|
Where
Are You Comin' From, Where Are You Goin' To:
The Researcher and Power The researcher and the researched: even the names assigned to the scholar and her or his informants imply that the scholar is active and the informants passive. The researcher is often named--named in the publication, named at the conference--but the informants/subjects/researched are often anonymous, or their voices are subsumed into categories, typologies or data sets. The asymmetrical relation of power between the researcher and the informants is usually unnamed in the report, as if it were not necessary to mention. Ignoring the issue of power does not make it go away: instead, power relationships, however oppressive, are reproduced because they remain unchallenged. In this thesis, power relationships play a part in at least two key ways. First, the researcher has the power of control, authority, and of academic discourse. Second, in any society where Whites are privileged, as in the United States, the White researcher has socially and historically constituted structural advantages over Black informants. Researchers have the power of control over the research process. They set the agenda for the study, they edit the material, publish it, and take credit or blame for the results (Frankenberg, 1993, p. 29). The researcher has choices. He or she decides what methods to use in conducting a study, how to interpret and analyze data gathered from subjects, and how to present the results. Even if an interview is open-ended or "loosely structured," the researcher still contructs the interview questions (Langellier & Hall, 1989). It is misleading, therefore, to assume that informants are participants, since informants rarely get to participate in making decisions about any of the phases of the research process: design, data gathering, analysis, and report of outcomes. Control is also made apparent through rules of status expressed in language use and physical gestures, as well as through dimensions of power such as race, gender, and class. Even in a dialogical interview, the informant is aware that he or she is performing, that he or she is being watched and listened to by a person who may have attained a higher level of education and who may have additional privileges as a White person, as a male, etc. When the researcher uses terms that are unfamiliar to the informant, this exclusionary usage only reaffirms the differential of power existing between the researcher and the researched. Historically constituted and systematically exercised power relations are reproduced through academic discourse in other ways as well. As Nakayama and Krizek note in their article "Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric" (1995), few if any research reports in the field of communication name the race of the researcher, especially if the researcher is White. And yet, "to assume that readers of communication scholarship already understand the multi-accentuality of whiteness is a mistake, for it presumes a white audience" (p. 304). The presumption of a White audience has material effects in that Whites are re-positioned as a privileged group with access to information from which others are excluded. Nakayama and Krizek explain, furthermore, that Whiteness must be interrogated in the context of other social relations, such as gender and class (p. 305). The power of authority also influences the relationship between the researcher and the researched. As hooks (1989) explains:
hooks makes it clear that problems arise "not when White women choose to write about the experiences of non-white people, but when such material is presented as 'authoritative'" (p. 48). Often, nevertheless, the White scholar--their Whiteness invisible in the research report--claims authority over the experiences of "the Other." Power relationships based on racism are significant, then, especially when the researcher is White and the informants Black (Frankenberg, 1993; hooks, 1989). Whiteness (Frankenberg, 1993; Nakayama & Krizek, 1995) is a location of structural advantage and of privilege. Rhetorically constituted, Whiteness stems from a strategic power differential, and the strategic rhetoric of Whiteness reproduces this differential. The "experiences and communication patterns of whites are taken as the norm from which Others are marked," remark Nakayama and Krizek (1995, p. 293). The White researcher, for example, is usually identified as just "the researcher," even when she or he is writing about the experiences of Blacks. As described earlier, Whiteness is silent and invisible, seemingly transparent, especially in academic discourse. Other social relations affecting power relationships based on racism include gender, class, and educational level, among others. White-collar, highly educated, White scholars are certainly afforded more privileges than low-income, non-degreed Black informants. Whiteness in the context of gender is especially complex. The current social and power relationships between Blacks and Whites, both men and women, are informed by the slavery of Africans in the United States. During slavery, White male slaveowners created myths that Black males were dangerous and lecherous. Although White males regularly raped enslaved Black women, they did not want their White wives to have sexual relations with enslaved Black men, and so not only were these myths disseminated, but "countless Black men were convicted and lynched due to allegations of rape, attempted rape, or 'thoughts of raping' white women" (Blackwell, 1991, p. 116). To this day, representations in the media and myths shared in everyday talk present Black men (and women) as super-sexual and yet dangerous (Carby, 1993; Hall, 1992; hooks, 1992; Kern-Foxworth, 1994). The "double-standard" that would make Blacks both sexually desirable and yet feared is rooted in what Rosaldo (1993) described as "imperialist nostalgia." Rosaldo (1993) defines this nostalgia as people's yearning for the "passing of what they themselves have transformed" (p. 70). In mass culture, adds hooks (1992), imperialist nostalgia can be found in advertising where "encounters with Others are clearly marked as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening . . . The lure is the combination of pleasure and danger" (p. 26). Hall, likewise, describes how in current advertising the tropics have become the signifier of the "black primitive" and his or her "erotic power" yet "dark savagery" (1992, p. 17). Another consequence of these long-lived myths is that interracial relationships, while no longer outlawed, remain for the most part taboo. Since, for some Black men, the "once-forbidden" white female partner "is a matter of ego-enhancement and status attainment" (Blackwell, 1991, p. 119), Black men in relationships with White women are often criticized (by Black women, especially) as "sell-outs" or are accused of being disrespectful of Black women. Likewise, Black women may be critical of and resentful toward White women in relationships with Black men. White women, on the other hand, may subscribe to the old myths of Black men as rapists and fear Black men, as Frankenberg discovered in her study of White women's constructions of Whiteness (1993). Or, they may subscribe to the desire/fear paradox of imperialist nostalgia. The social relationship between Whiteness and gender must not be ignored. Nakayama and Krizek (1995) criticize "the glaring imbalance in the reflexivity afforded the terms 'white' and 'women'" (p. 305). It is vital to critique both the racist and sexist politics that privilege particular voices over others, recommends hooks (1989). She notes that "white women who easily see the problems that arise if white males are seen as the authoritative voices within the area of scholarship about women have difficulty seeing the same issues in regards to scholarship by whites on non-white groups" (p. 45). In the following section I interrogate my position (and
privileges) as a researcher. I also outline the ways in which I have tried
to address the pitfalls of reproducing systems of racism and other oppressive
systems in my research. Critical cultural researchers attempt to challenge
power differentials through research defined as emancipatory, political,
and dialogical. This section of the methodology begins with an explanation
of the dialogical communication approach used in the research for this
thesis. Next, dialogical interviewing techniques are described, and I
conclude this section with an interrogation of my own position as a researcher
and as a White woman. Next> Challenges to Power Differentials
Placing and Black Students' Discursive Construction of Community Copyright (c) 1996, Corinna J. Moebius |