Chapter 2: Going Native/Being Native: The Promise of Critical Co-Constructed Autoethnography for Checking “Race,” Class, and Gender In/Out of the “Field”

Instead of taking the sanctimonious route to the White savior narrative, Martusewicz (2012) augments her initial statements with critical self-reflexivity:

Martusewicz (2012) serves as Editor-in-Chief of Educational Studies. She is known to be a well-cited White senior professor writing at the latter quarter of her career after having spent much of her career preparing and studying teachers either from Detroit or for Detroit. This additional background information is intended to suggest to the readers that Martusewicz offered her additional insights in earnest without publish-or-perish pressures coupled with any impetus to be viewed as the “cool” White professor on “race” matters. She writes critically self-reflexive words in the spirit of conveying lifelong learning and unlearning as a continued goal of qualitative research. Moreover, her self-reflexivity seems to be instructive for qualitative researchers either planning dis-consciously to “go native” or to be natives returning from the academy to explore some phenomenon of interest. Indeed, the plight detailed by Martusewicz is instructive for us as we began revisiting and reinterpreting our experiences as ethnographers in the same geo-political space but with differing lived experiences of race, class, and gender. The healing began when we revealed our common touchstones, blind spots, missteps, miscalculations, and vulnerabilities by essentially revealing how theorizing “about their lives and struggles” (Martusewicz, 2012, p. 213) and hopes can potentially transform how we respond to the world and each other. In this spirit of transformation and critical reflexivity, we pursued this critical co-constructed autoethnography.