Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in Research Methods

John H Stanfield II

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315420875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of original work demonstrates the new ways in which particular research methodologies are used, valued and critiqued in the field of race and ethnic studies. Contributing authors discuss the ways in which their personal and professional histories and experiences lead them to select and use particular methodologies over the course of their careers. They then provide the intellectual histories, strengths and weaknesses of these methods as applied to issues of race and ethnicity and discuss the ethical, practical, and epistemological issues that have influenced and challenged their methodological principles and applications. Through these rigorous self-examinations, this text presents a dynamic example of how scholars engage both research methodologies and issues of social justice and ethics. This volume is a successor to Stanfield's landmark Race and Ethnicity in Research Methods.

Part I: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

2 Holistic Restorative Justice Methodology in Intercultural Openness Studies

John H. Stanfield, II

Some Far Away Memories

I was born in Rome, New York. When I was six, my parents moved their young family of three daughters and one son eight miles outside the city limits into the rural Holland Patent Central School District. When it came to school records, my mother seemingly kept everything. One day a few years ago while visiting my parents, I stumbled across my primary school report cards. My sixth-grade teacher Mr. O'Brien wrote two comments to my parents on my report cards, one in the beginning of the year and the second at the end of the year.

The comment at the beginning of the school year was "John needs to work harder; he can do better than this." The end-of-the-year comment was "John was the best bathroom monitor I ever had." Those comments brought back some far-away memories.

Anyone who knows sixth graders, at least when I was one as a baby-boomer, knows that the most crucial ploy was finding ways to manipulate the bathroom pass rules so that two or more of your buddies or girlfriends and you can end up in the bathroom together, away from the eyes and ears of the teacher. Thus, becoming bathroom monitor was even more important than getting elected class president. Being an effective bathroom monitor was akin to being an effective department chair in the adult university world as the liaison between department faculty and the dean. As bathroom monitor, you were a temporarily displaced peer who had the respect of your classmates since you knew when to and when not to tell the teacher and because your peers were inclined more or less to "cut it out" when you told them to. This meant, of course, that you said nothing or little of much significance about your peers' behavior to the teacher lest you become accused of being a squealer. And by telling the teacher that "nothing is wrong, no one is disobeying the rules" (at least not enough to warrant the teacher's attention), the teacher comes to consider you to a most effective leader among peers—"the best bathroom monitor I ever had."

Mr. O'Brien was that balding, overly strict teacher every fifth grader in our small rural primary school, Stittsville Elementary, dreaded having the next year. He was the zealot gatekeeper to that big next step to seventh grade. At the end of the year, he made many arrogant sixth graders cry in the hallway when he told them they were being held back. Over the years, I remember seeing some of those tear-drenched faces as a lower primary student as I passed in the hallway seeing Mr. O'Brien's stern stare while he proclaimed the bad news.

To my amazement and fear, I was nominated to run against one of the popular kids to become the grand bathroom monitor. I was not a very popular kid in my sixth-grade class. I assumed that was because I was rather puny and so was not usually the first choice as a kick ball or soft ball playmate and certainly not when it came to tag football. Perhaps it was because I was a stutterer, which made me shy and rather quiet. Or maybe it was because I was the only black boy in the Holland Patent Central School District, not just in class.

My popular peer and I, competitors for the esteemed position in question, were both told to leave the room for the voting. When we were told to come back in, it was announced I had won and was the bathroom monitor for the year. The ringing sound of hands clapping followed. My life changed in ways that I did not have the emotional maturity to understand then, but did later as my life moved on.

Where and when we spend our formative years has much bearing on who we become as a sociologist focused on a particular research topic. My longtime career and personal interest in how Blacks, Whites, and other racialized people become open human beings in prejudicial environments have much to do with growing up on a farm (from the age of six to sixteen) in that overwhelmingly white upstate New York rural community.

Not until my mid-fifties did I find out from my parents why they decided to move us to the country. I do remember as a six year old being told or over-hearing that we had to move from the air force base where my father worked since civilians could no longer live there. But why move us out into the sticks? The answer to that question had to wait for over fifty years.

I found out that my parents decided to buy a house and become the first black couple of their generation in the Rome, New York area to become homeowners. My grandfather, whose name I proudly have, was the most prominent black civic leader in Rome, where I was born. He was seemingly respected enough across the small city to have the largest funeral in the city's history in the early 1960s. Yet, paradoxically, given the insane ironies of race, my paternal grandfather was not respected enough as a black man for the white bankers to extend a mortgage loan to his son and daughter-in-law.

So my parents turned to the lily-white countryside eight miles outside the city limits, without any black family for miles. They found a ten-acre farm being sold by a Polish American fanner. The farmer did the unspeakable by selling his property to Negroes, and many of his neighbors refused to speak to him again. Specifically, he gave my parents an owner mortgage loan since it was impossible for them to get one through a bank.

There was plenty of racial prejudice to go around when my three sisters and I began school in that rural school district, but by the time we moved to California shortly after my tenth year in high school began, we were a well-respected family still remembered in the community to this day. The journey of becoming a well-respected black family certainly was not easy; at times, my parents had to make it clear that we were there to stay even if it meant NAACP intervention, a vibrant and effective civil rights organization back then. Certainly the long meetings my parents had with school authorities and community leaders and their involvement with the PTA and other formal and informal groups of parents caused the local culture to open up a crack or two.

Also, my sisters and I went to school every school day, where we were all competitive academic performers, where we played, and yes, even at times, fought with classmates who dared to insult us due to our complexion. Over time, we transformed each other. We transformed each other to such an extent that it was just a matter of time before no white kid in his or her right mind would bother a Stanfield on the bus or on the play ground or they would be confronted with our white peer allies while we took a back seat and watched. And we Stanfield kids stood by and stood up for our underdog white friends—or at least I did.

And this had a spillover effect on my parents in unimaginable ways. One night, my parents driving back home on one of those old single-lane country roads with no street lights were hit head on by a drunken dairy truck driver, though not injured. The white deputy sheriff who came to the scene was the future brother-in-law of the drunk driver. To cover it up, the deputy cited my father for reckless driving or something like that. Some days later, in midevening, the deputy came by our house to arrest my father and take him to the local justice of the peace to make the charge official (I was a seven-year-old boy sitting next to my father watching television with him when the deputy came in and arrested him, which was certainly my initiation into the meaning of being a black man in America).

We had been in the country for about three or four years at the time. The deputy took my father, accompanied by my mother, to the justice of the peace that night and told his fabricated story. The justice of the peace stared at my parents for a few seconds and then asked, "Stanfield... is your daughter Andrea?" My father said, "Yes." "My wife," the judge began, "is Andrea's fourth-grade teacher. She is such a wonderful smart little girl." Turning to the deputy, the justice of the peace continued, "These are good people, let them go." My parents sued the dairy company eventually and won.

Two Missing Ideas in American Sociological Thought: The Universality of American Racial Prejudice and Intercultural Openness

Over the decades, we American- and European-educated sociologists and non-Western sociologists professionalized within Western frames of references have published reams of empirical studies exploring with more or less methodological rigor how racial prejudice produces disparities in quality of life and causes superiority and inferiority complexes in human development. On the other hand, there is little theoretically sophisticated sociological literature with adequate methodological design, implementation, and evaluation about how people who grow up or move to multiracialized societies or institutions, systems, and communities become interculturally open. This is to claim that intercultural openness is a state of becoming rather than a state of being, given the traditions, rituals, and expected attitudes and behaviors of race-centered societies embedded in multigenerational mundane racial prejudice.

To engage in openness studies theoretically and methodologically requires a confession sociologists and the public in multiracialized societies hotly resist genuinely expressing and doing. Namely, everyone who is born and reared in a multiracial society or moves into one, develops racial prejudicial attitudes, opinions, values, inclinations, and practices, whether conscious, semiconscious, unconscious, intentional, unintentional, insidious, or blatant. And no matter how much a person tries to be open-minded, we all have a bit of racial prejudice until we die. This is a hard pill for sociologists to swallow.: Most Americans, and those who internalize American ideological values and norms, consider themselves racial-prejudice free and become quite upset or defensive or both when told otherwise.

The presumption among American and Americanized and Europeanized sociologists that it is possible to be without racial prejudice is apparent in two themes. The first is the white anti-black prejudice and discrimination thesis in American sociological literature that began with the publication of and response to Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma in 1944. Swedish economist Myrdal, an idealistic admirer of the United States, viewed America as a democracy with the strange contradiction of having a long history of discriminating against blacks. The second is Robert Merton's (1948) response to Myrdal. In conceptualizing his notions of all-weather (white) and fair-weather (white) liberals, Merton formalized the presumption, now a well-institutionalized and erroneous norm in sociology as well as in the dominant U.S. culture, that Whites can be free from racial prejudice.

With no significant empirical evidence, Merton's (1948) think piece laid out four different individual white anti-black prejudice inclinations in conjunction with whether the institutional cultures Whites find themselves in either support or oppose racial discrimination against Blacks. There were the Mertonian all-weather liberal Whites who never discriminated because of their nonprejudical views about Blacks, even when institutional roles and values sanctioned discrimination against Blacks. Fair-weather liberals are Whites who are free from anti-black prejudice but discriminate when institutional roles and values require it. Fair-weather nonliberals are prejudiced against Blacks but will not discriminate if institutional roles and values require nondiscrimination. All-weather nonliberals are Whites who are prejudiced against Blacks and discriminate even when institutional roles and values require nondiscrimination.

This now decades-old folk wisdom in American sociological thought that it is possible for Whites to be without anti-black prejudice—though sometimes feel forced to discriminate against Blacks—has been enshrined for years in textbooks. These ideas were also prevalent in studies done by Merton and other third-generation sociologists and other social scientists coming of age in the 1940s and 1950s (Allport 1979; Simpson & Yinger 1953) about prejudice caused by discrimination. Separating prejudice from discrimination and claiming to be or do neither made it easy for liberal white sociologists to hide their prejudices behind claims of being nonprejudiced while becoming defensive and resentful toward anyone who dared question it.

A common response by Whites to someone trying to explain white prejudice as something most Whites are socialized into is: "Are you trying to call me a racist?" Usually what follows is a lecture on all the things they have done for Blacks and the list of black friends with whom they occasionally eat collard greens and cornbread with chitterlings on the side (a distinguished liberal white sociologist actually said something like this to me the moment we first sat down to meet each other). This denial of being prejudiced allowed post-1960s white sociologists who were liberal before affirmative action forced them to open the doors of their student bodies and departmental faculties to reverse themselves and become anti-affirmative action conservatives. They pointed to their 1950s and 1960s civil rights records (i.e., sending white students south to march with King) or to their abolitionist ancestors when accused of being racist.

Peggy McIntosh's check-list regarding white privilege as well as the recent new area of whiteness studies certainly calls into question this well-established presumption. The prejudice-free white presumption is still prevalent in American sociological research and in the politics of career-making (see Bonilla-Silva [2006] and the article by Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman, Sarah Mayorga, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva in this volume).

The free-from-racial-prejudice myth has also been extended to non-whites but in a different way. A popular false presumption is that blacks and other non-Whites cannot be racist since we do not have dominant group power with which to discriminate, exploit, and exterminate. As a demographic group, we Blacks cannot be racist in America in the power and authority sense of the word, but we cannot divorce ourselves, either as a population or as individuals, from the racialized historical origins and development of this country and the racialized culture that continues to be passed down from generation to generation in locally- and regionally specific ways.

In m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods
• Part II: Mixed Methods
• Part III: Comparative and Cross-National Studies
• Index
• About the Authors