Women of Color and Research

For the English 105 class I am teaching, we are reading Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher's Literate Lives.

The authors invited all of the human subjects they researched for the book to serve as co-authors with them. Each chapter lists Gail's name and Cindy's name as well as the people whose stories are told in the chapter. They talk glowingly (and convincingly, I might add) in the introduction about their desire to include the "objects" of their study as speaking subjects. Almost all of the people in the study accepted. Only a group of African-American women (three different generations of the same family) did not accept the invitation. This never struck me the first time I read the book (or the second time, actually). But, now, having completed some recent human subjects-based research myself, this stuck out to me prominently. I studied a class I taught last year, a Professional Writing class in which we used service learning as a means of fostering/teaching political engagement. And a similar thing happened to me with the women of color in my class/research study.

Per standard protocol, I presented my research to my students and asked them to voluntarily participate. I had 23 students. Nine of them declined to participate. That kind of hurt my feelings and dashed my spirits. Why not, I wondered? Of course, I could not ethically ask them that (I was their teacher as well, after all). What struck me was that most of the women of color declined to participate.

Why? Is this a group (and I mean that loosely because I am referring to Black women as well as Far East Asian women) who has been so abused by systems and institutions, that they are wary? Is this a group who feels like they have no time (Are they working multiple jobs as well as going to school? Are they raising kids?)? Or is it me? That percentage of students not participating is much higher than I have had in any other qualitative research project I have done (as the teacher or not).

Aside from the self-centered emotional reaction that I had, I need to wonder how this abdication of women of color will impact my study. Will the dearth of information from these women make my data incomplete?

Another reason just occurred to me: several of the students who declined to participate also chose the least overly political group – so maybe they were already planning to have an apolitical experience and figured their reaction to service-learning and political engagement were going to be close to nil. Hmmm . . .that is an angle that I had not thought of.

I take solace in the 12 fine participants that I had . . .