitly acknowledged, influences people’s attitudes toward and willingness to participate in research. The authors realized that if they wanted to understand the effect of researcher race on the willingness of people to participate, they would have to make themselves visible in the end results. They document the conversations of a White researcher with both Black and White participants, and the conversations of a Black researcher with both Black and White participants. They share the differences they notice in the transcripts of these conversations. As therapists, what excites us about the conversations documented here is that we can sense the new understandings, the changed worldviews, that are coming forth in the process. This is action research. Just asking the questions constitutes the beginnings of a community intervention. Reflecting on the results of the conversations furthers the process of understanding and lays the groundwork for new rounds of research and new rounds of responding to community problems. We encourage you to read this book. You will learn a lot in so doing. We hope you will be inspired, as we have been, to keep asking questions and acting on the answers as we work toward a more just and equitable society for everyone. Jill Freedman & Gene Combs June 2011 Authors of Narrative Therapy: The social construction of preferred realities.

PREFACE The Race that Meets the Eye: An Unexplored Asset in the Social Sciences Jaan Valsiner

Researcher Race is a book most necessary for the self-reflection of the social scientists in the 21st century. The serious need to re-vamp psychology’s methodological foundations that our new field of cultural psychology calls for (Toomela & Valsiner, 2010, Valsiner et al., 2009) requires a careful look at the context of the encounter between the researcher and the human beings who are designated as “observers,” “subjects,” or “research participants” at different times of the history of the discipline (Bibace et al., 2009). What the authors of this book have accomplished is an exemplary look at how the semiotically interpreted features of “the Other”—the researcher who tries to enter into the lives of other human beings—include the most obvious physiognomic meaning of the race. It is part of the look at the Otherness—alterity— in general (Simão & Valsiner, 2007). As such, it is by no means a simple meaning complex. In contrast to the North American rather strict distinctions between race categories—which might still become fuzzy when people are questioned about being a “pacific islander”—many other countries have less than distinct separation of people by skin color. Brazilians, for example, cannot force the multitude of skin colors and belief systems into simple race categories. ix

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Most importantly—the authors in this book restore the centrality of the researchers’ subjectivity to methodology—as different from methods (Branco & Valsiner, 1997). The meaning-constructing scientist— in all sciences, “hard” or “soft”—is operating through one’s personal subjectivity to reach the objectivity to make sense of the world. This subjectivity is inevitable—researchers are passionate about what they are doing. Researchers’ social roles are filled with obstacles of uncertainties of their findings, and of prejudices that are limiting their access to the phenomena they want to study. Not only the race but the gender of the researcher, or his or her marital status (e.g., Gunther, 1998) can enter as a limiting condition into the process that usually is seen as simple “data collection.” The data are never to be collected—instead, they are derived from the always particular socio-cultural (and political) contexts where the researchers’ abilities of negotiating the “minefields” of the social look by “the others” at the activities performed by the researchers. Accusations against cultural anthropologists from the United States in various African contexts as “CIA spies” parallel in such prejudicial construction similar considerations of British physical anthropologists as “cannibals.” The latter—collecting various bone remains of skeletons of pre-historic human remnants may be observed by the local people “boiling” them in pots—hence easy common-sense attribution of cannibalism. The notion of preservation of historic specimens via procedures that resemble the making of a stew bypass the minds of the local people. This is not so different from the discussions of honorable British gentlemen in some club in England, referencing the narrative evidence of Maori ritual practices as “cannibalism” (Obeyesekere, 2005). Being a researcher of different racial background than that of the persons studied is of course not an obstacle of the magnitude of gross misperceptions of “the Other” as spies, cannibals, or tax collectors. It is probably similar to the perception of other human social characteristics in the interpersonal encounters we call “research” in the social sciences. The first questions a female anthropologist or psychologist— who wants to study children and families in societies far from the Euro-American conventions of politeness—that is usually asked in the first familiarization process is “how many children do you have?” If the answer is not above zero, the feelings of pity for the poor woman may facilitate the ways in which the researcher learns the lesson of how to deal with children as accepted in the society she tries to study. Here the incompetence of the researcher may open a door to the phenomena—through the teaching goals the local experts—women with many children—set for themselves. If, in addition, it comes out that she is not even married, the pity may intensify, and lead to serious efforts to get the strange foreigner—obviously delayed in development—married to some of the local male relative. The data may emerge in the middle of such serious negotiations about how to save the poor

Preface xi

unmarried and childless foreign woman—not to speak of the prestige and pragmatics to have an emergent family member with a foreign residence permit. The concept of research is rarely—if ever—established among the populace of any society. So it becomes translated into common sense terms understandable by the human beings who are fashionably called “research participants” in ethics committees’ consent forms and in publications. In effect, the world is different—the researcher can at best hope to become “life participant” of his or her “research participants.” The researcher is the beggar who tries to enter the life-worlds of the subjects—rather than the latter immediately recognizing the value of science, and of their “participation” in the research act. However, the special conditions of the researcher—Black, White, Pacific Islander—arriving at the research site in a SUV or on a camel, unmarried, childless, and so on—need not be considered only a limitation. It also provides a unique opportunity for gaining access to phenomena that otherwise would remain hidden from the researcher’s view. The authors of this book point to the dialectical relation between the differences in race between researchers and researches that can also provide relief and reassurance, rather than misunderstanding. Years ago, during my first visit to Berlin (then West Berlin) I met a South African English speaking white female psychoanalyst who practiced her kind of work in the German context, and in German. To my naïve question —“doesn’t your limited German knowledge limit your work in such sophisticated area as psychoanalysis?,” her explanation set me straight. Just to the contrary—her German clients would be assured to feel comfortable with every German grammar mistake she would make, reminding them of the psychoanalyst as not being bound by the same German social expectations that her fluently German-speaking counterparts would be instantly believed to follow. I learned my lesson— my prejudice towards specific incompetence was overcome. But the lesson for the social sciences remains—it is possible to use the racial, gender, and other differences as a tool to study previously unaccessible lands of the psyche in a particular country. In the reverse of the famous Torres Strait Expedition that went from England to study the people living in Australia and New Guinea, what is needed is a similar expedition by African anthropologists and psychologists to come and explore race issues in the United States. With its unique historical trajectory (Mead, 1930) this is a country of a multitude of extremely interesting psychological phenomena embedded within a unique social system of U.S. democratic governance that is combined with the limitations of American exceptionalism (Lockhart, 2003). This has led the American style of democracy a very difficult to implement an export article for the rest of the World—with recurrent efforts by the U.S. institutions to promote it to other societies, by force or persuasion. Both fail—but give rise to various hybrids, at most.

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Both of the two Americas are rich in their cultural histories. The cultural-psychological phenomena that can be found in the United States in abundance constitute a historical particular context—and not the norm for all humanity. There is no single normative form of our being as humans— but a multiplicity of such, developed in their unique ways all over the World. Cultural psychology is a science of universal kind that attempts to discover generality that governs the high variability of human cultured lives. In that process of investigation, explicit inclusion of race of the researcher is a must. The present book—Researcher Race: Social Constructions in the Research Process—brings us all closer to the appreciation of the benefits of this view. Jaan Valsiner July 2011 Cultural Psychology, Series Editor

REFERENCES Bibace, R., Clegg, J., and Valsiner, J. (2009). What is in a name? Understanding the implications of participant terminology. IPBS: Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science, 43(1), 67–77. Branco, A. U., & Valsiner, J. (1997). Changing methodologies: A co-constructivist study of goal orientations in social interactions. Psychology and Developing Societies, 9(1), 35–64. Günther, I. A. (1998). Contacting subjects: The untold story. Culture & Psychology, 4, 65–74. Lockhart, C. (2003). The roots of American Exceptionalism: Institutions, culture, and policies. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Mead, G. H. (1930).The philosophies of Royce, James, and Dewey in their American setting. International Journal of Ethics, 40, 211–231. Simão, L. M., & Valsiner, J. (Eds.) (2007). Otherness in question: Labyrinths of the self. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Obeyesekere, G. (2005). Cannibal talk: The man-eating myth and human sacrifice in the South Seas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Toomela, A., & Valsiner, J. (Eds.) (2010). Methodological thinking in psychology: 60 years gone astray? Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers. Valsiner, J., Molenaar, P. C. M., Lyra, M. C. D. P., & Chaudhary, N. (Eds.) (2009). Dynamic process methodology in the social and developmental sciences. New York, NY: Springer.

INTRODUCTION We should not impose the notions or prejudices of our cultural clearing [onto our research], and yet we cannot help but do so. The trick, I suppose, is to be aware of what we are doing. —Philip Cushman (1995)

A common assumption of many researchers is that our work is objective. Most of us believe we can slice off a bit of reality, publish our findings, and bring the world closer to an ultimate truth. And yet our work is riddled with subjectivity. Our hypotheses reflect our curiosities; our procedures reveal the methodological preferences of our institutional review boards; our results are limited by our statistics training; our conclusions are shaped by journal editors. Why do we run from our subjectivity, when some of the most critical findings lie within our story? Is it possible that our experiences in the research process are not threatening to the “hard science” of our research, but rather accentuate the cycle of the scientific method, the endless sequence of filling in gaps in the literature, and formulating new research based on what questions remain? But what researchers want to come out from behind the curtain and make themselves vulnerable to the academic scrutiny that is accustomed to hiding them? Bringing awareness of the inherent biases of researchers into focus, as Cushman reminds us, is an important step to making multicultural research more transparent, significant, and rich. ENCOUNTERS WITH RESEARCHER RACE We have encountered many roadblocks along the course of our research careers, reminding us of the opportunities offered by the barriers to xiii

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research. And in multicultural research, the barriers are numerous. We use the term multicultural to refer to representations of multiple, diverse cultures within contemporary society, including but not limited to race and ethnicity. As the researchers in this study, we represent a number of perspectives and backgrounds that contribute to various hurdles as well as privileges. A White American, early career clinical academic and clinician in psychology (LM), a White American senior academic in psychology (DH), and an early career Black American researcher and social worker (RM). Across our different standpoints, our research experiences have highlighted the impact of social constructions of race in the research process.

Lauren Mizock’s Research Encounters In particular, my (LM) research experience conducting my master’s thesis offered important lessons in the obstacles that arose. Based on my previous work as a sexual health counselor, I learned that African American women were underserved in sexual health counseling, and I wanted to identify what would make sexual health services more accessible. My intent was positive—to increase access to health care in a marginalized community. Yet, participant perceptions of my identity as a White woman had a dramatic impact on data collection. In particular, it appeared to have an impact on who agreed to fill out a survey, whether I could solicit for participants, and if the surveys were completed or not. As could be expected, gaps in our dataset emerged. I could not recruit enough women of color. My department suggested that I add a White comparison group to increase the sample size of the study. This methodology felt removed from the focus of the study and ran the risk of reinforcing the assumption that the White group would be the “normative” subsample. However, I was desperate to complete the research requirement of my graduate program. More White women than Black women began to fill out the endless pages of the survey. More Black women left parts of the survey blank or returned it to me, reporting their discomfort with the questions. As I ticked off the numbers, filling my quota of 50 people from each racial group, holes in the data appeared. Imbalances among participants on each side surfaced. Empty spaces lingered in the response rows of more Black women’s surveys than White women’s surveys. I wondered if perceptions of my race as the researcher were having an indelible effect on the results that were produced. Or could it have been participant mistrust of the research based upon a legacy of researcher abuse? Evidently, the research design needed improvement. A Black researcher could have replaced me or accompanied me to counter potential feelings of cultural mistrust. I could have gone to a historically Black college or university

Introduction xv

and found more participants of color there to create a sizeable sample. Although when I tried on several occasions, I could not gain access to the schools with larger populations of color. One dean stated simply, “We are protective of our students of color when it comes to research.” No amount of assurance about my cultural competency training and awareness as a White researcher would dissuade him from his stance, and understandably so. The outcome of the study landed far from my original intent. Needless to say, the survey produced few results relevant to my hypothesis, with a central finding that Black women were more likely than White women to leave sections of the survey blank. The message in the experiment appeared not to lie in desirable counselor characteristics for Black women, but the impact that my racial identity had on the data. This experience led to further questions. My initial research interest was in understanding how to make sexual health counseling more accessible for African American women. Now I wondered, was I the right person to be investigating this question? Did my privilege—unearned advantages—as a White woman blind me to these potential barriers in the study? While I had developed the research question with my advisor, an African American woman, what other ways could I have more meaningfully involved women of color in the development of the research question to ensure I was doing work with the community instead of conducting research on the community? I was reminded of the critical importance of this tenet of action research. Yet I wondered, was there room in the article manuscript to tell the story of this experience? Community psychologists are calling for more visibility of the subtle variables that influence social science research—for a deconstruction of the researcher’s voice, an exposure, a revealing of the investigator’s mark on the data that are produced. But we’re often trained to believe that exposure of the researcher is not permissible by standard scientific methodology. Revealing the researcher feels divorced from the tradition of “objectivity” and rigorously manipulated research designs in which these threats to validity are to be prepared for and avoided. Many researchers feel that it is not worthwhile to come out from behind the curtain to expose their identity and explore how it impacts the research conducted. Moreover, they have been taught that it is not necessary to do so. And so we embarked on the present qualitative study, where deconstruction of the researcher’s voice is part of the methodology. Where objectivity is not assumed and the development of intersubjectivity is welcomed. Debra Harkins’ Research Encounters I (DH) encountered my own experiences where my identity as a White researcher came into play. I conducted an extensive five-year action-based

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research project that asked members of a teaching community to interview with our consulting team. For years, I have taught and conducted action-based research in which studies are conducted with community members not on them. I should have known better to look out for what happened. But I didn’t. Why did it not occur to me that randomly assigning research assistants to support teachers was not enough? By treating everyone the same, I failed to notice the social inequities already present in the community. Even though the community was intensely involved with all phases of the research process, I had overlooked something. The members of the research team who were asking all the questions were White and several of the participants were persons of color. By not noticing and acknowledging this disparity, I was perpetuating similar experiences of inequality. Why did it not occur to me that when the first teacher of color left the community, it might have had something to do with our research? Or when the second teacher of color transferred to another school? Yes, I noticed that the teachers of color were leaving while the White teachers stayed. But what I did not consider for several years was how we as researchers carrying out our “action research” were implicated in these events. How did I miss it? Staying aware of possible dynamics of race and privilege was not on my radar. For example, we closely listened to an interview later on between a teacher of color and a student interview. In this interview, it was clear there were lost opportunities to connect with the teacher’s expressed vocalization of feeling less connected with other teachers, parents and administrators. The student interviewer continued to ask the interview questions, getting her task completed; yet, ignoring potential opportunities to support and connect. Not preparing interviewers for such experiences resulted from my own lack of critical consciousness and awareness of my privilege. Unfortunately, the example above is only one of many such lost opportunities that occurred during this project. Renee Morant’s Research Encounters I (RM) have faced similar problems with race research, particularly when including people of color in my sample. As a Black woman parented by a single mother, I was interested in studying absent fathering across racial groups. I wanted to compare the social development of White Americans and Black Americans who had the experience of growing up without a father figure. I experienced difficulty in recruiting enough Black participants for the study; furthermore, most of the Black Americans who did participate were recent immigrants to the U.S. I was reminded of the social construction of race, and of the rich diversity within the few categories that

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are typically recognized. Many of the Black participants in my study wanted to check several ethnicities, making it difficult to classify participants into broader comparison groups. I was confused about how to word surveys to classify the intricacy of ethnicity appropriately and found a lack of clear guidelines from the field. Many potential Black participants were also suspicious of the research. I was asked, “What is this for? These questions are really personal; how is this going to be used?” I understood their suspicions about potential racism, but I also believed that it was important to contribute more research with populations of color to the small amount of literature in this area. I felt torn. Given the difficulties of gathering a Black American sample, I realized that I would not be able to draw strong conclusions about my group of interest. Because of the methodological pressures in psychology to study homogeneous samples, I considered only including White Americans. But as a Black, minority fellow in my graduate department, I was encouraged by members of my department to try harder to include minorities in my research. I felt frustrated that other researchers sponsoring my work did not understand the problems of lumping ethnic groups together, how different populations added variables of acculturation stress and various cultural norms that radically changed my focus. Even if faculty attempted to be supportive, I was concerned about the cultural sensitivity of the research. Can we really attain an ultimate truth in social science research? Or as stated in the Heisenberg Principle, does the very attempt to observe transform the phenomenon being studied? What value does our research offer? Why do we conduct this research? What compels us to spend incalculable hours typing at our computers, submitting proposals, working with committees to create acceptable surveys and experimental designs? And in a world where racism continues to be perpetuated by White Americans, and is encountered by people of color on a daily basis, what impact does the researcher’s race have on participants in cultural research? It is possible that we may never rid ourselves of our biases as researchers. But what we can do is to look honestly at our role in the research and deconstruct the potential biases that emerge. The research experiences that we have accounted here speak to the different ways in which race, ethnicity, class, generation, and other aspects of our backgrounds may inform, shape, and help construct experiences in the research process. Our biases may even offer opportunities for understanding a critical part of human experience. We can recognize the intersubjectivity that invariably develops between researcher and participant, and let go of our fruitless attempts to make ourselves invisible in the research process. Perhaps, understanding and exploring our positions as researchers in an explicit manner may be one of the most valuable opportunities in social sciences research.

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RESEARCHER RACE DIALECTICS Several areas of tension arise in the qualitative study of race that are explored throughout this book: • Dialectic 1: Race is social construction → race is social reality • Dialectic 2: Categorical grouping of race → within group differences in race • Dialectic 3: Intersectional identities → focus on racial identity • Dialectic 4: Black and White researcher locations → Black and White participant locations • Dialectic 5: Black–White dichotomy → moving beyond dichotomy We understand these points of tension as dialectics that may occur in contemporary research on race. The Marxian understanding of a dialectic is a process of change that can occur through the conflict of opposing forces (Marx, 1867). We wish readers to hold several dialectics in mind throughout the chapters in this book. We believe these conflicts in researcher race are important to understanding the complexity of the contemporary study of race. We believe that maintaining awareness of these areas of tension will ultimately move research on race, privilege, and oppression forward. First, we acknowledge that race is a social construction as opposed to a biological fact, with more biodiversity within races than between them. In fact, categories of race have often been constructed in order to justify the oppression or privileges of a particular group in history (Cushman, 1995). Nonetheless, race is a social reality that leads to real disparities, often in the context of research. Given the significant impact that race continues to have on how people are perceived, experience privilege and oppression, and deny and access opportunities, it is crucial that the role of race in the social science research process be explored in depth, which is the objective of this book. Furthermore, very real, unintended consequences may occur when studying race. For instance, one risks reinforcing and reifying existing racial disparities or stereotypes. To counter this risk, we emphasize, explore, and deconstruct the social construction and continued social reality of race in research settings today. Secondly, to avoid essentialism, themes in Black and White participants’ responses in this study should not be overgeneralized to all Black and White people, given the large degree of within group differences among each racial category and identity. At the same time, we are interested in themes across racial categories in this work as they function within a system

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of privilege and oppression that perceives and groups individuals according to membership in one race or another. While it should be understood that each participant and researcher in this study has a unique combination of ethnic, regional, socioeconomic, and intrapsychic identities (to name a few), we are also interested in focusing on the role of cultural and racial perceptions in the research setting. Third, the importance of focusing on intersectional identities is crucial in multicultural research and is evident in the complexity within each researcher–participant encounter. Intersectionality refers to the ways multiple aspects of identity that are combined to shape general experiences as well as experiences of privilege and oppression. However, we also wish to give focus to the issue of race in this study to examine how this aspect of social identity operates between researcher and participant. We will discuss this notion of intersectionality and its future in multicultural research further in the final chapter in this book. Additionally, while this research is interpreted through the lens of both Black-identified (RM) and White-identified researchers (LM & DH), the lens of the White researchers may be heightened given differences in writing responsibilities related to authorship, as determined by each author’s availability for making contributions to the final book. Therefore, while multiple voices are included in participant responses and researcher reflections, it is important to note that the writing may be more frequently filtered through the lens of the first two authors who are both White women with various privileges and power that shape interpretations of data and presentation of information in the book. Lastly, the authors, researchers, and participants in this book reflect a traditional Black/White duality of racial dialogue. While concentrating on the Black–White dichotomy may risk oversimplifying problems with race, leaving out other groups between this color line, it is a continued area of racial tension that we feel merits attention. In addition, this was a decision that was shaped by initial pressures from the research review board to create a parsimonious research design with comparison groups, reflecting problems in furthering research on race within the academic system. We see value in using comparison groups to develop further understanding of issues of racial identity as they are constructed within each racial group. However, we feel it is important to avoid presenting the White subsample as normative and take steps to avoid it. We will discuss Black–White dichotomy issues further in our analysis of multicultural competency in research (Chapter 2). Moreover, while we focus on issues of Black and White racial group membership in this book, we firmly support exploring other populations of color and aspects of social identity in future research endeavors.

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BOOK OVERVIEW This book is designed to expose the researcher’s role in the process of data collection in social science research, in order to highlight the utility of understanding our position, our relationship to participants, and our consequent influence on the data collected. What is missing from many other writings on race is the voice of the interviewer, and the perspective that this voice represents. We make the researcher’s point of view visible throughout this book via interview excerpts, with the intent to deconstruct researcher race effects. In the context of this book, we understand researcher race as both descriptive of a part of the researcher’s identity but also related to how participants ascribe race-related phenomenon to the researcher. To achieve this goal, we include passages from a qualitative and narrative research study with a sample of 20 Black-identified and 20 White-identified participants, as well as a Black researcher and a White researcher. Selections of data from across different researcher–participant racial dyads illustrate how issues of researcher race can arise in multicultural research. We review and analyze aspects of researcher race in the research process in two parts. In Part 1, we provide the history, theory, and method we used to explore issues of race and racism within the research process. We begin with Chapter 1, a review of the history of racial bias and maltreatment in research and how the past may contribute to contemporary cultural mistrust of research among participants of color. In addition, we discuss how this past history in research influenced the assumptions of current researchers who were trained using White cultural perspectives and norms. The following chapter describes the cultural competency theory guiding this research to premise our study of the social construct of race. Chapter 3 provides a brief overview of narrative research methodology and details of our study. In Part 2, we explore key matters related to researcher race in the research process, as evident in our study data. Chapter 4 features participant responses and preferences with regards to researcher race. Chapter 5 uses narrative excerpts to examine moments when the researchers go “off script” from the semi-structured interview. Next, Chapter 6 focuses on the discussion of traumatic racism among Black and White researchers and participants. We incorporate themes of racism among interviewees to clarify ways in which stories of racism are told in the research setting, altered by the combination of the racial identities of the researcher and participant. The final chapter expands conversations about researcher race to consider intersecting identities of gender, social class, and sexual orientation while balancing a focus on researcher race. In closing, the last chapter includes considerations for future multicultural research and training as well as final reflections and a summary of our conclusions.

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Throughout this book, we examine our biases, vulnerabilities, and relationships to the participant as they interlink with histories of privilege and oppression under the auspice of “objectivity” in research. We hope this book can serve as a guide for researchers, as well as students of research, culture, and diversity. With this book, we offer a tool for developing awareness of race and oppression as part of a lifelong commitment to social justice. With this book, we come out from behind the curtain of objectivity and step into the light.

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PART I HISTORY, THEORY, AND METHOD

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CHAPTER 1

PARTICIPANT INJURIES: HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF DISCRIMINATORY RESEARCH The term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, ‘research’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. —Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2005) It is a mistake to attribute African Americans’ medical reluctance to simple fear generated by the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, because this study is not an aberration that single-handedly transformed African American perceptions of the healthcare system. The study is part of a pattern of experimental abuse, and many African Americans understand it as such, because a rich oral tradition has sustained remembrances of pain, abuse, and humiliation at the hands of physicians. —Harriet Washington (2008)

Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book, Decolonizing Methodologies (2005), chronicles the history of research on indigenous peoples as an instrument of colonialism. She recounts the violations of trust that occurred in their research in order to appropriate resources for the empire—to construct an inferior “Other” subject to contrast with the valorized colonizer identity. In various

Researcher Race: Social Constructions in the Research Process, pp. 3–14 Copyright © 2012 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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iterations, this story is present throughout generations of research with African American participants. Harriet Washington’s, Medical Apartheid (2009), notes that while recognition of racism in research is often solely linked to the infamous Tuskegee study, when this mistrust has developed from centuries of exploitation and the persistence of racism in contemporary culture. It is difficult to capture the disturbing nature and quantity of these innumerable research studies marked by racism and exploitation in one chapter. However, this chapter will review a number of key research studies from the fields of psychology, statistics, and medicine. An unfortunate and significant amount of harmful research has been inflicted on various groups around the world. However, given the scope and focus of our book, this chapter focuses primarily on the history of racism in research with Black participants in America. The studies we present in this chapter range from the Tuskegee study to less familiar incidents in research, such as the categorization of Black skin in psychology, psychiatry’s attempts to label escaped slaves as insane, and medical testing on Black prisoners. These studies reveal a number of themes in the history of experimental racism, which are highlighted throughout this chapter: (1) an obsessive attention to differences between races in order to attribute superiority to the White population; (2) bad science and ethics driven to substantiate racist hypotheses; (3) involvement of the founders of various disciplines in biased research practices who often developed their field out of racist motivations; and notably: and (4) voices of resistance and refutations from other leaders in the field who called racist research practices into question.

HISTORY OF RACISM IN U.S. RESEARCH Early Studies in Psychology A chapter is missing in many history of psychology books—a period of psychology research devoted to identifying and categorizing differences between Black and White races. Implicit in these studies was a desire to differentiate in order to highlight the attribution of superior abilities to White racial group members. One of the first known American researchers to study differences in human psychology based on race was Charles S. Meyers. Meyers, a White American researcher, was highly influential in his field—he cofounded the British Psychological Society and coined the term shell shock (Costall, 2001). Meyers began his psychological research on racial differences by measuring reaction times of Japanese participants in comparison to that of Europeans in 1881. He argued for the racial superiority of Whites over other racial groups due to what he believed to be quicker reaction

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times. R. Meade Bache later applied this approach to compare reaction times between American Indians and Black participants, published in the Psychological Review (Benjamin, 2006; Bache, 1895). This early research in the field of psychology, pioneered by Bache and Meyers, was riddled with ethnocentric bias and reinforced racist beliefs about intelligence and cognitive ability. Another focus of early physiological psychology research centered on racial differences in physical characteristics, as noted by Guthrie in his 2004 book, Even the Rat was White: A Historical View of Psychology. Many White researchers created instruments to identify skin color through color blocks (von Luschan, 1922), a color-top (Bowman, 1930) and a skin illuminating photometer (Shaxby & Bonnell, 1928). This attempt to categorize skin color differences was precipitated by increased rates of interracial children in the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Psychologists specified categories of race based on amount of White blood (Fergusson, 1916) or degree of darkness (Crane, 1923; Strong, 1913). Other research included Paul Broca’s 1862 study of race and hair texture (Broca, 1862). Researchers even measured racial differences in thickness of the lips (Davenport, 1927) by studying, measuring, and quantifying each part of the body in contrast to the White body, which was considered to be the compulsory norm. These obsessive studies of difference were not only marked by flawed scientific methodology; they allowed researchers to assign labels of inferiority or superiority to the categories created, employing the auspice of science to reinforce racial prejudice.

Eugenics and the Study of Intelligence Racism in academic research was a significant focus throughout the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, a school of thought that was prominent in the study of intelligence in psychology and education. The founder of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton (1869) proposed in Hereditary Genius that intelligence was genetic. Galton, a White scholar from Victorian England, recommended identifying a select group of people to pass on the human race, coupled with sterilization of the less intelligent races. The eugenics movement argued for the ascendancy of the “dominant race” and the eradication of people of color, Jews, the impoverished, the mentally ill, homosexuals, and other individuals designated by Eugencists to be unsuitable for carrying on the human race (Mehler, 1997). White researchers who were contemporary to Galton in psychology and education were heavily involved in the eugenics approach in the study of intelligence (Guthrie, 2004). A prime example was the work of Lewis Terman, a psychologist at Stanford University and eventual president of the American

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Psychological Association. Terman (1916) attempted to apply IQ testing scales, normed on White Americans, to Latino and Black families. He reasoned that people of color were more commonly of below average intelligence and should thus be discouraged from reproducing. Yet, another psychologist and leader in the study of intelligence, Raymond Cattell, was also implicated in the eugenics movement (Mehler, 1997). Cattell’s treatise on the future of psychology, Psychology and Social Progress (1933), professed that poverty and illness maintain the ultimate health of a race through natural selection and extinction of the socially disadvantaged and populations of color. Many other psychological studies used the intelligence tests developed on White Americans to make unfair comparisons of Black and White intelligence. This research demonstrated the corruption of scientific methodology in early studies of race in order to validate racist hypotheses. For example, Stetson (1897), a White American scholar, measured the abilities of Black and White students to memorize and recite a poem. When the Black students averaged a stronger performance on this measure, researchers concluded that the test was an irrelevant measure of intelligence. In this case and many others, when contradictory evidence surfaced that countered anti-Black sentiments, researchers discarded their hypotheses. Black Americans were not the only ones deemed intellectually deficient by the emerging field of psychology. White American researchers conducted comparative intelligence studies in similar fashions on Native Americans and Mexican Americans (Blackwood, 1927; Hunter, 1922; Jamieson & Standiford, 1928). In addition, based on the purported intellectual advantages of White blood, these researchers attempted to study the intelligence of multiracial individuals. Thus, the development of the mulatto hypothesis arose, which claimed that intelligence was proportional to the amount of White blood present in multiracial children (Herskovits, 1934). Strong (1913) and Morse (1914) conducted intelligence tests on Black and White samples comparing Binet scales of IQ in attempts to confirm this theory. It did not take long for researchers to use new assessments developed for intelligence testing to reaffirm the intelligence of White Americans in explanation of their racial supremacy. White psychologists took a key role in assisting with the goals of the eugenics movement. The American Breeders Association, a eugenics group, called on a committee of psychologists to assist with the implementation of intelligence testing to identify who should be sterilized (Kimmelman, 2007). This committee suggested a number of strategies to carry out these goals of the eugenics movement. Alarmingly, many states instituted laws derived from the principles of eugenics, leading to the sterilization of over 10,000 individuals (Guthrie, 2004). Within this group was a disproportionate representation of people of Color, impoverished, homosexual, and mentally ill people. Nonetheless, some scientific developments grew out of the racially biased eugenics research. Many have argued that despite the racist basis of

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the eugenics movement, its focus on the study of heredity furthered many scientific developments in genetics (Kimmelman, 2007). While these contributions are important to note, they were not without a scientific cost. What further innovations in research may have resulted if this time was not misused studying invalid notions of race and social progress? Eugenic developments in intelligence research were not without criticism within academia, and many key contributors to intelligence research. Numerous researchers attempted to refute studies whose hypotheses appeared to favor eugenic principles, pointing out the importance of rapport on intelligence performance in IQ testing (Canady, 1936), contesting the mulatto hypothesis (Herskovits, 1934), and emphasizing the impact of socioeconomic confounds on IQ studies of Black children (Beckham, 1933). Several of the chief developers of intelligence instruments warned against erroneous assumptions about race based on test results. Stern, a German-Jewish immigrant to the U.S. introduced the very concept of IQ, and advised against interpreting findings of IQ testing (Guthrie, 2004). Wechsler, a White American psychologist, developed the WechslerBellevue Scale (1939), still in use in revised versions today, emphasized that the test was normed on Whites and not applicable to Black Americans. Sparks of resistance to the eugenic zeitgeist of the early intelligence movement occurred despite its prolongation into the mid-twentieth century. In addition, notions of the eugenics movement reemerged in psychology near the end of the twentieth century. Harvard psychologist Richard J. Hernstein and political scientist Charles Murray coauthored The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Lie (Hernstein, 1994), argued for the survival of the most intelligent, with higher IQ scores generally occurring among wealthier, White populations in America. These White American scholars’ book failed to examine how racial stratification conflates race and class or how intelligence tests are normed on White groups. The Bell Curve, written by a psychologist and political scientist, perpetuated racist beliefs about heritability of intelligence, carrying on the legacy of the eugenics movement of poor science and racial bias decades after its demise. In The Mismeasure of Man, the late historian of science, Stephen J. Gould (1996), also a White American, heavily criticized The Bell Curve for flawed conclusions stemming from bad science. As evidenced by reactions from critics like Gould, racist research has not been without some opposition for faulty methods in both historical and contemporary research. Unfortunately, criticism of racism in research has not always been heard.

Early Statistics Research Another body of research distorted by racist objectives occurred in the field of statistics in the U.S. during the 1800s. The U.S. Department of

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State conducted Census statistics that were corrupted by methodological failures in order to substantiate discriminatory behavior (Postell, 1953). The 1841 U.S. Census data reported free Black Americans to be in worse health than White Americans, with higher adult and infant mortality, mental illness, and sexually transmitted disease (Guthrie, 2004). Pro-slavery politicians cited falsified Census data in their campaigns and likely contributed to the prolongation of slavery for the next 20 years (Washington, 2009). Edward Jarvis, M.D., a founding member of the American Statistical Association in 1839, revealed erroneous findings and fabricated numbers in Census data ( Jarvis, 1852). Another critic of this data was James McCune Smith, M.D., an African American physician at Harvard University, also a member of the American Statistical Association (Morgan, 2003). He presented his critique of the Census statistics to the U.S. Senate in 1844. Fabricated Census data in the nineteenth century was not only a testament to the flawed methodology that was used to promote, justify, and maintain slavery; it also marked resistance among leaders in the research field against the use of bad science to achieve racist objectives. Not all of the leaders of the statistical field were as outraged by racism. In fact, several other founders of statistics were eugenicists. For example, Karl Pearson (1905), a White English academic, received the appointment of Chair of Eugenics at the University of London and developed many statistical tests tied to his belief that certain races were inferior and should cease to exist (Besag, 1981). Many of his famous works in developing correlation tests, standard deviation, and significance level stemmed from his attempt to authenticate eugenic notions of heredity (Norton, 1978). Similarly, Charles Spearman another White eugenicist psychologist and statistical originator contributed key concepts in correlation equations and created factor analysis (Norton, 1979). Like Pearson, many of his statistical concepts were attempts to measure the mental abilities of the different races followed by questioning the right of presumptively inferior races to vote and reproduce (Spearman, 1914). Early statistics research reveals a genesis of statistical concepts and formulas despite racist convictions. Several leaders of the statistical field were driven to innovate out of racist inclinations. Conversely, other key figures made important contributions to the field out of a sense of social and academic justice.

Studies in Psychiatry Early research in psychiatry reveals similar problems with racism as in neighboring fields. White American Benjamin Rush, M.D., the professed father of American psychiatry, attempted to find a “cure” for Black skin

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(Rush, 1799). In the late 1790s, he believed Black skin was the result of a leprosy he called negritude, which he believed could be removed through medical intervention. In 1851, the White American psychiatrist, Samuel Cartwright M.D., issued his publication, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race” in which he detailed mental illnesses of Black Americans. Most famously, he coined the term drapetomania, a disorder developed to label slaves who attempted to escape slave owners as undergoing a temporary insanity. He also put forth a number of other malaises characterizing “disorders” of slaves such as laziness (Hebetude), destruction of property (Dyaesthesia Aethiopis), and a propensity for eating dirt (Cachexia Africana). The latter is likely the currently known Pica Disorder, the consumption of nonnutritive items due to nutritional deficiencies or anxiety (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000). Unable to consider the effects of malnutrition, stress, and anger of Black Americans in slavery, leading psychiatrists developed pathologizing disorders that located the problem within the individual and their mental health. This labeling bares similarity to controversial diagnoses of the last several decades in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that have labeled homosexuality and gender variance as mental disorders, with little to no acknowledgement of the social contributions. Washington (2009) documents some of the most dramatic forms of harm in research on Black Americans in the disproportionate number of lobotomies psychiatrists and neurosurgeons inflicted on Black Americans from the 1930s through the 1960s. In the 1950s, White American psychiatrist Robert Heath, M.D. of Tulane University experimented on Black prisoners by inserting electrodes into the brains to stimulate pleasure centers. In addition, he conducted LSD and other drug experiments on predominantly Black prisoners for the CIA. From the 1960s until the 1970s, psychiatrists regularly performed brain ablations—removal of brain matter—on African American children deemed hyperactive. Psychiatrists often performed these lobotomies on Black children without a psychiatric diagnosis or the informed consent of their parents. This history of research in psychiatry notes some of the overtly racist research practices in which psychiatrists deliberately harmed Black participants, and the unconscious devaluing of Black American life that led to their overrepresentation in damaging medical studies.

Gynecological Experimentation Adding to the number of founders of the various modern academic professions involved in racist research was James Marion Sims, M.D., a White

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American physician considered to be the father of the field of gynecology and inventor of the speculum (Kapsalis, 1997). To conduct his experiments, Sims forced enslaved Black women into gynecological surgeries against their will and without anesthesia, despite the popularization of the use of ether as an anesthetic. Several medical assistants left the position following years without experimental results and intolerable screams (Washington, 2009). As a result, women held one another down during these excruciating procedures. Sims eventually developed surgical techniques to repair fistulas—tears during labor leading to incontinence, infection, and pain. The slaveholders permitted these surgeries with the expectation their slaves’ improved reproductive abilities would increase their wealth (Kapsalis, 1997). While Dr Sims’ techniques improved, his experimentation contributed to the deaths of a number of infants and adult Black women (Kenny, 2007). Other physicians trying to perfect their skills conducted research to the death—many women in slavery lost their lives during various surgical procedures (Ojanuga, 1993). When infections and fatalities followed these gynecological procedures and births, the physicians often blamed the women instead of their burgeoning techniques for failing to care for themselves adequately. Shockingly, members of the medical profession have recently published a number of articles defending his work from claims of racism (de Costa, 2003; Wall, 2006). In addition, his statue still stands today before the New York Academy of Medicine and several other medical institutions (Washington, 2009). His monument and ongoing defense by many physicians are testimonies to both the brief memory of racism in medical experimentation as well as the persistent refusal to accept it.

Tuskegee Syphilis Study One of the most commonly referenced medical studies in which vast racial injustice and harm occurred is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study of Macon County, Alabama. This longitudinal experiment occurred between 1932 and 1972, and included 399 Black American men of Macon County who had been diagnosed with syphilis. These men were informed that they were receiving free treatment. Instead, participants were left untreated, despite the availability of penicillin as a successful treatment as early as 1947. Several White American physicians, a Black American doctor, and a Black American nurse were involved in conducting the study. These researchers documented the course of the disease in these men, punctuated with the deaths of over 100 participants and the infections of a number of their wives and children (Washington, 2009). Following its conclusion, the results of the Tuskegee study were published, presented at conferences, endorsed

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by the American Medical Association, and directed by the U.S. Public Health Service. One of the primary motivations of the study was to test a eugenicist belief that the brains of Black Americans were less developed and were thus left intact by the disease while doing most damage on cardiovascular systems (Lombardo & Dorr, 2006). Researchers also believed Black Americans were vulnerable to medical illness due to alleged hypersexual behaviors that increased sexually transmitted disease rates, a fallacy given transmission occurred most frequently at birth. In 1972, the story of the Tuskegee Experiment broke and Senator Ted Kennedy held hearings that called for a full investigation (Curran, 1973). The federal government appointed a panel to investigate the abuse of this study. While this panel put an end to the study in 1972, government officials and the leader of the panel thwarted many of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Ad Hoc Advisory Board panel’s attempts to uncover and publish honest findings of the study. No implementation of interventions for this disease occurred, the study did not advance clinical treatment for the disease, and no one benefited except the physicians and researchers involved in the study. In 1974, victims filed a $10 million class-action lawsuit following the Tuskegee hearings (Center for Disease Control, 2010). However, this led to only $37,500 awarded to each study participant and $15,000 for heirs. On May 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton issued a long overdue public apology for the Tuskegee study (Center for Disease Control, 2010). The experiment reveals the tragic loss of lives and years of suffering on the part of Tuskegee participants—a primary example of the unfortunate tradition of racist research in America. This well-cited study is often a source of wariness among many African Americans toward research practices. However, Washington (2009) emphasized that this study is only one of too many examples of unethical, downright harmful, and even fatal research conducted against Black Americans. She writes: By focusing upon the single event of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study rather than examining a centuries-old pattern of experimental abuse, recent investigations tend to distort the problem, casting African American’s wariness as an overreaction to a single event rather than an understandable, unreasonable reaction to the persistent experimental abuse that has characterized American medicine’s interaction with African Americans. (p. 181)

Washington also notes that these studies were not only marked by blatant racism and genocidal goals but also by bad science. Control groups were spoiled, records were lost, and without question, ethics were compromised. Despite the suffering of the Tuskegee participants and the destructive

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fervor of the researchers involved, few, if any, scientific advances were gained by the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Like many other of the racist studies described in this chapter, the costs far outweighed any benefits.

Post-Tuskegee Medical Experimentation One might hope that medical experimentation that was exploitative and harmful toward Black Americans would end with the public exposure and outrage following coverage of the Tuskegee study. Unfortunately, racist medical experimentation on Black Americans persisted long after the Tuskegee study. Numerous injustices continued from the 1950s into the 1970s, especially in prison research (Washington, 2009). Mostly Black prison inmates were encouraged to participate in a vast number of experiments with financial incentives, private space in the jails, and the potential pride and attention of being part of what prisoners often considered to be meaningful activity over the course of their lengthy sentences. These skin tests, fingernail punctures, and other painful product and drug testing led to skin scarring, hair loss, and chronic illnesses. In fact, infection occurred for some men due to poor record keeping and cross-contamination with nonsterilized instruments. As a result, muddled information of their prolonged ailments interfered with treatment. The 1979 Belmont Report issued the Common Rule, with guidelines against experimentation on prisoners of more than minimal risk (Fisher, 2006). However, some experiments of questionable risk have continued from the 1980s in many prisons in the U.S. Brown University researchers are still attempting to lobby for rights to continue experimentation on prisoners today (Washington, 2009). Another recent case of biological research lacking consent to the profit of the medical industry is the case of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman who died of cervical cancer at the age of 30 whose cancer grew so rapidly that it became a critical study in cancer research (Skloot, 2009; Zielinski, 2010). White American journalist, Rebecca Skloot (2010) has written in her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about this African American tobacco farmer whose cervical cells, named HeLa, were taken without her consent by a doctor at Johns Hopkins in 1951. Her cells were preserved and regenerated to make critical developments in cloning, in vitro fertilization, and the polio vaccine. HeLa cells fueled billions of dollars in profit for medical industries, yet, many members of her family have lived in poverty, generally uninformed about the details of their mother’s research contributions. One might imagine that this story would have been different had Henrietta Lacks been a wealthier, White woman. Among the most recent phenomenon in research is the high-risk medical invention testing on disproportionate numbers of Black Americans.

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Nontherapeutic research on African American male youth in the 1990s is one example of this research. Columbia University medical researchers used fenfluramine to examine aggression in African American males in attempting to demonstrate heritability of violence and aggression (Shamoo & Tauer, 2002). This drug was found to induce brain damage in experimental animals in 1973. Additionally, many Black patients have been coerced into testing of high-risk medical inventions such as artificial blood or artificial hearts in the 2000s, with grave outcomes (Washington, 2009). The number of other studies that have been carried out since the Tuskegee Study is too vast to list here. While truly harmful research is much less predominant today, much of the harmful research studies with Black participants have often been imported to Africa where fewer medical regulations exist that permit researchers to take more risks with the lives of participants of color (Washington, 2009).

CONCLUSIONS A number of themes are present in the history of racism in scientific research presented in this chapter. For one, differences between races were studied in order to ascribe superiority to White participants and inferiority to Black participants. This history of unsound science and unethical attempts to provide evidence for racist claims clarifies why many African Americans are wary of research. In fact, eugenic motivations marked the genesis of a number of academic disciplines. However, throughout this history, some leaders of their respective disciplines met racially biased research with active resistance. These antiracist, scientifically, and morally just efforts deserve acknowledgment in the history of racism in research. Because of the history of racism in research and contemporary racism in America, cultural mistrust towards researchers may pose a significant barrier to including Black participants in current research. Terrell and Terrell (1981) operationalized cultural mistrust as the general lack of trust among Black Americans towards White Americans and other predominantly White mainstream systems given the history of oppression. The small number of high profile researchers of color may add to distrust of researchers and fear of being exploited in predominantly White research settings (Cort, 2004). Knowledge of the Tuskegee experiment may not be requisite to develop this mistrust of scientific research. An inevitable familiarity with the longstanding history of racial bias and mistreatment of Blacks by White institutions may be enough to contribute to cultural mistrust (Gamble, 1997). What are the effects of cultural mistrust towards research among Black Americans and negative attitudes towards research? Cultural mistrust has been identified as a research variable among Black populations

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(Terrell & Terrell, 1981) and has been linked to more negative attitudes toward research (Mizock & Harkins, 2009), mistrust of medical facilities and hospice care (Cort, 2004), and barriers to accessing therapy services (Nickerson, Helms, & Terrell, 1994; Watkins, Terrell, Miller, & Terrell 1989). These are a few of the outcomes studied thus far. Additionally, after years of overrepresentation of Black Americans in high-risk experimental research, underrepresentation of Black Americans is predominant in current medical research (Mizock & Harkins, 2009), dropping to less than 1%, according to some estimates (Washington, 2009). Another meta-analysis found only 2% of a sample of 8,809 articles from five major psychology journals from 1990 to 2004 inclusive of populations of color (Quinland et al., 2004). As a result, we are missing important information to develop interventions with Black Americans, vital to reducing race-based medical and mental health disparities. Washington (2009) recommends improvement of IRB procedures to address ethical issues in research involving participants of color, creating a guide to assist participants of color with making informed consent decisions. Additionally, there is a significant need for broader academic representation of people of color and cultural competency standards in current research settings, which we will describe further in Chapter 2. Reports of racially unjust research practices continue to surface. News broke in October 2010 about U.S. research on Guatemalan prisoners from 1946 to 1948 (McNeill, 2010). During this period, researchers deliberately infected 700 Guatemalan men with various venereal diseases to test the treatment of penicillin. While in prison, these men received researchsanctioned visits from sex workers with syphilis, application of the bacteria directly onto lesions made on their penises, and spinal injections. Researchers in this experiment were also involved in the Tuskegee syphilis study, continuing to devalue the lives of people of color in medical research history. This book examines the impact of this sordid history of racism in research and implications for engaging in more ethically and culturally relevant study. In particular, we sought to examine how the relationship between researcher and participant, varied by race, shapes research participation and outcomes. We want our study to serve as an alternative to the colorblind response in so much of the research conducted today, which responds to race by simply ignoring its influence. This book is in the spirit of resistance of many of the academic reactions to the racially biased practices throughout the history of research. We conducted our study to uncover the impact of the history of racism in research out of a sense of ethical, methodological, and social justice.

CHAPTER 2

CULTURALLY COMPETENT METHODOLOGY: MULTICULTURAL RESEARCH THEORY If psychologists believe they need only specialized training, they will never become culturally competent. Cultural competence must be obtained through experiential reality. —Derald Wing Sue (in Tracey, 2006)

As described in Chapter 1, a history of overt racism and corrupt methodology created barriers to research examining racial and cultural factors in the past, and continues to pose problems for conducting research today. Currently, more covert than overt barriers to cultural research are prevalent in research institutions, the publishing community, in addition to the internal barriers within the researchers themselves (Cox, 2004; Maton, Kohout, Wicherski, Leary, & Vinokurov, 2006; Mizock & Harkins, 2007; Toia, Herron, Primavera, & Javier, 1997). In this chapter, we review recommendations for overcoming barriers to ensure culturally competent research. Practicing cultural competence as a researcher requires more than participation in a single diversity training—it is

Researcher Race: Social Constructions in the Research Process, pp. 15–21 Copyright © 2012 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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an experiential process as stated in the aforementioned quote by Derald Wing Sue. We will discuss how various theories of culturally competent methodology and researcher identity guided our study of researcher race.

WHAT IS CULTURAL COMPETENCE? Cultural competence refers to a complex skill set involving knowledge, awareness, and actions that promote cross-cultural understanding across a range of settings such as research (Arredondo & Toporek, 2004; Cross, Bazron, Dennis, & Isaacs, 1989). The notion of cultural competency has been prevalent as a concept in mental health practice but has also had applications in research, teaching, medicine, business, and other fields. Cultural competency theory reflects a change from a focus on cultural knowledge—factual information about various cultural groups—to a complex skillset. This previous trend emphasized acquiring information about the history, values, and belief systems of many cultural groups (Adams, 1995). Cultural knowledge was once considered to be among the most important ways of approaching multicultural work. While still important, cultural knowledge is not sufficient on its own to effectively engage in cross-cultural interactions and relationships in research. Cultural competence and other terms like, cultural sensitivity, cultural relevance, and multicultural competence are often used interchangeably. Use of these terms may vary depending on the discipline or researcher. However, variations exist in the meaning of these concepts that determine their utility. For example, Whaley (2001) specified cultural sensitivity as an active engagement in the process of considering cultural issues needed prior to developing cultural competence. In some cases, culturally sensitive research may be a term that is used to describe this encounter in a research setting. Cultural competence is a notion that has advantages and limitations for researchers. One disadvantage is the implication of competence as something that is attainable as an end product for researchers in training. However, the constantly shifting nature of culture makes cultural competence a moving target that requires ongoing engagement (K. Crawford, personal communication, September 1, 2009). An advantage of this term is the value placed on developing a competency that requires commitment and skill in research practice. It has even been argued that cultural competence is an ethical responsibility on the part of researchers and practitioners (Arredondo & Toporek, 2004; Paasche-Orlow, 2004).

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CULTURALLY COMPETENT RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES Many professional organizations have acknowledged the importance of cultural competence and have instituted cultural competence standards in research, training, and practice (e.g., American Psychological Association [APA], 2002; American Medical Association [AMA], 2004; National Association of Social Workers [NASW], 2001). These guidelines call for the integration of issues of race and ethnicity into academic curricula. Unfortunately, exploration of race and ethnicity continue to be underrepresented in psychological research in particular. A meta-analysis of 800 empirical studies from psychology journals between 1990 and 1999 found only 11% of 457 articles investigated race or ethnicity (Delgado-Romero, Galván, Maschino, & Rowland, 2005). A second, more comprehensive study found this problem to be worsening, with only 2% of a sample of 8,809 articles from 5 APA journals during 1990–2004 to be inclusive of populations of color (Quinland et al., 2004). To add to the scarcity of multicultural research, many of the articles that do include minority populations commit methodological errors that reinforce problematic notions of race, which we will describe further in this chapter. Research exploring the paucity of studies involving minority populations has found that the White graduate students who comprise the bulk of graduate academic research programs are hesitant to conduct multicultural studies (Liu, Sheu, & Williams, 2004). Some of this tentativeness is due not simply to the absence of interest; but from a lack of awareness of issues of race and culture, a lack of cultural sensitivity training, and a fear of reinforcing problematic biases and assumptions regarding race and ethnicity. The research environment of the graduate department has been found to significantly affect research attitudes among training researchers (Royalty, Gelso, Mallinckrodt, & Garrett, 1986). Faculty may also play a large role in the development of cultural competency in researchers. Faculty mentorship has been found to have a large role in the self-efficacy and productivity of graduate student researchers (Hollingsworth & Fassinger, 2002), having implications for their comfort and pursuit of issues of race in research from a culturally competent perspective. In addition to the hesitancy of White graduate students to conduct race research is the wariness of participants of color to take part in research studies. As discussed in Chapter 1, the effects of the history of racism in research contribute to mistrust among many participants of color. As a result, research that advances awareness of racism and examines important topics in race and ethnicity are understudied. More urgently, Washington (2009) highlighted the lack of important intervention research with populations of color who are affected by race-based health disparities.

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These factors add to the urgency of advancing culturally competent methodologies in current research practices and training that are preventionoriented (Bernal et al., 1999; Ridley, 2005). Several researchers have provided guidelines for publishing multicultural research in the discipline of psychology. One issue that arises is the nature of race as socially constructed, but is also a social reality that leads to real disparities (Bryant-Davis & Ocampo, 2005). How does one study the effects of race and racism while also attempting to avoid the dangers of reifying the problematic construct of race? Helms, Jernigan, and Mascher (2005) described the lack of scientific meaning in the variable of race due to its socially constructed nature, leading to problematic use of this construct in data collection, analysis, and interpretation. To address this problem, these authors recommended racial groups be categorized further with more specificity, emphasizing within group differences like racial identity attitudes. García Coll et al. (1996) recommended addressing variability within each racial group by considering associated experiences of racism, prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. Ideas such as these for elaborating further on the model of race in research can allow the concept to be more appropriately represented as socially constructed and intertwined with class, ethnicity, and other aspects of social identity. Another useful distinction for addressing the effects of social construction of race on individuals and groups is the notion of psychorace and sociorace. Psychorace refers to the effects of the intrapsychic internalization of the social construction of race, and sociorace refers to intergroup racial relations and dynamics (Helms & Richardson, 1997). These terms hold utility for referencing individual differences in race versus group differences. Researchers in the social sciences have observed the importance of specially designing methodology to reflect a culturally sensitive mode of inquiry into the variable of race. Typically, researchers advocate for the mixed method approach in conducting culturally sensitive experiments regarding issues of race and ethnicity, which utilizes both quantitative and qualitative data. Unfortunately, the use of surveys is often insufficient for capturing the complexity of racial consciousness (Carlson & Chamberlain, 2004). While the traditional quantitative method is useful, it may not be enough to gather the multifaceted data related to racial consciousness. Therefore, the use of qualitative methodology in a multicultural research design may allow the additional flexibility needed to open up dialogue for voices of color that have so often been silenced in scholarship (Bobo & Fox, 2003; Cox, 2004; Pinro & McKay, 2006). In addition, research rarely contextualizes questions, methods, results, or discussions as aspects of White culture in an explicit manner. This problem reinforces the compulsory attitude of White culture as the dominant norm. Qualitative methodology can also expose this barrier to culturally competent research.

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Another suggestion has been for culturally mindful researchers to consider limitations of the Black–White paradigm in psychological study (Parker & Lynn, 2002). As mentioned in our introductory chapter, this dichotomy is part of a key dialectic in our own study of researcher race. A strict reliance on this dichotomy may imply that all critical racial/ethnic issues are centered on tension between Black and White racial groups. Experimentation that focuses on group comparisons between Black and White samples often assigns the White group as the compulsory norm to compare the “abnormalities” of the Black sample. A focus on the Black– White paradigm may run the risk of oversimplifying racial differences, ignoring the oppression of other racial groups, and neglecting multiracial identities (Shpungin & Lyubansky, 2006). Nevertheless, the Black–White dichotomy remains a critical area of racial tension in America, and is deserving of further study (Lee, Bean, Batalova, & Sandhu, 2003). Research that is centered on Black–White race relations, such as the present study, may address these problems by emphasizing within group differences, acknowledging the social construction of racial groups, and avoiding framing White participants’ experiences as normative in contrast to the experiences of participants of color. Understanding the impact of the social construction of racial groups with its associated privileges and disparities can help move cultural research forward. Cox (2004) asserted that all racial/ethnic groups participating in a study should be represented on the research team to adhere to an ethical process. He writes of the importance that research teams be multiracial, in order to provide various racial/ethnic perspectives to the research process. Given the low rates that graduate students of color are given entry and supported in finishing graduate programs (Maton et al., 2006), creating multiracial research teams may face certain barriers. When this occurs, ensuring the cultural competency of White researchers is vital to conducting culturally sensitive study. In addition, it is often a false assumption that researchers of color may be culturally competent due to their racial identity. Therefore, cultural competency training for all members of the research team is recommended. Another area often missing in multicultural research is consideration of the role of the researcher.

THE ROLE OF THE RESEARCHER IN MULTICULTURAL RESEARCH What researcher variables are important to consider in promoting culturally competent research methodologies? Langhout (2006) specified the importance of examining the role of the researcher’s identity in the research process by encouraging investigators to question the relation between their beliefs and behaviors within the research environment.

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In this way, researchers can assess the role of their identity in the work to avoid self-censorship and expose any challenges to doing research (Cox, 2004). By becoming self-aware, self-critical, and maintaining sensitivity to the race-related dynamics enacted in the research setting, researchers can remain transparent in their objectives to enhance participant trust. The subjectivity of the researcher inevitably makes studies on race and ethnicity vulnerable to racial bias. Cushman (1995) described the researcher as only capable of presenting research through their subjective notions of culture. Attempts to claim objectivity may conceal the sociopolitical standpoint of the researcher (Stoddart, 2002). Ironically, the researcher’s cultural beliefs and perceptions are often more powerfully reflected by the study than that of the subject. As a result of this dynamic, explicit reflection on the researcher’s role enhances the quality and cultural competency of research manuscripts. Ethically sound research with a White investigator and a respondent of color includes a therapeutic stance that acknowledges the history of racism while strengthening the personal connection. Bond (1999) coined the term, connected disruption, involving “actively disrupting arrangements that preclude meaningful involvement across gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability, yet doing so while staying in relationship to others” (Harrell & Bond, 2006, p. 374). Harrell and Bond advocated for three diversity principles to be enacted during the research process: informed compassion, contextualized understanding, and empowered humility. This research framework can help to create an atmosphere of relational sensitivity in a context that empowers participants. Bond and Harrell (2006) identified some of the central challenges and guidelines for culturally sensitive community research. Researchers can be aware of when diversity issues are invoked and remain open about assumptions. Bond and Harrell stress the importance of speaking in a narrative voice that personalizes the struggle of diversity-related work. Adding critical inquiry of the impact of White privilege (McIntosh, 1989)—unearned advantages afforded to Whites—and White racial identity on the research process is essential to work generated by White researchers in particular, given the relative invisibility of White privilege in broader society. Encouragement of anti-racist research by White researchers may draw attention to problems of racism in research among White experimenters while modeling exploration of the effects of racism on White identity. Similarly, identity as a researcher of color may increase the likelihood of cultural sensitivity, given potential experiences and awareness of racism and prejudice. Yet, such experiences do not guarantee cultural competency in research. Culturally competency in social science research includes deconstructing the social location of researchers of color, as well as that of White

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researchers. We will explore these dynamics further through analysis of qualitative data from our study in Part 2 of this book. Experimental inquiry can be an intervention in itself, advancing understanding among racial groups and contributing important findings regarding underserved populations to the field. When done in a collaborative manner, the research process can allow for mutual empowerment and agency between researcher and participant across color lines. Similar to the therapy process, the empirical investigation can build multicultural relationships to increase personal growth and self-knowledge around issues of race and power. Race and ethnicity research can serve as a means of education and intervention in the history of racism in research and its impact on current study. In general, multicultural research must embody a political consciousness about how racial bias in research may perpetuate injustice. Sue, Bingham, Porche-Burke, and Vasquez (1999) recommended that researchers use their privilege and power to alleviate injustice and oppression. Involving oneself in research practices that are collaborative with participants from different racial groups is one important way in which to examine racial disparities in research and speak out against inequality. Research can be a form of activism and therapeutic liberation that takes a stand against racism and launches academic dialogue on prejudice and discrimination. This stance of anti-racist activism and intervention in prejudice are essential to the mission of the present study.

CONCLUSIONS There is a general lack of research with a race and ethnicity focus in the field of psychology. Culturally competent research approaches can be promoted to fill the gap in this research. Cultural research will always contain biases of the researcher. However, as culturally competent researchers, we can acknowledge biases and remain open about barriers and experiences. We can use our privileged positions as researchers to conduct empirical study that offers intervention, builds connections, and promotes empowerment. We developed our study based on these recommendations in the literature for building empowering, culturally competent research methodologies. Our study focused on furthering understanding of Black and White researcher–participant relationships and how race and ethnicity enters into the research process when varying the researcher race. In Chapter 3, we further describe the research design that grew from this literature and how we negotiated these recommendations to work to engage in culturally competent methodological practices.

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CHAPTER 3

CRITICAL NARRATIVE METHOD: THE RESEARCHER RACE STUDY [We create our sense of self] by telling our stories and consuming the stories of others. —Kristin M. Langellier (1999)

Stories hold special importance for social justice research. White and Epston (1990) emphasized narrative means for the achievement of therapeutic and healing outcomes in narrative therapy. Narrative therapy contends that in order to make sense of lived experiences, people ‘story’ their existence. White and Epston posited that if individuals actively participate in stories perceived as unhelpful, unsatisfying, dead-ended, or otherwise negative, then alternative narratives can be created. Since its foundation, narrative therapy has become an especially crucial means to work with marginalized or disenfranchised populations (Fraenkel, Hameline, & Shannon, 2009). Similarly, other qualitative methodologies, which engage and elevate the narratives of interviewees, whether as therapy clients or research participants, are often oriented towards social justice (Kamya, 2007). Social science research designs that engage in narrative methodology often seek to amplify the voices of individuals typically rendered voiceless in terms of dominant social discourse. It is for these reasons we chose a

Researcher Race: Social Constructions in the Research Process, pp. 23–27 Copyright © 2012 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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narrative approach to address potential existent racial issues in the process of doing race research.

NARRATIVE METHOD FOR CRITICAL RESEARCH In Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative, Mishler (1991) argues that interviews should be designed to create opportunities for respondents to speak in their own voices, allow space for storying, and create more equitable distribution of power between researcher and participant. Ideally, such interviews should be conducted in an open format, allowing space for extended narrative accounts by respondents. The study discussed throughout this book was developed based on these suggestions for engaging in critical, multicultural, narrative interviewing. The narrative approach to method was selected for this study based on evidence of the value of gathering participant’s experiential accounts of race and racism (Bond & Harrell, 2006, Rappaport, 1995, Rappaport, 2000). Research that values experiential knowledge can act as a tool for empowerment (Williams, Brewley, Reed, White, Davis-Haley, & 2005). For these reasons a narrative research methodology is well suited for racial and cultural research where empowerment is one goal. Narrative analysis adapts to the collective identities present in many communities of color where connection is important to resilience (Rappaport, 1995). Stories of resilience can be highlighted in recounting traumatic racism, facilitating positive outcomes from negative circumstances (Rappaport, 2000). Yet, the researcher must be careful when eliciting personal stories from Black and White participants. For example, one must avoid assuming that racism is the key concept explaining all experiences of participants of color (Sin, 2005), or explains all beliefs about race for White participants. We attempted to engage stories of resistance and resilience in the interviews presented in Part 2 to balance the disempowering nature of racism.

CRITICAL MULTICULTURAL METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCHER POSITIONS As a key component of narrative research, it is essential to locate the social identity and standpoint of the researcher, as well as to clarify the lens of the research—how it is generated and understood (Harrell & Bond, 2006). We present our research design in this section to locate the methodology. The first author (LM) is White American and served as the White interviewer throughout the study and the second author (DH), also White

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American assisted with research design and research writing. The third author (RM) is African American and served as the Black researcher in the interviews. Additionally, the research underwent review and supervision by a team including an African American female researcher and an East Indian female researcher. All researchers are currently middle class, with various origins of working class and upper class socioeconomic statuses. They are able-bodied individuals with assorted degrees of privilege and marginalization. Given the lead researcher and second author’s racial position, we acknowledge the possibility that our own unconscious racist precepts, or the privilege that our social locations represents, could have entered into the investigation. We hope that through a continual process of selfreflection, we might deconstruct some of our biases in the interpretation of the data. Furthermore, we sought to mitigate the potential influence of the barriers posed by majority group perspectives by working with a multiracial and multiethnic research team. We feel that examining the ways our beliefs and biases affected the research will extend understanding of the interaction of researcher race in the development of race-related research. Prior to conducting the study, we received approval from the institutional review board at the university where the research was conducted. During that stage of the research process, we underwent pressure to narrow our original research design. We revised our initial plan to study broader groups of participants of color, reducing our sample to two groups of study for comparison: Black- and White-identified participants. While we were disappointed by the potential risks of dichotomously classifying our subsamples into Black and White comparison groups—concerned that this design might conform to biases in identifying the White group as normative, and reifying limitations in Black–White dichotomizations of race—we elected to amend our original plan in order to move forward in our study of researcher– participant racial interactions. Given the continued problems with Black– White racial tensions in the U.S., we felt that this design would still allow us to study these important issues in the research setting. In order to avoid the aforementioned risks, we took care to avoid identification of the White group as a compulsory norm; instead, focus was given to the participant narratives that unfolded around our study of research settings, researchers, and race.

THE STUDY Participants The sample for this study included 40 undergraduate participants from a private, urban university in the northeastern United States. Participants

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self-identified their race and ethnicity, creating subsamples of 20 Black participants (13 females, 7 males) and 20 White participants (13 females, 7 males). A female Black researcher (RM) and a female White researcher (LM) each interviewed a subsample of 20 participants to create four dyads: (1) 10 Black researcher–Black participant dyads, (2) 10 Black researcher– White participant dyads, (3) 10 White researcher–Black participant dyads, and (4) 10 White researcher–White participant dyads. We did not include male researchers in this study due to lack of availability. The research team reasoned that keeping researcher gender constant would reduce threats to validity in this area and agreed to examine the impact of gender differences in data analysis.

Procedure At the time of data collection, we (LM and RM, the interviewers) were graduate student researchers recruiting undergraduate participants for the study, meanwhile building community ties with a campus diversity organization by contributing volunteer efforts. We informed participants of the study’s focus on the impact of race in the social science research process with questions on racial and cultural identity as well as racism. We conducted the semi-structured interviews within a private research space in the university. Interviews were recorded with the consent and permission of participants. In the initial stages of the study, participants completed a survey regarding issues of cultural mistrust, racial identity, and attitudes towards research as part of the larger mixed method structure of the study. We analyzed and published the results of the quantitative survey data separately (Mizock & Harkins, 2007). In addition, we asked participants for their perspectives on this type of research. Their responses and reflections contributed to the development of the qualitative interviews that will be discussed in Part 2. The questions in the semi-structured interview focused on three areas: culture, race, and research. The conversation began with questions about cultural identity, providing participants with the opportunity to define what culture meant to them. In the next portion of the interview, we discussed the participant’s sense of racial identity, experiences with racism, and ways of dealing with racism. Lastly, we invited participants to reflect on the interview they had taken part in. We asked participants to consider if and how race may have played a role in the interview and how research might ideally approach this variable to maximize empowerment.

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Data Analysis The audio recordings of the interviews were transcribed. Nonlexical utterances, pauses, repeated words, and extraneous words (i.e., uh, um) have been edited from the selected quotes presented in this text to ease readability. However, this editing was conducted to retain the meaning of the narratives and comments. To contextualize excerpts from interviews, participants’ self-identified ethnicities are described in order to emphasize within-group differences that underlie the socially constructed category of race. Our research team, including the research interviewers, contributed to the different stages of the research process, from the development of the research question to interpretation of the resulting interview data—an important approach to culturally competent research (Cox, 2004; Moffatt, George, Lee, & McGrath, 2005). Per the thematic analysis approach (Aronson, 1994), themes from the 40 transcripts that were identified and coded into a related pattern. This data was categorized into sub-themes. From this group of sub-themes, several key themes were selected based on related literature in this area. Representative excerpts were selected from the interviews within the various themes. Next, we organized central themes of these interviews into sections following the order they surfaced in the semi-structured interviews in order to deepen exploration of the stories that transpired. We organized these stories and themes in a manner to highlight the effect of researcher and participant race on telling the stories of race, culture, and research.

CONCLUSIONS Qualitative methods in studies of race can benefit from a process approach, maintaining an awareness of the coconstruction of many truths between researchers and participants (D’Andrea & Daniels, 1999). This consciousness can be especially important when examining the relationship developed between researcher and participant. Not only does the present study examine certain research questions, but also the impact of who asks them. In Part 2 of this book, we will address the role of the asker further, through narrative excerpts from actual interviews.

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PART II RESEARCHER RACE AND THE RESEARCH PROCESS

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CHAPTER 4

DOES RESEARCHER RACE MATTER? PARTICIPANT PREFERENCES FOR RESEARCHER RACE For a few psychologists, analyzing the experimenter’s race was expressly intended as a means to analyze the politics of science. —Jill Morawski (2004)

Rarely do researchers ask participants if they felt race affected a research interview or the completion of a survey. This discussion is often considered impolite, uncomfortable, irrelevant to the conversation at hand, and even contaminating to the research process. However, it is likely to play a key role. In an attempt to examine the influence of race on the research process, we asked participants the following questions: “What is it like to talk about these experiences with a [Black/White] researcher? What suggestions would you have for [Black/White] researchers doing research on race with [Black/White] participants?” Initially, we hypothesized that Black and White participants would advocate for racial matching with the researcher. This hypothesis was based on some of the research on race matching that is listed in the following section. We expected that participants would feel more at ease discussing

Researcher Race: Social Constructions in the Research Process, pp. 31–43 Copyright © 2012 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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the difficult issue of race with someone who shared their racial identities. We learned that our hypotheses were not entirely supported by our data. In this chapter, we detail our findings following a review of the literature on the impact of researcher race in social science methodologies. We conclude with implications and directions for further research that would focus on the influence of researcher race in the investigative process.

BACKGROUND ON RESEARCHER RACE VARIABLES In the sparse literature on researcher race effects, conflicting findings have emerged. Some studies describe the benefits of researcher race matching, whereas others report neutral and even negative effects. Moreover, many studies published in psychology journals do not report the racial demographics of the participant (Munley et al., 2002) and even more rarely do they report the race of the researcher. A number of studies detail the benefits of matching researcher and participant race. According to Egharevba (2001), a researcher of color may be less likely to pathologize or stereotype participants of the same racial group, leading to increased comfort among participants as well as quality of data produced. Sherman (2002) warns of the problems of not matching researcher and participant race in his own account of being a White male researcher conducting focus groups with Black female participants. Problems that may arise include: interviewees of color may change responses to avoid reinforcing hostility or aggressive stereotypes of their race; or participants of color may be wary of dubious intentions of the researcher to profit from the outcome of the research. Tyler (2005) adds that participants of color might be concerned as to whether the researcher is appropriately educated in the history of his or her community. Little research has been conducted to examine the effects of researcher race matching with White participants and researchers. Many experimental studies have found positive performance effects for matching experimenter and participant race in studies that predominantly focus on Black participants. For example, Black participants working with a Black experimenter outperformed those working with a White experimenter on a challenging verbal test (Marx, 2005). In several older research studies, similar results were found. For example, Black middle school students performed better on a game using praise with a Black experimenter than a White one (Carringer & Wilson, 1974). The cultural mistrust of Black participants for White researchers due to the contemporary racial bias and a history of prejudice enacted by researchers (Washington, 2009)

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have been reasoned to be central factors in these performance differences. Again, most likely due to suspected effects of racism on participant performance, this research has rarely explored White participant responses to researcher race differences. Physiological research has found negative effects when the race of participant and researcher differed, and has demonstrated some focus on White participant responses. For example, heart rate responses for Black and White children indicated more stress when subjects were paired with a different-race experimenter than same-race experimenter (Anderson, 1989). In another study, White participants showed significantly lower stress levels as measured by galvanic skin responses when paired with Black, rather than White, experimenters (Fisher & Kotses, 1973). These psychophysiological and developmental studies support the notion that matching participant and researcher race can reduce stress and improve performance in a number of tasks for Black and White participants. Egharevba (2001) acknowledged that both benefits and disadvantages might surface from researcher–participant race matching. As a counterpoint to a list of arguments in support of race matching, she outlined the views of researchers who have critiqued race matching for containing similarly negative or in some cases neutral outcomes. For one, a race-matching perspective may marginalize participants and researchers of color, assuming these issues are solely their responsibility or concern. Furthermore, race matching may be an overly simplistic method to investigate how race and social identity power dynamics occur, as these outcomes are often variable and unpredictable. Power dynamics other than those related to racial identity may take place between same-race researcher–participant dyads, including differing socioeconomic status (SES), gender, age, and ability to name just a few. Other studies investigating experimenter race have found a lack of discernible effect. Some research with White experimenters has revealed no adverse effects on intelligence performance for Black participants in several studies (Graziano, Varca, & Levy, 1982; Sattler & Gwynne, 1982). Another study that examined the impact of community violence on African American children found no effect of interviewer race between Black American and White American researchers (Oravecz, Kablinsky, & Randolph, 2008). An early study of Black and White American students and examiners administering the WISC and WISC-R intelligence assessments likewise found no effect for examiner race (Hanley & Barclay, 1979). Neither did experimenter race did affect word recall of Black and White 6th graders in one investigation (Friedman, 1980). These early studies suggest that researcher race had no noticeable impact in certain contexts.

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While literature on the influence of researcher race on experimental results remains relatively underdeveloped, a more substantial body of research has been conducted to examine race interactions in cross-racial or mono-racial dyads in therapy (Coleman, Walpold, & Casili, 1995). Similar to the literature on researcher race, these studies have a range of results. An example in literature focused on the counselor–client dyad is one study of 34 Black and White therapy clients (Proctor & Rosen, 1981). One half of both Black and White groups of clients reported no preferences, while the remainder preferred counselors of their own race. Additionally, a study of 145 White counselor trainees found more developed levels of racial identity attitudes to be predictive of less anxiety during racially provocative counseling and supervision dyads (Utsey & Gernat, 2002). A third study found Black clients were less likely to disclose intimate details to White peer counselors than to Black therapists (Berg & Wright-Buckley, 1988). In contrast, a more recent study of clients in a university marriage and family counseling center found no differences in client satisfaction based on variations in therapist race (Murphy, Faulkner, & Behrens, 2004). The developing research on racial dyads in the supervision of therapists in training has also demonstrated a diversity of findings. In a series of qualitative interviews with 10 Black psychology doctoral supervisees, previous experiences in cross-racial dyads with White supervisors led to many negative encounters reported by the supervisees (Constantine & Sue, 2007). Another qualitative study of 12 cross-racial psychologist-client dyads, African American therapists had the added benefit of more commonly addressing issues of race than European American therapists (Knox, Burkard, Johnson, Suzuki, & Ponterotto, 2003). Perhaps, the most illuminating study was conducted recently to examine racial dynamics in supervisory dyads. Results indicated that beliefs and attitudes about issues of race are more important than the race of the supervisor alone in determining supervisee satisfaction ( Jernigan, Green, Henze, Helms, & Perez-Gualdron, 2010). Not surprisingly, the results of this study suggest that some of the myriad findings on preferences for the therapist’s race in supervision and therapy may be accounted for by individual differences in racial attitudes of the practitioner (supervisor, researcher, therapist) as well as of the interviewee (supervisee, participant, or client). While only a handful of researchers have explored the topic of researcher race preferences specifically, even fewer have asked participants explicitly about this issue. Based on this gap in the research literature, we explored the issue by asking participants directly to reflect on the influence of researcher race in their experience during a narrative interview. These findings from the current study are presented in the following section.

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RESEARCHER RACE PREFERENCES IN BLACK RESEARCHER–BLACK PARTICIPANT DYADS Among dyads in which Black participants were interviewed by a Black researcher in the current study, race matching was one of the recommendations. The reasons for this preference appeared to be manifold. One African American female participant speaking to the Black researcher (RM) explained her preference for a same-race researcher. When asked about what it was like to work with the Black researcher, she spoke of her reservations in working with the White researcher (LM). Participant (P): It was a lot more comfortable, because I’m not going to lie, I thought the other girl [the White researcher] was going to do it. And when I was like, oh, race and culture—I’m like, oh man, prejudice. I don’t want to tell her White people are just evil. Researcher (R): … Would you have lied and just said things you didn’t believe? Would you have lied and just said what you think she would’ve wanted to hear? P: For the most part, yeah. Because, I mean, even though, you know, I’m on this whole Black power trip or whatnot, whatever you want to call it, but I still don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. I mean, I’m not that downright uncouth. Upon further analysis of this excerpt, I (RM) deconstructed this exchange and my role within it as a Black researcher. My use of the word, “lied” in her response showed my strong reaction regarding the degree to which she would be uncomfortable in speaking openly to White researchers about race, which I felt had not come up as clearly earlier in the interview. I attempted to clarify the degree to which the participant might change her responses depending on the race of the interviewer. The participant reflected her sensitivity to the impact of her anger towards Whites, likely due to her experiences with racism and her protective desire to avoid “hurting other people’s feelings.” She discussed her concern that open discussions about the effect of her experience of racism with Whites would be too confrontational or hurtful for a White interviewer to hear. The participant appeared to believe that this feeling is so strong that her feelings might be considered to be “downright uncouth.” She may have also been attempting to protect herself from having to contend with her expectations of a Whiter person’s inability to talk about racial and cultural issues.

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Other participants of color cited positive identification and understanding as an advantage to matching the race of the researcher. One Black, Dominican American female participant described her preference for the Black researcher. What was it like to talk about your experiences with a Black researcher? P: Um, well I guess you could see a little bit more of my side because we are a minority race, so I guess you could understand me a little bit more than—you helped me a little bit clear up what I wanted to say so that made it easier. R: Do you think it would have been more difficult or more uncomfortable with a White researcher? P: Yes. Because um, they probably, probably would not have had a— probably wouldn’t understand what I was trying to explain. Because they would have not that much experience with it. R:

In this exchange, the participant is describing the shared minority experience of working with a Black researcher, which enabled her to feel that she would be more understood. I noticed this occurrence among many of the Black participants I worked with, possibly due to a belief of a unified perspective of our shared racial experience in the U.S. Race matching may have been endorsed by participants of color working with a Black researcher due to increased levels of comfort, identification, and understanding. In this excerpt and in others, participants’ perceptions of researchers’ racial background appears to influence researcher interactions. Despite participant claims of increased comfort with same-race researchers, research suggests race matching of clients and mental health workers does not always lead to increased comfort (Daily & Claus, 2001). This issue quickly becomes complex when one considers the many other demographics that may differ between researcher and participant, such as ethnicity, gender, SES, and ability. The lack of increased comfort in same-race dyads appeared to be true for the researcher–participant relationship as well, based on interview data in this study. Several participants exposed the limitations of a mono-racial versus cross-racial researcher–participant relationship. For example, a Haitian American Black female participant working with me affirmed the limitations of race matching given the diversity of intraracial ethnic identity, stating, “I don’t know if you’re Haitian. So then if you wasn’t, then you would have no idea what I’m talking about.”

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RESEARCHER RACE PREFERENCES IN WHITE RESEARCHER–BLACK PARTICIPANT DYADS Black participants working with the White researcher (LM) often reflected positive aspects of this combination. However, several of the Black participants directly critiqued research conducted by White researchers with Black participants, suggesting that race matching would be beneficial. For example, one of the Black-identified participants recommended that the researcher and participant be matched by race due to issues of cultural mistrust. R: What suggestions would you have for White researchers doing research on race with participants of color? P: Honestly? They shouldn’t ... It’s always easier for anyone to talk to someone that they can relate to…. You know, it would be easier for a White person to respond to a White researcher, an Asian to an Asian, a Black to a Black. You probably get more honest answers. It’s probably easier for me because I know you, or I knew you already [from the recruiting phase of the study]. But I would suggest that, especially because of the past history of research. All of the old trustdistrust issues amongst Black people and White researchers. R: … What comes to mind when you think of that history and trust and distrust? P: Tuskegee. This participant specifically cited the Tuskegee syphilis study as a key contributor to the mistrust of White researchers among participants of color. She recommended that White researchers avoid conducting research with participants of color. Surprisingly, she indicated that despite this sentiment, she was somewhat comfortable with me (LM), the White researcher, and attributed this to contact with me during the research recruitment phase. This statement reinforced the benefits of White researchers establishing reciprocal relationships with the communities of participants of color. Other researchers who focus on the development of culturally affirmative practices have also made this suggestion (Cox, 2004; Ridley, 2005; Tuhiwai Smith, 2005). Another Black female participant of Haitian American descent indicated that White researchers might be effective in working with Black participants as long as they do not focus solely on race.

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What suggestions do you have for White researchers doing research on race with Black participants? P: I think they should just be—not so many questions I know, like Blacks they like talking about their race, but I think they should limit the questions asking about race because everyone knows that, everyone knows that minorities—whenever White people tend to ask minorities questions it’s always about race. And sometimes people are just so sick and tired of hearing about it. R: Sort of it being the main issue P: Yeah. R: —and White people always being curious about it. P: Yeah. R: - what it’s like for you P: To be a minority and stuff like that. R:

The Black participant informed me that she frequently experienced Whites to be overly inquisitive about the minority experience. She described her frustrations with this over-focus on race. This dynamic can be easily transferred onto the research relationship, and was likely to have occurred during this interview. Matching a Black participant with a Black researcher may have the advantage of circumventing a problematic dynamic in which a White researcher might position participants of color as passive subjects of study, as opposed to active collaborators in the research process. However, these excerpts demonstrate some variation in recommendations for providing culturally sensitive interview skills in the case of cross-racial research dyads.

RESEARCHER RACE PREFERENCES IN BLACK RESEARCHER–WHITE PARTICIPANT DYADS In White participant–Black researcher dyads, another theme from White participants was that the race of the researcher did not matter to them. A typical response came from a White female Italian American participant who spoke of the following to the Black researcher: R:

P:

Do you think that when doing research on race do you think it should be matched like with a Black researcher with a Black participant or a White researcher with a White—? No, I don’t think that at all. Because I mean, like I said, I don’t think that should be a factor in it. I mean, I know the survey is on race, so I don’t know, obviously, how it is. But I don’t think that matters at

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all. I feel that someone should be comfortable talking to anyone about it if they’re different races or the same. R: So you think it doesn’t matter? P: Well, yeah. If you do feel racist, then I guess that’s different for you, but if you don’t—I don’t feel uncomfortable. I don’t think there’s anything you should feel uncomfortable about. I (RM) responded to the participant’s indication that researcher race is not important by reflecting and clarifying the participant’s drawn-out response. It is likely that the participant’s response revealed her hesitancy to state an opinion on race in general, as well as her fear that she might be considered racist. Such a fear may have been reflected in her interruption of my question about matching race. Her use of indirect language (e.g., “someone should be comfortable talking to anyone”) suggested some apprehension with identifying with the “wrong” belief on race. I attempted to be more direct by responding to her vague statements of “they” with my use of the word “you”, and encouraged her use of “I” statements. This dance between the self (I) and the other (they) continued with the participant’s final statement on the matter, with the word “you” to refer to other White participants, instead of locating the feeling within herself. In line with the participant’s colorblind beliefs about race, she described no preference between Black or White researchers. Processing the potential difference in comfort level she feels with a Black or a White researcher might mean admitting to racial difference, a stance that allows one to deny the existence of racism. More rarely, White participants paired with a Black interviewer acknowledged the value of creating researcher–participant relationships with individuals of different races. They saw the value in examining differences in participant comfort levels with race. For example, a White female participant brought this opportunity to light when speaking to the Black researcher about her preference for variations in researcher race. P: I would mix it definitely. Just to get like a different feeling. I don’t know. I guess some people would feel uncomfortable talking to another race but I feel like it should be uncomfortable. R: You think it should be. Why? P: I don’t know. Just to like open their eyes more, you know. If they’re uncomfortable than I feel like they should be even more forced to talk to somebody of another race. R: So I guess if they’re uncomfortable there might be a reason for that and they should talk to someone. P: Yeah.

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This participant described the importance of White participants working with researchers of color despite potentially not feeling comfortable in doing so. She was aware of the discomfort that might emerge from crossracial research dyads. Furthermore, she presented a clear understanding of the value in examining that discomfort and avoiding escape of dialogue on racism between people of different racial backgrounds. Her response reflected Allport’s contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954)—that direct contact between different groups is one of the best ways to overcome racial boundaries. However, as in the previous passage, this White participant also made less direct statements to the Black researcher. White Americans with colorblind attitudes may find direct references to race impolite, given the attempt to avoid acknowledging the effects of racial difference (Gallagher, 2003). These excerpts reveal both common themes and variations in responses among White participants working with the Black researcher.

RESEARCHER RACE PREFERENCES IN WHITE RESEARCHER–WHITE PARTICIPANT DYADS Similar to some of the Black participants working with a same-race researcher, several White participants described a comfort in working with an interviewer of the same racial background. The following selection illustrates this ease, excerpted from an interview between myself (LM) as the White researcher and a White female participant of mixed European descent. R: P:

What is it like to talk about these experiences, and thoughts, and ideas with a White researcher? I feel safer. Because if I was talking to a Black person, or a Hispanic person, or an Asian person, I wouldn’t have been as open. I would’ve watched what I say. I’m afraid—I don’t want to offend anyone, but, I understand that I can be offensive because just the fact that I don’t know.

This participant specifically linked comfort to safety in her interview with the White researcher, emphasizing the importance of comfort within the researcher–participant relationship. This participant may have felt “safer” with a White researcher than she would imagine feeling with a Black researcher given a potential fear of exposing areas of ignorance about race. In contrast, several White American participants noted the advantages of varying the race of the researcher and participant, despite issues of comfort with race matching. A White, Irish American male responded to this issue when discussing the influence of researcher race with the White interviewer.

Does Researcher Race Matter? Participant Preferences for Researcher Race 41

P:

I think it’s something like that you should be able to talk about with someone who’s Black. But I know, I know me personally would find it kind of tough just because I wouldn’t want them to get offended. But I think it’s like, it is something that needs to be addressed openly, and that people don’t want to talk about it just because it’s uncomfortable.

As in other researcher–participant racial combinations, this White participant expressed the perceived advantages of both cross-racial and monoracial researcher dyads. In addition, both expressed wanting to avoid offend people of color—suggesting fear of broaching topics of race and racism without causing upset. This fear suggests a lack of confidence, familiarity, and direction expressed by many of the White participants with regard to discuss the topic of race. In many cases, race matching for White participants enabled assumptions that the White researcher would not be offended by their racial beliefs. Many of the White participants may have presumed that while working with a White researcher, they wouldn’t have to face their own racism or be perceived as racist. However, this belief that White Americans are less offended by racist statements made by other White Americans is a false assumption (Wise, 2005). Given the range of racial identity schemas among individuals of various racial groups (Helms, 1995), same-race researcher– participant dyads may not always guarantee the similarity of perspectives surrounding the complex issue of race.

CONCLUSIONS Participant preferences for researcher race affirmed the various and sometimes discrepant findings in the literature detailed in the introduction to this chapter. Black and White participants alike expressed a variety of preferences for researcher race based on a number of factors. For example, in the Black researcher and Black participant racial dyads, the participant often expressed an increased sense of comfort that the Black researcher will understand the Black participant’s experiences in the interview, and thus preferred a Black researcher. Among the Black researcher and White participant dyads, White participants often claimed the race of researcher did not matter. In dyads that included a White researcher and a Black participant, there were mixed beliefs as to whether the White researcher should or should not conduct research with Black participants. Lastly, White researcher and White participant racial dyads featured participants who described a sense of comfort with the White researcher given their beliefs that the researcher would not think that the White participant is racist.

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However, within each of these dyads, participants’ preferences for researcher race ranged depending on the race of the interviewer and participant, the relationship they developed, as well as each participant’s individual perspectives on race. Despite the study’s myriad findings, one common thread did emerge from these interviews—context shapes the data that participants provided. The information gathered was influenced not only by the racial identity attitudes and perceptions of racial backgrounds, but also altered in conjunction with the researcher’s racial identity and attitudes. Participants found something valuable about the researcher race dyad they were assigned to, and this interpretation influenced their preferences. In conversations regarding race, the dialogue may be inevitably uncomfortable given fears of offending the conversation partner, or of being labeled as prejudiced. Furthering this dialogue may lead to some discomfort in a research interview, yet could be necessary in order to bridge difference and establish a connection. However, if the research is focused on topics for which establishing a strong comfort level is essential, race matching may increase the likelihood that participants will feel more willing to self-disclose during the interview. In addition, it may be useful for participants to retain the assumption of understanding, identification, and shared experience between researcher and participant in order to open up during conversations about race (Egharevba, 2001). A same-race researcher may offer the potential to increase a sense of comfort for participants. However, the cultural awareness and sensitivity of the researcher may be a more influential factor to promote understanding than simply matching the race of the researcher with that of the participant, as seen in research on supervisory dyads ( Jernigan et al., 2010). Many participants appeared to recommend for future research inquiries of the race of the researcher they were working with regardless of the researcher’s race. One explanation for this occurrence may be the salience of positive aspects of that research relationship to participants when they were asked this question at the end of the interview. Conversely, other participants may have focused on what was lacking from the dyad, leading to suggestions for different types of research designs, despite positive and negative aspects being present within each dyad. Therefore, the relationship established between researcher and participant may be one of the most influential factors in shaping participants’ responses in regards to this research question. It is important to consider some of the potential variables that could have confounded the findings of this segment of our study on researcher race preferences. We review the potential limitations of this study in detail in Chapter 7. Despite various methodological limitations, these interviews

Does Researcher Race Matter? Participant Preferences for Researcher Race 43

suggest that research on race with varying researcher and participant racial identities can lead to differences in participants’ stated researcher race preferences. Of note are the assumptions that participants may make related to the perceived racial background of the researcher. In the brief time that a research interview transpires, a participant may assume that a researcher of the same background shares a similar view on issues of race. At times, these assumptions may prove to be correct. However, it is possible that attitudes towards race and cultural sensitivity may differ across Black and White researchers. Participants may utilize stereotypes and assumptions in order to make quick judgments about the type of responses that are permissible on the “impolite” topic of race in a research interview with a researcher who is not known to the participant. Future studies can take into consideration the strategies and assumptions that participants may use, based on the race of the researcher within this topic of study. This answer to our initial hypothesis regarding participant preferences for researcher race is not simple. Due to the complexity of racial identity attitudes among participants and researchers, our study reveals that participant race does not uniformly determine researcher race preferences. Clearly, researcher race impacts participants’ reflections on, and suggestions for, the research process. In the next chapter, we investigate how researcher interjections further expose the complex interaction between researcher and participant race, and its impact on the data that is collected.

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CHAPTER 5

GOING OFF SCRIPT: THE RESEARCHER’S POSITION Data can be considered an artifact of the research process. What we end up with is dependent on what we ask and how we ask it. —Chih Hoong Sin (2005)

Positivist schools of thought on qualitative methodology have proposed that deviations from the research script can harm data quality (Moffatt et al., 2005; Ongena & Dijkstra, 2007). Script subversions, or “breaches” have often been thought to bias the participant’s response and skew the data produced (Garfinkel, 1967; Schau, Dellande, & Gilly, 2007). On the other hand, departing from the research script can offer significant benefits (Huber, Huber, & Clandinin, 2004; Mishler, 1991). Breaches in research script may enhance communication, particularly when multicultural issues of oppression and resistance are the focus of the study (Schau et al., 2007). Departing from the interview script may even be necessary to fully answer the research question, by eliciting additional detail and complexity, and/or strengthening the rapport needed for a rich interview (May, 2008). In fact, moments when the researcher departs from the interview script are often critical for research dialogue and worthy of examination by the research team (Huber, Huber, & Clandinin, 2004; Mishler, 1991). In this chapter, we analyze times during the interviews when we went “offscript.” We examine variations across different researcher and participant

Researcher Race: Social Constructions in the Research Process, pp. 45–56 Copyright © 2012 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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racial dyads. What can we learn about the role of researcher race in these moments? We preface our data analysis with a review of literature surrounding researcher interjections during data collection. Next, we include excerpts from the qualitative interviews selected from our four research dyads, varied by researcher and participant race. These departures from the interview script were selected because they draw attention to the role of researcher race in qualitative interviewing. Finally, we conclude with suggested areas for further investigation into the impact of researcher race on research findings.

RESEARCHER INTERJECTION IN MULTICULTURAL RESEARCH When conducting multicultural research, a collaborative, flexible approach to research interviewing can be more effective in empowering participants, particularly when discussing topics of discrimination and prejudice (Moffatt et al., 2005; Rappaport, 1995). Researchers may be more likely to interject or make asides to highlight stories of resistance that contest dominant, oppressive narratives (Huber, Huber, & Clandinin, 2004). In these cases, researchers may decide to depart from the research script to provide space for stories of oppression and resistance. In culturally-centered research, researcher interjection may occur in a number of ways. The interviewer may offer words to give a name to the experience of oppression or privilege and acknowledge the social structures with which the participant recounts experience to enhance understanding (Moffatt et al., 2005). Researchers may disclose their biases and research motivations (Ramanathan, 2005), thereby helping participants to better understand the position of the researcher and to evaluate the researcher’s trustworthiness (Moffatt et al., 2005). Researchers might emphasize parallel struggles in their own experiences with oppression or privilege to convey their positioning in the research study (Sherman, 2002; Trevillon, 2000). The interviewer might identify ways in which race, class, ethnicity, and other aspects of social identity enter into the interview to enhance awareness of multicultural issues (Ramanathan, 2005). In addition, experiences with previous participants in the study may lead researchers to make impromptu changes to the script based on previous interviews to enhance the dialogue surrounding culture, discrimination, and privilege (Cannell, Marquis, & Laurent, 1977; Olson & Peytchey, 2007; Singer, Frankel, and Glassman 1983). However, researcher interjection and self-disclosure in the research process is not without risk (Miehls & Moffatt, 2000; Slatttery, 2001). By injecting their own stories into the research interview, researchers may lose their focus on the personal experiences of the participants (Moffatt,

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George, Lee, & McGrath, 2005). Self-disclosure may fail to mitigate issues of power discrepancy, or even sometimes magnify them, potentially recapitulating disempowering dynamics (Ramanathan, 2005). Developing a careful awareness of interjection related to researcher race is important to minimize potential harm in qualitative race research. The semi-structured interview is a methodology well-suited for dialogue in research on issues of race, privilege, and discrimination. Semi-structured interviews can facilitate a more natural flow of conversation and allow researchers to draw from conversational resources that facilitate dialogue (May, 2008). This research style emphasizes the meaning of the question rather than its wording, rendering the interview an interactive process (Houtkoop-Steenstra, 1996; Mishler, 1991). As a result, the researcher avoids mining the participants for facts (Moffatt, George, Lee, & McGrath, 2005). Participants and researchers can ask additional questions in order to better understand research questions and responses, increasing the trust and rapport needed during sensitive discussions of race and oppression. In this methodology, off-script conversation between the researcher and participant may occur with relative frequency, providing important information about the research transaction.

RESEARCHER RACE AND INTERJECTION An important area for further inquiry in qualitative research includes understanding the role of the investigator in the research (Ramanathan, 2005). As we have stated in previous chapters, researcher race and ethnicity variables may interact with participant variables and impact the data collected. Matching researcher and participant race may offer participants increased comfort, satisfaction, and opportunity for disclosure (Sherman, 2002; Thompson, Worthington, & Atkinson, 1994). However, matching the race of the researcher and participant does not guarantee quality of data or rapport in multicultural research, as the relative cultural sensitivity of the researcher may vary regardless of race (Daily & Claus, 2001; Springman, Wherry, & Notaro, 2006). Nonetheless, our research underscores the powerful effect researcher race can have on the data collected in multicultural research. In this context, we see that the notion of researcher race serves as both a descriptive part of the researcher’s identity but is also related to how participants ascribe race-related phenomenon to the researcher. The following excerpts highlight the role of race in researcher interjection. The researchers were permitted to deviate from the interview script to explore participant responses and build rapport. These excerpts were analyzed to clarify how the researcher–participant racial dyad affected researcher interjection.

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BLACK RESEARCHER–BLACK PARTICIPANT INTERJECTIONS A common theme underlying the off-script comments of interviews with the Black researcher and several Black participants was the enhancement of a sense of shared experience and understanding of racism. In conversing with a Black, Cape Verdean American female participant, I (RM) responded to a comment about her aunt’s avoidance of cultural traditions. Their mom—she’s like, oh I don’t feel the need to. We’re not in Cape Verde anymore. We’re in America. Researcher (R): Mm hm. So she wants them to be kind of assimilated. P: Yeah. They like, “Oh, why should we be teaching them about the Cape Verde culture? We’re not there anymore. We’re here.” So now the kids come to Cape Verde and it’s basically like every other person. We’re not Cape Verdean. They don’t know anything about the culture. Participant (P):

In this excerpt, I found myself attempting to name her experience. This participant appeared to be having negative feelings about her family’s response to immigration. By offering the word, assimilated, I provided a label for a process many immigrant families undergo. I stepped out of a neutral role to emphasize the universal narrative of dealing with the challenges of immigrating into another culture (Küver, 2009). My role as a Black researcher may have allowed me to feel more comfortable with demonstrating an understanding of her experience and attempting to name it. I also demonstrated my understanding of the encounters of a Black, Haitian American female participant who faced discrimination in several restaurants. Like one time I walked into a Chinese restaurant and I had ordered. and he wouldn’t take the order. And I was trying to tell him, but he was like, “Hold on, hold on.” He kept walking away. And another person came in behind me. I think she ordered the same plate as me. He gave it to her before me. And I ordered, maybe ten minutes ago, the same plate, — R: As you did. P: —rice and chicken. And he gave her the rice chicken. R: And he gave her your plate. Yeah. Yours came out later. P:

Going Off Script: The Researcher’s Position 49

So, I ordered, and I ordered again, and then I left. And, whatever food they made just went to waste because I did not pay for it. Like I was so upset. Like that was so rude. So that’s actually two events. R: So that’s—okay, I was going to say that’s like several from the [Italian restaurant] where they were taken before you. And then the Chinese restaurant. P: Yeah. R: So that was someone of minority treating you— P: Mm hm. R: —discriminatorily. P: Yeah. P:

I attempted to join in the participant’s story by filling in her words. I felt this story was my story too—a story of internalized racism enacted between people of color of different racial backgrounds. I experienced a departure from my role as interviewer and used conversational resources in this moment, as though conversing with a friend. I interrupted the story to share its emotional burden. My identity as a researcher became less salient than my identity as a Black woman who had experienced the same discrimination, and recognized my story in this participant’s story. As a Black researcher in a position of power, I found myself wanting to relieve her of the pain of having to convince me that racism is real. Common themes among researcher interjections in the Black researcher–Black participant dyads included researcher comments that tended to make interpretations to further understanding of racism. When speaking to Black participants, my comments attempted to enhance a sense of shared experience and understanding of racism. As the researcher, I showed my understanding of the participant’s experience of racism by filling in the participant’s sentences and supplying the next phrase or experience to address the commonality of these incidents, working to strengthen the research alliance.

WHITE RESEARCHER–BLACK PARTICIPANT INTERJECTIONS In the dyads between myself (LM) as the White researcher and Black participants, I made frequent expressions of validation in response to stories of racism. In other instances where Black participants appeared hesitant to express mistrust of White Americans, I attempted to make supportive statements, as shown in this interview with a Black, bicultural, Haitian and Dominican American male participant who described his disagreement with his mother’s comments regarding her mistrust of White Americans.

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It just bugs me. It’s just like, “Stop. You don’t know these people,” I always want to say. R: Mm hm. I could understand—I mean, I have no experience, or no idea—but I could understand, you know, why she might have some mistrust towards White people given racism in society today. P: Yeah. R: And maybe some things that she might have heard about. P: Yeah. P:

This participant described his responses to his mother’s expressions of distrust toward White Americans. The participants recount his close relationships with White Americans and the conflict he experienced when his mother would make cautionary statements about becoming friends with his White peers. As opposed to validating his conflicted feelings, I attempted to further understand his mother’s mistrust in response to experiences of racism. Similarly, another off-script comment occurred when a Haitian American Black male participant struggled to pinpoint why he felt it was inappropriate for White Americans to use the n-word, but less problematic for Black Americans. R: P: R: P: R: P: R: P: R: P: R:

I was thinking sort of about the n-word thing that you were talking about—sort of the difference when a White person uses that word. Yeah. The different meaning that that would have. Yeah. The different history associated with White people— Exactly. Yeah. —saying that word. And what’s going on now. Right. And what it means for a White person to use that word, and not acknowledge that history. Yeah. I mean to tell you the truth that would be a great question to ask the White [participants] even more. Definitely.

As the White researcher, my comment corroborated the participant’s instinct about the problems of White Americans using this word. I highlighted the history of the derogatory use of the word, in contrast to the word-reclamation purposes used by Black Americans (Küver, 2009; Low, 2007). This off-script comment heightened the different historical contexts of the word use and supported the participant’s resistance to racism. My comment can also be interpreted as facilitating dialogue and encouraging the participant’s suggestion for future research topics on racism.

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In my role as the White researcher, I tended to make overt statements of support and validation towards Black participants in regards to experiences of racism. This tendency derived from my knowledge of the traumatic nature of racism (Carter, 2007a; Carter, 2007b) and common denial among White Americans that racism continues to exist. As a White researcher, I attempted to avoid the denial that White Americans typically express with regards to racism. At other times, my departures from the research script allowed the participant to vocalize less positive statements regarding White Americans as well as to acknowledge cultural mistrust that Black Americans may have experienced.

BLACK RESEARCHER–WHITE PARTICIPANT INTERJECTIONS In my (RM) role as the Black researcher, interjection in conversations with White participants often served to support cultural identity development. In the following exchange, a White, Irish American female participant described her pride in her heritage. P: I’m very pro-Irish… R: You really identify with your roots … A lot of White people say, “I don’t know, I’m just White.” Or, they’ll say like maybe ten countries, and they don’t really identify with any of them in particular. That’s interesting that you’re a little bit different in that way. In this moment, I drew from my memories of interactions with previously interviewed White participants, as well as with other White Americans I had personally encountered, who did not identify with their ethnic roots. I remembered the feeling of being disallowed identification with a dominant norm that is not asked to claim more than regional location, or sometimes any identifier at all. Minorities are often identified by another ethnic identity of origin (i.e., Egyptian), and not allowed to claim the dominant identity of American or White until it is in the best interest of the dominant group. White Americans have the privilege of being able to claim the identity of American without being asked to clarify or qualify their identity further (Cushman, 1995; McIntosh, 1989). This exchange reminded me of the uncomfortable responses I had received from Whites when I identified as simply Black American, including an insistence that I claim a more “exotic” international background. Similarly, I encouraged a White American participant’s awareness of her own cultural identity when this aspect of herself was unclear, partially due to her parent’s silence around specifying her European roots.

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P: I just wish I could be like, “I’m this.” But I can’t. R: Well, you did. P: Sort of. R: American is a culture. P: Kind of. R: If you went somewhere else you’d be really—have you traveled abroad at all? P: No. R: Okay. Well travel somewhere and you’ll be able to see, “Yeah, I’m the American.” P: Yeah. R: And you’ll feel a connection to your culture. In this conversation, I sensed a disconnection from a sense of cultural identity in the White participant. This participant had disclosed her diminished feelings of self-worth due to her inability to positively identify with a particular culture. While the participant gained many invisible privileges associated with her Whiteness (McIntosh, 1989) and was not required by others to be identified by her ethnicity or race, she also experienced a loss of positive identification with a distinct racial and cultural identity. I remembered the salience of my racial and American identity that I experienced while traveling abroad, and I wanted to offer this understanding to her as an experience to enhance cultural identity formation. In my role as the Black researcher, I found my off-script comments with White participants to typically encourage an awareness of the White participants’ racial and cultural identities. The invisibility of one’s White American culture further contributes to White privilege and a lack of awareness of racism (Cushman, 1995; Helms, 1992). To counteract this process, I supported a sense of cultural identity in the White participants and encouraged White participants to refrain from a passive approach to viewing their culture as normative or unseen.

WHITE RESEARCHER–WHITE PARTICIPANT INTERJECTIONS As the White researcher, I (LM) tended to interject in interviews with White participants in order to enhance awareness of racism. In this excerpt, I spoke to a White participant about her feelings of increased comfort in talking about race to a White researcher as opposed to a Black researcher. R:

What was it like to talk about these experiences and thoughts with a White researcher?

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P: R: P:

R: P: R: P: R:

P: R:

It probably made me easier, it easier for me to tell you how I felt about Black people. Yeah. Definitely actually. Yeah. In what way? If you were Black, it would probably be a lot harder for me to say… probably really, well ... It’s easier to express your opinions to someone of the same race without offending. Yeah. What kinds of things do you think you might be concerned about offending a Black researcher? Noticing that I might be chosen before them in a store, it’s kind of rude. It feels rude to even notice it? Yes. It does. Because… I don’t know, I just feel bad about those kinds of things. Mm hm. Yeah, I think that’s part of what makes the conversation so silenced or not happening a lot because, you know, there are good intentions in not wanting to offend other people. Also, I think, like I said, just noticing these things are happening is actually a really important thing to notice, that you’ve noticed that people are being treated differently. I have mixed feelings on it. Yeah. It sounds like that.

In this excerpt, the White participant expressed ambivalence about noticing discriminatory treatment towards Black Americans in a store. She expressed her concern that just noticing these differences in treatment was prejudicial because it did not fit with a colorblind mentality—a limited perspective on race relations that believes one should not acknowledge racial difference at all (Gallagher, 2003; Helms, 1992). I interjected in this moment in order to reinforce the White participant’s experience of taking note of racism and encouraged her to continue to maintain awareness of discrimination. Helms and Cook (1999) might describe this as a progressive racial interaction. In progressive racial relationships, the person with more social power and more advanced racial identity attitudes (i.e., the researcher) is able to facilitate the racial identity of the person with less social power and less advanced racial identity (i.e., the participant). I interjected during another conversation with a White participant who witnessed discriminatory treatment. The White American female participant of mixed European descent described what it was like to receive better service from staff in stores. P: It makes me kind of upset that I would notice that, and maybe even for an instance think, be proud that I would be chosen first. It makes me disgusted.

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R:

P: R: P: R: P:

R: P: R:

So maybe there are all kinds of automatic things that go off? So maybe that automatic, initial pride of being chosen first, that feels rude. Yeah, that feels like it’s human nature, but I feel like it disgusts me. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just me. I don’t know. Yeah. Probably just me. Well, I think a lot of people do feel these things. These are really complicated issues— Yeah … Why should I notice it? Like if it was two White people who came into the store, I wouldn’t have thought anything. Maybe they saw me first. Yeah. So maybe you’re kind of judging, you feel? I’m sure I probably do. Well, it also seems helpful to be aware if it is happening because a lot of times it is.

In this case, the White participant asked for the White researcher to coevaluate her experience with race. Given my understanding that White Americans need to process their racial biases, I reinforced the participant’s awareness that racism had transpired. This comment encouraged reflection on the participant’s feelings of guilt and disgust about the racism within her. This process of reflexivity between researcher and participant can encourage participants to move towards transforming these feelings of awareness into social action (Prodinger & Stamm, 2010). As the White researcher, my interjection with White participants tended to occur in cases where White participants had adopted a colorblind attitude. My comments in this area encouraged awareness in an attempt to optimize the potential of the research setting to process White participants’ feelings about race. At times, White participants asked for assistance with evaluating their feelings about race. In these cases, my remarks highlighted participant’s feelings about the racism to encourage awareness of this prejudice in their lives. In sum, as the White researcher, my racial background informed my attempts to model and facilitate anti-racist stances as a White person.

CONCLUSIONS Common themes emerged from each of the four dyad combinations of researcher and participant races. A central theme of the off-script moments in the Black researcher–Black participant dyads included communication of shared understanding to ease the emotional burden of telling the story

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of racism, as will be detailed further in Chapter 5. Among the White researcher–Black participant dyads, the White researcher tended to acknowledge and empathize with participants’ experiences with racism. When working with White participants, the Black researcher encouraged cultural and racial identity development. The White researcher worked in a similar fashion with White participants, but also pushed these participants to acknowledge the racism they may witness and in which they may be implicated. Again, throughout all of these dyads, variations emerged that reminded us of the power of the context of the research setting and individual differences within racial categories that contribute to researcher styles of interjection. As researchers, our goals are to improve lives and promote learning, especially in the precarious and powerful issue of racial identity. We (LM & RM) took the opportunity of this research experience to facilitate awareness of racism through dialogue with participants. We found ourselves making responses of validation and offering direction on topics of race. As a result of the silence around these emotionally laden topics of race, we often interjected in moments of tension around these issues. This opportunity to have an expanding, honest dialogue between people across racial groups felt precious. The excerpts highlighted the impossibility of objectivity and the need for intersubjective dialogue in qualitative race research. But our off-script comments were not without risks. Our conversations raised the possibility of worsening power dynamics between researchers and participants, within and across racial groups. Researcher interjecting must be done mindfully, with considerable reflection and analysis by interviewers and other members of the research team. Attention to the race of the researcher is an essential component to researcher that is cognizant of the potential impact of off-script comments on the research dynamic. Overall, researcher race had a consequential impact throughout these interview passages. Off-script comments by the researchers tended to differ depending on the researcher and participant race. As researchers, we attempted to enhance awareness of racism, facilitate racial identity development, and increase comfort in conversations about the race. This research reinforces the importance of researcher race in making considerations about implementing a semi-structured interview and making modifications during the interview depending on the researcher–participant racial dyad. With consideration of the impact of researcher race, researcher interjecting can be used strategically. Off-script conversation may fully utilize the potential intervention of the research space in multicultural research—facilitating identity development, validating experience, and encouraging participants to take action. Researcher interjections that are thoughtful about the influence of researcher race on the interview situation

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can be useful and necessary to carrying out multicultural research that reduces silence and contributes to social change. In the next chapter, we explore an essential barrier to social change— incidents of racism. Studying racism can be helpful to providing information to ameliorate this problem in broader society—as well as in the research setting. How does researcher race impact Black participants’ feelings of safety and healing when telling stories of racism? How does researcher race influence White participants’ ability to avoid or confront the traumatic nature of racism? We further investigate the role of researcher race when participants discuss specific experiences with racism in Chapter 6.

CHAPTER 6

CRITICAL QUESTIONING: RACISM NARRATIVES IN RESEARCH It is imperative that the psychological and emotional experience of racism not be overlooked, even if there is considerable effort in our society to hide racism and to keep targets silent. —Robert T. Carter (2007a)

On July 16, 2009, Harvard University’s eminent scholar of African American history, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was wrongfully arrested by a White police officer who was brought to the scene by a White caller. She had witnessed two Black men, Professor Gates and his cab driver, attempting to open his jammed front door. She believed the men to be trespassing. Despite Professor Gates’ presentation of personal identification, the police officer continued to question Professor Gates’ presence in his own home. When Gates responded with frustration and outrage, the officer encouraged him to leave his property and was then able to arrest him for disorderly conduct. While many rallied in support of Gates, others scrutinized the intensity of his angry response during his arrest. A number of White Americans accused Gates of acting disrespectfully to the White officer and escalating the situation (Goodnough, 2009). Why was Professor Gates’ outrage called into question? This event illustrates the lack of public understanding and denial of discrimination Researcher Race: Social Constructions in the Research Process, pp. 57–69 Copyright © 2012 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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that contributes to the potentially traumatic experience of racism. One Black professor quoted in Feagin and Sikes’ 1994 book, Living with Racism, described how White Americans “see each act of discrimination or any act of violence as an ‘isolated’ event. As a result, most White Americans cannot understand the strong reaction manifested by Blacks when such events occur” (p. 23). The traumatic nature of racism can elicit a strong intense reaction from survivors of racism to the threat of discrimination. This tendency of many White Americans to question Black Americans’ reaction to racism is a persistent problem that warrants further examination. In this chapter, we examine variations in the stories of traumatic racism told during the interviews that we conducted. Our interest was whether participants would discuss their experiences of racial bias and whether their narratives would vary depending on perceptions of the race of the researcher. We review background literature on race-based traumatic stress and follow with excerpts from our qualitative interviews. In these excerpts, we highlight some of the ways in which researcher and participant race interact to heighten or provide support for traumatic aspects of racism. We conclude with a summary and suggestions for future research on racism and trauma.

RACE-BASED TRAUMATIC STRESS The severity of the stress response resulting from racism makes race-based trauma an important area of study. Experiences with racism can lead to symptoms similar to a disorder as serious as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Many Black Americans tend to score high on PTSD indices (i.e., report high levels of posttraumatic stress) without fully meeting criteria for the diagnosis after repeated exposure to racism (Carter, 2007b). Carter’s (2007a) definition of this condition, named race-based traumatic stress, is the product of the chronic stress caused by experiences with racism. Racebased traumatic stress may lead to classic symptoms of trauma such as intrusive thoughts, avoidance, and arousal (Carter, 2006). This condition can also lead to other adverse reactions such as depression, anxiety, inattention, diminished self-esteem, and shame (Bryant-Davis, 2007; Loo, Singh, Scurfield, & Kilauano, 1998; Sorsoli, 2007). Some may suffer traumatic stress from exposure to racism, while others may be able to function well and manage the stress depending on the nature and severity of the racist injury, the chronicity of exposure to racism, resource availability, and protective factors of resilience (Franklin, Boyd-Franklin, & Kelly, 2006). A wide range of experiences with racism may elicit different types of individual responses to racism.

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However, race-based traumatic stress contains unique features that are dissimilar from PTSD, making it important to consider a distinct category and further investigation of this condition. For example, a traumatic incident may be compounded by previous experiences with racism, in which future experiences call up countless incidents from the past (Feagin, 2006; Thompson-Miller & Feagin, 2007). Racism trauma may be passed down intergenerationally in communities of color given the collective cultural memory of slavery, segregation, and discrimination (Carter, 2007a). Additionally, race-based trauma may result in the internalization of racism and a diminished sense of self-worth (Bryant-Davis, 2007; Bryant-Davis & Ocampo, 2005). Worsening the trauma is the cultural denial of the racism, requests for proof, as well as accusations of paranoia, hostility, oversensitivity, and manipulation (Essed, 1991; Kelly, 2004). These accusations may add to the dismissal of a traumatic experience of racism, increasing psychological distress (Kelly, 2004). The cumulative, daily nature of the trauma resulting from the daily overt and covert racism at institutional and individual levels is part of what makes this condition distinct and of grave consideration (Carter, 2007a; Jones, 1997). Racism can be a form of emotional abuse that can lead to negative affective, behavioral, and physical symptoms (Sanchez-Hucles, 1998). Feelings of fear, helplessness, horror, numbness, depression, anxiety, grief, diminished self-value, isolation, dread, and anger can result from experiences of traumatic racism (Bryant-Davis & Ocampo, 2005; Sorsoli, 2007). Inividuals may respond to truamatic racism with behaviors such as substance abuse and self-harm (Franklin et al., 2006) and physical symptoms of migraines, energy loss, nausea, body aches, and chest pains that can take a serious toll on the body (Bryant-Davis, 2007). Survivors of traumatic racism may even feel spiritual effects of the chronic stress of racism, questioning faith in God or humanity (Sorsoli, 2007; West, 1999). These symptoms can overwhelm coping abilities, interfere with resilience, and become compounded by additional incidents of racism (Allen, 2001; Thompson-Miller & Feagin, 2007) creating chronic and detrimental effects to the wellbeing of those afflicted.

CONTRIBUTION OF WHITE AMERICAN RACISM TO RACE-BASED TRAUMA Contributing to the traumatic nature of racism is the denial of many White Americans that racism exists, or that they have a predominant role in it (Wise, 2005). With the election of a Black president in 2008, many White Americans may feel they can escape their responsibility in ending

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racism with this belief that racism is over in the U.S. (Wise, 2009). One psychology study demonstrated that White Americans may verbalize support of the Black president while simultaneously allowing themselves to engage in prejudicial stances against Black Americans (Effron, Cameron, & Monin, 2009). Theoretical research indicates that the lack of acknowledgment of racism by White Americans could increase race-based traumatic stress for individuals who feel their experiences are labeled as paranoia (Essed, 1991; Jones, 1997; Franklin et al., 2006). Empirical study in this area is sorely needed. Many White Americans may maintain a problematic sense of apathy, lack of anger, unexpressed concern, and absence of urgency in response to racism (D’Andrea & Daniels, 1999). White Americans who lack awareness of racism often view each experience of racism as an individual event and misunderstand the strong response to racism, not realizing the multiple prior experiences called up by the “individual” event (Feagin & Sikes, 1994). The role of White Americans in perpetuating racism adds to the mental, physical, and spiritual health damage of race-based trauma (Feagin & McKinney, 2003). The present chapter explores participants’ responses to the traumatic nature of racism with attention to whether the race of the researcher impacts the telling of stories of racism. Guiding questions of interest include: Do Black participants feel greater safety and healing when retelling their story to Black or White researchers? Do White participants avoid or confront the traumatic nature of racism with Black or White researchers?

HEALING TRAUMATIC RACISM IN THE NARRATIVE RESEARCH SETTING The narrative research setting can be an opportunity for the unburdening of the story of traumatic racism. Many survivors of race-based traumatic stress in America need to tell the story of their trauma in order to promote healing, gain mastery of the experience, and receive acknowledgment from the listener (Freedman & Combs, 1996; Watts & Serrano-Garcia, 2003). Narrative qualitative research interviews have been found to have particular benefits in ameliorating trauma through the recounting and witnessing of accounts of traumatic racism (Harvey, Mishler, Koenen, & Harney, 2000; Sorsoli, 2007). Narrative work with trauma can help to construct meaning of a traumatic experience, increase insight, give voice to marginalized stories, and highlight experiences of resilience (Berman, 2000; Freedman & Combs, 1996). These excerpts allow exploration of the effectiveness of a narrative approach to research that includes stories of traumatic racism.

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RACISM NARRATIVES IN BLACK RESEARCHER–BLACK PARTICIPANT DYADS Interviews that discussed issues of traumatic racism between the Black researcher and a number of Black participants typically reflected a sense of shared understanding with the potential to bolster resilience to traumatic racism. The excerpt below illustrates such potential. In response to a question about previous encounters with racism, the Black participant recounted an experience with racism while working at a department store and responding to a White customer’s request to locate an item in the store. Participant (P): I went to find someone to help her and she was like, “You Black people don’t know anything.” Researcher (R): She really said that. P: Yeah. So. I kind of lost my job right there. R: How did you react? P: I kind of lost my job that day. Well now looking— because I was younger—now looking at it, if I had handled it a way, like it not have been Black and ghetto, because I know she was expecting that and I gave in to her expectations. R: Well, she was inappropriate. P: Yes, she was. The use of the term “Black and ghetto” was one aspect of this excerpt that underscored potential differences between the White and Black researcher styles. As the White researcher (LM) reflecting on this excerpt, I felt that I might have asked more about how the participant referred to her behavior as “Black and ghetto,” questioning what I saw as a potentially pejorative label to her understandably emotional response to the customer. The research team (LM, DH, RM, & SR) wondered if this potential question may have increased distance from the experience, accentuating different perspectives, as opposed to staying with the participant in her experience. I (RM), the Black researcher, attempted to show my shared understanding of this phrase, as another Black woman, and tried to stay with the participant in the situation, validating her experience. In the participant’s response, “Yes, she was,” she shows the positive effects of this shared understanding. In hindsight, it may have been helpful to combine the strategies of conveying understanding while exploring more about what the participant was communicating in her use of this term. This exploration may have clarified further what she was experiencing in that moment. Some Black researchers may feel pressure to assume

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understanding of Black participant experiences to racism that may lose some of the individuated meaning for that participant. Additionally, my response, “She really said that,” was made as a statement instead of a question, attempting to join with the participant in a feeling of dismay over the customer’s insult. This excerpt clarifies the potential for empowerment within the research setting, where validation of the experience of racism can increase emotional coping and resiliency, as well as the pressures to assume understanding in cases of racism when researcher and participant share racial backgrounds. Another excerpt with an African American female participant includes the story of her predominantly Black school being moved out of a White neighborhood. This passage shows a similar tendency for mutual understanding in experiences of racism between the Black researcher and Black participants. P:

R:

A: R: A: R: A:

You’re taking all these minorities, and you’re kicking them out of [a local neighborhood] where the majority of people are White. The people that lived there. And taking them, putting them back in [a predominantly Black town] back in, you know, the place where they’re from... So, that was just a big experience for me. And I mean usually don’t talk about that, because I don’t talk about race and culture every day and whatnot. Mm hm. So was that tense then between the students I guess that year when you’re kind of wondering what’s going on and, and everything? Yeah it was. It was a real interesting year because I think that year out of every year, that was the year when the students became a lot closer— Mm hm. —and a lot more unified. And then you know to have that decision made where you know our school was closed and— So that the whole community kind of raised up against you. Yeah.

In this excerpt and in other conversations between the Black researcher and participants was the tendency for the researcher to provide a comforting presence in joining with the participant in her experience. Demonstrating this effect was the participant’s description at the end of the interview who described working with the Black researcher as “a lot more comfortable” than if she had met with a White researcher. Offering a samerace researcher might provide the participant with an enhanced sense of comfort in describing traumatic issues of racism.

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RACISM NARRATIVES IN WHITE RESEARCHER–BLACK PARTICIPANT DYADS In the narrative interviews including the White researcher and Black participants, the racism stories included a particularly high content of trauma in participants’ responses. The following is a representative excerpt from this type of dyad, in which the participant is responding to a question about suggestions he might have for White researchers doing race and ethnicity research: I guess just kind of like be careful of the questions you ask just because I feel like a lot of Black people have gone through racism and it still really hurts. And like, any kind of question could just set them off. I mean like, with any race just like, when you ask racially motivated questions it could really like damage them almost, to kind of like relive those experiences. R: What was it like for you sort of talking about those today? Did it feel damaging? P: I mean it hurt a little bit. Just because like there was some things I hadn’t thought about in a while. But I mean, like I feel like I’ve grown up, I’m past it. And like I just have to get over it. Like it’s happened already. P:

While I (LM), the White researcher, and the participant had had a conversation about his experiences of racism, he referred to Black people as “them” instead of including himself; possibly to avoid confrontation which he may think might make the White researcher uncomfortable or increase his own discomfort. I introduced the word “it” into the conversation, objectifying the conversation out of my own impulse to escape the topic and perhaps avoid feeling confronted with his feeling that may have created another traumatic experience of racism. He minimized his statement of hurt with the modification of “a little bit,” potentially safeguarding against the White female researcher’s power to increase trauma in the experience. He may have also felt pressure to protect the White researcher in this minimization, or have indeed felt a more mild level of pain that he was describing. The use of passive language in this dialogue shows how Black participants and White researchers may distance themselves from the conversation when it becomes too painful or confrontational. This type of language also exemplifies how the responses of a White researcher can increase the pain associated with racism—that talking about racism with a White researcher may “really damage them.” It is possible that the participants may have been less uncomfortable if he’d been paired with a Black

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researcher, or may have worked less hard at distancing himself as a form of self-protection within the interview. In another interview between a Black female participant and the White researcher, problems with addressing issues of race with White researchers are discussed. When asked about suggestions for White researchers doing research on race with Black participants, the Black participant provides the following recommendation. R: How would you suggest kind of going around that if the research is on race? Would it feel better if a Black researcher were doing it, or—? P: I think it’s just the way the questions are set up. Like have different question—like have obviously about race—but also questions like you did about culture and just different things. The Black participant indicated the potential difficulty with the focus on race that White researchers may perpetuate in multicultural study. This excerpt suggests the need for White researchers working with Black participants on topics of racism to deepen inquiry to move beyond a one-sided focus on questions related to race to enrich narrative study in this area.

RACISM NARRATIVES IN BLACK RESEARCHER–WHITE PARTICIPANT DYADS Among the Black researcher–White participant dyads, in many cases White participants enacted racism in the research setting, which did not occur in interviews with Black participants. The following is an excerpt from an interview with the Black researcher and a White participant. This dialogue included a significantly higher level of hostility on the part of the White participant, but was representative of similar ideas presented among other White participants. In this selection, the White participant described an experience of racial tension from her youth when asked about previous experiences with racism. The participant suggested a “Kick-Your-Ass-BlackDay,” revenge for the “cracker day” she experienced in grade school, which she reported included White students being attacked by Black students. If we were to have you know, oh, “We’re going to Kick-Your-AssBlack-Day,” they would hate us. And then it would be on the news. And just like every little thing that we do, they like make it so much bigger but if they do it it’s okay. That’s how it felt like when I was younger. R: Mm hm. (Pause). So you feel like it’s unequal. P: Definitely unequal. Like they like the upper hand. P:

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The presentation of the Kick-Your-Ass-Black-Day felt like an indirect attack against my (RM) identity as the Black researcher. The participant’s use of the word “we” showed her position in this scenario as a White person. She made vague reference to Black people with “they,” avoiding use of the term “you” to perhaps evade direct reference and confrontation of the researcher’s race. I responded to this jarring statement from the participant with an affirmative, yet minimal, “Mm hm” and provided my reflection of the participant’s comments with, “So you feel like it’s unequal.” With these utterances, I attempted to show understanding of the participant’s position in her potentially traumatic racist statement that may be aggressive towards the researcher’s race. I used the word, “You” in order to bring the participant back as the focus of the conversation. The participant retorted with, “That’s how it felt like when I was younger.” Here the participant took a passive voice after making her attack. This language could also be understood as distancing from an event experienced as traumatic by the White participant, called up by the race of the researcher. The participant’s traumatic experience in this event may contribute to a need to feel retaliatory toward the researcher in her response. This excerpt demonstrates how White participants might use the research setting as a place to retaliate against unacknowledged oppression of White Americans or to enact racism, leading to potentially traumatic effects for researchers of color. In other cases, White participants may make colorblind statements that show a lack of recognition that racial differences exist, as in the following excerpt. What was it like to talk about these experiences with a Black researcher? P: I don’t know. I guess it was the same as talking with anyone else. I don’t really see the difference. R: Do you have any suggestions for Black and White researchers doing research on Black and White participants? P: No. R:

This exchange displays how some White participants with colorblind attitudes may have difficulty acknowledging the impact of racial difference between the researcher and participant. In this interview and many others, the White participant appeared to be focused on avoiding being perceived as racist by the researcher for acknowledging the existence of general difference across racial groups. This fear is evidenced by one of her first statements at the beginning of the interview in which she claimed, “I’m not racist at all, I don’t ever want anyone to think I was. “It was not uncommon for White participants to make similar assertions throughout the interviews with the Black researcher. At times, Black researchers working with White

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participants with colorblind beliefs may have difficulty eliciting responses that are disinhibited from fears of being perceived as racist.

RACISM NARRATIVES IN WHITE RESEARCHER–WHITE PARTICIPANT DYADS The general theme extracted from the White researcher–White participant dyads was a sense of White participant’s lack of awareness and understanding of traumatic racism. The following excerpt demonstrates a typical exchange in the interviews between White participants and the White researcher on the nature of racism. R: When have you noticed people of color being treated unfairly? P: … It’s just, you see a lot maybe when you go to [coffee shops] and you order a coffee and the person in front of you can’t deal with you know the cashier in the same way. They get the order wrong, they might mumble under their breath, “Oh, if you spoke English it would be easier.” Or something like that, you know? So I see it in small doses like that but never something really traumatic. In the participant’s frequent use of the word “you” in recounting her recurrent observation of racism, she revealed both the omnipresence of White Americans’ observations of racism while distancing herself from the responsibility of taking action against it. The word “they” called up her vague objectification of people of color working, without further detail or specificity in referencing them. The words “they” and “their” were also used to refer to racist White people, emphasizing her lack of identification with racism in White people. Racism is something that “they” do, not something that she would be a part of or contribute to. Finally, she stated that racism is “never something really traumatic,” reflecting her lack of exposure to and understanding of the traumatic nature of cumulative experiences of racism, as Carter (2007a) describes, the daily accumulation of countless incidents of trauma. Another interview between the White researcher and a White participant exemplified a similar inclination of misunderstanding the potentially traumatic effects of racism. In this moment in the interview, a White male participant is recounting his friends’ tendency to harass Middle Eastern gas station owners, mimicking their accents. R: What is it like for you to watch that happen? P: (Laughing.) Well it doesn’t bother me per se, because it’s not me being involved.

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R: Do you think it’s funny? Do you just laugh it off? P: Yeah. (Laughing). R: And how did he respond to that? P: The gas station guy? He usually doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t respond. He probably just takes it. He’s probably used to it or something. This exchange shows the White participant’s lack of understanding of the impact of the harassment on the gas station attendant. He finds this type of incident laughable, instead of acknowledging the potentially traumatic experience of racism in this case. These excerpts highlight that White participants potential dismissal of the trauma of racism. Lack of awareness among many colorblind White participants of the dramatic impact of racism may lead to mislabeling these claims as hypersensitivity. In this excerpt, it is elucidated that those who deny the traumatic nature of racism in fact may also be in a place of denial and discomfort with racism (Bryant-Davis & Ocampo, 2005). The presence of a White researcher may lead White participants to feel they might escape the issue, assuming that the White person will understand this passivity and permit it to occur (Wise, 2005).

CONCLUSIONS Common themes from each of the four dyad combinations of researcher and participant races emerged across interviews in this study. An advantage of the Black researcher–Black participant dyad was a communication of shared understanding that made telling stories of traumatic racism feel more comfortable. A large degree of trauma content was in the stories of racism that occurred in interviews with the White researcher and Black participants. In contrast, interviews between the Black researcher and White participants tended to include claims that White Americans experienced racism perpetrated against mostly White Americans by people of color, conveying a sense of unfairness. Interviews between the White researcher and White participants tended to show White Americans’ lack of awareness that racism might be traumatic for people of color at all. Dyadic interactions clarified the way in which Black participants may feel a mistrust of White researchers due to the history of racism in research in addition to widespread racism in the U.S. outside of the research setting (Mizock & Harkins, 2009; Thompson-Miller & Feagin, 2007). Lastly, many Black participant responses indicated more of a feeling of trust and a sense of shared understanding with a Black researcher. However, as demonstrated in Chapters 4 and 5, a large degree of variation occurred across

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researcher–participant dyads. This variation reinforced previous statements about the importance of context and the within-group differences regarding racial identity and attitudes for each participant. For example, a White participant with colorblind beliefs may report differences in attitudes towards racism than a White participant with anti-racist convictions. Of note are the assumptions that participants may make about the racial identity attitudes of the researcher. In the brief time that a research interview transpires, Black participants’ comments suggest a shared an understanding of racism with the Black researcher. White participants’ comments revealed some assumptions that the White researcher would agree that racism no longer exists and that White Americans have no responsibility in ending racism. While these assumptions may generally be true, it is possible that attitudes towards racial identity and cultural sensitivity may differ across various Black and White researchers. Participants may utilize stereotypes and assumptions in order to make quick judgments about the type of responses that are permissible on the “impolite” topic of race in a 1-hour research interview with a researcher who is not known well to the participant. Several recommendations based on this research can be applied to future study. It is essential to make the environment a safe and compassionate one so that participants may disclose racist incidents (Bryant-Davis, 2005; Goodman et al., 2004). The researcher may need to take a proactive role in the context of racial bias among participants and recovery from traumatic racism (Watts & Serrano-Garcia, 2003). It is also important for White participants to be in a research setting that allows them to explore biases and beliefs. The researcher might consider interjecting commentary in research interviews to facilitate acknowledgement of racism among White participants, and validate the feelings of participants of color (Mizock, Harkins, & Morant, 2009). The passivity of researchers towards White participants’ denial of racism may reinforce cognitive distortions that maintain “delusions of superiority” (Thompson-Miller & Feagin, 2007, p. 113). Research on resilience and protective factors in the face of traumatic racism is also important to consider (Franklin et al., 2006; Sorsoli, 2007). Additional research is needed to focus on why White Americans maintain racism and lack awareness on racism and how systems can be modified to function from an anti-racist framework. Engaging in narrative research is a valuable means to give voice and capture subtle levels of how language perpetuates racism. These interviews suggest that research on race with varying researcher and participant racial identities can lead to differences in the researcher’s tendency to impact understanding and acknowledgement of racism. It is essential in race research to constantly expose problems as they occur, to

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speak candidly and with an open heart about these experiences in order to raise consciousness in the field of multicultural research. Within the researcher–participant relationship, the story of traumatic racism can be told so that the experiences of racism by research participants of color can be heard and unburdened, and White research participants’ understanding of traumatic racism can be understood and reinforced. Whether it is possible for the research setting to become a healing space, it is imperative that further racism on the part of the researcher be avoided to prevent worsening of participant trauma in research settings. It is important to note that in order for the telling of the story to be healing and not re-traumatizing, safety from re-experiencing racism among participants is needed. Although social change may not be immediate, research on traumatic racism can be coupled with anti-oppression work within the community of the participants to reduce reoccurrence of traumatic racism and promote freedom. In our next and final chapter, we will expand on these directions for future research based on our study findings on researcher race. We will further detail recommendations for anti-oppression stances in multicultural research.

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CHAPTER 7

COMPLEX IDENTITIES: FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS IN MULTICULTURAL RESEARCH My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition. —Audre Lorde (1988)

Is race always the “master status”? In other words, does race always trump other marginalized aspects of social identity? While the focus of this book has been race, it is crucial to examine the interaction of other aspects of social identity in the research encounter, such as class, gender, ability, and size, to name a few. Our study highlights the dialectical tension between the need to address intersecting identities and the value of focusing on one area. The practice of examining the interaction of these factors in one’s experience is referred to as intersectionality. This chapter addresses the importance of enriching conversations about race with issues of gender, class, sexuality, and other aspects of social identity. We will explain the value of intersectionality as well as opportunities for future research in this area. We address limitations in our study and follow with a discussion of recommendations for research training in

Researcher Race: Social Constructions in the Research Process, pp. 71–77 Copyright © 2012 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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multicultural research. Excerpts are provided from moments in interviews where participants touched on these topics and offered examples of how issues of multiracial and intersecting identities may present in research settings. Finally, we conclude the chapter with personal reflection on the present study.

RACE AND BEYOND: INTERSECTIONALITY IN MULTICULTURAL RESEARCH The notion of intersectionality dates to early twentiethcentury American social-political organizing, in which activists strove to unite different marginalized groups under anti-oppression initiatives (Cole, 2009). Since then critical race and legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw (1993) has received credit for coining the term intersectionality—a vital concept for understanding the interlocking components of our social identities that affect our experience of the world. In a seminal paper on intersectionality, Elizabeth Cole (2009) emphasized the importance of elucidating intersecting identities in research to avoid “essentializing” or overgeneralizing categories such as race, and to call attention to how different categories rely on meaning from one another. While race has been the focus of this book, it is without a doubt that gender, class, and other dimensions of identity influenced participant and researcher interactions in our study. However, we chose to focus on the topic of race, realizing that many other social identities intersect with this variable. In this chapter, we return to the complex puzzle of identity and intersectionality in order to ask a larger question. How do we explore intersectional identities in social science research? Many ideas for study have been proposed to address intersectionality in quantitative and qualitative multicultural research (Bowleg, 2008; Cole, 2009). It is important to address the complexity of lived experience by bringing attention to the constant shifting of the lens through which we experience the world, as well as to associate historical contexts. In several instances, participants directly addressed the issue of intersectionality, highlighting the relevance and challenges of exploring this concept. One example was contained in an exchange between a White male participant of mixed European heritage and the Black researcher who asked about his definition of culture. Researcher (R): My next question is, what is your idea of culture? Participant (P): Culture in my ideal sense is everybody being able to come together under the banner of equality, under

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the banner of just not even one group of people. Because, we are always going to have our different sections and our different cliques, if you will, of people and classifications. However, it’s being able to share that with different groups. Being able to share my culture with your culture or being able to share an Asian culture or an African American culture and being able to do that in a respectful manner where, you know, everything can come together. The other thing is, it doesn’t even pertain to just race. It also pertains to different types of people. So whereas I’m GLBT, to pass my culture on to me being the straight culture or the bisexual culture or the transgender culture and being able to learn from them as well. It can’t be just one-way and say, “Oh, here’s my thing, it’s off my idea.” No, it’s got to be—it’s got to be a fluid type thing where it can just flow throughout our society. This participant understands culture through different aspects of his social identity, such as sexual orientation, race, and gender. He acknowledges ethnicity and sexual orientation as dual experiences—intersecting aspects of his identity through which he sees the world. Because of his awareness of cultural marginalization as a gay male, he believes that others must ultimately unite in anti-oppression discourse. However, there are disadvantages to the concept of intersectionality as well. Focusing solely on intersectionality may render invisible one’s membership to a particular social category, obscuring this identity with multiple identities (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008). In addition, individuals may use the notion of intersectionality to escape the guilt and shame of awareness of White privilege (Helms & Richardson, 1997). For example, one White American participant of mixed European descent spoke about her emphasis on gender over race in understanding her experience. What do I think about race in general? … It would probably almost be like if I were to describe myself, the very last thing I would say was White. I would probably go through first that, oh I’m a woman, I’m a twin, I’m—and it would probably be the very things that I don’t categorize myself as being White. And some people do identify themselves as that and feel very proud about that and good—and that’s good for them but I personally don’t take myself as being that way… R: So what is it about defining yourself as White that feels like the last thing you want to define yourself with? P:

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I guess I don’t consider it important to label myself as being—as being White. It’s like a label almost like I guess anything else, like um, even categorizing myself as a woman and putting myself, like, in a group I really have—feel the need that maybe I have to tell other people that I’m White. I don’t consider that important and I don’t think other people do need to either. Because everyone should try to accept everyone for who they are. And not have to be like, oh well, I’m Black and I’m proud of it, or I’m Asian and I’m proud of it.

In this case, the participant is focusing on other aspects of her social identity to evade the topic of race and the privilege that accompanies her identity as White. This is an example of how individuals may focus on other aspects of social identity to avoid processing race. What is more commonly seen in academic circles is an attempt to escape the potential guilt, shame, or loss invoked by topics of racism by emphasizing other aspects of social identity, like gender, class, or religion. An example from professional practice was when a male colleague was confronted by a female colleague about comments he had made that she found sexist. He responded by saying the matter was more complex than female oppression, involving aspects of professional identity. He explained that, as a male in psychology, he felt less powerful, due to the relatively low proportion of men working in the field. While this may be true to his experience, he did not attend to the issue of gender in this particular exchange. Instead, he denied sexism in his comment and claimed a disempowered status through another aspect of his professional identity in the field. In another case, when we presented a portion of the data collected in this study at a research conference, a White female professor responded to a conversation about the use of the n-word among Black conference attendees. She indicated that the use of the word was more complex than issues of race in its intersectional aspects. She stated that the word invoked aspects of time, space, and other dimensions. While her statement may be true, many Black conference attendees had been having emotionally laden responses to the notion of White people using the n-word. However, this affect was interrupted by an academic concept and the conversation ended. In this example, intersectionality functioned to silence conversations of race that may be emotionally difficult for many White Americans to tolerate. The interview excerpt from our study presented above represents a more blatant form of what we term, intersectional escape, in which a focus on racial identity among people of color threatened White identity. Research that investigates intersectionality might elicit the additional benefit of focusing on multiple aspects of social identity as well, thereby expanding opportunities for this dualism and dialectic tension (as we described in the introduction) in various research endeavors.

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LIMITATIONS Several limitations were present in our study. First, the sample was exclusively comprised of university students, which limits the generalizability of our findings to broader populations, especially with regard to age and socioeconomic status. Second, gender differences were present in some of the dyads due to the involvement of two female and no male researchers, which could have impacted results, reinforcing the need for further intersectional study of researcher–participant dynamics. Varying gender, age, and educational background in addition to race in future studies would begin to address the interactions of these key variables in data that are collected in narrative race research. Furthermore, uneven power differentials between researcher and participant may have affected the participants’ comfort when responding to questions on identity and experiences of racism. Research that is conducted by peers of participants may be helpful to mitigate power barriers created by researchers that may influence participant responses. Moreover, action research methodology emphasizes the importance of integrating underserved participants into the research as collaborative investigators in the design (Bobo & Fox, 2003; Carlson & Chamberlain, 2004). While we did not utilize an action research design and enlist participants in developing our research question, we encouraged their suggestions and reflection on multicultural research in the qualitative interviews. Finally, the present study included narrative interviews between Black and White participants and researchers. We have acknowledged throughout this book that while this dynamic is a persistent and significant relationship to explore in race research, the Black–White dichotomy is only one segment of contemporary racial tension. Research that would extend beyond these groups to members of other racial categories should be conducted in this area.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH The study described throughout this book highlighted for us what many other studies have previously demonstrated—the opportunity for research to be a resource in developing anti-oppression narratives. Yet, there still exist multiple possibilities for the training of other researchers to better utilize their own voices through their research and practice in order to combat social inequalities. Developing research dialogue between researcher and participant can also build alliances and relationships that serve as a resource in the face of racism (Williams et al., 2005). Strong cultural competency training in research is recommended to promote research that avoids oppressive power dynamics and enhances satisfaction and effectiveness for research trainees and participants across

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cultural contexts. Other researchers conducting anti-oppression research can be guided to utilize culturally thoughtful methodology for complex issues surrounding racism (Moffatt et al., 2005; Williams et al., 2005). Researchers in training can use narrative voice to highlight key moments in researcher–participant narratives (Bond & Harrell, 2006; Huber, Huber, & Canidin, 2004). It is essential to create an ongoing reflective and interpretive process on data with a diverse research team in order to monitor the risks and strategies of using researcher voice (Moffatt et al., 2005).

FINAL REFLECTIONS In sum, this study highlighted the complexity of race, without clear-cut answers to understanding race interactions among Black and White researchers and participants. Major themes emerged at times, but with individual differences throughout the encounters. It is without a doubt that our lenses shaped the analyses of excerpts presented throughout this text. Moreover, it is likely that other researchers’ identities and experiences could produce countless interpretations of our data. The major consistent finding was that researcher race did matter. The study reminded us that simple statements about race in research cannot be made. Sweeping conclusions about race risk essentialism, overgeneralizing across racial categories. However, participants frequently made noteworthy comments about the role of researcher race in their experiences of the interviews. Additionally, researcher race played a key role in discussions of traumatic racism in many research interviews as well as in the researchers’ off-script comments. Race had complex and nuanced meanings for each participant and in each exchange. Given the socially constructed nature of race, participants and researchers experienced race in the research setting through layers of their own construction and knowledge. An important part of a culturally competent approach to research is attention to the dialectic that we have previously identified—a focus on race versus a focus on intersectionality. In addition, a dialectic may take place between the racial identity of the researcher and participant. Researcher–participant race interactions may provide relief and reassurance, or may conflict and confront in the research setting. This study can reinforce the complexity and significance of researcher and participant race interaction in research settings. This book makes clear that researcher race is a key consideration in culturally competent approaches to research training and practice. Acknowledging and deconstructing

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researcher race is an important part of moving multicultural research forward. Continuing to consider the impact of researcher race is essential to moving the researcher out from behind a curtain of scientific objectivity. We have become accustomed to hiding our identities in research writing for far too long. By focusing on researcher–participant race interactions, we can advance the study of race by enhancing awareness of associated privileges and inequities in order to reduce their daily power in our lives.

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APPENDIX

CONTINUING THE WORK: RESOURCES FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH We must have more results of our efforts be products of deep involvement with the community. Without this we will cultivate a credibility gap with the very populations (family) that gave birth to our multicultural advocacy. —Anderson J. Franklin (2009)

Books • Adams, M., Blumenfeld, W. J., Castaneda, R., Hackman, H. W., Peters, M. L., & Zúñiga, X. (2000). Readings for diversity and social justice. An anthology on racism, antisemitism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and classism. London, UK: Routledge. • Bulmer, M., & Solomos, J. (2004). Researching race and racism. New York, NY: Psychology Press. • Frankenburg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. • Guthrie, R. V. (2004). Even the rat was White: A historical view of psychology (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. • Helms, J. E. (2008). A race is a nice thing to have: A guide to being a White person or understanding the White persons in your life. Hanover, MA: Microtraining Associates. • Ridley, C. (2005). Overcoming unintentional racism: A practitioner’s guide to intentional interventions (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. 89

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• Skloot, R. (2010). The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. New York, NY: Crown. • Singleton, G. E., & Linton, C. (2006). Courageous conversations about race. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. • Tatum, B. D. (2003). Why are all the Black kids sit together in the cafeteria: A psychologist explains the development of racial identity. New York, NY: Basic Books. • Washington, H. (2009). Medical apartheid: The dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from colonial times to the present. Anchor Books: New York, NY. • West, C. (1994). Race matters. New York, NY: Vintage Books. • Winston, A. S. (2003). Defining difference: Race and racism in the history of psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Books. • Wise, T. (2007). White like me: Reflections of a privileged son (2nd ed.). Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press.

Videos • Butler, S. (1998). The way home: Women talking about race, gender, and class, in the United States. Oakland, CA: World Trust. • Wah, L. M. (1994). The color of fear. Berkeley, CA: Stir Fry Productions. • Reid, F. (1995). Skin deep. Berkeley, CA: Iris Films. • Herbes-Sommers, C. (2003). Race: The power of an illusion. San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel.

Websites • Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture. http:// www.bc.edu/schools/lsoe/isprc/ • Poverty and Race Research Action Council. http://www.prrac.org • Race: Are we so different? http://www.understandingrace.org/home.html • Race: The power of an illusion. http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/ 000_00-Home.htm • Teaching tolerance. http://www.tolerance.org/activity/test-yourselfhidden-bias

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We owe deep gratitude to a number of people who have supported this book and the research within it. Jill Friedman and Gene Combs offered a good deal of support and made an invaluable contribution to the book. Jaan Valsiner provided an insightful perspective on the interdisciplinary applications of the book. A special thank you to Carlton Green who went above and beyond with his review to help Researcher Race become a better book. Yvonne Wells and Sukanya Ray played instrumental roles in the development of this project. David Jefferson provided thoughtful edits to enhance the readability of the book. Lastly, we’d like to thank our families for encouragement and inspiration in our commitments to courageous conversations about race and promoting social justice.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS Lauren Mizock received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Suffolk University. Currently, she is a research fellow at the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University as well as an outpatient therapist at Arbour Counseling Services. She teaches courses in undergraduate psychology at Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts and is a consultant for nonprofit organizations. Her areas of research and practice include racial identity, transgender issues, size acceptance and mental illness. Debra Harkins holds a PhD from Clark University in Psychology. She is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Suffolk University and is a licensed psychologist in Massachusetts. She is also an executive coach and consultant, specializing in leadership development for women and non-profit human service organizations. Her areas of research focus on social justice, race and ethnicity, conflict resolution, organizational psychology, and community psychology. Renee Morant received a MA in Clinical Psychology from Suffolk University. She conducts public health research at the Center for Health Justice in Los Angeles, California. She is also a social worker in the foster care system of Riverside County, California. Her areas of research and practice include race and ethnicity, divorce, public health, and HIV.

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Mizock Harkins Morant

Researcher Race: Social Constructions in the Research Process

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