Gray or For Colored Girls Who Are Tired of Chasing Rainbows: Race and Reflexivity

Abstract

Reflexivity interrogates the cause and effect of self-awareness and self-reference in qualitative work. This article uses reflexivity to resolve the meaning and implications that race has on ethnographic research. The author argues that race automatically and inevitably influences research, therefore conscious race reflexivity is a useful tool for auto/ ethnographic work. Even when race is not named out loud, it is germane to how an ethnographic project will be conceptualized, interpreted, and completed. By using examples from ethnographic studies that concentrate on race and excerpts from personal experiences, the author names the reflexive stories “race stories” and identifies the analytic reflections that follow, “gray spaces,” to reference and demonstrate the subjective and synergistic role of race in reflexive research.