Introduction: racialising reality

In this chapter I explore tensions and synergies within ethnographic research that has social policy resonance and reach. Specifically, I argue that where research fields and their researchers share an arc of politics and identity, impacts on the researcher may be varied and potent. Before this, however, I provide some context for the way in which writing around race and ethnicity has been of a political nature, and can be traced back to the West's earliest contacts with the ‘colonial other’ (Loomba, 1998, p 72). Establishing this foundational premise around the nature of writing and representation frames the ensuing discussion in which I explore how insider/emic status can have an impact on traditional professional boundaries and identity more generally.

Political endeavour can be seen through the development of action, partisan, activist and critical forms of social research (Hammersley, 2000; Letherby, 2003; Gomm, 2004), and through the production of literature, including fiction, more generally (Orwell, 1946/1984). Research which has political orientations, for example, feminist, anti-racist and activist, may seek to remedy forms and bases of inequality, injustice and discrimination (Ali et al, 2004; Bloor, 2004; Gomm, 2004). This is particularly, although not exclusively, the case with ‘race’ research and writings, including texts that were produced before early academic ‘race and ethnic studies’ literature. William Foote Whyte's (1943) Street corner society, St Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's (1945/1962) Black metropolis and Jacques Barzun's (1938) Race: A study in modern superstition are all highly significant in their own right, but they are also emblematic of the academy's broadening scope of inquiry during the first part of the 20th century. Furthermore, the emergence of interest in this subject matter demonstrated race to be a construction tightly linked with the practice and legacy of Western colonialism and, in the case of Whyte's work, for example, America's multiethnic identity. However, race and ethnic studies research is located within, and as a consequence of, the context in which the concept of race was being formed. Indeed, race as a rationally defined concept came into common usage in the period from the mid to late 18th century. This period is commonly seen as the high point of the Enlightenment, yet it is during this era that doctrines about race came to be articulated in a consistent manner (Solomos and Back, 1996, p 32).