Transnational Black Feminism and Qualitative Research

Black Women, Racialization and Migration

Tanja J. Burkhard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000536904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Ricerche e metodologie nella psicologia

Transnational Black Feminism and Qualitative Research invites readers to consider what it means to conduct research within their own communities by interrogating local and global contexts of colonialism, race, and migration.

The qualitative data at the centre of this book stem from a yearlong qualitative study of the lived experiences of Black women, who migrated to or spent a significant amount of time in the United States, as well as from the author's experiences as a Black German woman and former international student. It proposes Transnational Black Feminism as a framework in qualitative inquiry. Methodological considerations emerging from and complementary to this framework critically explore qualitative concepts, such as reciprocity, care, and the ethics with which research is conducted, to account for shifts in power dynamics in the research process and to radically work against the dehumanization of participants, their communities, and researchers.

This short and accessible book is ideal for qualitative researchers, graduate students, and feminist scholars interested in the various dimensions of racialization, coloniality, language, and migration.

1

Building a methodological framework

Toward transnational Black feminist inquiry

DOI: 10.4324/9781003056621-2

America

The U.S. is good. –

It has all these things –

Opportunity –

I get a job.

I got married –

Everything is so convenient

There is water

when you want it

There is electricity

There is everything –

The sky’s the limit

But there’s still something –

that is missing

We have income –

We have jobs

And we still have stress

That busy lifestyle is not so good –

I feel like I’ve lost

a lot of my culture

That humanness is not there –

You’re suffering

by yourself and

nobody cares

(Data Poem “America” Words by Naima, Haki, Marisha)

I initially merged the voices of the participants in my yearlong qualitative inquiry into the lived experiences of Black transnational women into data poems (Glesne, 1997), after recognizing the poetics in the timbre of their voices, their speech, and their storytelling as I listened to interview data over and over again. Naima, Haki, and Marisha, whose voices are merged in the poem titled “America,” come from different parts of the world. Naima is from Somalia, Haki from Kenya, and Marisha from Jamaica. They do not share the same educational backgrounds, but they do share an experience of “America” as well – and all of its tensions – as Black women who have been here for varying lengths of time. “America,” in their words, offers opportunity but demands sacrifice. Marisha and I share grandparents as first cousins, though we grew up in different countries. I recall spending summers with her and many of our other cousins, as I struggled to communicate in English, sometimes by drawing pictures, sometimes by charades, and sometimes giving up – feeling inadequate.

In Germany, where I grew up, I had no cousins or family members of my age. As the only child of color in my school, who was also painfully shy, I was always out of place. My mother was often also the only Black woman in her educational and leisure spaces, but she held her head high, even when she experienced violence and terror. She reminds me frequently that Germany (and Switzerland, where she now lives) are not her home, but rather temporary spaces she navigates. There is a special type of resilience, which she draws from her knowledge that there exists a small plot of land and a house that she took years to build from abroad surrounded by her siblings, nieces, and nephews to which she can return if life in Europe becomes too much to bear. The vision of this home that despite all of its changes continues to embrace her with the warmth of familiarity is not familiar to me. When my mother shares it, in bits and pieces, I wonder what it must feel like to have a physical and imagined place to which one can return or escape – to walk down the street and be recognized by neighbors, family members, and friends the way my mother is in her home village, no matter how long she was away. I am certain that my mind has glorified this notion of home to which I have no access, but my mother always confirms: “Yes, it is beautiful.”

Tracing (grand)mother’s stories

In an interview with Naima shortly before the U.S. presidential elections of 2016, she pointed to our difference from her perspective, which is that if the situation in the United States were to become worse for immigrants, I could always return to my home country, while she did not see the option of returning to Somalia without feeling unsafe and without the possibility of envisioning a successful future. I started thinking about this idea of “home” and what a contested imaginary and physical space it could be. I had just returned from a trip to Jamaica, where my mother and her siblings had discussed aspects of my maternal grandmother’s life that I had not previously heard about. The fragmented lived experience recalled and shared by grandma Hildred’s children reminded me that the experiences of being severed from home, of migrating for one’s own survival or the survival of one’s children, and the economic and educational power of North America in the lives of myself, Naima, Haki, Marisha, and the other participants are only extensions and continuations of the experiences of many of our foremothers.

I work to retell the fragmented bits of my grandmother’s story here, both as an act of remembrance as well as to illustrate one way to think about daughtering (Evans-Winters, 2019) and by extension of piecing together the fragments of lived experiences, “granddaughtering” in qualitative inquiry. Citing Dillard (2012) and Errante (2000), Rhee (2021) argues that “academic knowledge, training, and expertise or credentials, more often than not seduce us to forget…. I forgot how to listen to my own m/other” (p. 17). As for Rhee, many feminist of color writers consider relationships with mothers and motherhood as a central aspect of exploration. However, having been raised in the same household with one grandmother and in total absence of another, I recognize the ways the stories of our mother’s mothers can impact our lives. In many ways, their stories are not only windows into different times, but they also provide context for our own mother’s ways of knowing their desires and their journeys. Carol Boyce Davies writes “my mother’s journeys redefine space. Her annual migrations between the Caribbean and the United States, are ones of persistent re-membering and re-connection” (1995, p. 1).

Similarly to Davies’ mother, my mother spends life between two worlds, Switzerland and Jamaica, different versions of her coming to life in the various spaces. During her travels, she switches from Swiss German, to High German to Patois, and Jamaican Standard English in the matter of hours. She spends hours on the phone remembering and reconnecting with her siblings in various parts of the world. Sometimes, when I call from across the world, she calls me by her sister’s name first, as she always has, laughing off the mistake she has been making since I can remember. I have always recognized these moments as being ruptures in space and time, moments in which my mother occupies all of her selves and remembers banter and levity with her sister in times before they were regaled to sometimes tense visits throughout the year. Each time she returns from a visit to home, a sad longing feeling washes over her to go back as soon as possible. She often recalls withering away during her first year as a young woman in Germany, homesickness rendering her unable to eat and be active. Her own mother, my maternal grandmother, Hildred died in a small village outside of Ocho Rios, Jamaica, when my mother was only 11 years old. I have heard fragments of her story throughout my life, some as cautionary tales, and in the praises sung to this woman, who loved education so much that she would herd the neighborhood children into a room over the summer to combat what we now call “summer learning loss.” Her untimely death, at the age of 35, has been a cornerstone of caution, not only in my life, but also in the lives of Marisha and Maya, who are both my first cousins (and participated in my research project). My mother always reminded me of the importance of life insurance in case she would not live beyond 35 years of age and admitted that she had always assumed her passing would occur around the same age as her mother’s. As the story goes, Hildred was an intelligent, deeply religious, book-smart woman from Kingston, Jamaica, who had made it as far as being admitted to a university in England in the late 1960s. Her own mother had vigorously fund-raised for her ship fare, but she met my grandfather and decided to pursue the relationship with him, rather than moving abroad. She bore eight children and went to work as a service worker in Canada in the midst of a financial crisis. Upon her return to Jamaica only 11 months later, she immediately became pregnant again and found out that the money she had carefully sent to her husband went to funding a different family’s life. She died very soon after giving birth to her youngest child. Her children scrambled to continue living, with none of them recovering from their loss. Hildred’s story ricochets through our family. My own mother migrated from Jamaica to Germany after meeting my father, and has since moved to Switzerland, and I moved to the United States to pursue higher education. In each context, we are required to grapple with our position and social location as Black women, who are must make and re-make our homes, social networks, and memories in light of the geographical and sociopolitical landscapes we now navigate.

When I returned to the United States as an exchange student from Germany in the midst of the financial crisis of 2009, my university held an exchange program with several schools in the United States, including Middle Tennessee State University. I was thrilled not only at the prospect of teaching German, but also at the idea of potentially living in a community, which would be much more diverse than the German small towns in which I had grown up and attended university. However, once thrust into the South of the United States, I did not only have to navigate this new country and context, but also had to reckon with the local and global histories of enslavement, racialization, and continued de facto segregation. I was so ignorant. Several students in my classes voiced that I did not embody what they had envisioned a competent German instructor to look like and assumed that I was an American who had studied German and was therefore less competent than my colleague, who was happy to wear the traditional garb of her home, Bavaria. Although I lacked the language, I knew that racialized readings of my body were intimately attached to presumed competence or incompetence further underlined by the assumption that I was not a “native speaker.” It turned out that the “Otherness” that I had become so intimately aware of growing up in Germany became more complicated in this new setting, as the assumptions about me were always intimately tied to my capability and competence, even if translated differently in each context.

When I heard snippets of these ideas repeated by other Black women over the years, I started to wonder what it meant to collect and center their stories – our stories – and to consider the transnational dimensions that shape them. For me, growing up in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s in Germany meant that my access to understand what Blackness was, was framed by American exports in film and music, as well as the anti-Black discourses and narratives that circulated around my region, the Southwest, in which many U.S. military bases still remain in existence. Derogatory terms, such as “war baby” and “Mischling” (mutt), were often applied to those of white German and Black parentage, even if neither parent had served in the military. I navigated educational and private spaces as the only person of color, with only my mother as a point of reference for how to understand race and racism. While my school curricula heavily emphasized discussions of anti-Semitism in the Third Reich and chattel slavery in the United States, understandings of Black Germanness were never included. In my schooling experience up to the ninth grade, I often heard of eugenicist myths related to the supposed deficient cognitive capacity of people of African descent and, at times, began internalizing these myths that were presented as biological facts (and had been long proven to be false). The remarkable work done by Katharina Oguntoye and Audre Lorde, for instance, in their 1986 book Farbe bekennen and May Ayim’s (1995) Blues in schwarz-weiß and many others organizing on behalf of Afro-Germans and Black Germans in the 1980s and 1980s were not included in the curricula, and I did not learn about the existing transnational Black feminist organizing until I came to the United States for graduate school. In recent years, race and racialization in Europe have garnered attention. I recognize that growing up within this space of overwhelming presence of whiteness (Sleeter, 2001) differed in experience from the participants in this study. In this work, I seek to attend to this difference and points of departure along with understanding the many overlaps.

Qualitative researchers, who are invested in the knowledges, ways of being, and stories of their participants, are inevitably faced with the question of what it means to interpret and render the complexity and multilayered nature of someone’s lived experiences in ways that are comprehensible for the reader without being reductive and in ways that are careful and reflexive, without obscuring the knowledges produced by projecting one’s own lens.

Working with and for communities of color, generally, and Black immigrant communities, specifically, inevitably also requires a reckoning with how contexts of globalized White Supremacy, xenophobia, and anti-Black ideologies are shaping not only the lives of our research participants, young and old, but also our lens of interpretation, our own notion of what is worthy of study, what we include and discard, and why. It requires of us to not only know how to conduct sound qualitative research by asking the right questions, but also understand all of the contexts – historical, geographic, and sociopolitical – that help us to determine what the right questions are and what answers we feel ready and able to interpret and make legible to readers. What do we make of the stories of our participants, and what do we make of the stories of ourselves in relation to those of our participants, our communities, and our ancestors? As a researcher, I have found that it is in the stories of that echo throughout our lives, sometimes as cautionary tales, at times as wisdom to be carried forth from generation to generation, often make sites of wonder, friction, curiosity, and familiarity when they are placed in relation to those of others. The remainder of this chapter offers a review of literature on Black immigrants in an effort to work toward a Transnational Black Feminist Framework for qualitative inquiry.

Black immigrants in the United States

The first time I encountered Naima. At the time, she was 29 years old⁴ and proud to know her age, which she later noted, because in her home country of Somalia, it was not common that birth records were produced and retained in the 1980s, when the country was already wrought with civil war, which destroyed institutions. After being referred by their teacher, I met Naima and her friend for English tutoring in the lobby of a local community college, at which they both were taking a writing class at the time. I entered the lobby later than I had wanted to and was immediately greeted with warm embraces from both women. I recall feeling naked next to them due to my exposed arms, although just a moment before, I had been grateful for not wearing long sleeves in the heat of August. We immediately started chatting, and it wasn’t long before Mariam showed me pictures of her children, her husband, and quite a few selfies on her phone. She asked to see my family, and since I was single at the time, I produced images of my Black Jamaican mother and my white German father. I recall her saying loudly (and having repeated it quite a few times since) “Oh, look at your mother! She is darker than me! I thought you were like Mexican.”

The experiences of Black immigrants in general have not been the focus of many research studies. The few studies that do exist, however, often fail to explicitly discuss who counts as Black, an identity marker that has been reclaimed and politicized by African American writers and scholars from various schools of thought (Gordon, 2003; Essien-Udom, 1962), but may be contended by those who hail from countries that are so predominately populated by African peoples that marking oneself as Black has been unnecessary until one arrived in the United States. On the other hand, knowing that Blackness is subjugated in many spaces across the world – particularly due to the globalization of White Supremacy (Allen, 2001), with its manifestations in predominately Black spaces through colorism – can represent a marker of difference that is not readily accepted by those who are formally racialized as Black, for example, on the U.S. census. U.S. notions of Blackness oftentimes still operate based on the one-drop rule, which focuses on lineage rather than phenotype and which further complicates the notion of Blackness and Black identity.

In either case, claiming or not claiming Blackness can create tensions that are founded in cultural or ideological difference. However, I would argue, not explicitly engaging the term allows it to potentially function in unwanted ways, particularly if it determines the recruitment of research participants. For example in

Moore’s (2013) work, The American Dream Through the Eyes of Black African Immigrants in Texas, the author, who self-identifies as a Black immigrant, states that she collected qualitative data from “80 Black African immigrants regarding the American dream” (p. 5). Nevertheless, Moore fails to provide a di...