Colorblind Spots in Qualitative Methods Training

Race and Ethnographic Fieldwork Exercises: Tales from the Classroom

We came to this seminar from different roles and positionalities. Sue was the instructor of record and identifies as a biracial (Chinese/white) woman and has conducted ethnographic research in Mexico and among Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States. Núñez is a light-skinned, self-identified Mexican American who is bilingual and attended the seminar as a graduate student in Sociology. Harris is a self-identified African American male who is a former high school teacher and attended as a doctoral student in Education.

Early in the course, students are asked to engage in several activities to develop ethnographic skills in observing and recording human behavior and discourse, one of which is a “go-along,” a hybrid methodology that draws on the strengths of participant observation and interviewing. For the go-along exercise, students stand outside of a grocery store and ask incoming shoppers whether they can accompany them as they shop, as part of a class assignment. As students shadow shoppers, they ask them questions about their shopping behaviors. The idea of approaching a stranger elicits anxiety for some students, which is part of the pedagogical lesson: to reflect on the emotion work involved in fieldwork and prepare students for some of the challenges with entering a new setting. For students who are highly uncomfortable approaching a stranger, they are given the option of asking someone they know whether they can accompany them on a shopping trip.

Presumably like many instructors, Sue modeled her ethnographic training partly off that which she had been exposed to as a graduate student. At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), she had engaged in the “go-along” activity alongside a diverse cohort, in the context of a diverse city. Possibly due to this context, concerns over the exercise did not surface among her fellow classmates. When Sue began teaching qualitative methods at her current institution, situated in a predominately white upper-middle-class city, she transferred these activities and experiences into her own classroom, without adequately thinking through how the new context could shape students’ experiences with the exercise. Nevertheless, for over a decade, she had assigned this activity to students, who were predominately white but far from exclusively so, without incident. However, very few of Sue’s students were African American, and none were African American men, until the seminar under discussion. Although the role of gender in these exercises surfaced frequently, and race to some degree, the intersections of raced/gendered positionality had never surfaced in such an explicit and problematic manner.

About half of the 12 students in the course identified as Asian, Latino/a, African American, and/or being born outside of the United States. However, the intersections around race, color, gender, and physique became uniquely salient for Harris. The class was made aware of this as we went around the room sharing our experiences with the activity, a reflection exercise that typically takes over an hour. The students who approached strangers had generally positive experiences. A white male student was first ignored, but then ended up successfully accompanying a woman customer. A white male international student (who is 6′5″) reported a very positive experience accompanying a scientist. A medium-skinned, multiracial black woman student was successful in completing the exercise but was very conscious about not appearing to be “a crazy woman” as she approached shoppers. A light-skinned Latino student was also successful, but selectively approached people who looked like “moms” or were elderly. He ended up shopping with a Hispanic woman. A white woman, with an athletic physique, stood outside of a Whole Foods store. She tried to dress like a Whole Foods shopper but admitted that she probably looked like one anyway. She had a positive experience.

When it was Harris’s turn to share, he pointed to our Whole Foods “go-along” colleague and offered, “I had the opposite experience” (i.e., he did not fit in). He shared that he did not have race on his mind when he embarked on the exercise. Instead, awareness of his tall stature, dark skin, and gender only became apparent, and quickly paramount and daunting, after reading the reactions of potential participants. One woman moved her purse to the side as she walked past him into the grocery store. Another shopper gave him a curt “no” and another giggled nervously. After considering how white people may perceive an African American male standing in front of a grocery store, Harris realized that more than simple embarrassment or rejection was at stake. His status as a doctoral student or former education professional could not protect him. An encounter with law enforcement became an increasingly realistic outcome. Harris thus abandoned the exercise.

After Harris finished debriefing the class, we collectively processed the fact that, as a black male in a predominately white community, his ability to execute a seemingly simple class exercise was severely constrained by the intersection of his gender, color, race, and stature. For other colleagues in the seminar, the intersection of their whiteness or lightness, gender, and student status provided them access to the activity, although some black and Latino/a students had to think more carefully about how they were presenting to shoppers. Upon hearing Harris’s experience, some white classmates (particularly women) expressed being upset, surprised, and generally unprepared to hear such a visceral experience with racism. A Latino student felt anger and sadness that Harris had to undergo such an experience. Sue was frustrated by her lack of anticipation of this potential scenario and questioned whether she should continue to assign the exercise at all. In hindsight, she realized that, although prior students of color had not encountered similar problems, it was Harris’s intersecting identities and status as a dark-skinned black man in a very white environment that made his experience unique. Finally, Harris was hesitant to share his experience with the class but felt supported during its recounting and thus experienced it positively—it both affirmed his personal identity and his identity as a developing researcher. He believes he would not have experienced the same level of growth without the opportunity to share and digest the experience with his sociology peers.

From Classroom to Long-Term Fieldsites: Unprepared for the Messiness of Race

Our class experience exposed another potential colorblind spot in ethnographic methods training—the lack of preparation for researchers of color with regard to how their individual-level attributes may interact with the “racially pre-conditioned environments” of their field sites (i.e., environments with established meanings and rules related to race). While Harris’s experience illustrated how his positionality interacted with the grocery store environment on a single occasion, when students have a continuous presence in a field site, less-visible attributes such as political stance and language, in combination with visible attributes such as phenotype, work together to shape how researchers are viewed and received. This level of complexity is likely overlooked or inadequately addressed in many methodological training courses. We highlight how this issue surfaced in our own seminar by sharing Núñez’s experience in her class field site.

In the course, students not only engaged in various one-time fieldwork exercises, but they also embedded themselves in a field site which they visited regularly, allowing them to practice various ethnographic field techniques. Núñez’s field site was two conjoined Chicanx-based campus student organizations: UMAS (United Mexican American Students) and MEXA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán). UMAS was developed at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and its purpose was to improve educational opportunities for Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The group later morphed into MEXA and expanded to include broader forms of political activism. Upon entering the field site, Núñez possessed assumptions about what it means to be a person of Mexican descent, which were rooted in her experience living on the U.S.–Mexico border. It took a series of interactions and missteps before she recognized how the rules of authenticity vary across environment, even among the same ethnic group.

Studying a Chicanx student group meant that multiple aspects of Núñez’s identity were placed under scrutiny. During the first meeting, all members introduced themselves by stating their identities. For Núñez, as a Mexican American student, gaining access to UMAS and MEXA was not particularly challenging. In contrast, gaining the group’s trust and acceptance was much more difficult. Núñez’s fair skin contrasted with the darker complexion of most of the group’s participants and impeded her early efforts to gain their trust. Given that the campus is mostly occupied by white, upper-middle-class students, the tendency of the group’s members was notably not toward mirroring those students, but instead setting themselves apart by positively valuing what they perceive the dominant group to devalue. Within this context, Núñez’s light complexion was not an asset, and her racial authenticity was suspect. Núñez was unprepared for this as her ability to speak Spanish and her surname had left her ethnicity unquestioned in the border region where she grew up. However, UMAS and MEXA members in Colorado had very different understandings of what it meant to be Chicanx, as Núñez soon discovered.

Núñez’s initial interactions with group members were congenial and polite, but distant. This changed when she participated in a campus protest, which led to a new level of acceptance and integration with students in the organization (e.g., they invited her to socialize outside of meetings). She started to become cognizant of the vital importance activism holds with respect to the group’s identity. The weight given to political engagement defied her initial expectation that her ethnicity would be enough to be accepted. Like most social circles, organizations, or informal groups, insider status is rarely guaranteed. One must continuously work to maintain their position within a group or risk losing legitimacy. In Núñez’s case, constant commitment to the ideals of the group, more than ethnicity, nativity, or language, appeared to be the driving force behind her eventual acceptance. Núñez’s experience illustrates the complexities of how race is constructed in the field and the importance of preparing researchers to think about how their attributes interact with racially pre-conditioned environments.

Conclusion

In this article, we drew on our collective experiences with teaching and learning qualitative methods to begin a conversation about how methods training can better address the complexities of race for the benefit of all students, but particularly students of color who we believe have been underserved by traditional training. We imparted our experiences to illuminate some of the potential methodological colorblind spots that exist in our classrooms. Although we have no way of knowing whether these or similar colorblind spots are present in other courses, we suspect they are given documented experiences by scholars of color that they received little to no methodological training on race, critiques of insufficient guidance on the methodological aspects of studying race, and our perusal of standard qualitative training texts and qualitative methods syllabi which suggests that race and racism are oftentimes not covered or only covered superficially.

At a fundamental level, we believe that issues of race may not be addressed or adequately addressed in methodological training because of the level of discomfort it can bring. In discussing our “go-along” exercise, our class experienced a collective sense of unease upon the realization that, although most in our community drew beneficial knowledge and skills from this exercise, Harris, our colleague, was deprived of that experience. Regarding Núñez’s experience, it was difficult for Núñez not only to have her ethnicity challenged in the field, but also to write and speak of those dynamics, knowing that it could compromise her authenticity as a researcher and a racial “insider,” in the eyes of her colleagues (Alexander 2004). However, our experiences reveal how, in a supportive environment, students can learn from others with experiences dissimilar to theirs and that collective reflections can propel research and teaching that are more nuanced and considerate of communities and context. In reconnecting with our class colleagues, we learned that, for some, these experiences were among the most impactful lessons on race they had encountered in graduate school and have left a long-lasting impression, spurring them to integrate our class experiences into their own teaching and research.

After reflecting on our collective experience, we propose the following set of recommendations for instructors and students engaged in qualitative methods training. First, we encourage instructors to incorporate readings that address the complexities and challenges of positionality and intersectionality, including guidance for researchers of color who study “their own” communities, as well as those studying predominantly white spaces (Buford May 2014). While not all aspects of fieldwork pertaining to race can be anticipated or fully explicated, there should be more recognition given to the role of racial dynamics, including intra-ethnic distinctions, to prepare researchers of color for their ethnographic careers. Sue plans on assigning this article in the first week of class, to set the stage for these discussions. In addition to assigning relevant literature, the material needs to be integrated into class discussions to encourage consistent reflection on issues of positionality.

Second, Núñez and Harris’s experiences highlight the need for an accounting of race and intersectional identities throughout methods training, as the ethnographic philosophy of “getting your hands dirty” holds drastically different consequences based on identity. We recommend open and intentional conversations about race and positionality throughout the entirety of the course. Sue had a week dedicated to these issues, but it came too late, and framing them as a “topic of the week” could have signaled that these issues were isolated from other topics when, in fact, they are deeply embedded in all aspects of qualitative research. Although we do not think it problematic to do a “deep dive” on these issues in a particular week or weeks, it needs to occur alongside an integrated approach. Addressing these issues head-on, especially in the first weeks of class, would have encouraged a more organic and deliberate consideration of race in each of the methods exercises students engaged in.

Third, although ethnographic research presents multiple challenges, including encounters with racism and sexism, reducing students’ engagement with these activities will not serve them in the long run. With regard to the “go-along” exercise, we believe that instead of simply including an “out” for students who were uncomfortable approaching strangers by allowing them to shop with an acquaintance, Sue could have used the exercise as an opportunity for discussing how to creatively gain entrée while taking positionality into account (e.g., utilizing an informant or having two classmates stand outside a store together). To help inform these conversations, students could informally observe their “go-along” site before engaging in the actual activity. Race and other forms of identity need not be hindrances to engaging in fieldwork (Stuart 2018); rather, seminar participants can collectively help each other use positionality as a starting point for making strategic choices in the field. Novice researchers would benefit from working through these challenges in a classroom environment that recognizes and helps them prepare for the different realities that identities pose, providing emotional and strategic support when challenges arise. That said, it is important to set individual boundaries. While some degree of discomfort is embedded in nearly all qualitative research, before any fieldwork exercises take place, we recommend that the class engage in an exercise in which students consider hypothetical field scenarios, with each student defining their own threshold of comfort, based on emotional and physical concerns. The class should then collectively discuss exit strategies for when a threshold is being approached or crossed.

Finally, instructors and students should continually approach qualitative methods from a context-driven perspective. Instructors should avoid simply replicating methodological training techniques across contexts, without regard to their potential effects. This includes the context of the city, university, classroom, and students’ field sites. Instructors should be aware of and openly discuss how positionality interfaces with various environments with which students are engaging, all of which are racially preconditioned in different ways. They should encourage students to always think of context when navigating and interpreting their ethnographic experiences. Instructors should make a point of preparing all students, and particularly students of color in certain contexts (e.g., predominantly white settings), for the potential emotional labor and even safety concerns involved in such fieldwork. They should also be prepared to refer students to university support services, when necessary, and be familiar with resources related to racial trauma (e.g., Comas-Díaz et al. 2019).

We realize that the implementation of these recommendations might require a significant departure from current methodological training. Moreover, none of these conversations are comfortable and they will have the effect of placing all class participants’ identities front and center. But, in avoiding them and allowing colorblind spots to persist, we do a disservice to an increasingly diverse group of emerging researchers and thus reproduce the very injustices that much of our research aims to expose and dismantle.