Abstract
Engaging in reflexive analysis or “working the Self-Other hyphen” is central to establishing credibility in critical qualitative research methods today. However, while there is a robust literature on how to navigate the Self-Other hyphen, this tends to be written for white scholars going into communities of color. There is very little written by and for scholars of color going into the field to study whiteness. In this paper, I unravel the challenges and complexities of negotiating the Self-Other hyphen as a scholar of color. This manuscript is based solely on a secondary analysis of previously published data. I draw on examples from my own health communication research over the past decade in two different settings: HIV and AIDS in India and hunger and food insecurity in the United States. I use peer reviews and reactions from dominant actors in the academy to elucidate how orientalist and white racial frames impact the interpretive, analytical, and writing work of qualitative research. Highlighting the micro-politics of knowledge production, the paper argues that since power operates differently for Black and brown researchers in white spaces, considerations for working the hyphen must be dramatically altered. The paper offers suggestions for how researchers might maintain a critical, counterhegemonic presence in their research in the face of hegemonic responses.
Highlights
This opening excerpt depicts a brief exchange that took place between a research participant (Xavier) and myself in a midsize city in Midwestern United States
I, an Indian immigrant, a woman of color, a researcher studying the stigma of hunger and food insecurity in food pantry spaces and my interviewee an African American Muslim man who experiences hunger and food insecurity, racial and religious stigma, and uses the Chum food pantry2
I revised my original assertions to read in this way: in her use of the term prickly lady, I was already primed for the race of the client, because in this context, the term prickly fit precisely within the trope of the “Angry Black Woman” (ABW)
Summary
This opening excerpt depicts a brief exchange that took place between a research participant (Xavier) and myself (the interviewer) in a midsize city in Midwestern United States. Even as my own article attempted to interrogate orientalist assumptions underlying the use of the term “folk” in discussing meanings of medicine, I was being asked to make a distinction between the two Reflecting on these interactions, I realize that the purpose of requesting these descriptive details was to allow the Other to fit within dominant cognitive schemas—in this case orientalist and “white racial frames” (Feagin, 2013)- and doing so increased the credibility of the research in this particular venue. In this particular instance of the Black man and the “poverty bandit,” I ended with this statement All in all, this text joins the deluge of discourses circulating in society that reinforce age-old racist assumptions and stereotypes about people of color being poor and lazy, while absolving the roles of capitalism, structural racism, and a whitened Christianity in producing racial disparities. I revised my original assertions to read in this way: in her use of the term prickly lady, I was already primed for the race of the client, because in this context, the term prickly fit precisely within the trope of the “Angry Black Woman” (ABW)
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