CHRISTINA M. GREER
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATION: NEW YORK CITY
When I was in graduate school, I decided to write a dissertation on urban centers and the complexities for Black communities therein. I had entered my doctoral program in political science fully prepared to continue research I had begun as an undergraduate, comparing crime and public policy in urban centers. At my first meeting with the director of graduate studies, I told him about the research I had conducted in Boston and Baltimore. I proudly explained how I had learned about, and successfully executed, various aspects of qualitative methods and snowball interviewing. I also eagerly told him how I perceived my role as a researcher in urban spaces—as a Black American interacting with other Black Americans from diverse geographic locales and varying socioeconomic statuses. What were the ties that bound us? Would racial identity be enough to solicit honest and candid responses? Would my outsider status prevent my respondents from being forthcoming, or would that status serve me well as I inquired about details pertaining to their city, institutions, and historical practices?
I was fully prepared to establish my intellectual foundation as a scholar of politics in American urban spaces. The director heard me out and then bluntly replied, “Cities are dead.” There was not an ounce of my being that agreed with that statement. At that moment, I realized that an equal dose of flexibility and conviction would be necessary for me to survive and thrive in this profession. These types of statements and interactions are more common than we would like to believe. If you find yourself interested in a “dead topic,” you may want to think about the projection of the field. Are your interests really in the dustbin of academia, or are they merely out of fashion for the moment? If the latter is the case, by the time you have conducted your research and begin to establish yourself within your respective field, you may find yourself at the forefront of new and emerging debates. Urban politics has seen a resurgence in the past few years, and nothing is more encouraging than knowing that you followed your academic instincts and anticipated or created new ways of thinking about “dead topics.” Essentially, graduate school is the nesting ground where you establish and sharpen your intellectual instincts. There will be times when you falter, and the advice of seasoned scholars should be carefully considered. However, if a burning question is inside you that you feel must be analyzed and answered, then you must follow that feeling. You may need to shift the focus ever so slightly, but the kernel of truth that you know to be real must be interrogated.
I switched gears over the course of my tenure in graduate school so I could follow my first intellectual passion while simultaneously writing from a framework that was more mainstream and widely accessible to leaders within the discipline. I began to craft a research agenda that focused on the distinct identities of African, Caribbean, and Black Americans in New York City. Many scholars had compared Caribbean and Black American populations, but very few social scientists at the time had compared all three large Black ethnic groups. That is, people who had immigrated voluntarily from countries throughout the Caribbean and the continent of Africa as compared to Black Americans who were descendants of individuals involuntarily brought to these shores and forced into chattel slavery for centuries. Social scientists who had conducted research on Caribbean and Black American attitudes and interactions had largely focused on qualitative analyses to support their emerging and robust theories. As I attempted to build on this research by adding Africans as a third comparative group, I also felt it necessary to conduct quantitative analyses to support my claims. I then did what any graduate student in the social sciences who is interested in quantitative methods would do: I went straight to the National Election Study (NES) and the General Social Survey (GSS). These two large data sets sample roughly two hundred fifty “blacks” in each iteration, which rarely yielded any statistically significant results when I attempted to disaggregate the data by ethnicity. Even when aggregating the data over several years, there were often barely enough Black ethnics in the sample to adequately test my hypotheses.1
Next, I looked at the National Black Election Study (NBES); clearly this robust study, conducted by some of the leaders in racial politics, would include questions about race and ethnicity for Blacks in America. I initially scanned the codebook and found nothing. I didn’t panic, I assumed my “control-F” search needed to be a bit more specific. As I searched for the words ethnic, ethnicity, Africa, Caribbean, West Indian, and so on and consistently yielded no results, the panic set in. I then printed out the codebook; surely the NBES would have questions about Black immigrants because at least 10 percent of the Black population in the United States is foreign born, to say nothing of second and third generation Caribbean and African groups. I was wrong. The NBES had not asked any questions pertaining to Black ethnicity. It was then that I realized I would have to conduct my own quantitative research from scratch.
Before I embarked on research on something that seems so obvious and necessary, natural doubt crept into my psyche. If ethnic distinctions within the Black community are so obvious to me as a researcher, why had no one previously conducted quantitative research analyzing them? Had I stumbled upon an innovative dissertation and research topic, or was I destined to travel down a dead end? These are the types of questions that inevitably seep into my consciousness at the beginning of a research project each and every time.
My first challenge was how to gather data. I could not rely on preexisting data sets as my peers had done. Therefore, I had to go beyond the traditional data sources and think more creatively about where I could collect consistent and robust data.2 I had a relationship with the Social Services Employees Union (Local 371 in New York City), and the president of the union allowed me to use his eighteen thousand member population as the basis for my research. I secured a small amount of funding from my department and university, but it was clear that I would need to be not only the intellectual driver behind the research questions but also the coordinator of the survey in the field. Because I was conducting the survey in 2005 with a relatively older union population, I chose to conduct the survey via mail and not online. I made this decision for two reasons. First, the digital divide is real. I was surveying a largely Black population, and I knew that many members did not use computers the way many young graduate students did. Second, the research was conducted in 2005. Smartphones were barely a thing, and computer use was not as prevalent as it is today.
The cost of conducting the survey through the mail far exceeded costs for an online survey. I received grants for the external and internal envelope stamps and the envelopes of different sizes. These minor details were so necessary. Placing an envelope inside of an envelope required business envelopes of two different sizes. Stamps and labels had to be affixed, and the weight of the outgoing survey could not exceed the weight of mailing a normal letter. However, an introductory letter outlining the research and the institutional review board notification; a three-page, double-spaced, stapled survey; and a cover letter with a return envelope affixed with a stamp and address label—all included in a regular envelope which also had a stamp and address label affixed—came in just under weight. I had not thought about these costs when deciding to conduct my mail-in survey. Had I included just one more stamp or staple, each survey would have had an additional thirty-cent mailing cost. That may not seem like a lot, but when sending out three iterations of fifteen hundred surveys … I will let you figure out the math. Essentially, it is expensive to conduct original research. It is also important to keep in mind that many prestigious fellowships and grants are subject to a home institution “fee,” which can mean that up to 30 percent of the grant you receive goes toward the general university overhead fund. There are hidden and unexpected costs to conducting original research: paying for survey construction, hiring research assistants to help with field experiments, traveling to archives, and more.
Once I finally got the survey out into the field, completed surveys slowly began to be returned. I will never forget what it felt like to open the first survey and see the multiple-choice questions answered. Not only was I looking at people’s attitudes toward immigration, government spending, participation, and other Black ethnic groups, but I had also begun to create original data. I was officially a social scientist. What I did not anticipate were the personal notes that accompanied the surveys. Respondents of countless surveys wrote me a note of thanks. Some were glad these questions were finally being asked, others were glad they were finally being acknowledged. Many wished me luck in my research endeavors, and a few respondents even included coupons for regular grocery items to “keep me going” as I finished my studies. There was something very familial about the personal notes from my respondents. It reminded me of political scientist Michael Dawson’s larger idea of “linked fate,” which I was exploring in my dissertation.3 What was it that connected Black respondents to me, my survey, and ultimately to my success in graduate school and beyond? For them, the survey was more than just questions about their attitudes toward political participation and policy issues; it was a rare acknowledgment that they and their truths and their stories mattered. My survey was a vehicle for them to be seen in a country that often ignores and devalues the experiences of the “others.”
After conducting my surveys in the field, I followed up with qualitative interviews with union leadership and rank and file members. As I interviewed older Black union workers, many asked if I had relatives from outside of the United States. Many of my Caribbean respondents were excited to hear that my paternal grandmother was from the Bahamas. I had not planned on sharing that piece of personal history with my respondents, but almost every Caribbean or African respondent inquired whether I was something other than “just Black.” In many ways their questions confirmed some of the theories of racial solidarity and ethnic distinction I dissected in the project. I wondered how forthcoming some of my respondents would have been had I not been able to tell them about my deceased grandmother whom I had never met from a country I hadn’t visited since I was in elementary school. Still, the family connection was enough to serve as a seal of approval and increase my response rate.
If I had not had the “grandmother card” at my disposal, I often wondered whether my Black immigrant respondents would have been so generous toward me and so honest in their responses. I may never know. What I do know is that research can serve as a means not only to explore new ideas but to shed light on communities and populations who are often pushed into the shadows. I was able to collect enough data to ultimately have statistically significant findings and responses that would help inform my subsequent qualitative interviews. Through my survey collection, I discovered that Caribbean immigrants, not Black Americans, were the least likely to believe in the American dream. I uncovered some of the minor distinctions between Black ethnic groups that threatened to obstruct collective action and substantive coalition building. And I developed a theory of Black ethnicity directly tied to a diasporic understanding of race and linked fate. My survey collection enabled me to better understand the nuances and complexities of Blacks in America, using questions I thought important, timely, and pertinent. That is the power of data collection. An intellectual vision, a methodological plan, and a touch of flexibility can change how we view the world and the groups we care about.
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Christina M. Greer is associate professor of political science at Fordham University.
PUBLICATION TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Greer, Christina M. Black Ethnics: Race Immigration and the Pursuit of the American Dream. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
NOTES
1. The Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) did not exist when I began my dissertation or when I finished my manuscript. The CMPS is a recent data set that provides postelection content from a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual set of more than ten thousand respondents. This cooperative data source has provided a space for current (and future) scholars of race, ethnicity, and politics (REP) to contribute to a collective and ask and share questions of interest to their particular research interests.
2. Mark Q. Sawyer, Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
3. Dawson’s theory of linked fate argues that blacks across the class spectrum will have a shared racial identity that transcends class status. Most surprising to scholars was Dawson’s analysis of the strong ties that wealthier blacks felt toward the less economically stable members of their racial group. My research sought to better understand this concept and the potential complications ethnicity may pose to Dawson’s theory: Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.