Reflections on Working With Black Youth From Underserved Communities in the United States: Decolonizing My Whiteness Through Critical Collaborative Interrogation

Abstract

This autoethnographic paper introduces a decolonizing methodological process termed—critical collaborative interrogation (CCI)—one offering a more radically reflexive approach to teasing out inherent power relations within sport-for-development spaces. The process of CCI utilized four autobiographical vignettes written by the first author as means of decolonizing his whiteness, vis-à-vis, an academic peer from his present and a coworker from his past. By ascribing to a decolonizing praxis, we contend that CCI offers not only a novel way to elucidate innate racial biases, complicities, and moral imperatives within sport-for-development work, but also promoting CCI as a transformative process by drawing upon “other” ways of knowing and alternative perspectives.