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Abstract

This paper outlines my experience as an early career researcher engaging with my power and privilege embedded in my white, English-speaking identity while working with Mexican American male-identifying research participants. Utilizing critical race theory as a framework, this paper chronicles my reflections on un/hooking from whiteness within the context of scholarly inquiry. Specifically, I draw inspiration from a qualitative research project to anchor the discussion of privileged epistemologies and power structures embedded in the inquiry process and academia more broadly, and how race can intersect with how we negotiate our roles, methods, and subjectivities as qualitative scholars. More broadly, this paper explores notions of knowledge and agency in educational inquiry against the question of whose stories are told, how, for whom, and by whom. This paper contributes to the conversation and efforts toward disentangling from whiteness and the epistemologies around which research, higher education, and society are structured to instead magnify the voices and experiences of participants through more egalitarian inquiry practices.

Keywords

critical qualitative inquiry hegemonic whiteness epistemology critical race theory researcher subjectivity qualitative interviews

Introduction: Finding the Hook to Unhook

My experience studying in Mexico as an undergraduate student cultivated my desire to pursue teaching. Additionally, this experience fostered a desire to better understand students’ and teachers’ bilingual and bicultural experiences, and how these intersect with imperial structures that shape public education within the United States (U.S.)—a desire that, in retrospect, may have inspired the research project underscoring this paper. As a former P-20 teacher-turned teacher educator and researcher, I have and continue to engage with structures that maintain inequities along various lines, ones that similarly maintain my privilege and subsequent success within national and global educational systems that were “made for [me]” (Martin & Garza, 2020, p. 11) and those like me (cisgender, white, and native English-speaking). Through interrogating how such privilege enables possession of various forms of capital and power within educational and qualitative inquiry contexts (Bourdieu, 1993; Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021; Yosso, 2005), my status as a white cisgender woman with social, linguistic, and cultural capital--allowing me to occupy scholarly conversations that enable knowledge dissemination of participants’ stories with whom I work--came into much sharper focus (Foster, 1999; Parker, 1998). Not only did this realization highlight academia’s racial and educational power hierarchies underscored by a politics of academic exclusion (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021); through inquiry, I realized my scholarly and civic responsibility to amplify participant perspectives within scholarly spaces by facing my “good white liberal” positionality (Hayes et al., 2016, p. 123).

This paper is inspired by a larger qualitative inquiry project at a U.S. minority-serving institution in 2022 that examined the intersectionality underscoring the educational experiences and emerging teaching philosophies of Mexican American male-identifying preservice teachers. Although I attempted to position myself in the inquiry context background, I realized I did not accomplish this aim, failing to foreground participants as co-creators of scholarship (Mayan & Daum, 2014; Milner, 2007), privileging white knowledge and the white researcher-as-knower. Consequently, this reflective paper draws inspiration from this now-paused inquiry project that illuminated my persistent attachment to my own whiteness and the white privilege entrenched in the academy. I take up Hayes and Hartlep’s (2013) concept of “un/hooking from whiteness” as a way to engage with not only my position as a white person in academia, but also how unhooking—or disentangling—myself from racism, whiteness, and white privilege is incredibly difficult, messy, haphazard, and often unsuccessful; particularly within the context of academia, a space premised on upholding whiteness and inequitable structures around knowledge production (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021). Utilizing theoretical tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT)Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Milner, 2007), I position whiteness, then, as the hook that draws us back in, often subconsciously, no matter the risks we take or our seemingly valiant anti-racist efforts. From there, I grapple with how to “reposition” the whiteness hook (Fasching-Varner et al., 2013) from mere acknowledgement of white privilege toward utilizing it as a productive tool to address inequitable structures within and beyond the academy. As conservative, U.S. public discourse continues to weaponize CRT and similar anti-racist scholarship and broader justice-oriented social and educational initiatives (Gross, 2021), this paper contributes to the importance of unhooking from whiteness in inquiry (Hayes et al., 2016), alongside amplifying perspectives from communities of the global majority within educational research and public discourse.

Critical Race Theory, the Mexican American Experience, and the Whiteness Hook

Although some might view racism as a matter of discourse, fundamentally inequitable discourses similarly re/produce inequitable systems of privilege and power. Building on the fusing of critical legal studies and radical feminism, Critical Race Theory (CRT) seeks to transform inequitable social organization and the intertwined relationship between race, racism, and power along economic, historical, contextual, and subconscious lines (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). CRT positions racism as deeply embedded within the American social fabric (López, 2003), and as a perpetuating form of material advancement of whiteness—and thus, difficult to address and eradicate. Bonding colonialism, capitalism, and the subsequent displacement of perspectives from the global majority, whiteness encompasses a privileged consciousness and regime that oppresses those who exist outside of these racialized boundaries and privileged perspectives (Calderón, 2006; Grande, 2004), while entrenching white voices and ways of knowing as unequivocal. In this way, whiteness becomes property that ensures capital and absolves structural responsibility (Harris, 1993). The often-utilized colorblind and neutral approaches to racism in the U.S. maintains its image as an allegedly post-racist society through well-intentioned discourse (Lockard, 2016; Melamed, 2006), yet also obscures the structural racial inequities embedded in economic, historical, and educational structures and hooks the “good white liberal[s]” (Hayes et al., 2016, p. 123) onto the very whiteness they allegedly aim to dismantle.

My line of inquiry aimed to unpack participants’ teaching realities at the intersection of race, language, and gender–a central component of CRT (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995)–a process that I assumed I had sufficiently engaged with through various iterations of scholar positionality statements and an awareness and capacity to define “white privilege” from a scholarly standpoint; yet still unaware how whiteness had–and still–hooked me as an early career scholar. Although I felt I was cognizant of my privilege as a white, English-dominant person in academia–particularly through public admission (wasn’t that enough?) (Lockard, 2016)–I initially believed such awareness to be sufficient for beginning my inquiry project on–rather than with–participants of the global majority. It was not until much later that I realized the significance of the on/with distinction in inquiry more generally, and how my adherence to the former suggested that the whiteness hook still held me as a scholar–particularly, in how I conceptualized knowledge, and who held responsibility to produce and disseminate it. Although I acknowledged my whiteness-as-property within the research context, I had not yet realized how this hook entrenched–and normalized–the exclusion and Othering participants–in inquiry and beyond (Krumer-Nevo, 2012)–have historically faced.

Contextualizing the Pursuit of Belonging in the Mexican/American Experience

Participants in my inquiry project identified as Mexican or Mexican American and were enrolled at various stages of their teacher licensure program. Historically, exclusion, difference, and displacement deeply undergird the Chicanx and Mexican experience and discourse (Elenes, 1997), reflective of a cultural and linguistic in-between that exposes the tensions embedded within the bilingual-bicultural experience for Chicanx, Mexican, and Mexican Americans in the U.S. (Anzaldúa, 1987; Jaramillo, 2012). Similarly, notions of belonging emerged as an integral focal point for participants in their prior educational and current teaching experiences, as well. From this perpetual state of difference, feelings of belonging and recognition represent constant pursuits against a backdrop of the U.S./Mexico dichotomy entrenched within whiteness, racism, and nativism (Elenes, 1997)–elements that inequitable social structures perpetuate and institutionalize on individual and collective levels (Jaramillo, 2012; Krumer-Nevo, 2012). Despite sharing a national border, economic power often bends toward the United States (Laboe, 2022), leading to the association of social and cultural capital with whiteness and white ways of knowing/being/doing that can cultivate perpetual Othering (Krumer-Nevo, 2012).

Although such hegemonic and institutionalized forms of Othering and racism are similarly entrenched within educational structures (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021), the proliferation of scholars from the global majority in the U.S.–and the insurgence of decolonizing, critically-oriented scholarship–reflects a changing tide within higher education, in particular. Nevertheless, whiteness remains an ever-present positioned hook within academia (Hayes et al., 2016; Hayes & Hartlep, 2013), one that either stubbornly or intentionally informs our pedagogies, scholarship, and inquiry practices toward a persistent ethos of participant-Othering through exclusion, difference, and displacement (Krumer-Nevo, 2012).

Whiteness, Othering, and Participant Connections

As a result, I remained unaware of how the whiteness hook enveloped my research design, despite my scholarly–yet superficial–recognition of knowledge and representational inequities within and beyond my inquiry context and academia more generally. And so, in retrospect, not only had I not sufficiently engaged with how dynamics of racial and linguistic Othering would intersect with an academic context hooked onto whiteness; I had also not interrogated how these elements would simultaneously shape my work with former student-participants. Participants had previously been enrolled in courses I taught; and, although recruitment and study participation did not occur until after course grades were posted to avoid coercion, I only fleetingly considered how participants’ positions as former students might have shaped the inquiry context. Primarily, participants might have felt obligated to participate because they had an academic connection to me, the researcher. From there, this connection may have shaped their responses in interviews and focus groups. Although I might have executed adequate measures to mitigate participant coercion, I failed to account for how the inequitable power dynamic between instructor and student carried over into the inquiry context–to the distinction between researcher and participant–and how academia’s positioning of researcher-as-neutral knowledge producer kept my project hooked on whiteness (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021).

Interrogating My [Hooked] Methods

Inquiry involves the simultaneous investigation of another person, topic, or phenomenon; as well as ourselves (Dillard, 2000; Godwin, 2020), since our personal and professional identities deeply undergird our scholarly pursuits (Chapman, 2007; Milner, 2007). I realized I had not deeply scrutinized how design aspects could consequently hinder the inquiry context, relationships with participants, and subsequent knowledge dissemination. I believed that I had embraced qualitative inquiry’s capacity to position experience as a source of understanding. However, as an early career scholar, I was unsure of how to ensure my participants’ experiences and stories remained at the center of the project (Fernández, 2002), particularly as I fell back onto a familiar procedure through semi-structured, phenomenological interviews (Seidman, 2019). Hoping to foster an additional layer of “conversational relation[s]” (Rossman & Rallis, 2012, p. 286) and a community-of-practice between participants regarding educational and teaching experiences as Mexican American males (Lave & Wenger, 1991), I instituted focus groups. Although I aimed to create a sense of belonging among participants within a predominantly white and female profession (see Carter Andrews et al., 2021; Sleeter, 2017), in retrospect, I enacted the very familiar guardrails I critiqued, the gates that excluded different ways to create and circulate knowledge— whiteness still hooked me.

However, the research context often illuminates issues and structures of power between the researcher and participant (Milner, 2007; Subedi & Rhee, 2008), even if mutual trust and respect underscore the researcher-participant relationship. From previous class discussions, participants knew that I began teaching in Mexico and spoke Spanish; and so, my limited understanding of life in Mexico, programmatic dilemmas, or teaching experiences underscored some degree of trust and some level of emic understanding. However, I became increasingly cognizant that I did not share my participants’ bilingual and bicultural experiences through listening to individual interviews and the shared experiences between participants in focus groups—already-limiting and narrow forms of data collection that limited participant co-creation of knowledge. It was during data collection that I more deeply wondered how much my role as a researcher–and particularly, my role as a white researcher–impacted my interactions with participants, my understanding of their responses, and how these would confine knowledge dissemination. From there, during my data collection process, I realized that the study design did not involve my participants as knowledge co-creators and disseminators. To what was I clinging, expecting, or even privileging in my chosen research design? How hooked was I still, onto whiteness and white knowledge forms?

Attempting to Unhook From Research(er) Whiteness

The Hook of White Researcher-as-Knower

By pursuing lines of inquiry to address, engage with, or sometimes solve a particular problem or question; new knowledge emerging from inquiry can maintain or upend our deeply-ingrained epistemologies, subjectivities, and broader normalized hegemonies (Koro-Ljungberg & Cannella, 2017). Although I hoped to position myself in the background of the study context– functioning as a conduit between questions and participants’ stories–I realized that my research design hardly cultivated this desire. Instead, it remained hooked on privileging white Westernized ways of knowing and inequitable power structures often apparent in research (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021). Therefore, I attempted to “locate [myself] in the tensions” (Lather, 2006, p. 47) through in how I conceptualized what is seemingly worth knowing, who decides, and how these issues were shaping my inquiry context and the negotiation of power and knowledge production.

Post/positivist approaches to research still normalized in the academy foster an entrenched dichotomy between “fact” and bias or value (Antony, 1993; Hankinson Nelson, 1993; St. Pierre, 2011), privileging finite definitions of the former and viewing the latter as an issue researchers must remedy. However, such a juxtaposition is not clear-cut—because no research design–or researcher–is value-free, an idea I only superficially understood at the time of data collection. Despite my position that all people hold knowledge forming capabilities (Foucault, 1975), I–and my research design–were chained to the academy’s whiteness hook in its privileging of Westernized ways of knowing, being, and knowledge production—positioning these as unequivocal. As a result, aligning with narrow conceptions of “research” and scholarly productivity embedded in the academy often exclude knowledge forms of other groups (Denzin, 2017; Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021), sustaining inequitable power structures between researcher and participant often emerging in inquiry. By framing knowledge and research as seemingly neutral (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021; Longino, 2001), apolitical (Hankinson Nelson, 1993), and capital-dependent (Koro-Ljungberg & Cannella, 2017), scholars like myself similarly view such entrenched practices and beliefs as normalized, despite their egregiousness at privileging whiteness. From there, participants are subjects, rather than co-creators of knowledge, entrenching the researcher-as-knowledge producer paradigm (Fine, 2006, p. 613), and knowledge as an extractable value-free commodity from work on—not with—participants (emphasis added). This allows us to overlook historical “wrongs” (Lockard, 2016), and how we co-opt participant knowledge for academic boundaries and publishing accolades within a context entrenched in whiteness (Denzin, 2017; Jordan, 2023).

Although research participants—and communities embedded in inquiry—hold agency within the research context, the context itself is often premised on distance, anonymity, and narrow interpretation to align with more powerful interests (Lockard, 2016). As data collection progressed, I felt uneasy about the distance, anonymity, and what I perceived to be a passive exchange of information that I stored on my protected drive for later use–in truth, for my own scholarly benefit. I had not sufficiently engaged with the possibility of emerging from the safety of my workspace and surrendering some of my knowledge authority. Although we are obligated to challenge hegemonies as public intellectuals, faculty like myself often maintain existing academic hegemonies through enacting scholarship premised on capital, competition, and narrow metrics (Denzin et al., 2017; Dimitriadis, 2016), which sacrifices opportunities for more public, stakeholder-included, and activist scholarship (Koro-Ljungberg & Cannella, 2017)—and, for more expansive and inclusive conceptualizations of “data” collection--whatever “data” might mean. As a result, the whiteness hook remains enmeshed with our scholarly pursuits and practices.

Further, because the whiteness [epistemological] hook pervades much of the academy and academic practices (Denzin, 2017; Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021), epistemologies and practices of people of the global majority are often positioned as too emotion-laden and thus, devalued (Elenes, 1997; Milner, 2007). As a cultural, racial, and linguistic outsider, I questioned whether I could effectively receive and represent participants’ stories and experiences. Toward the end of data collection, after asking each participant “what [it] means to be Mexican” during individual interviews, I realized how much my position as a white person, white scholar, former instructor, and how I viewed knowledge production and dissemination as mostly my responsibility deeply complicated the telling of participants’ stories as young men of Mexican descent, especially since people of the global majority have historically been exploited and misrepresented in educational research (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021; Milner, 2007). How I initially perceived “research,” knowledge production, what was worth knowing, and who decides–needed to be challenged, and for good reason. Interrogating how we perceive systems of knowing and our environment demonstrates a genuine pursuit toward new knowledge and seizing the whiteness hooks that restrict us professionally and personally (Fasching-Varner et al., 2013; Ladson-Billings, 2000). However, these are often difficult to pinpoint in ourselves–delaying the realization of how embedded and hooked we are onto privileging whiteness, its properties, and its systems within our research designs and within the academy.

The Hooks of White Privilege, White Talk, and Confession

Faculty engaged in inquiry often feel entitled to produce knowledge about the participant-Other (Fine, 1994; Krumer-Nevo, 2012), entitlement stemming from the obscured yet intertwined relationship between researcher and participant. As a result, the question of authority and agency over and within knowledge production and dissemination–and whether inquiry maintains or challenges the whiteness-hooked status quo–still nagged at me. Toward the end of the last focus group interview, one research participant asked what I was uncovering. I discussed the significance of the intersection between race, language, and gender in their educational experiences – which underscored a desire for belonging – and how participants negotiated issues of teacher blame and teaching dilemmas within their schools and the teaching profession. I weighed whether to disclose emergent findings; and in the end, decided to share some sparingly, because I felt it was important for participants to know because we had an established connection before the start of the project. I felt as if I were bestowing the extractable knowledge on participants. And, an established connection before the start of the project–if that did not exist, then what? I would tell participants nothing? Share nothing with them? I naively assumed–in addition to confession-like positionality statements (Pillow, 2003)–that this is what researchers do.

By being initially guarded about my findings, I missed an opportunity to unhook, to upend whiteness-hooked researcher-participant hierarchies. More poignantly, why wonder how to interrogate racial or researcher-participant hierarchies, when one remains hooked onto the exclusivity of knowledge? Like any well-intentioned white person (Lockard, 2016), I placated principles of diversity in inquiry, yet remained a gatekeeper to constructing and sharing knowledge. The question of who can and should conduct education research with and about communities of the global majority brings both racial hierarchies and ethical dilemmas increasingly into focus (Banks, 1998; Hamilton, 2019; Walther et al., 2015). These dilemmas forced me to question the more significant issues of power and constraint over representation of participants’ stories, participants’ relationships to knowledge production, and the enduring presence and my internalizing of the whiteness hook.

It is difficult to name what we do not recognize. Well-intentioned white people haphazardly engage in anti-racist work, instead utilizing their white privilege and discursive tools like white talk and confessions as a way out of responsibility for future and more deliberate action (Ahmed, 2006; Lockard, 2016). As a “good white liberal” (Hayes et al., p. 123), I supported, even enacted, inquiry that aimed to engage with oppression and discrimination—but only if such lines of inquiry did not disrupt my neatly-carved epistemologies. Sullivan (2006) argues that white privilege is more insidious than white supremacy, due to its covert, invisible domination through difficult-to-transform unconscious habits residing in the background of white people’s lives (Sullivan, 2006). I failed to see the “unconscious habits” (Lockard, 2016, p. 2) of white privilege normalized within and by the academy in my project, and in my scholarly practices. By only offering some aspects of findings and analysis with participants–and rationalizing that “some,” and however I defined this, was enough–I “white talk[ed]” (McIntyre, 1997) myself out of responsibility for perpetuating racism and oppression through passive data collection procedures and gatekeeping findings, self-theorizing that the project’s underpinning was somehow noble. White talk functions as a distancing strategy that, in this case (Bailey, 2015), minimized the ways in which communities of the global majority have historically been exploited in the name of “research” (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021).

Although I acknowledged my complicity within academia’s hegemonic whiteness hook by perpetuating the researcher-as-knowledge producer paradigm, admissions of privilege or racism often fail to accomplish intended anti-racist ends (Ahmed, 2006). Such admissions or acknowledgements are increasingly tempting to substitute for genuine anti-racist work (Lockard, 2016); and, in many academic spaces, such “confessions” represent a widespread cross-discipline truth-producing act that creates the appearance of purifying one’s behavior. These confessions of privilege–what some might say I’m doing here–are powerful in that they seemingly purify and transform “who we think we are” (Lockard, 2016, p. 16) as fundamentally racist. Such an acknowledgement–or confession–shows we are somehow morally better than other, unaware, white people, while situating racism around comfortably defined boundaries and failing to enact any anti-racist outcome. Without dimming the pervasive misogyny in the academy (Miller, 2019), I realized that as a white, economically advantaged woman, I straddle the oppressed-oppressor line from oppressed womanness, while remaining a social and racial oppressor (Sullivan, 2006, 2014). Even as racism exists in plain sight, our own racism and privilege remains obscured as an unbreakable hook, despite the proliferation of spaces in which confessions as attempts to unhook are expected and normalized (Lockard, 2016; Sullivan, 2014).

Remaining Personally and Professionally Hooked

Although some scholars argue that knowledge about communities matters more than who conducts inquiry about such communities (Banks, 1998; Tillman, 2002), those of us in the academy hold scholarly and civic responsibility to scrutinize what is privileged, legitimized, and in/excluded to disrupt the institutionalized, inequitable power structures (Koro-Ljungberg & Cannella, 2017). For me, this meant grappling with my privileged racial, linguistic, and professional capital within inquiry and larger scholarly spaces. I admonished how I utilized whiteness to collect data, to represent my participants’ stories, and to gate-keep my findings. Drawing upon CRT seemed a merely discursive endeavor enmeshed with a superficial recognition of the whiteness hook on my inquiry practices; where my research design and execution failed to disrupt colonizing notions of research on communities of the global majority (Banks, 1998; Tillman, 2002). I missed opportunities to enact egalitarian, justice-oriented methods reflective of inquiry with participants–rather than on participants (emphasis added) (Carter Andrews et al., 2021). Sentiments of and pursuits toward belonging and recognition emergent in the Chicanx, Mexican, and Mexican American experiences have led to the creation of alternative methodologies for research with communities of the global majority, positioning them at the forefront of knowledge construction to challenge whiteness and its ways of knowing (Hartlep, 2016; Solórzano & Yosso, 2001). More egalitarian practices of testimonios and cultural intuition to illuminate participants’ stories of bilingualism, schooling, and education eluded me (Hamilton, 2019; Solórzano, 1998). My lack of knowledge and familiarity with culturally and historically grounded methodologies within Latinx communities’ political history speaks to my own blind spots (Bernal, 1998; Lockard, 2016), as well as the academy’s hook onto whiteness that fails to normalize these alternative methodologies. Through individual and focus group interviews, reflections, and artifacts–some procedures I had initially adopted–I could have more deliberately elevated participant representation as knowledge co-creators to challenge racial, social (Hamilton, 2019; Milner, 2007), and educational hierarchies in inquiry and knowledge production (Bernal et al., 2012; Solórzano & Yosso, 2001).

Therefore, the anticipated–and unanticipated–obstacles I faced in this short project complicated how I understood and grappled with the internal whiteness hook(s) and those within the academy. Because teacher education is often tailored toward the needs of white teachers and researchers, policies, courses, and institutional structures that overlook the needs and perspectives of practitioners of the global majority (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021; Gay, 2000); I wondered how, or whether, participants could be more involved in establishing structures and protocols for data collection, analysis, and knowledge production to both align with more egalitarian approaches, and to challenge the pervasive whiteness hooks in teacher education and the academy writ large. Consequently, I questioned what it would look like to redefine the parameters of my research, to reimagine how my participants’ stories are told against pervasive power-inequitable research paradigms, and whether I was capable of enacting such work. Attempting to unhook from academic whiteness–although desirable–might relieve me of my responsibility to continuously disrupt individual and structural forms of whiteness, a potentially problematic scenario that could jeopardize continued anti-racist work (Lockard, 2016). And, amid scholarly misrepresentations of historically marginalized communities and institutionalized whiteness hooks in academia posing additional challenges to un-hooking (Fasching-Varner et al., 2013; Hayes et al., 2016), I found both a responsibility and opportunity to not unhook, but to “re-positio[n] the hook” (Fasching-Varner et al., 2013, p. 71) alongside participants, leaning into agency through authorship (Rossman & Rallis, 2012).

Conclusion: Toward “Re-Positioning” the Whiteness Hook(s)

Awareness without action rarely leads to future anti-racist work (Lockard, 2016). At the 2023 AERA conference, another scholar illuminated the importance of unpacking researcher subjectivity in racially, linguistically, and culturally divergent researcher-participant relationships, particularly to reframe expertise and storytelling agency within these relationships (However, I realize that engaging and presenting at academic conferences illustrates hegemonic academic whiteness hooking me back in.) Supporting immersion within participants’ communities, practices, and daily lives to humanize participants’ stories in inquiry, this scholar also discussed presentations and publications with participants, complicating—and rightfully so—the notion of whose voices exist in scholarly spaces, to tell whose stories, and on what grounds. As an early career scholar, I was unaware such an option was proverbially allowed (emphasis added) in the perpetually exclusionary academy (Hartlep, 2016; Koro-Ljungberg & Cannella, 2017), let alone possible. It was this very recent conversation that inspired my decision to re-position some of the academic whiteness hook(s) toward cultivating co-authoring, presenting, and inquiry opportunities to situate participants as knowledge co-creators.

As both a reflective (and reflexive) process, this paper highlights the tensions that emerged in examining my own power, privilege, and subjectivity; and how this internal work has encouraged me to reexamine institutionalized practices within the academy, my own capital and privilege, and how these intersect with–and complicate–egalitarian inquiry and attempts toward genuine anti-racist work. More broadly, this reflective paper grapples with the questions of whose stories are told, in what spaces, by whom, and for what purpose (Brunsma et al., 2013; Foster, 1999; Smith, 2014). Finally, these reflections illuminate the importance of disrupting privileged epistemologies and normalized whiteness in educational inquiry and the academy, reinforcing the ways in which our roles intersect at “tension and responsibility, but also power and possibility” (Hamilton, 2019, p. 200) in the vibrant truth-telling of peoples’ stories (hooks, 2001). Not only did transferring educational institutions in the middle of the project force me to pause this inquiry; but this reflective and reflexive opportunity encouraged deeper engagement with my positionality, research design, and how to re-position whiteness hooks onto co-creation and project revision toward more egalitarian and genuinely anti-racist ends. And, although the research project that inspired this paper initially felt like a failure (see Wohlfart, 2020), circumstances coalesced to serendipitously reinforce the importance of researcher subjectivity and reflexivity when designing qualitative inquiry with racially and linguistically divergent researcher-participant backgrounds, consequently offering a way to re-position whiteness hooks onto something more agentive.

Nevertheless, it is important to challenge the ways in which white privilege tempts us to feel hopeful about our efforts toward alleged anti-racism. It is worth noting that writing for an academic journal, for narrow impact factors, to an academic audience, is at the very least one small dimension of why the work that I do—and the systems in which this work and I am embedded—complicate efforts toward critical public scholarship and re-positioning whiteness hooks. Further, engaging participants in current co-authoring opportunities has also highlighted the pervasiveness of the belief that the academy remains a more valued space for knowledge dissemination. Such tensions illuminate how I still am hooked onto academic whiteness, thereby operating within the realm of a scholarly “racist anti-racist” (Fasching-Varner et al., 2013, p. 88), perpetually seeking ways to interrogate and re-position these hooks. As I continue to question my inquiry practices “on [my]self and the world” (Sullivan, 2006, p. 197) I realized the importance of giving up knowledge-producing authority and the privilege of being or feeling “right” (p. 184). Consequently, in the spirit of Lockard (2016), Ahmed (2006), and Sullivan (2006; 2014), this paper is less focused on what actions I can take to make myself feel better—because that is not the point (or at least, it should not be). Because I, we, white people, have a responsibility to transform the conditions and systems in which we are embedded, if we are to claim our positions as racist-anti-racists (Fasching-Varner et al., 2013). That does not mean that I cease to imagine creating and conceptualizing knowledge differently (Dimitriadis, 2016), or that I will cease more complicated efforts to unhook from whiteness—albeit a messy, haphazard, and imperfect pathway toward that unhooking. Instead, “repositioning the hook” (Fashing-Varner et al., 2013, p. 71) reflects efforts toward transforming whiteness (Sullivan, 2014)—of using my privilege against itself—toward vulnerably acknowledging the effects of my scholarly actions and course-correcting for the future (Bailey, 2015).

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Angela Kraemer-Holland

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“Re-Hooking” in the Field: Negotiating Power,Privilege,and Whiteness in Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction: Finding the Hook to Unhook

Critical Race Theory, the Mexican American Experience, and the Whiteness Hook

Contextualizing the Pursuit of Belonging in the Mexican/American Experience

Whiteness, Othering, and Participant Connections

Interrogating My [Hooked] Methods

Attempting to Unhook From Research(er) Whiteness

The Hook of White Researcher-as-Knower

The Hooks of White Privilege, White Talk, and Confession

Remaining Personally and Professionally Hooked

Conclusion: Toward “Re-Positioning” the Whiteness Hook(s)

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References