Black Researchers Studying Racial Battle Fatigue Among Black Students

Abstract

In this paper, we explore what it means to be Black researchers exploring racial battle fatigue while simultaneously navigating our own racial battle fatigue. We undertook a photo-elicitation project to investigate racial battle fatigue among Black undergraduate and graduate students. Amid doing this work, we wrestled with how to responsibly complete this research while treating participants with care who had full lives, histories, and stories. Using scholarly personal narrative methodology, we make sense of our research process as a research team of five Black people (two faculty members and three graduate students). We share journal entries to underscore the questions with which we were grappling in the research process, ultimately, to help readers understand our answer to the question: What does it mean to center racial battle fatigue in educational research when Black researchers are navigating their own racial battle fatigue? We close the article with lessons learned from our process to leave readers with ideas to consider as they embark on their own journeys of researching a topic with which they are also experiencing.