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c h a p t e r t h r e e Contemporary society [is] unfair, unequal, and both subtly and overtly oppressive for many people. We do not like it, and we want to change it. —Carspecken, 1996 I remember feeling a knot in the pit of my stomach as this research project began . Weeks had passed, and I had been waiting in dorm lounges, coffee shops, pizza places, conference rooms, and the campus union alone with stacks of pizzas , over and over again—waiting for the women to come. I had worried about how, as a White woman, I would gain trust with African American women, and these solitary meetings enlightened me that perhaps the customary way of recruiting participants into my research project would not work in this case. I sent more than 400 e-mails to African American women across campus, using contact information I received from a merit-based financial aid program, a statewide need-based financial aid program, an African American learning community, and a mentoring program on campus. I posted fliers all over campus. I attended meetings of various student organizations like the Black Student Union where I knew there would be African American students present. Many students agreed to participate, but when it came time to actually meet me, I remained alone with my stacks of pizzas. So, how did I go from these empty rooms to nine months of biweekly focus group/sister circle meetings with 30 women? I got real. That is, I let myself become an integral part of the research process while I simultaneously focused on building meaningful relationships in which Research across the Color Line Empowerment, Mutual Learning, and Difficult Decisions 50 t h e u n c h o s e n m e I spent time with the women in various aspects of their lives rather than simply in a researcher-participant relationship. I had long ago chosen to conduct my project using critical qualitative methods, because I found the advocacy approach1 of critical inquiry so fitting for my project about the imposed identity of African American college women. I also enjoyed the active role that the participants would play in the research process within critical methods. But perhaps most importantly, I found the specific attention to identifying and fighting oppression in this method not only to fit my own ideas about research but also to suit my project that so centrally concerned itself with race and gender oppression on college campuses and in the larger society. By getting real, I mean that I realized that as a White woman attempting to gain the trust and participation of African American women, I couldn’t simply attend a meeting here and there and beg for participants. I couldn’t only be interested in doing research about African American women. I had to do research with them, in their way if I were to gain insight into their experiences or if I wanted to begin to encourage them to remain involved in the project. I had to make myself vulnerable if I ever wanted them to share their stories with me. This chapter provides a description of the process that I underwent in this research. It is not a chapter about methodology per se, although I do provide a brief summary of the methodology here. Rather, this is a place for me to reflect on the process of conducting research across color lines. My hope is that this chapter personalizes the research process, tackling the reality of gaining access to a group of people different from oneself and summarizing my role and the decisions I made in a personal as well as a scholarly way. This reflective process is also an integral aspect of the critical style of research that I used in this study. In addition, I provide a more thorough description of the methodology , particularly the data analysis and validation techniques, in Appendix B. the critical aspect of critical methods Since critical research became one of the primary ways that I “got real” in this research process, I will provide a brief overview of the primary characteristics of this style of research. Critical inquiry or research is concerned with social inequality and social justice. It directs itself toward social change. Critical researchers “find contemporary society to be unfair, unequal, and both subtly and overtly oppressive for many people. We do not like it, and we want to change it...

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