Gray or For Colored Girls Who Are Tired of Chasing Rainbows: Race and Reflexivity

Abstract

Reflexivity interrogates the cause and effect of self-awareness and self-reference in qualitative work. This article uses reflexivity to resolve the meaning and implications that race has on ethnographic research. The author argues that race automatically and inevitably influences research, therefore conscious race reflexivity is a useful tool for auto/ ethnographic work. Even when race is not named out loud, it is germane to how an ethnographic project will be conceptualized, interpreted, and completed. By using examples from ethnographic studies that concentrate on race and excerpts from personal experiences, the author names the reflexive stories "race stories" and identifies the analytic reflections that follow, "gray spaces," to reference and demonstrate the subjective and synergistic role of race in reflexive research.

The Impact of Racism and Midwifery's Lack of Racial Diversity: A Literature Review

“…Researcher reflexivity is an important element in qualitative research that involves considering the relationship and power dynamics between the researcher and study participants, and describing how complications and bias are addressed . A key component to researcher reflexivity in qualitative studies on race is recognizing that racial concordance between researchers and participants can increase access to participants and certain kinds of information, as well as enhance the depth of information provided …”

“…27,35 A key component to researcher reflexivity in qualitative studies on race is recognizing that racial concordance between researchers and participants can increase access to participants and certain kinds of information, as well as enhance the depth of information provided. 36,37 Goode, a black woman, describes how her racial identity shaped her interests, guided her research questions, and facilitated access to her population of study. Of note, 3 study participants asked if Goode was black before agreeing to be interviewed.…”

How Urban Black Girls Write and Learn from Ethnographically-based Poetry to Understand and Heal from Relationship Violence

“…Based on our own standpoints of being women of color from urban neighborhoods often stigmatized in the research and policy discourse, as well as in the popular media (i.e., South Central Los Angeles, California, Corona Queens, New York, and North Shore Staten Island, New York, respectively), we are committed to doing work with young people in and countering pejorative narratives about similar urban spaces. Our subjective experiences are also sources of knowledge (Baker-Bell 2017), and they better equip us to engage with young people deeply and artistically because we continue to commit to our own self-reflection (Boylorn 2011).…”

The Genealogy of Roberts Settlement Explored Through Black Feminist Autoethnography

“…Perhaps this autoethnography could be labelled as Black Feminist Autoethnography (BFA) as scholars have named the pairing of autoethnography with Black feminist epistemology (Griffin 2012;Salters 2016). Mawhinney (2011) used this method to describe the lived experience of other-mothering at a historically Black university, and Boylorn (2011Boylorn ( , 2016aBoylorn ( , 2016b has built a body of scholarship that she names blackgirl autoethnography, through which she centers Black women's lived experiences in relation to music and media. Through BFA, Black women ask and answer: What does my lived experience as a Black woman offer in this research story?…”