ABSTRACT
As Vic and the seller were finishing their transaction, the old woman reached over and touched Vic’s arm, her face now absolutely perplexed, nodding in my direction: “What is she (me)? Is she a white woman?” I nearly fell over, a rush of emotions running through me, from absolute horror to disgust to disbelief to sadness. Vic giggled and explained to the woman (who had still not quit starring at me) that I was not a white woman but a black American. But that evening in my researcher’s journal (and through confused, angry, and sad tears that could’ve filled a river), I wondered aloud as I wrote: “How could she see me as a white woman?” “Couldn’t she see the African woman I could see in myself?” “Didn’t she know what had happened to millions of Africans who’d been forcibly taken from the shores of Ghana and other West African countries?” “Where did she think we had gone?” “Had she never imagined that some of us would return?” “How can this sister/mother see me this way?” In reflection, what
frightened me most about her question was that, at that very moment, I couldn’t answer it myself:
Talking Back: It’s beyond Intellectual The narrative above is a story taken from my book On Spiritual Strivings: Transforming an African American Woman’s Academic Life (2006), very much in the spirit of the conversations called for by hooks and Mesa-Baines in the quote above. I share it as a way to both stand in solidarity with and to bear witness to the power of memory to inform research ethics-our system of moral principles that undergird what we believe to be right or wrong and which shape and influence the morality of our motives and our practices. And as an African ascendant feminist researcher, this is a revolutionary task, one that requires courage and daring to boldly “talk back” (hooks, 1989): To ourselves, to the academy, to various cultural spaces and places in the world, to one other, to those who are culturally distinct from ourselves. In such ethical racialized voices (particularly in those of many African American women scholars) is an underlying and unasked question that DuBois (1989) raised years ago: “unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All nevertheless flutter round it, the real question … How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word” (pp. 1-2).
