It's a struggle but worth it: Identifying and managing identities in an interracial friendship

Abstract

Academic and other social settings are sites of building, questioning and contesting interracial or interethnic relationships. Yet, limited research is available in which researchers tell stories of their own racial and ethnic experiences unmediated by an outside observer or researcher. This qualitative study was conducted by female communication scholars, one Black and one White, who developed a friendship during their doctoral graduate school experience. Their autoethnographic accounts and Sense‐Making interviews about race revealed their struggles with identities during difficult discourse; and their subsequent talk and analyses point to how reliance on Spirit, personal, and racial identities help them to negotiate their way through the difficult discourse. To manage future tensions and sustain valued identities, they offer a process of talk, reflecting, checking with trusted intra‐racial others, and return to talk again and again for personal and collective well‐being. The authors speculate that maintaining dialogue over time may be a helpful element in resolving difficult interracial discourse. They recommend future studies to examine interracial talk and contexts, interracial or intraracial and “other‐difference”; (e.g., gender, sexuality) communication problems, and descriptive studies grounded in Spirituality.

Key concepts:

• interracial
• intercultural
• identity
• spirituality
• friendship