Black Researchers Studying Racial Battle Fatigue Among Black Students

Abstract

In this paper, we explore what it means to be Black researchers exploring racial battle fatigue while simultaneously navigating our own racial battle fatigue. We undertook a photo-elicitation project to investigate racial battle fatigue among Black undergraduate and graduate students. Amid doing this work, we wrestled with how to responsibly complete this research while treating participants with care who had full lives, histories, and stories. Using scholarly personal narrative methodology, we make sense of our research process as a research team of five Black people (two faculty members and three graduate students). We share journal entries to underscore the questions with which we were grappling in the research process, ultimately, to help readers understand our answer to the question: What does it mean to center racial battle fatigue in educational research when Black researchers are navigating their own racial battle fatigue? We close the article with lessons learned from our process to leave readers with ideas to consider as they embark on their own journeys of researching a topic with which they are also experiencing.

Introduction

Racism is longstanding system that treats People of Color as inherently problematic, fearful, and non-human, which has systemic, material consequences for Black and Brown people that keep them subjugated (Coates, 2015; Kendi, 2019; Love, 2019). A resulting symptom of the disease of racism is racial battle fatigue - the psychological, physiological, and emotional behavioral stress responses associated with repeated racism (Smith et al., 2011). We are five Black researchers who explored the topic of racial battle fatigue within a large, predominantly white, research-intensive institution. In the process of undertaking a research project to investigate how racial battle fatigue manifests among Black undergraduate and graduate students, we noticed we were wrestling with our own racial battle fatigue.

As Black researchers, we listened as Black students shared their stories of pain and trauma with us - the myriad ways white faculty and peers and the predominantly white contexts in which they studied often worked to break their spirits, sometimes overtly, but oftentimes in subtle, seemingly innocuous ways. We studied the pictures they took to illustrate how racial battle fatigue makes them feel, paying attention to the details in their photos as well as the captions and words used to make sense of their experiences. We centered their stories, their experiences, their voices toward the aim of more deeply understanding how to support educators in developing principles to create environments centered on joy, healing, and thriving for Black students.

Because we focused on participants, we rarely had space to reflect on ourselves. In our biweekly research team meetings, we focused on our agenda - the tasks we needed to complete to honor not just participants’ stories and photos, but also, be good stewards of the resources given to us to undertake this study. Yet, in each meeting, we inevitably found fleeting moments to reflect - to process the ways this work was changing us, to discuss how the photos and words made us feel, and to think about how we were changing as Black researchers researching racial battle fatigue among Black participants.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the question: What does it mean to center racial battle fatigue in educational research when Black researchers are navigating their own racial battle fatigue? As researchers, we embrace the interconnectedness of our personal history and scholarly investigation and believe it adds unique depth and perspective to our research by drawing on our relatability to participants and our ability to integrate their emotional connection and insider knowledge with our own (Edward, 2018; Liu & Burnett, 2022).

We structure the article in the following way: first, we provide background information on racial battle fatigue to help readers understand more deeply this phenomenon and major insights gleaned from previous scholars’ work on this topic. Next, we discuss the methodology and methods that guided this paper. We then share the findings in the form of our journal entries. We close with a discussion and implications for practice, which we frame as our lessons learned from undertaking this work as Black researchers studying racial battle fatigue.

What is Racial Battle Fatigue?

Racial battle fatigue (RBF) is an embodied form of physical, psychological, and emotional stress responses that People of Color experience when they are subjected to repeated racism and racial microaggressions (Smith, 2004, 2008a, 2008b; Smith et al., 2007, 2011). When People of Color experience RBF, they report a multitude of health-related symptoms, including physical internal and external body pain (e.g., headaches, ulcers, backaches, elevated blood pressure), mental and psychological distress (e.g., anger, depression, anxiety), and emotional response strategies (e.g., overachieving, social withdrawal) (Smith et al., 2007, 2011). Racial battle fatigue as a culmination of these symptoms depletes energy of People of Color and detrimentally affects their overall health and wellbeing (Franklin, 2019; Franklin et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2011). Higher education scholars have directed their attention to studying RBF and its impact, particularly on Black students and faculty in undergraduate and graduate higher education spaces (Pirtle et al., 2021).

Scholars have focused on investigating how RBF is a resulting outcome of racism toward Students of Color during their college experience (Corbin et al., 2018; Smith et al., 2007, 2011), how students navigate and cope with RBF in academic and social spaces (Beatty & Lima, 2021; Corbin et al., 2018; Smith et al., 2007, 2011, 2016), how RBF impacts students’ progress toward degree completion, specifically its effects on retention and graduation (Beatty & Lima, 2021; Franklin, 2019; Franklin et al., 2014), and the strategies students use to remediate their RBF (Beatty & Lima, 2021). Additionally, scholars have noted gendered instances of Black men feeling exhausted from being seen as threatening and surveilled on campus (Smith et al., 2007) as well as Black women navigating psychosocial stress responses such as frustration, psychological and emotional exhaustion, shock, and sadness as a response to negative racially gendered stereotypes in academic spaces (Corbin et al., 2018; Okello et al., 2020; Quaye et al., 2020; Quaye et al., 2023). Scholarship focused specifically on Black student stress responses to RBF identified that the stress from RBF can negatively impact overall health and wellbeing, even when RBF has yet to happen (Franklin, 2019; Franklin et al., 2014; Smith, 2004; Smith et al., 2007).

As Black researchers who studied RBF, we must also consider scholarly insights on how RBF impacts Faculty and Researchers of Color. Researchers have explored RBF in post-civil rights and ‘post-racial’ America eras (Shelby-Caffey et al., 2015; Smith, 2004), highlighting ongoing patterns of racial and epistemic exclusion, silencing, and cumulative stress among Faculty and Researchers of Color (Hartlep & Ball, 2019). Regarding Black faculty, specifically, scholars have examined how community college faculty experience role strain, contend with double consciousness, and navigate RBF (Ford, 2019; Stevenson, 2013), and how faculty at large public research universities encounter cognitive biases in tenure and promotion processes, which contribute to RBF (Arnold et al., 2016). Importantly, researchers have also examined how faculty confront and cope with RBF in their roles as educators (Acuff, 2018; Palmer, 2019), including how RBF influences the ways faculty facilitate intergroup dialogue on racism with graduate students (McGowan et al., 2021). In her recent semi-autoethnographic essay, Desnoyers-Colas (2019) implicates white colleagues’ and allies’ contribution to RBF through both their actions and inactions; her work challenges them to acknowledge white privilege and leverage (and be willing to risk) their privilege to confront RBF and institutional racism through pointed advocacy.

Although scholarship on Black researchers navigating racial battle fatigue while conducting research with Black students is sparse, Anthym and Tuitt (2019) use counter-narratives to illustrate the toll racism takes on Black scholars engaged in race work. Most notably, the article concludes with five pillars to help educators and researchers confront racial trauma amid doing race work: preparation, communication, authority, initiative, and human concern. Preparation involves being ready for navigating racial trauma before it occurs, and communication is focused on engaging in ongoing dialogues about racial trauma. The third pillar, authority, means developing appropriate responses to racial trauma at an institutional level. Initiative focuses on prioritizing campus climates that are welcoming, and finally, human concern, the fifth pillar, means demonstrating concern for People of Color navigating racial trauma by reminding them of their self-worth and building intentional relationships with other People of Color (Frierson, 1990). Relatedly, other researchers have also examined doing work with Black communities as a Black researcher responsibly, including paying attention to one’s relationship with Black participants and continuously reflecting on one’s power in the research process (Frierson, 1990; Serrant-Green, 2002). Understanding the RBF literature enabled us to engage thoughtfully in researching Black students and helped us ground our own reflections about how Blackness shapes our approach to educational research.

Methodology and Methods

The focus of this article stems from our previous experience using photo-elicitation methodology to investigate how postsecondary educators can address RBF among Black collegians. Our research team includes two Black women and three Black men. At the time of data collection, our academic roles were one professor, one assistant professor, one doctoral candidate, and two master’s students.

In this article, we used scholarly personal narrative (SPN) methodology and journal entries to explore what it means to center Blackness in educational research. SPN requires scholars to center themselves in narrative writing through self-interrogation and charges them to draw larger conclusions for readers that challenge existing educational narratives (Nash & Viray, 2012, 2013a, 2013b). SPN is appropriate for this work as it is “unconstrained by any specific research method or perspective” and “gets at the construction of personal meaning through self-narrativizing, essaying, self-interpreting, describing lived experience, re-creating the self, investigating key life themes, universalizing, and, most of all, by assiduously avoiding simplistic research formulas and questions that are one-dimensional” (Nash & Viray, 2013a, p. 46). Perhaps relatedly, SPN writing has been described as freeing, self-validating, and empowering for others, particularly for students with minoritized identities (Nash & Viray, 2013b).

Scholarly personal narrative served as both our methodology and theoretical framing. As a theoretical framework, SPN enabled us to analyze our journals to draw larger conclusions from our writing for readers beyond ourselves. By interpreting our reflections in relation to each other’s writing and considering the implications of our writing for Black researchers studying RBF, we allowed SPN to help us theorize and make sense of our research process (Nash & Viray, 2013a).

In the next section, we share more about ourselves, what researchers often call positionality statements. Rather than structure our positionality statements in a traditional way by sharing our social identities and how these identities influence our work, we instead respond to the following question: What do I want readers to know about what brings me to this work and why does knowing this matter? In the process of conducting research on racial battle fatigue among Black undergraduate and graduate students, we regularly reflected on our own Blackness as well as the racial battle fatigue we were simultaneously navigating.

Positionality

In this section, we share responses to the question: What brings you to this work and why does knowing this matter? The reflections below serve as our positionality to help readers understand our stories and our reasons for doing work on racial battle fatigue as Black researchers.

Stephen

On August 9, 2014, Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Although Brown was not the first unarmed Black teenager killed by police, his death affected me deeply. I struggled to do anything - my work, my parenting, my relationships with friends, eat, or sleep. I just kept thinking about how young and vibrant Brown was and how he is no longer here. And why? Why, why, why? This “why” question kept me up at night - I kept pondering the why. And when the answers did not surface, I became angry, no, I became furious. The sleeplessness, hopelessness, and anger I felt translated into ambivalence. I simply was going through the motions of my days not remembering how I even did what I did or remembering what I did.

In the midst of trying to find my way out of this slump, I came across the concept of RBF by happenstance. And all the dread, the pain, the hopelessness I had been feeling started to peel away. I consumed everything I could about this concept of RBF because I now had words to name what I had been feeling. I felt empowered to move out of my feelings and use my knowledge to help others who I was sure were also struggling to process Brown’s death and the racism that they, too, navigated on a daily basis. Ultimately, readers need to know that Brown’s senseless killing is what brings me to this work, and more importantly, trying to figure out how to keep living despite the hopelessness, fury, and dread. This matters because I/we are more than our pain and trauma. We can live with RBF and still find a way forward. This way forward is what guides me and motivates me to push and learn through the hopelessness.

Kristen

Love brings me to this work. I was born in Detroit, Michigan, a majority Black city, and raised by a family with southern roots. Detroit is special and Black folks are too. I have an unshakeable love for Black people and a deep appreciation of Black culture. Witnessing Black joy is almost a spiritual experience. My chest swells with pride, I breathe deeper, easier; I smile with my whole face, and my eyes probably twinkle. I wish for longstanding joy and thriving among Black communities. To borrow from author and MacArthur Fellow Kiese Laymon (2019), I wish for Black Abundance. I yearn for holistic healing for myself and other Black people. One persistent threat to Black joy, thriving, and healing is racism.

I have come to understand racism, prejudice, and other forms of oppression through my lived experience as a Black girl and woman in the United States. RBF is a phenomenon that I experienced long before being able to name it. Initially, discovering the language to describe my own experiences was liberating. I appreciated the emphasis on various stress responses and their relationships to interpersonal and systemic racism. As I consumed research by scholars who investigated RBF, I felt validated, justified in my attempts to cope and demonstrate resilience, and humanized instead of pathologized. Soon after, though, I wanted (and maybe needed) to know more about if Black students could readily name RBF, and how RBF manifested among Black students, how RBF affected them, and what could be done to reduce RBF while resisting racism and working toward racial equity. As a doctoral student at the time, I was struggling to figure out how to sustain myself and my commitments to racial equity. I chose to expand my research agenda to include RBF. The decision to join the community of researchers who examined RBF was my way of pouring into myself and my community with what was available in my cup.

I understand the utility in justifying why studying race-related topics is important. Still, each time I provide a rationale it feels icky. Here, I provide two reasons why this work matters - one in academic prose and one where I hope you can feel me. First, investigating RBF (and broadly disseminating the knowledge base) matters because it 1) illuminates unseen factors that challenge student persistence and resilience, 2) creates space to validate student experiences and facilitate dialogue around their needs, 3) provides insights for supporting Black students’ healing from RBF, and 4) invites higher education professionals to leverage findings to become ‘battle buddies’ committed to RBF awareness, understanding, commitment, and action for Black students. Second, this work matters because. Because anxiety, helplessness, fear, clenched jaws, frequent illness, high blood pressure, insomnia, and fatigue. Because apathy, withdrawal, isolation, avoidance, overeating or loss of appetite, and prolonged high effort coping. Because well-being, hope, safety, health, and rest. Because social connections, community, healthy coping skills, and stress management. Because Black joy, healing and thriving. Because we matter.

Hunter

After learning more about RBF from Kristen and Stephen, I became interested in joining their research team. I realized that RBF was something I had been experiencing for quite some time. As a Black woman who has spent most of her school years in predominantly white schools, I became accustomed to feeling exhausted from dealing with racist remarks from my peers along with a lack of understanding about my experiences from staff and faculty members. Usually, I would dismiss my feelings or feel ashamed when I felt hurt from my experiences. Learning more about RBF allowed me to openly contend with my feelings. It also provided insight into the experiences of others.

Reading about and listening to the experiences of others who experience RBF made me feel validated in my own experiences. This also led me to be further interested in researching the phenomenon because I came to feel as though the experiences of other Black students should be highlighted. I feel as though highlighting our experiences with RBF can bring forth more awareness which will lead to more support and resources for Black individuals. This research experience has also helped me understand that I do not want others to experience RBF the way I have in the past or feel like there is no legitimacy to their feelings. That is what has drawn me to this work.

Na’eem

I entered this work as a Black male graduate student who wanted an opportunity to gain valuable research skills and experience, become a better scholar, and find community amongst Black scholars. For a while, I endured feelings of self-doubt because I had convinced myself that I was not ready to be a researcher and that the faculty in my program would pass on the idea of allowing me onto their research team. In the summer of 2022, I finally worked up the courage to share my research aspirations with my advisor, Stephen, and he then presented me with the opportunity to join the research team where I was welcomed with open arms by Kristen, Hunter, and Neal. As a member of the team, I gained valuable research skills, became a better scholar, and found the community I was yearning for.

Knowing what brings me to this work and how I got here matters to the research around RBF because I experienced and understand the desire, determination, and drive it takes for Black collegians to be successful. Surprisingly, a lot of the time, the obstacles that hinder the success of Black collegians is others believing Black students are not worthy enough to attain their dreams and desires. As such, Black collegians need to remind themselves that they are deserving of their dreams and more than capable of turning their dreams into reality.

Neal

As a first-generation Black queer cisgender man living with disabilities, I am brought to this work because I have felt RBF in academic spaces almost my entire educational journey before I had the vocabulary to understand it. It began when I was in middle school in the 1990s, and I recall the first instance happening when I had to read Huckleberry Finn in my sixth grade humanities class. My teacher directly asked me, my twin brother, and another Black classmate how we felt about the use of the “n-word.” I also recall that in my junior year in undergraduate, my communication professor invited the class to have an open discussion about whether the “n-word” could ever lose its power, and the only Black folks in the room were me and one other Black student. While I don’t remember what I said in these instances, I will never forget the shared glances I exchanged with my other Black peers. From those moments, I came to know that Black people will always have a shared experience of RBF without ever having to exchange a word, and that connected knowing is what brings me to this work.

This knowing matters to me, especially now, because I understand how it feels to be a problem (DuBois, 1903) in academia, reading Harper and Quaye’s (2009) Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theoretical Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Diverse Populations in my master’s program, taught me how RBF stories like mine often deter many Black students, specifically Black men like me, from being academically successful. This information angered me and shook me to the core because I came to realize that despite my own experiences with RBF, I was a rarity, and that was by design. White supremacy has gatekept so many of my fellow brothers and sisters, that sticks with me. I hate it here. Especially now as I am progressing through my doctorate, RBF is a constant presence on my back as the only Black person in my cohort, and particularly in the preparation of scholarship and considerations about pursuing pathways into the academy, I know I should keep going for the culture, but I am tired.

Data Collection and Analysis

We generated data for this study through individual journal entries. First, we each wrote a journal entry in response to the following prompt: Describe what surfaced for you in the process of being Black researchers studying racial battle fatigue. Next, we read and reflected on each other’s journal entries. Then, we wrote a reflective journal entry of our reactions. Lastly, we each generated three lessons learned from doing work on RBF as Black researchers to draw larger conclusions for readers that challenge existing educational narratives, an imperative of SPN (Nash & Viray, 2012). These three lessons formed the basis for the “Lessons Learned” section below. Stephen synthesized the recommendations by first searching for similar lessons across our journals to form initial themes. After this thematizing process, he pulled quotes from the individual lessons to illustrate examples of the theme. Finally, he asked Kristen to provide feedback on if the lessons/themes resonated with her based on the data from our journals.

Trustworthiness Strategies

To conduct a trustworthy study, we engaged in journaling to make sense of our reflections as we collected and analyzed data for the photo-elicitation project. Reading each other’s journals and providing reactions and feedback also served as another strategy to check our biases, assumptions, and developing insights. Finally, our collective discussion about insights gleaned from reading each other’s journals served as a member-checking strategy to make sense of our interpretations. We chose not to note limitations in our process given the non-traditional approach we undertake in this paper. We have biases, based on our different intersected identities; however, we do not see acknowledging these biases as limitations. Rather, they serve as limits in our perspectives.

We share our original and reflective journal entries in the findings section. In our discussion section, we close with lessons learned from undertaking this work to offer possibilities for readers as they consider working responsibly and with care on a topic with which they are also wrestling.

Findings

In our positionality statements, readers see ideas around love, a desire to not feel isolated, acknowledging the intersection between our various social identities, feelings of self-doubt, navigating our own racial battle fatigue, and still finding Black joy amid pain. In essence, we entered this work to help Black students and ourselves feel seen. Below, we share our journal entries to narrate our perspectives on what it means to center Blackness in educational research and, more specifically, what it means to center Blackness in educational research on racial battle fatigue while navigating one’s own racial battle fatigue.

Being Black Researchers Researching Racial Battle Fatigue

After sharing our positionality statements via “What brings you to this work and why does knowing this matter?” we reflected on and wrote a response to the prompt: Describe what surfaced for you in the process of being Black researchers researching racial battle fatigue. We share our entries below.

Stephen

Is what we are doing enough? What does “enough” look like? Who decides what is “enough”? These three questions ate at me each time we met to figure out our plan for making sense of participants’ photos and interviews, especially the question of: what does enough look like? No matter how much we made meaning of the data, I felt this nagging feeling that we were not doing enough.

I often reflected on the feelings I had when Wilson killed Brown in 2014. What did I need from those around me as I navigated my pain? What do I still need from others? I keep returning to this question because it is a question I often wondered about the participants in our study–what did they need from us and were we providing that? Even the notion of the words “participants” and “study” are troubling me now as I write them. Participants–this implies that the students were freely participating, but in what, exactly? Were they participating in sharing their pain with us, with readers? Were they participating in being re-traumatized? What is trauma, and how do we know when it is occurring? Study–to me, this means to think about a concept carefully and dissect it to get to the root of its deeper meaning. Is this what we were engaged in - trying to get to the deeper meaning of healing from racial battle fatigue? Both words - participants and study - leave me feeling a bit meh.

Given my own identity as a Black man, I felt even more responsible for doing this work right. By “right,” I mean not exploiting participants’ pain, leaving them with something more sustainable than a gift card, honoring their stories, and contributing to lessening their pain. However, did we accomplish these goals? It is difficult to answer this question. Simply put, I am not sure. Yet, the responsibility is even more present as I write these words. To be responsible means to see the bigger meaning and leave things better than you found them. Did we accomplish that? Perhaps it is the feeling of never being able to answer with certainty that question, “Is what we are doing enough?” that serves as the motivation needed to keep pushing and progressing. Not being able to say “yes” to that question leaves me unsatisfied such that I keep trying to do justice to the stories participants gifted to me, to us, as researchers.

Kristen

I think it is important to mention that our research team was named FAM by one of our graduate research assistants. FAM is not an acronym, but is instead, short for “family.” Our name alone helped set the tone for how we operated in the space. This was the first research team I was charged with running as a faculty member and my first grant-funded research project as faculty. I entered this work with a sense of excitement for what we could accomplish and concern about taxing Black students by examining racial battle fatigue amidst dual-pandemics (i.e., COVID-19 and systemic racism).

What first surfaced for me in the process of being a Black researcher researching racial battle fatigue was awe. I was in awe that our research team included exclusively Black scholars. I was in awe that our research team would openly center Blackness in our study. It was a striking contrast to most of my own graduate studies. I was excited to examine such a heavy phenomenon with scholars who I believed were committed to the work. In discussing our [research team members’] interests in the project during lab meetings and together with participants during photo-elicitation training, I was struck by the wide differences in our life experiences as Black people and yet our shared experience with racial battle fatigue. Our discussions helped me to confront my own expectations for what the data might reveal early on.

I felt an ethical and personal responsibility to the participants, our research team, and the university community to carry out this project with critical care. Participants trusted me with their angst, discomfort, hurt, uncertainties, hope, and truth(s) in addition to their meaningful, sometimes very personal imagery. They did not hold back. I felt more responsible as Black women became the majority of our sample. I could not fumble this opportunity to amplify our stories. Our research team trusted me to show up as my full self, lead, collaborate, problem solve, analyze, write, and provide scaffolded professional development opportunities. Our grant sponsors, members of the university community, trusted me to identify approaches to design, implement, improve, expand, or revise academic success programs and services to reduce RBF and promote academic success among Black students.

I resonated with participants when they described the power of naming RBF. I experienced vicarious RBF while listening to students describe their struggles with interpersonal and systemic racism. I felt their fatigue and did not present a neutral researcher facade. I reveled in their appreciation of participant-led photo-elicitation methodology for providing them with a creative outlet to capture and reflect on their stories before sharing them with us. I appreciated the agency participants could exercise by using photo-elicitation. I honored Juneteenth and rescheduled focus group interviews. I listened as participants discussed the relevance of Beyonce’s “Break My Soul” to understanding RBF. I probed for support strategies that could be used to reduce RBF and promote academic success. I learned from them. I debriefed with co-facilitator(s). I learned from them too. At times, I held my breath; at other times, I found healing.

What I know for sure is researching RBF in community with other Black researchers was necessary. Our research team, our community, organically cultivated a space of constant reflection, authentic self-expression, intellectual curiosity, encouragement, innovation, challenge, and growth. We created and took up space. We read. We talked about how we felt. We listened. We talked about what we learned. We brainstormed next steps. We pivoted. We worked together. We missed deadlines. We divided and conquered. We gave each other grace. We wrote. We presented. We accepted constructive criticism. We wrote some more. We did crafts. We supported dreams. We celebrated wins.

What surfaced for me then and now is that I cannot fumble the opportunity to amplify our stories - participants’ stories, FAM labs’ stories, and the stories of Black researchers centering Blackness.

Hunter

Before I had a better understanding of racial battle fatigue, I think I used to believe that it was something for other (Black) people to feel, but not me. I believed I could encounter racism and keep striving for success without having to acknowledge my own exhaustion and hurt from racism. I believed that the less I acknowledged my own racial battle fatigue, the more impervious I would become to its effects. Conducting research on the phenomenon has allowed me to gain compassion for myself while acknowledging my own fatigue. I was able to better understand that my attempt to avoid acknowledging my racial battle fatigue was also an attempt to cope from the very thing I was trying to avoid. During this research process, I began to confront the reality that my coping mechanisms were holding me back from being an effective learner and it was ultimately impeding my own growth.

Not only was I avoiding acknowledging my racial battle fatigue, but I also unnecessarily pressured myself to hide my feelings from others. Though I was on a research team with other Black researchers, I was still afraid to admit to feeling fatigued and overwhelmed by racism and white supremacy. The research we were conducting contributed to my fatigue, though I did not know how to express that at the time. Hearing the stories of other Black students who have had painful experiences with racism at their institutions became disheartening at times. However, conducting this research also brought about feelings of validation; I felt a small sense of comfort in knowing that I was not the only one having encounters with microaggressions and having visceral reactions as a result. I was not the only one having these experiences while attempting to continue with daily life. With validation, I also felt frustration. I became even more frustrated while learning about the pervasiveness of racial battle fatigue and how there seems to be a lack of care and resources for those of us who are affected. These feelings propelled my desire to continue doing this work. I want the stories of others to be heard and validated. Co-creating space for others to share their experience was something I was grateful to be a part of.

Though I was researching racial battle fatigue, I still felt like I did not deserve to feel fatigued myself. Even though I was trying to excel within an institution that was created with my exclusion as one of its functions, I felt and sometimes still do feel guilty for feeling inadequate. My feelings of inadequacy come from my failure to conform to whiteness. I was never meant to be what is routinely referred to as the norm. Having this time to research helped me to better understand that my feelings of inadequacy within a system that was built to exclude me are expected. However, that does not mean that I have to let false inadequacy define me and my work. I no longer feel guilty for my failure to conform under the crushing force of white supremacy. Instead, I feel joy and pride in my efforts to dismantle this false ideology. One of those efforts is my contribution to research focused on racial battle fatigue.

Once I took time to confront the uncomfortable truth that my feelings of inadequacy are borne out of a failure to conform to whiteness, I felt more comfortable with taking time to cope with my own racial battle fatigue. My coping has included avoidance and denial. There have been times throughout the research process when I consciously and unconsciously avoided work related to this research topic. I have realized this is partially because I was trying to deny that my racial battle fatigue was exacerbated by engaging in the research. Being a part of this research team emboldened me to feel more comfortable confronting the truth of my feelings and processing them in various ways. Acknowledging my racial battle fatigue and having it acknowledged by other members of this research team provided me with the freedom to attempt engaging in more restorative coping strategies than pretending my feelings do not exist. I am grateful for that.

Though I do not claim to be an expert on coping with racial battle fatigue, conducting this research has helped me to begin feeling less guilty about taking intentional time to rest away from my work so that I can avoid feeling overwhelmed. Now, I am trying to ask myself questions like, “Am I avoiding this because I’m afraid to feel? Or am I taking time away to heal so that I can preserve enough energy to do this work?” I am still trying to stop using avoidance as a way to deny my negative feelings. I do not want to continue avoiding the truth and origins of my feelings just for the sake of avoiding. During this research process, I have realized that I feel more whole when I contend with the truth of myself and my feelings. This includes the truth that I am hurt by racism in its varied forms. Wrestling with this truth has fostered my healing and provided a new understanding of myself and others. I may not be perfect, but perfect does not equal white. I want others who may not be at this point in their journey to eventually come to know and understand this truth. I feel as though researching racial battle fatigue has been a way for me to reach this point and can be for others as well.

Na’eem

Being a Black researcher while researching racial battle fatigue is a unique experience because you find yourself positioned at a unique crossroads where you are consuming bodies of knowledge to understand the phenomena of racial battle fatigue better, investigating the impact that racial battle fatigue has on Black collegians, and having the actual experiences of being on the receiving end of racial battle fatigue and having to cope with it.

There were moments when I was reading articles and papers on racial battle fatigue and writing my sections for the literature reviews, where much of the work became overwhelming. For about two weeks, throughout this process, I struggled to make meaning of what I was reading, writing, or a combination of the two. In these moments, I found myself reflecting on my experiences dealing with the same racial microaggressions presented in an article and asking myself if I would have described the feeling in the same way as the authors. I also questioned if I explained the feeling of being on the receiving end of a microaggression in a relatable way.

For a while, I was conflicted. I began to wonder if all Black people felt the same feelings of hopelessness and not caring due to racial battle fatigue or the same feelings of awkwardness and shame due to being on the receiving end of a microaggression. I sat in this void of confusion for a while; it was not until we broke off into groups to conduct thematic analysis that I understood that some common feelings and experiences are shared from person to person.

When Kristen and I were curating themes based on the codes derived from our examination of the transcripts of the interviews, it sparked an insightful and meaningful conversation regarding racial battle fatigue. When we both shared stories of our experiences and feelings when faced with racial battle fatigue, there were similarities in how we both felt in those astonishing moments. I was amazed that we could understand each other’s feelings and why we both felt that way. There were also moments when we helped each other define emotions that the other had trouble explaining. This moment made me realize that a unique and inherited connectedness is shared by a group of people experiencing racial battle fatigue.

Neal

The undergraduate student stories shared in our research process brought to mind just how insidious whiteness is in rendering RBF visible and invisible to young Black students. Several of the undergraduate students spoke very vividly about how they notice and experience RBF; whereas, a few others shrugged off certain experiences as normalized. I related to these moments because I similarly had areas I did not see in grade school through my first year of my master’s degree because whiteness fooled me into disregarding the severity in which I experienced RBF through racial microaggressions as a student.

In the graduate student discussion spaces, I felt extremely validated and seen in many of their conversation topics about RBF at the graduate level because they spoke of very similar issues I also experience pursuing a doctorate. In an alternate timeline, I would have quickly signed up for this study, so it made it hard for me to operate as one of the researchers for the study because I wanted so badly to share my own experience and validate every single story shared. However, I made the decision to withhold taking up space to allow the student participants to build off each other and not overtly disrupt the space with my own influence. As I reflect on it now, I am certain that any researcher of minoritized identities who studies identity issues that they share has to navigate this, but it made me question the researcher/participant boundary and to what end does the “objectivity” in research serve whiteness and limit minoritized researchers the ability to co-construct liberatory spaces with their participants? I do not have an answer, but I know that I felt like I had to limit how much I brought my whole self into the graduate student focus group conversations because of these concerns, and that in and of itself made me feel like I was experiencing RBF as a researcher.

As a result of these experiences, I find myself questioning and editing myself responding to this prompt because as an emerging researcher with a deep critical constructivist orientation in the body that I occupy, doing research on topics such as RBF has been challenging. Specifically, it has been challenging for me to navigate how I show up because it’s so personal and relatable, yet in order for the research to “be valid and rigorous,” I am pushing up on what white scholars taught me about research, which is that I must limit my personal perspective when analyzing the data to not bias the interpretation. The methodological choices in this study, namely using photo-elicitation, helped me feel more liberated because we were able to center the students' voices so prominently in our analysis. Thus, I feel like I must continue to work with more liberatory frameworks in order for any current and future research I work on to allow me to feel like myself and to feel proud of the research that I attach my name to.

Reflective Journal Responses

Readers see several issues we raised in being Black researchers researching racial battle fatigue: wonderings about doing enough; awe about centering Blackness and our research team comprised solely of Black people; navigating our own racial battle fatigue while researching this topic; and feeling validated and seen while doing this work, to name a few. The next step in our process involved reading each other’s journal entries and writing a reflection based on our reactions. We share those reflections below.

Stephen

Kristen, Na’eem, Hunter, and Neal sparked a feeling in me that I best describe as seriousness. It is a serious experience to study RBF, and more importantly, how to support Black students in moving through it while holding on to who they are. It is serious to be doing this work together as five Black researchers. It is serious to invite graduate students, who are also learning how to be researchers, into this work while they are also navigating their own experiences of RBF. It is serious to figure out how to do this work meaningfully while not centering our own needs of healing and emotions.

Neal’s journal surfaced this notion of objectivity. Objectivity is a traditional mindset that researchers should have when doing research. Although the field has moved away from these traditional notions of objectivity, vestiges, and in some cases, stronger feelings, still remain. Because we eschewed objectivity, Neal wrestled with learnings around not “biasing the interpretation” and how close to be to the participants and when to interject his own feelings. Again, this is a serious feeling.

Neal’s journal relates to the points I raised in this previous paragraph. Na’eem wrote about how he and Kristen at times struggled to make sense of the themes from participants’ words. In these struggles, it was helpful for them to be able to help each other define the emotions because of their own shared feelings of RBF. This demonstrates a serious situation - that because Na’eem and Kristen could not just feel the pain of participants from a distance, but instead draw from their own related feelings, they were able to join to define the emotions in participants’ words. This point is serious because it illustrates the severity of RBF and how having researchers who are also living it benefits the analysis process.

Reading my collaborators’ responses, a core theme surfaced around feelings and emotions. Both Neal and Na’eem wrote about these ideas, and Hunter posed the following question: “Am I avoiding this because I am afraid to feel?” This is a serious question that surfaces fear and the emotion of avoidance. Avoidance is often a coping mechanism one uses when feeling RBF.

Finally, in Kristen’s response, readers see her name the term vicarious RBF. Did we, as researchers, experience more RBF from hearing participants name their own RBF? Likely yes, and yet, being in community together also fostered our own healing process. I see this in Kristen’s words about “wide differences in our life experiences as Black people and yet our shared experience with RBF.” Readers see five Black researchers who have vastly different life experiences and unique ways we construct our Blackness. Yet, we are joined in our shared RBF experiences, which enable us to make deeper sense of this phenomenon as Black researchers.

Kristen

I stepped away several times to form my reflection, and I kept coming back to gratitude and discomfort. I am grateful to be in the company of scholars who are committed to social change, especially for Black folks. I am also grateful for our shared space, in its many forms. I am proud of the ways we all have grown as people, as researchers, and as scholars because of this work. I appreciate how intentionally we each grapple with topics that are important to us. In reading our reflections, it was difficult for me to take in some of the challenges we encountered through this project. I wanted to protect you. I wished I had found ways to intervene in real time that may have offered each of us some protections from questioning ourselves. I wished I had modeled more transparency. I wished I had provided more reassurance. I wished I had provided more professional development opportunities. I wished I had organized more lab celebrations. We laughed a lot while building community, but I wished we had done more of that too. I feel it necessary to re-emphasize that this work was made better because of this team - because of who we are, how we think, the decisions we made, and what we offer to each other, the field, and the world. I am glad that, even through the challenges, we each found validation in this work. The questions raised across our reflections are important for any scholar interested in what it means to center Blackness in educational research to consider: What is the value of objectivity in research, if any? How do we (or when do we get to) show up as our authentic selves? How do we make sense of literature, data, and emotions? How do we know when what we are doing is enough, and who decides that?

I related deeply to Stephen’s questions about defining and doing enough. These questions have not left me since I read them. Perhaps it relates to the icky feeling I get when justifying why studying race-related topics is important. For the research team, many of us came to first understand RBF through our own lived experiences. Relatedly, many of us had few opportunities to process our RBF or felt unheard by the folks and systems that we hoped would support us. Is what we are doing enough? We purposefully designed and conducted this study. We created and yielded space for participants, Black women and men undergraduate and graduate students, to process, illustrate, and articulate their experiences with RBF without challenge, without distraction, and without judgment. We analyzed this data and engaged trustworthiness strategies. We have and continue to disseminate this work using various modalities to reach audiences who can advance the implications of this work. Students were heard by us and by others who are in positions to support them. What does “enough” look like? Enough looks like joy, healing, and thriving for Black students. Who decides what is “enough”? We decide, and it’s complicated. Yes, we did enough for this work. We did what our expertise and capacity allowed; we did a great job. No, we have not done enough for joy, healing, and thriving among Black students yet. It is a journey, and we cannot do enough alone, a takeaway from our reflections. We are part of a broader community making daily incremental, transformative change. This work is another pathway toward joy, healing, and thriving of Black students. Photo-elicitation and other visual research methods will remain powerful tools to center Blackness in educational research.

Hunter

I am grateful to have read the journals of Stephen, Kristen, Na’eem, and Neal. I am grateful for their willingness to share their thoughts and feelings on our shared experience. I found it enlightening to read about our shared experience from the differing perspectives of our research team. Each of us held different positions while engaging as members of this team. Kristen as a first-time leader of a research team while serving as a faculty member, Stephen as a seasoned researcher and faculty member, Neal as a PhD student, and Na’eem and myself as master’s students. I was intrigued to read about how our positionalities impacted how we engaged in this research. After reading the journals of our team members, I first noticed that almost all of us described what it felt like when we first learned about RBF. It appears all of us had mixed feelings, which included understanding, frustration, and curiosity. It is as if each of us said, “Finally! I have a term to describe something I have felt for a long period of time.” This sentiment, no matter what period in our lives that we first felt it, seemed to be one of the guiding factors for us to engage in RBF research. However, each of us described the ways we wrestled with our own questions and RBF while engaging in this research.

After reading the thoughts of the research team, I am left wondering if RBF is a cost of being Black in America. Does it have to be? We spent hours listening to the stories of Black students describe instances that exacerbated their RBF. These instances took place in academic settings, workplaces, social settings and beyond. Causes of RBF are widespread, which is why I continue to believe that research on the matter must continue. However, it feels disheartening to recall the pervasiveness of RBF among those who chose to participate in our study, and after reading the journals of my team members, how widespread RBF is among Black researchers who continue to conduct this research.

Neal shared a thought that made these thoughts especially present for me. He said, “Especially now as I am progressing through my doctorate, RBF is a constant presence on my back as the only Black person in my cohort, and particularly in the preparation of scholarship and considerations about pursuing pathways into the academy, I know I should keep going for the culture, but I am tired.” This made me question whether it is inevitable for Black researchers’ RBF to be exacerbated by conducting this research. If so, is this research something that I want to continue doing in the future? Right now, I still feel as though I have a responsibility to continue with research on this subject or on subjects of similar nature despite (and maybe because of) my own RBF. As I continue in my academic journey, I wonder if that sentiment will change. Whether I am one of the researchers conducting this work in the future or not, I wholeheartedly believe this work must be done.

Even with my lingering thoughts, I am grateful to have been provided with the opportunity to be on this research team. Kristen and Stephen provided opportunities for Na’eem, Neal, and me to be actively engaged team members as students. While there were times I made mistakes, I was given freedom to learn from them and fix them. I did not feel like expectations were ever lowered. Expectations remained high because we were being trusted with the stories, experiences, and truths of others. Throughout the entire process, I remained inspired by my teammates and the students who chose to participate. Taking time to reflect on my experience left me with more questions than answers. Despite this, I am captivated by the process of searching for those answers.

Na’eem

I am thankful we can share our perspectives and feelings in this format. It has made me aware that we all had been wrestling with so many emotions and feelings throughout our participation and engagement in RBF research as members of FAM Lab. At this moment, I wish I had been more upfront about my emotions and feelings throughout our research journey. There have been moments where I experienced similar feelings to Stephen, Kristen, Hunter, and Neal but held back from expressing how challenging this work can be at times. I was holding back in those moments because I could not find the words to describe my feelings or did not have the bandwidth to do so. Writing journal entries has been an excellent medium for me because it has allowed me to choose to write what I feel when I am ready, and it also gives me the time I need to find the words needed to share my feelings. Journaling in this format has allowed me to process and understand what everyone has been experiencing.

To Stephen: Your journal entry asks three questions: Is what we are doing enough? What does “enough” look like? Who decides what is “enough?” And I, too, do not know the answers to those questions. The thought of not knowing if we did “enough,” especially after all our time engaged in this research, left me feeling gut-wrenched. But I have faith that our work means something to the overall study of RBF and to the many people who endure the harmful effects of RBF every day. Our research has the potential to shine a light on RBF experienced by Black collegians and be a catalyst that influences pivotal change in the way universities, organizations, and others create and maintain a welcoming environment for Black collegians by combating the sources of RBF.

To Kristen: I appreciated your reflection because it reminded me that even though the research regarding RBF can lead to feelings of uneasiness, there will be moments of joy. Thinking back to our FAM Lab meetings, we always spent the first five to ten minutes checking in with one another, sharing updates about our day, personal achievements, future goals, and how our parts of the research were coming along. In those moments, there was not a single time when one of us did not have a smile on our faces. Those five to ten minutes each week gave me the joy I needed to recharge my enthusiasm for this research and made the hard work worth it.

To Hunter: Your reflection has shown me the potential of liberation in the work around RBF. In your reflection, you talk about how engaging in this research and the ability to cultivate a space where people are open to talking about experiences with RBF and how it can help to start addressing how RBF has impacted you. Your reflection also reminded me that coping with RBF is not a perfect process, and sometimes, there is comfort in avoidance and denial. But to grow, we must look deeper within ourselves and ask ourselves hard questions to understand the root of the negative emotions and feelings. Once we know the essence of the feelings that upset us, we can take the next step in properly healing.

To Neal: I resonated with your reflection on researchers who have minoritized identities navigating how to remain objective while studying issues regarding an identity that is salient to them. I found myself feeling this way during the thematic coding phase. There were moments when I felt the frustration and pain in the responses that the participants shared and having to navigate and not cross what felt like a paper-thin line to remain objective and maintain the “integrity” of the study. Even in this dissonance, I am glad that we, as researchers, were lucky to have a more in-depth understanding of the frustration and pain shared with us because it allowed us to describe the experiences shared.

Neal

Hunter’s statement “I think I used to believe that it [RBF] was something for other (Black) people to feel, not me. I believed I could encounter racism and keep striving for success without having to acknowledge my own exhaustion and hurt from racism” hit home so hard for me. This idea of being exceptional, and not like the other Black people (particularly men), was an unhealthy coping strategy that I hadn’t known I was using until my master’s program. Figuring out how to not only give compassion to myself, but also to see myself in community with other Black folk and their exhaustion from RBF, especially in academic spaces. The insidiousness of whiteness to normalize this impression that we can be immune to RBF by ignoring or pushing down it down is wild to me, and as Hunter also brought up, the conflict of emotions (the hiding, the validation in hearing others stories, and the subsequent frustration about those experiences) is so real, as is the guilt and shame about how we confront our own truths in our lived experiences with RBF. Often, I tell my fiancé (who is a white man) that I wish I could wake up tomorrow and never talk about racism again, and this project embodies why. RBF feels inescapable and suffocating even when we’re studying it as researchers. There is no objectivity in this work as researchers of RBF, I am not immune as an individual from the heaviness of its impact on the students we study, nor are we as a collective in our own lived experiences, especially when we don’t talk about. As such, we have to actively seek healing each day to not be consumed by RBF, and that in and of itself is exhausting.

Na’eem’s reflection on how Black students often have to convince themselves, not others, that they are deserving to dream and turn dreams into realities immediately sticks with me because I recognize now just how effective this belief is, especially in PWI [predominantly White institutional] spaces. Linking to Hunter’s reflection, I surmise that this belief of un-deservingness may perhaps be the root cause for why we (Hunter and I) experience this conflict of emotions while studying RBF; RBF attempts to convince us that this un-deservingness is valid because we hear it being told to us by our own minds. And unless we have the conversation with other Black folks about what’s going on in our head to name and give meaning to the emotions we’re experiencing from RBF, then we easily find ourselves discouraged from pursuing our dreams. What’s worse to me is that we are easily susceptible to the individualism that white supremacy uses to shape the academic institutions; from day 1 of grade school, U.S. teachers set the foundation for this belief of un-deservingness by maintaining a culture that evaluates student success solely on individual abilities. Without Blackacademics coming together as a collective to identify this belief of un-deservingness, we are susceptible to stop ourselves from dreaming, allowing whiteness to continue to prevail as intended.

Stephen’s questions about what is “enough” when it comes to RBF leaves me feeling a conflicted sense of empathy, sadness, and rage. To me, putting the qualifier of enough before anything we do is something that whiteness places on top of us in order to keep us from feeling whole, thereby engaging the feeling of RBF. “What is enough?” is a question with an unattainable answer because whiteness maneuvers in infinite ways; conquest and colonialism has demonstrated that whiteness will consume everything and still not be satisfied. Enough embodies a vacuous spectrum that leads Na’eem and Hunter to respectively question whether Black folks are deserving enough to chase their dreams or striving for success enough to outrun RBF. In an ideal space, I don’t want any of us in this research process to have to question ourselves because we have done enough just by existing. Our ancestors paid the price of enough when their bodies were violently removed from their lands, bought, and sold into chattel slavery. We are beyond enough.

Though unintentional, finishing this reflection by reading Kristen’s reflections filled me with the joy and most importantly, hope I needed. Our collective effort as a research team to engage in this work together and doing so in a communal way has made everything about researching RBF worth it. Research, in general, is hard; researching race and racism while being subjected to racism is damn near impossible to do alone. Witnessing the complexity and depth of Blackness in each other and our participants made this process feel liberating no matter how much RBF and white supremacy tries to pull us down. Our strength as Blackademics in studying RBF is tied to our collective resolve to do this work with joy, with gratitude, with laughter, with determination to be more than what RBF tries to make us into. I have never felt so cared for in a research project nor have felt so determined to cultivate an ethic of care for our participants. Choosing to depart from the “traditional” (read: white) forms of research methods and relationality to each other allowed us to do this work in ways that I thought bring us closer to liberation, and if the research process isn’t focused on liberation, then I don’t want it.

Lessons Learned from Using Photo-Elicitation to Explore RBF

To close this paper, in this final section, we share lessons we learned from our photo-elicitation study, and specifically, being Black researchers studying racial battle fatigue. We view this section as both a Discussion, with connections back to the literature, and an Implications for Practice, enabling readers to connect our lessons to their own practice and work. In doing so, we honor our scholarly personal narrative approach, which calls for four elements: thematizing, connecting themes to one’s personal stories, using research to ground the narratives, and asking readers to draw larger conclusions from the narratives (Nash & Viray, 2012). As seen in the previous journal entries, our work surfaced complicated feelings about objectivity in research, doing enough in the research process, gratitude for the community we built together, and hope for moving this work forward. Although we gained many insights from undertaking this work, we highlight three larger lessons: (1) the importance of centering Blackness; (2) the importance of doing work together as Black researchers; and (3) the importance of role-modeling alternative ways of doing research for new scholars.

The Importance of Centering Blackness

Kristen shared that “Centering Blackness in education research and practice is necessary.” Centering Blackness is perhaps the most significant lesson we learned, and this sentiment grew as we listened to Black students’ stories and made sense of their photos to capture their feelings of RBF. “As a Black researcher, when you share identities and experiences with participants, it does not bias your work,” Stephen noted, “It actually strengthens your work as a researcher. It allows you to not distance yourself from the pain. It allows you to understand the seriousness of the work and be invested even after the work is done.” As Black researchers, we were experiencing similar feelings of anger, frustration, exhaustion, and invalidation as the participants in our study, tied to the effects of RBF (Smith, 2004; 2008a; 2008b), and not distancing ourselves from our own pain enabled us to make deeper meaning with participants.

Na’eem captured his feelings of centering Blackness in this research:

Realizing I was not alone changed everything. Before, I would craft my thoughts and write in solitude, only discussing my work when receiving feedback from colleagues. But when I grasped that as part of a team of Black researchers we were a collective, it shifted my approach.

The collective that Na’eem named was foundational in our work together, as our collective Black racial identity provided a place from which to make sense of racial battle fatigue (Quaye et al., 2020). Neal wrote: “The first thing I learned from this project is a reminder that I love the excellence and un-shakeability of Black thought.” Centering Blackness meant we approached this work with Black thought, as Neal noted, at the forefront. He continued: “Our Black thought will always come out on top better, greater, more creative, and more profound than anything whiteness could ever dream to be.” We resisted centering whiteness in this project, and instead, rooted our Blackness as the foundation of the project.

The Importance of Doing Work Together as Black Researchers

Given the difficulty of researching racial battle fatigue as Black researchers, we learned that we needed each other to do this work. In essence, we needed community, as Hunter referenced: “I learned how effective it can be for participants to be in community while sharing potentially painful truths about their experiences.” Because of the pain that surfaces from recalling and sharing traumatic experiences with racism, we believed focus group interviews would allow space for participants to be validated and heard, potentially leading to their own healing process and not their re-traumatization. This community is vital to healing from RBF, as Anthym and Tuitt (2019) and Quaye et al. (2020) noted in their work. “Their responses [Hunter and Kristen] were powerful sources of affirmation and encouragement,” Na’eem conveyed, “that reminded me that I and my experiences are an integral part of a community of scholars in continual development and growth, all navigating the research journey together.” This togetherness was important to the research process.

Neal’s words build further on the importance of forming this community as Black researchers: “I also learned from this project that as Blackacademics, to achieve a place of healing, we will never not need each other to resist RBF.” To reiterate Neal’s words: “We will never not need each other.” In a world where racism can make Black people feel isolated, needing each other resists this isolation and individuality of white supremacy culture (Anthym & Tuitt, 2019; Quaye et al., 2023). Finally, Stephen also commented on the importance of doing work together as Black researchers.

I also learned the importance of doing this work with others who see you and get you. Doing this work in FAM felt like a family. I am not talking about a romanticized notion of family, but instead, the real notion of family. Family that has all its flaws and faults, families that make you mad and upset, families that do not live up to your expectations, and yet, families that keep moving through all the difficulties.

The Importance of Role-Modeling for New Scholars

An unintended benefit of doing this research with three graduate students is that Stephen and Kristen engaged in role-modeling alternative ways of doing research. The photo-elicitation process we employed enabled Hunter, Na’eem, and Neal to see themselves as capable of doing research because the photos and focus group interviews aligned with their stories and identities. Not distancing ourselves from participants in our research process enabled us to see the benefits of pushing against traditional ways of collecting and analyzing data. In fact, the SPN approach we adopted in this article is another example of resisting conventional forms of research (Nash & Viray, 2013a, 2013b). Na’eem’s words capture this sentiment:

During my first month as a FAM Lab member, I recall dealing with imposter syndrome, fueled by the privilege of working alongside four exceptionally brilliant scholars. This internal dissonance made me question my worthiness as a contributing researcher whose Black racial identity exposes them to the same harmful effects of RBF as the participants in the study.

Imposter syndrome, the feeling that one will inevitably be found out as incompetent and not belonging, was present for Na’eem, but practicing alongside Kristen and Stephen’s role-modeling enabled Na’eem to learn he is competent and deserving of doing this work. Relatedly, Hunter wrote: “This experience taught me about what I am capable of. At first, I was apprehensive to contribute my thoughts as I was afraid of being wrong because of what I did not yet know.”

In her journal, Kristen posed the question: “In what ways can we express care? How can we create space to affirm participants, as needed? How do we show up as researchers?” We role-modeled care for each other in building a FAM research space rooted in love (Corbin et al., 2018; Okello et al., 2020; Quaye et al., 2023). We did not simply center our weekly tasks, but instead, sought ways to prioritize our love for each other. Neal’s journal entry encapsulates this point:

I felt the most connected to my co-researchers when we engaged in seeing one another outside of the research space, such as catching up before the research meetings, presenting our work at conferences, and a personal favorite, a group outing to an arts-making space.

This connection was essential to doing work where participants’ pain was palpable. Connection yielded healing for us and demonstrated our care for each other outside of simply completing the research project. We learned the significance of role-modeling what one is asking new scholars to do. If one wants to push against traditional ways of doing research and develop care and community in the research process, then one must illustrate and practice what that looks like. Na’eem’s words below provide a poignant way to close this paper.

“This experience has taught me a valuable lesson – a reminder that I'm not alone, and it's perfectly acceptable to lean on my community.”