My “Findings” Journey

As I poured over and reflected on the approximately 30-hours of transcripts associated with this practitioner inquiry, I became aware that we are most definitely “doing something.” While I recognized it as group behavior, each time I stopped to test it for validity I found myself unsuccessfully trying to apply “it” to the level of the individual. #sofrustrating In other words, each time I thought I “figured out” a general model of behavior for how white teachers navigate and negotiate conversations about race and racism in our community, I could hear the participants protesting: Not me. You’re taking my words out of context. You cherry picked these responses and/or “set us up” and are now overgeneralizing. I would then argue with these voices in my head, “But the booklet! People thought I captured the range of opinions and viewpoints in our community!” I would then offer this exchange between two participants as evidence:

CORNELIUS (00:29) — Yep. I think it was interesting to hear how people were responding to this. Not, not particularly surprising. This is mostly my sense of things and my sense of how people around me feel for the most part. I don't know. Were you surprised by anything particularly here?

MARK (00:44) — Ah-- [Pause] No. I feel like it hits a lot of- Some people say, "Well what are you really going to be able to do?" Some people, "We can't do enough." Some people, "Well I don't like the way those people talk about it." Like it's just kind of... all the different perspectives. It just seems very, very comprehensive in terms of what different people are saying and how it all fits as a different piece in this puzzle. 

(Mark & Cornelius, Phase Two Small Group 6, 10/26/18)

I took comfort in this exchange because it confirmed my effort to capture -- in the participants’ own words -- the generally accepted “common knowledge” in our community: it was reasonable that some people in our school community do not think we are going to be able to do anything, while others feel we “can’t do enough” in our effort to become a more equitable and inclusive community. And then -- after hours upon hours of reflection and reviewing the literature -- I realized trying to test patterns of collective behavior for validity at the level of the individual is actually what stalls out these types of conversations #invivo. This is exactly the aspect of #whitefragility I wanted to move through. And so, these findings are best understood as explicating how our collective behavior as white people, in general, and white educators, in particular, help to hold in place an inequitable and anti-Black status quo despite our best intentions.

That said, talking about “white people” or “white educators” as an abstract collective felt (and reads) like I was trying to distance myself from “those white people” who “didn’t get it” and were not as #woke as I was now that I had read some books about whiteness, racial literacy, and anti-racism. Since validity in an ethnographic practitioner inquiry is judged in part by the rigor of the methodology -- particularly around addressing/accounting for/being transparent about my positionality and the motives driving the inquiry -- this section is structured around five of my own “default” narratives I recognized in the responses of the fifteen white participants. For each of these narratives, I offer both a personal vignette and various participant responses to exemplify the narrative.  Then, in Chapter 5, I offer “a way forward” -- that is, how I have critically reflected, reframed, and reimagined my own problematic and unproductive narratives.

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