Black on Black: Insider Positionality and the Black African Migrant Research Experience in Australia

Abstract

This chapter stems from a conversation that ensued after a fieldwork interview that we had conducted in the city of Adelaide, Australia, in 2011. After the interview, our participant commented on how 'refreshing' it was to be able to talk about their experiences to people who understood exactly what it was like being a black African migrant in Australia. Any other researcher, the participant maintained, would not understand unless they were black 'and' a migrant, especially 'the part' about racism. In Australia, the participant commented, the belief is that racism does not exist, but we, as black researchers, know that is not true. The participant revealed that they probably would not have talked about racism in the interview 'the way they had', had it been 'any other researcher'. What followed our participant's comments was an exchange between the three of us, of instances of racism that we had encountered, how we had felt and responded in those instances. We talked about the burden that our blackness placed on us in spaces imagined and constructed as white, though claimed as multicultural (Kwansah-Aidoo and Mapedzahama 2011 a, Mapedzahama et al. 2011).