Racism and Denial of Racism: Dealing with the Academy and the Field

Abstract

Abstract We discuss our experiences of both racism and its denial in the context of our interactions with research participants, research teams, and academic communities. Greenhill questions scholarly traditions that insist upon objectivist methods and, in the process, side with researchers and research participants who refuse to acknowledge and expose White-identified, privileged social actions. Reflecting on decades of responses to her own research on the performance of race and gender in Morris dancing and Brommtopp, she concludes that both the denial and the performance of raced and marginalized others underscore deeply held views about Canadian homogeneity, diversity, and multiculturalism. Marshall focuses on responses to the anti-racist histories she has collected, and, more importantly, to the ethnographic ways that she has collected them. By straddling the boundaries between academic and non-academic life, she has used her work to reveal the histories of people who have often lived in the shadows of dominant cultures. Yet questions about methods, methodology, and theory have sought to erase the results of research on the level of systems of knowledge--to make it impossible not because of its content but because of its sources. We contend that diversity must be about the use of multiple methods, theories, and approaches that guard against the denial of racism. Defending, explaining, and fighting for anti-racist perspectives is eye-opening and sometimes exhausting, even for two White-identified, privileged academics like ourselves.