As a queer Vietnamese American graduate student interested in pursuing an academic career, I sometimes worry about sharing views that may challenge dominant norms and ideologies. Some established academics of color have recommended I keep my mouth closed until tenure or after tenure, whereas others have said that if I minimize my voice, I will assimilate into the system that silences more radical perspectives. Because I value social justice, I wanted to reach beyond my fear to name and confront an issue I witness in academia that I will refer to as the white academic gaze, or when white researchers conduct research on people of color, especially without including them in the research and publication process.
The white academic gaze constitutes a serious issue in the field of psychological research because even though white people who conduct research on people of color may have good intentions, the act of doing so can feel extractive as well as an overreach of power. For example, years ago before I entered a PhD program, I spoke to a woman of color working as a doctoral student under a white woman in a clinical psychology program who researched Black and Latinx youths’ health outcomes. This doctoral student informed me that even though her PI published on Black and Latinx youth, she would often microaggress her own graduate students of color. I myself have witnessed white people who have published on Asian American communities who have proceeded to harm actual Asian Americans in interpersonal interactions. It saddens and angers me that white researchers can benefit from the struggles of communities of color even while hurting members of those communities.
Furthermore, even if a white researcher did not commit racist acts, their engagement with research on people of color still feels extractive. Racial inequity in psychological research persists in that while research on race is rare, even when research on race is conducted, it is often executed by white researchers. For example, I have observed white researchers win large grants to study the experiences of queer men of color. As a queer person of color myself, I first wonder if those researchers have examined their own complicity in racism, and I then wonder about all the marginalized queer researchers of color I know who struggle to enter academia or to make it in academia because they do not have the access to data necessary to publish. Given the numerous benefits of having faculty of color in university settings, I feel curious about what we can do to promote academics of color securing opportunities to conduct research on and with their own communities, so we can build a more equitable academy.
Though many perhaps consider science objective, I feel that privilege and oppression play a large part in who gets to conduct science. I will implicate myself here – for my undergraduate honors thesis, I examined the role of feminine norms on college women’s eating behaviors. Though I am in the process of exploring my gender identity now, at the time I had identified as a cisgender gay man who had always leaned into his femininity. I felt interested in examining how femininity may influence food intake, and I found the measures examining femininity within men lacking. After I graduated, I became sole author of that paper and proceeded to publish it. Looking back, I wish I had done more to include a woman on that paper, even though I had already written the entirety of the paper, such as by asking for help with the revisions. Or, I wish I had interrogated my privileges earlier on in the process and had collaborated with another woman in addition to my advisor from the beginning of the process. At the time I had identified as a cis man, so I wish I had asked myself: as someone who has benefited from male privilege, was it my place to conduct this research at all?
I will admit that as a queer graduate student of color, it does feel a bit scary to share these beliefs on a public forum. I remind myself though that I am allowed to make my voice heard and that I can thank the many writers of color who have come before me for guiding my own growth. For example, I think about Myriam Gurba, a queer Mexican American woman who courageously called out a white woman for advancing her own career through writing about Mexican people’s stories. Gurba’s intelligent, impassioned post sparked long-necessary discourse on how the publishing industry privileges white writers even when they write about communities of color. I feel that psychological research could benefit from a similar reckoning, especially given the American Psychological Association’s stated commitment to dismantling systemic racism.
As a future counseling psychologist, I firmly believe that both individual and systemic-level change are necessary. As an aspiring academic, I am committed to actually checking in with my students and asking them how they feel about my relationship with them, to mitigate the potential for harm and to practice actual accountability if I have hurt them. I will name power differentials that come from my position as an advisor as well as the power dynamics that emerge from our various privileged and marginalized social identities. I will continue to educate myself so that that burden does not fall on my students. Furthermore, I commit to knowing my own lane and supporting researchers doing research on and with their own communities, while reading more about how I can help decolonize research overall. I do hope academic journals will institute policies and practices that empower academics of color. At this point though, as a graduate student and early career researcher, I try to focus on what I can control. I do my best to take accountability for my own actions as I engage in advocacy and activism. I also remember to practice gratitude for the mentors I have had who have nurtured my passion for social justice-related research, as well as those who have nurtured my voice and my desire to speak out about injustices in the academy overall.
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Thomas Le, MS, is a doctoral candidate in Counseling Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research integrates counseling, cultural, and health psychology by focusing on how gender socialization and racism impact the development and maintenance of eating disorders and substance use in marginalized communities (e.g., Asian Americans, LGBTQ+ people of color). In their free time they enjoy laughing and processing with close friends, reading books about social justice and interpersonal relationships, and listening to Blackpink. You can contact him at tple[at]terpmail.umd.edu.
Recently, I had been trying to come up with creative ways to help my students link concepts from class to the real world. Improving learning is one connection. But there are many others, such as how we might frame an advertisement to help it sell, or how we can improve procedures in the criminal justice system to avoid false convictions – like Steven Avery’s first conviction. (The many who watched Making a Murderer have probably thought a lot about this connection to cognitive psychology, possibly without realizing how much of a role it plays!) Anyway, I decided to create an assignment requiring my students to interact with one another and make connections with popular psychology-related articles on Twitter. The first step was creating a Twitter profile for myself, and building it up with psychology-related tweets.
About the authors:
Yana Weinstein is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She received her PhD in Psychology from University College London and had 4 years of postdoctoral training at Washington University in St. Louis. The broad goal of her research is to help students make the most of their academic experience.