Half-Shackled: When Rapport Is "Kept" From Between an African American Male Researcher and Black Boys

• In Event: "Dangers Seen, Unseen, and Unforeseen": The Experiences of Black Male Researchers Interviewing K–12 Black Males

Abstract

Many have come to accept that a simultaneous belief in the notion of a racial achievement gap with the belief in or acceptance of the brilliance of African American children is a contradiction of terms and the latest subtle form of socio-political racism (Martin, 2009). That is, it promotes a false linkage between Black students and a social political construct of racism: the gap. Many African American students, perhaps intuitively, reject this “conceptually and practically incompatible” process (Martin, 2009, p. 135). However, joining these two incompatibles has become the progressive’s claim to equality, though it, arguably, abrogates a fundamental condition of authentic research: rapport.

The author, shackled to a largely color-blinded method, observed in his research an intermittent emergence of rapport as he occasionally succumbed to his desire to identify with his African American youth participants – and thereby began a partial application of critical race theory. For example, when he constrained the dominant premise that says research is contaminated if he were to cease being impartial (objectivity) in lieu of foregrounding his shared relationship to the boy’s racialized condition (Ladson-Billings, & Tate, 2006; Reviere, 2001). The critical race/emancipatory analysis adopted by the author required a clear definition of his racialized location, leading him to reject the notion of impartiality (validity, etc) (Asante, 2009; Milner, 2007) he had mostly adhered to during the interviews with the boys.

In this paper the author employs Richard Milner’s (2007) Engaged Reflection and Representation framework to examine how the interview protocol he used helped or hindered rapport between he and the boys as they discussed their school experiences in predominantly white controlled and/or predominantly white populated educational spaces. Rapport; is defined here as the shared feelings, ideas, relationships, stories and experiences between researchers and participants. Milner’s framework, a critical race framework by design, holds that there are dangers “seen, unseen, and unforeseen” when researchers fail to give critical attention to their own and others’ “racialized and cultural systems of coming to know, knowing and experiencing the world” (p. 388). In this work, rapport is evident when critical attention to the racialized and cultural characters (e.g. ideas, stories) of the boys has occurred. Because these aspects were not explicitly considered in the development of the study the author examines, retrospectively, his intermittent “de-shackling” for whether it hindered or helped engender rapport. The author relies on the work of scholars that have shown commitment to the racialized and cultural experiences of students of color (Carter, 2008; Hale, 2000; hooks, 2003; Ladson-Billing, 1997; Martin, 2000; Milner, 2013; Parker & Stovall, 2004; Tuitt & Carter, 2008). In the end, the author argues that what is normally unseen or unforeseen can be seen and understood when researchers seek rapport. Moreover, he contends that this work builds upon the warrant for more non-Eurocentric research (Clark, 2009; Scheurich, 1997) as it seeks to add to and strengthen this profession's rapport with who is, unquestionably, America’s most resilient students of all (Anderson, 1988; Fairclough, 2007).

Author

• Khalel Hakim, Michigan State University