You Have Never Lived a Day Outside of Your Body: Engaging Racialized and Gendered Positionality in Ethnographic Research

Anthropology's well‐known history of racist and colonial practices continues to inform which bodies go (un)marked with regard to researcher and researched subjectivities, with consequences for methodology and analysis. The imagined unmarked body of the researcher in the ethnographic context disallows consideration of any interaction between their subject position, its attendant histories, and how researchers interact with the community under study. And when the researcher's positionality is made explicit, it is rare to find discussions of how the researcher's positionality informed how and what they could observe. This article argues that overtly engaging, not just noting, research positionality in ethnographic texts illuminates underexplored, analytically rich, and pedagogically valuable aspects of the ethnographic process. By highlighting three ethnographic encounters as a Black male ethnographer of young white conservative students, this article explores some of the benefits and challenges of engaging researcher positionality, and how doing so benefited the ethnographic process. This article contains references to sexual assault and sexual violence.


INTRODUCTION
Within the field of anthropology, it is often assumed that the ethnographer is white, male, and heterosexual.This shapes both anthropological analysis and methodological approaches.For Black anthropologists studying white spaces, this is particularly a conundrum.In Fall 2019, I attended a panel at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) discussing ethnographic research on the right wing.Having recently completed an ethnography of conservative student groups on a liberal university campus (Muwwakkil 2019), I was curious about the panelists' methods.Multiple panelists discussed the tactic of "hiding in plain sight" and getting only "one bite at the apple"; as one explained, "Because once they Google you, they'll never talk to you again."In other words, these ethnographers were advocating that researchers misrepresent themselves to communities they disagree with politically in order to gain access, with the expectation of being cut off once they were found out.The panelists' presentations dwelled not on the dubious ethics of such work, but on how to stay safe after being discovered.
I was confused.In my own work, I hadn't even considered misrepresenting myself to conservative students.I must have been missing something.And then it hit me; what I was missing was whiteness.
There was an implicit assumption that research participants and the researcher would be racially similar and therefore would be presumed to be likeminded.As scholars of color in the audience, myself included, pointed out during the question period, the entire panel was composed of white researchers doing work in white conservative communities.When these researchers talked about "hiding in plain sight," they took for granted that they could be read as in-group members, an approach that, even apart from its ethical problems, was unavailable to me as a Black linguistic anthropologist studying white conservatives.
This experience caused me to reflect on the circumstances wherein we as researchers are called to engage our own subject position in ethnographic work and how that engagement shows up in our work.This article explores some of the theoretical, Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 31, Number 2, pp. 125-136, ISSN 1051-0559, electronic ISSN 1548-7466. Ó 2023 The Authors.Transforming Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association.DOI: 10.1111/traa.12257.methodological, and analytical implications that arose during my ethnographic work on white conservatives' discursive practices from the racially marked positionality of Blackness in the US context.I argue, building on decolonial and reflexive scholarship in anthropology, that researcher positionality is analytically consequential in ethnographic research and that the interaction of the researcher's body with the local ethnographic context should be robustly accounted for within ethnographic texts.My hope is that this article will advance understandings of the impact of the racialized and gendered body and its attendant histories in the anthropological research process as well as to elucidate the role of white supremacy inside and outside of the discipline (Beliso-De Jes us and Pierre 2019; Smalls, Spears, and Rosa 2021).Specifically, this article is an intervention regarding the relationship between Blackness and reflexive anthropology within the context of ethnographic work on conservative white spaces.
Reflexivity has been a point of exploration in anthropology for decades.A key starting point has been the postmodernist critique that challenged notions of objectivity in cultural interpretation and presentation; the center of this discussion was the text Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986).Building on the foundational tension between conceptions of ethnographer and "informant," Writing Culture inaugurated a wave of rethinking what ethnographic writing is and could be as well as the role of the ethnographer both in the research and in the text.In subsequent years, anthropologists have highlighted some limitations and oversights of the volume, 1 especially with regard to gender and, to some extent, race (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1991;Behar and Gordon 1995;Jacobs-Huey 2002;Trouillot 1991).
Of course, the question of "when and where I enter" (Giddings 1996) is central to the long tradition of intersectional reflexivity of Black feminist scholarship within anthropology (e.g., Harrison 2008;Hurston 1990;Jacobs-Huey 2002;McClaurin 2001;Nelson 1996;Williams 2021), which was not taken up in this discussion.Two of the many major contributions of this body of work are the commitment to politically engaged anthropology and the exploration of the complexity of being an insider or "native" anthropologist.In addition to doing ethnographic work "at home," these scholars often augment their research agenda and practice to facilitate "examine(ing) the historical legacy of anthropologists' role in the subjugation, exploitation, and exoticization of people of color throughout the world . . .incorporating the experiences and voices of research participants in ethnographic texts . . .and returning something of value to the researchers' host community" (Jacobs-Huey 2002, 792).This politically engaged form of anthropology also reveals the gradations of endogeny (Nelson 1996) in ethnographic research and demonstrates that different elements of in-group/outgroup-ness produce complex findings.Additionally, considerations of translation (style of prose written for one audience may exclude another) and representation (written account may embarrass or otherwise harm family members/local participants) make a native anthropological stance fraught (Jacobs-Huey 2002, 797).
This article contributes to anthropological conversations on reflexivity by considering the role Blackness plays within the unique context of ethnographic work in conservative white spaces.I explore how my positionality impacted my research process.Anthropology's fraught relationship with race and its history of anti-Blackness has produced gaps in the literature around the politics of race and subject position.As Lee Baker details, anthropology has historically been a patriarchal white discipline defined by anti-Blackness: "The original American school of anthropology not only helped to shape the first generation of academic anthropologists but also gave scientific authority to proslavery forces" (1998,16).Furthermore, Baker argues that anthropology has always understood the ethnographic object to be the primitive Other.This disciplinary stance is exemplified by the words of Margaret Mead: "The ethnologist has defined his scientific position in terms of a field of study rather than a type of a problem, or a delimitation of theoretical inquiry.The cultures of primitive people are that field" (1933,15).With the "cultures of primitive people" as the field of inquiry, it follows that the research is necessarily conducted from a "non-primitive"-i.e., white and Westernpositionality (Ntarangwi 2010).In spite of this legacy, numerous scholars of color have chosen to challenge racist assumptions from within the field, actively resisting the hegemonic white gaze and its structural entailment, anthropological exoticism (e.g., Allen and Jobson 2016;Baker 1998;Dominguez 1994;Drake 1980;Harrison and Harrison 1999;Jacobs-Huey 2002;McClaurin 2001;Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997;Smedley and Smedley 2012).Michel-Rolph Trouillot confronts the apparent paradox of the white gaze in his influential concept of the "Savage slot": "It is a stricture of the Savage slot that the native never faces 126 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL.31(2) the observer.In the rhetoric of the Savage slot, the Savage is never an interlocutor, but evidence in an argument between two Western interlocutors about the possible futures of humankind" (Trouillot 2003, 133).A key consequence of the logic of the Savage slot is that the West and whiteness, and therefore white supremacy, remain ethnographically underexamined.This flawed reasoning is especially visible in the US context, where-for a number of structural, security, and affective reasons-it is still rare that "Black scholars ethnographically enter and do deep interactive interpretations of White cultural space" (Moss 2003, 2; original emphasis).
Researcher positionality is crucial to situating one's work (Bucholtz and miles hercules 2021) and may be represented in ethnographic texts in a variety of ways.It may be indexed implicitly through in-group language use (Shange 2019), overtly through a positionality statement (e.g., Anderson 2019), or inferenced through assumptions that the reader already has knowledge of the author's subject position (Molina 2011).As it stands, much contemporary in-text engagement with positionality reads as performative and can easily drift into the realm of virtue signaling (miles hercules and Muwwakkil 2021).Conversely, in his ethnography The Color of Class (2003), which focuses on poor whites in the Midwestern United States, Kirby Moss offers a valuable example of how a researcher might highlight the opportunities and limitations of their subject position.As a Black researcher intimately familiar with the research context, he was acutely aware of how his racial identity might impact his data collection.Instead of leaving the interaction between his racial identity with his research participants to the imagination of the reader, he explicitly shares relevant instances of his embodied positionality and their analytic implications.Another example can be found in Norma Mendoza-Denton's Homegirls (2008), where she ethnographically engages with gang-affiliated Latina youth in California.Mendoza-Denton continually demonstrates how she is read by her participants and how those assumptions inform the research context.Notably, she deftly points out that her racialized and gendered body influences not only how the Latina participants interact with her, but also how the audience within anthropology reads and interprets her through her work.These richly reflexive ethnographies serve as models for how and why researchers should overtly reflect on their positionality and bring the discussion of their body's impact on the ethnographic context into the text itself.

DOING ETHNOGRAPHY AS A BLACK RESEARCHER OF WHITE CONSERVATIVES
My engagement with these issues emerged through my work on my master's thesis (Muwwakkil 2019), an ethnography of politically conservative student groups at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI) in California that had recently gained Minority Serving Institution (MSI) status.My study examined how young conservatives formulated and deployed discursive strategies to engender solidarity among themselves and to recruit fellow students.I began the research just after the 2016 US presidential election, having little knowledge of political conservatism.Indeed, I undertook the research in order to better understand the perspectives of Trump supporters.While I see Trump's election as but one instance in a long list of contemporary and historical moves in the maintenance of white supremacy (see Rosa and Bonilla 2017), I still found myself curious as to how any collegeaged voter could support him.I therefore approached two conservative student groups on campus, the College Republicans and the Young Americans for Liberty, making clear my status as a researcher as well as my progressive orientation.The student leaders showed me great hospitality and welcomed me into their spaces.During weekly meetings of each group, which were attended by twenty-five to thirty-five students, I took notes in addition to conducting multiple ethnographic interviews with eight key participants over the course of two years.The meeting attendees were almost entirely undergraduates, roughly seventy percent male and thirty percent female, and nearly all were white.They comprised a broad set of academic majors, with a strong emphasis on STEM fields, economics, and philosophy, which is a common pre-law major, a popular career goal for many of these students.I also attended regional conferences with group members, including both the California College Republican Conference in San Jose, California, and the Young Americans for Liberty Spring Summit in Los Angeles.
In conducting this research, I chose to avow my political stance early on so as not to misrepresent myself to either group.Given my racialized and gendered presentation as a Black man, it is reasonable to assert that my embodied presence was marked in these overwhelmingly white spaces.While I did bring my (progressive) political leanings and values to this work, the research caused me to be more attentive to and reflective in how and why I think what I think.I initially expected that race would overshadow gender in my engagement, such that there were few to no Black participants and many male ones.However, I came to find that misogyny and white supremacy are twin forces.Shared masculinity became ethnographically salient through invocations of misogyny, and my race became salient through invocations of white supremacy in ways that surprised me.Furthermore, under some circumstances, the intersection of my race and gender produced complex interactions (see hooks 2004; Majors and Billson 1992;Neal 2015).
Much of what follows is an exploration of those interactions.
Acknowledging my positionality as a Black male progressive researcher allowed me to interact with the white conservative undergraduate community in a conscious and intentional way.Although I started the research from a noninterventionist stance, I shifted stances throughout the ethnographic process.Some of these shifts may have resulted in limiting my subsequent access to spaces and conversations, while others potentially broadened my access in other areas.However, shifting stances was not just an ethnographic strategy.It also allowed me to maintain my sense of integrity throughout the research, especially in ethically precarious circumstances wherein I felt that not doing so would pose harm to vulnerable research participants.In the remainder of the article, I reflect on three ethnographic encounters in which my race and gender were salient in the white conservative spaces of my research.These encounters illustrate my developing understanding of my roles and responsibilities as a first-time ethnographer, as well as the complexity and utility of engaging one's subject position in ethnographic research.

RESEARCHER RACIALIZED AND GENDERED POSITIONALITY IN THREE ETHNOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTERS
The first encounter I discuss involves my passive participation in the telling of an offensive joke during a conservative conference that I attended with several of my study participants.This situation caused me to reflect on my noninterventionist stance as a researcher and reassess the cost of silence.Next, building on the lessons I learned from the first example, I consider my experience of tepidly intervening in a discussion about the formation of a future white ethno-state during a general body meeting of the Young Americans for Liberty.Lastly, I reflect on my experience of directly confronting a guest speaker after a group meeting, a moment that brought my subjectivity to bear, having developed a clearer sense of myself as a Black ethnographer over the course of this research.Taken as a whole, these three examples encapsulate my argument that the subjective stance of the researcher vis-a-vis the researched community is multifaceted and yields complex ethical, methodological, and analytical dynamics.Interrogating these dynamics head-on and addressing them in our ethnographic writing results in a more complete research account. 2

Ethnographer Silence
One of the first times a conflict arose between my subjectivity and my perception of my role as a researcher took place at a politically themed conference I attended alongside club members about two months into my research.The California College Republicans Conference, an annual multiday gathering of California-based chapters of the College Republicans, was held at the San Jose Convention Center in Spring 2017.I volunteered to drive three members of the club to the conference, which was over four hours away.
I did not know any of the passengers well prior to the car ride, but bonding with Trent (pseudonym), one of the club members, over our shared appreciation of the television show Rick and Morty resulted in an invitation to a party in a hotel room with about fifteen current and alumni members of the chapter.During this rare and illuminating opportunity, I was able to observe club members interact with each other and with other young conservatives in a less formal setting.
The lack of formality in the party brought forth a greater level of comfort, and jokes and commentary ensued.We played beer pong (with watermost people in the room were underage), disagreed about the impact of Trump's latest tweets, and chatted about the slates and candidates running for California College Republican leadership.Throughout the two or so hours I was present, we touched on a broad range of topics, most of which were quite thoughtful and benign, but some remarks shifted into varied degrees of edginess.Throughout the night, more than a few comments stunned me.However, none shocked me more than the remark "Conservative girls can't be raped," following a passing mention by one of the other members about the #MeToo movement.This quip was uttered by an alumnus of the university and a former College Republicans club member named Fred (pseudonym).I was dumbfounded.If this was an inside joke or a reference to one of the many memes that club members often alluded to in casual conversation (Muwwakkil 2019) who heard the remark, including several women, smiled and giggled a bit.After seeing my shock, a male club member, Joshua (pseudonym), whom I knew well, laughingly explained the joke to me.The implication, Joshua said, was that liberal young women often falsely "cry rape" for financial gain, for attention, or to slander the men they accuse, whereas conservative young women, morally principled as they are, are less likely to do so.Therefore, Joshua's reasoning went, it follows that conservative girls can't be raped because conservative girls don't cry rape.In other words, a charge of rape is always false.
Setting aside the jaw-dropping logical fallacy, which I had no intention of challenging, I had to weigh my options regarding how to react and the consequences of doing so.Were I to voice my outrage and challenge either Fred or Joshua, I could sacrifice my access to these literally closed-door spaces.My actions could also result in the members censoring themselves around me and could thus limit what I was able to observe in the future.In the moment, to my shame, I decided not to speak out.I grimaced a bit and looked away as another man in the room, Steven (pseudonym), uncomfortably chuckled and changed the subject.While I believe that the comment was intended to be in jest, I regret not condemning it and its horrifying implications (cf.P erez and Greene 2016).I thought at the time that a noninterventionist approach would produce the best ethnographic context for observation and understanding.What I failed to consider in my decision was my own positionality with respect to this community and the salience of my subjectivity in that space.My position as a graduate student was known and valorized by the largely undergraduate participants in my study.I had accomplished what they were aspiring to: an undergraduate degree.I was also approximately ten years older than most of the members, perhaps lending me an aura of maturity and wisdom.Additionally, my Black masculinity in this context could be seen as a marker of coolness among these young white men (Bucholtz 2011;Chun 2013), and the members may have been trying to impress me.Given the various possible readings of my subjective difference in that context, my silence in response to the rape joke was different than that of most of the other participants.Only belatedly did I realize that, independent of my desire to simply observe and report, my (non-) engagement in this moment conveyed meaning to the group.
The remark, and the others' approving response to it, contributes to a misogynist cultural ideology that deliberately discourages conservative women from coming forward with sexual assault complaints not only because they will not be believed, but also because they may be seen as liberal or perhaps as a bad conservative.Multiple aspects of my subject position may have implicitly suggested that I would respond well to such a joke.One was the fact that, even though everyone knew that I was a non-conservative researcher, I was also a man at a conservative conference that I had gone out of my way to attend.Additionally, like the majority of the students in the room, I was understood to be cisgender and heterosexual.(I am, in fact, cisgender and heterosexual, but none of the participants inquired as to these dimensions of my subjectivity).It is also worth noting that there is a history of the hypersexualized Black male that could have informed the baseline assumptions (Allen 2021).It is possible that the comment was a test of my reaction or a performance for my benefit.
It is also possible (indeed, likely, given my research) that these conservative students felt that women are more powerful than men in contemporary society, and thus criticizing women who "cry rape" may have been born of fear of false accusation.In this way, the joke can be understood as praising conservative women as safe for men to socialize with because only liberal women (falsely) accuse men of rape.This analysis views men, conservative or otherwise, as a vulnerable class in society, unreasonably subject to accusations of rape that are socially and materially consequential.I leave it to the reader to decide which world we currently occupy.
Regardless of the motivation for the joke, viewing this interaction as impacted by my structural positionality and identity (i.e., Black cool; grad student) illuminates both the research process and the possible interpretations of this moment.Deborah D'Amico-Samuels reminds us that "the connection between what we describe as social scientists and who we are personally and structurally needs to be a part of the way we design our methods as well as the way we analyze our data" (1997,73).I failed to consider this principle and therefore failed to recognize at the time that my presence not only likely affected the research context but also may have influenced these young people's worldview.I do not mean to overstate my impact on their lives, only to acknowledge that I in fact had some influence.I therefore had a responsibility to wield that power in such a way that consideration of my participants' humanity overruled consideration of the research context (Paris and Winn 2014).I now believe that staying silent in a space where I might have used my influence to shift or interrogate the group's ideas about sexual assault was an abdication of my responsibility as a researcher.Reflecting upon that reality after the fact prompted a shift in my stance in subsequent situations.

Ethnographer Curiosity
As noted above, my initial stance in my research was noninterventionist, during the weekly meetings of both the College Republicans and the Young Americans for Liberty; hence, I mainly observed and took notes without actively participating.However, as an ethnographer, I took a stance of curiosity, asking clarifying questions at relevant times.I was conscious not to argue with group members' positions from my own very different political perspective, as I was often tempted to do; instead, with each question I asked, I tried to give an opportunity for elaboration.I did not try to convince anyone to change their position, nor did I feel that anyone tried to change my mind.In fact, very rarely was I asked about my own political positionality at all, presumably because the group members believed that my policy positions could be predicted by my race and by my initial introduction to them as a non-conservative.However, at a Young Americans for Liberty general meeting four months into my fieldwork, I discovered that curiosity becomes a difficult stance to maintain when the discussion topic is advocacy for a white ethno-state-especially when the argument is predicated on the presumed inherent inferiority of Black and Brown people based on our supposed comparatively low IQ and biological penchant for criminality.Jake (pseudonym), the club member who espoused this position, often put on a show of resisting the alt-right moniker, but his statements (such as in this meeting) clearly aligned him with this ideology.I interacted with Jake on a few occasions throughout my research, as he was one of the more talkative members of the Young Americans for Liberty.As a frequent attendee and contributor to meeting discussions, he had gained popularity in the group for his "spicy" takes on issues-"spicy" being a term favored by these conservative students for "edgy" or transgressive rhetoric, a trait that was viewed as positive (Muwwakkil 2019).Jake was a white second-year history student who often wore a polo shirt with khakis, a style that emerged as an alt-right uniform after the notorious 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, featuring infamous white nationalist Richard Spencer as a speaker.Jake even had a "high and tight" haircut similar to Spencer's circa 2016.On the day that Jake made these comments, the meeting room was full; most attendees were regulars whom I recognized, although there were a few first-time visitors.This was the first time, at least in my presence, that race was discussed so openly at a conservative student group meeting.
The topic of white nationalism was introduced by the club president, Ryan (pseudonym), and arose from a discussion comparing different economic systems, which progressed to a conversation about US immigration policy.Jake, standing while he spoke, overtly steered the conversation toward white nationalism by first asserting that ethnically homogeneous societies are the most successful.Then he introduced racial elements, arguing that Western and white societies have been the most successful.Finally, his concluding policy recommendation was that US immigration policy should reflect these supposed facts.Jake's assumption, first implicit and then explicit, was that poor immigrants from Latin America are biologically prone to favoring socialism/communism (terms he used interchangeably), and so to allow immigrants from these nations into the United States would bolster the number of Democratic voters; like many US conservatives, Jake viewed the Democratic Party as having a socialist or communist ideology.Jake's argument was that immigration from south of the US border would knowingly lead to what Jake termed "white genocide."This openly racist term references an altright conspiracy theory known as the "great replacement" and entails a purported Jewish plot to eliminate the "white race" through miscegenation and forced assimilation (Kelly 2017). 3Therefore, Jake concluded, the US must limit immigration along political lines, impose voting restrictions such as ID laws, and implement any other strategy that would maintain a white numerical and political majority within its borders.Although he was the primary club member advocating such measures, he was supported by sporadic nods and bolstering comments from the club president.
In this moment, as a Black ethnographer, I was compelled to contemplate both my previous noninterventionist stance as a researcher and my racial positionality.I could remain quiet, while doing my best to conceal my shock, and keep taking notes.This non-response would likely allow Jake's openly racist ideas to go unchallenged and, perhaps, to be taken up by impressionable young people in the group to whom these ideas were new and may have seemed convincing.Or I could speak out, challenging Jake's conclusion and his cited "evidence" as 130 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL.31(2) grossly inaccurate and overtly racist.This course of action could potentially change the dynamic within the meeting.By taking the initial risk myself, I could either foreclose or create the opportunity for one of the other group members to stand against Jake's racist rhetoric.A further difficulty was that I had a personal stake in the outcome of the debate.Not only did I have my own strongly held personal opinion and political positionality, but I also understood that the conversation could be consequential to how the younger students in the room might understand the United States and the future of its people.As a Black voter, I was well aware of the nation's history of voter suppression (Ross 2014), and I understood that not challenging open advocacy for racism and race-based gerrymandering could lead to harm for people like me in the not-too-distant future.Therefore, I made the decision to intervene in the discussion.I raised my hand, and, after being called on by Ryan, I asked Jake several pointed questions about the logistics of his proposed ethno-state and how it might be brought about.I invited him or any other proponents of his position to state explicitly that violence was the means by which some or all of the United States could be made white-only.I asked a series of questions that I have tried to reproduce here: "By what procedure would individual Americans gain the designation of white?Who would decide?""How would mixed-race people be treated as well as those who were not seen as white in earlier periods of US history, such as the Irish, Italians, and Jews?" (Here I had in mind research by scholars such as Brodkin [1998], Guglielmo and Salerno [2003], and Ignatiev [1995]).This line of questioning was intended to guide listeners indirectly to recognize that the category "white" is socially constructed, just like all other racial categories, and that it has no basis beyond arbitrary phenotypical attribution and the structural power that attends that attribution.In other words, I tried to prompt the understanding-at least among other audience members, if not my interlocutor-that race is an ideologically driven social imposition.
I next turned to Jake's argument that Latin Americans are biologically predisposed to socialism.Instead of addressing the obvious absurdity that a preference for a political philosophy or economic system could be genetically inherited, I focused on the political tenets underlying his argument."Suppose," I said (to paraphrase myself), "it is in fact the case that a majority of immigrants from a given region come to the United States, take note of the policy positions from each political party, and consistently choose Democratic candidates over Republican.Then, is it possible that Democratic policies better suit the needs of these voters when compared to Republican policies?Which is to say, instead of writing off this demographic of voters as perpetually aligned with the Democratic party, why not give them a reason to vote Republican by changing your policies to better align with the will of the people?"I asked these questions not only to show how ridiculous the idea of biological political determinism is, but also to humanize the immigrant communities in question.By characterizing these voters as making rational decisions based on the available options, I hoped to validate the agency of all voters, whether immigrant or not.I also hoped that listeners would recognize that if their party was losing a particular demographic, it had a political responsibility to address its own failures; however, this final point was a little too on-the-nose for me to mention. 4  There were certainly risks and consequences associated with my course of action.I might have alienated the group by directly intervening in a conversation they were having among themselves, and this could have limited my future access to certain spaces or individuals.Additionally, this demonstration of my willingness to intervene when I strongly disagreed with an argument could influence which conversational topics the participants chose to bring up in my presence.With respect to this point, it is important to note that no formal or informal discussion of a white ethno-state ever came up in my presence outside of this single meeting.My decision to intervene thus may or may not have been a sacrifice from a research standpoint.However, I view it instead as a validation of the reality I was already experiencing.Being the only Black person in the room, especially in an avowedly conservative political space, is not a covert positionality, and this situation has analytical implications.Regarding ethnographers of color, bell hooks writes, "Can we believe that no one has considered and/or explored the possibility that the experiences of these nonwhite scholars may have been radically different in ways from their white counterparts and that they possibly had experiences which deconstructed such old-school ethnographic practice?" (1990, 126).Unlike the white ethnographers of the right wing whose AAA session I attended, my racial positionality never allowed me the possibility of hiding in plain sight: I was marked from the beginning.My interventionist stance was therefore a personal embrace of contextual dynamics that I was unable to avoid.Moreover, this stance freed me from the burden of wondering, as in the rape joke situation, whether I was passively endorsing noxious ideas through my silence and inaction.I was ultimately able to make peace with the simple ethnographic fact that, as a racialized researcher, I necessarily change white public space (Hill 1998;Page and Thomas 1994) when I am in it, and I concluded that any such impact might as well be intentional and politically informed.

Ethnographer Opposition
After shifting to an overtly interventionist stance after the last interaction, I was pleasantly surprised that my research participants continued to welcome me into their space.In fact, several weeks later, members of the Young Americans for Liberty invited me to accompany them to the regional Spring Summit Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center, which I did.I was still treated warmly at weekly meetings, and I continued to maintain consistent attendance at weekly meetings of the College Republicans and the Young Americans for Liberty throughout the school year.My relationship with both groups was good, and, as remarked upon by Erik (pseudonym), the president of the College Republicans, the members had come to see me as a consistent fixture during weekly meetings-so much so that, on the rare occasion that I missed a meeting, some members would ask why I wasn't there.Feeling this degree of acceptance and hospitality, not to mention visibility, helped me to feel more comfortable taking a direct interventionist stance again when the circumstances called for it.
One Monday night during a College Republicans meeting near the end of the school year, Erik made a surprise announcement that at the end of the meeting, a special guest would join the group for an informal discussion.Because it was lastminute, he explained, he didn't want to take up meeting time with this visit, but he welcomed anyone who was interested to stay behind after the meeting to meet and hear from the guest.I will not disclose the name of this guest so as to not contribute to his notoriety.Instead, I will refer to him as Brock.Brock was billed as a moderator of a prominent politically conservative subreddit on Reddit, an online community platform that has gained national attention for, among many other things, its hosting of alt-right discussions (Kelly 2017). 5 Erik said that Brock would discuss how he came to his present professional position, give advice to anyone interested in working in the "conservative influence space," and answer questions.While I did not recognize Brock's name, I was familiar with the subreddit he moderated and some of the controversy it had engendered.I decided to stay and hear what he had to say.
After the club meeting, Brock was ushered into the meeting room by one of the group's executive board members and took a seat in the circle of chairs, the typical configuration for these meetings.His appearance was unremarkable, in a five-yearsout-of-the-frat-house kind of way.He was accompanied by a white woman, who remained unintroduced and silent throughout the visit.Many of the members had opted not to stay, possibly because it was already ten o'clock on a weeknight, but about twenty members remained, including three women.As was the norm, I was the only Black person in the room and one of few people of color.
Erik introduced Brock as a media influencer, conservative commentator, and "pick-up artist."(I had to look that last one up afterward: Pick-up artists [PUAs] are an online community of men who deploy social and cognitive pseudoscience toward the goal of manipulating women into having sex with them [O'Neill 2018; Strauss 2005]).Scattered applause ensued.Remaining seated, Brock expressed his gratitude for being invited to address the group and began his brief monologue by noting that college campuses are an important battleground in protecting the right to free speech, a common sentiment among conservatives (Chemerinsky and Gillman 2017).At this point, I thought I knew where we were going.I had heard similar remarks at the Young Americans for Liberty Spring Summit in Los Angeles, condemning colleges and universities as sites of "liberal indoctrination."The first sharp turn away from my expectations occurred when Brock stated that when Nazi soldiers invaded France during World War II, "not all the women who were raped by Nazis didn't enjoy it."This outrageous statement caused me to physically lean forward as I tried to keep my face from registering shock and disgust.It turned out that Brock, in keeping with PUA ideologies, was building the case for biological gender determinism by suggesting that women cannot help but be attracted to "alpha male" behaviors such as those exhibited by Nazis.The statement perpetuated the vile ideology, popular in alt-right spaces, that even if a woman's mind says no, her body says yes (Denes 2011).
Prior to that moment, I had never heard rape sincerely described in such a cavalier manner.Even the rape joke I had heard in the hotel room several months prior had been framed as humor.I was astonished not only by the repugnant ideas Brock 132 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL.31(2) was presenting, but also by his very matter-of-fact, unmitigated manner of speaking.It was as though he did not feel he was saying anything controversial-and perhaps he believed that, in the context of this conservative student group, he was not.In that moment, as in the instance of the ethno-state discussion, I felt a sense of ethical responsibility to directly challenge him that went beyond ethnographic curiosity.I decided to engage Brock in dialogue both to see how serious he was, and also to see if his ideas had support in the room.While I might have feigned curiosity in an attempt to mitigate assertions of bias on my part, I deemed the content of Brock's assertions so vile that I hope my participants knew I was against them.Before I could raise my hand, Brock transitioned into speaking about the current generation of young men growing up in "fatherless homes" and therefore "working out their masculinity in nontraditional spaces" (i.e., online spaces such as his subreddit).He argued that (to roughly paraphrase his words) these young men were looking for guidance and would be receptive to others who validated their perspective on masculinity, who supported them for wanting to push the boundaries imposed by "political correctness" or to tell the "truth" about feminism.Brock then suggested that we, as older, college-educated men, were well positioned to influence these young men and thus gain an online following.His message boiled down to: Misogyny has worked out for me, and it can for you too.Most of my subreddit users don't have very good grammar, and you, as university students who write coherently, can therefore gain influence with them.
I gestured to ask a question at this point, still trying to control my facial expression.I asked Brock what his goals were, and where he planned to lead the young men on his subreddit.My questions were something like, "Do you have an underlying political philosophy?Are you promoting a group, organization, or policy?I understand that you're describing the state of affairs and the potential to gain influence and a following, but to what end?" His response was even-tempered.He broke eye contact with me and addressed the rest of the audience, saying something to the effect of, "Before you can go anywhere, you have to have a following.So, this is just step one.Once you're popular online, lots of opportunities open up and you can go anywhere you want." Again, I signaled to ask another question, but I did not wait to be called upon.I asked, in essence, "So, you don't have a specific cause or goal apart from gaining popularity and influence.And you are willing to exploit emotionally vulnerable young men by doubling down on their worst instincts.Can you explain to me how that is not evil?"I noticed a few head nods among the students.Brock, once again, looked away from me and addressed his response to the rest of the group.He said, roughly, "See, this is good.Because when the left attacks us, it just amplifies our message."I quickly responded, a bit more agitated this time, "I'm not attacking you.It seems like you knowingly and willingly are looking to influence, by your own account, emotionally vulnerable young men by specifically keying into their angst about feminism.And you haven't expressed any goals beyond wanting their support for your own personal ends.So again, how is this not evil?"Brock continued to talk to the audience rather than to me, saying that controversy is beneficial for online influencers and recommending that if conservative students want to gain online influence, they should create fake accounts pretending to be liberals and then attack the posts that appear under their own names."This way," he explained, "other liberals will pile on, and your signal will be amplified."Again, I was astonished-not only because Brock did not address my questions, but also because he was entirely transparent about the intellectual vacuousness of his position.It seemed to me that in his view, it did not matter what ideas conservatives put forward.He would embrace any position if there was something to gain from it.This was opportunism masked as activism.
I felt a conflicting mixture of emotions: frustration that regardless of the incoherence of his strategy, it had gained him prominence, anger at Brock for consciously targeting a vulnerable population, and compassion-not for Brock, but for the students listening to him.I realized that his presentation had two goals, one overt and the other covert.The overt goal was recruitment: to encourage more young men to participate in his subreddit and spread nonsense in the name of "spiciness/edginess."He worked to accomplish this goal through flattery, saying that because the group members were college students, they had an advantage over most other users.Recruiting these students would enable him in turn to exploit the vulnerabilities of younger and less well-educated men.Brock's covert goal was for him to exploit the college students' own vulnerabilities in precisely the same way.He rhetorically framed the students as agents of influence, but he also positioned himself to influence them.In the same way that the young men on his subreddit were susceptible to victimization by these college students, so too were the college students susceptible to victimization by Brock.
While this exchange was exceedingly frustrating and troubling for me, it also crafted a lens through which I could, a bit more clearly, see the humanity of the conservative students in my study.Some of those in the audience seemed unfazed by the encounter, but I did see the proverbial scales fall from some students' eyes.After I spoke, two other students, both white men, followed up with similar questions, asking the speaker about his purpose.When I talked to club members about this incident several months later, some reported that they regarded Brock as "kinda out there."These reactions give me hope that conservative students do not always or inevitably succumb to their attempted exploitation by older men in their political camp.They may still maintain their conservative leanings, but they see the game for what it is (see also Muwwakkil 2019).
Brock gave the group what he thought they wanted to hear: misogyny and grievance about the victimization of conservatives.But underneath it all, his political philosophy was vacuous.He was not conservative; he was a con man.From my positionality, I could see the con man for what he was and sympathize with his victims, not using their naivete as an excuse, but holding Brock responsible for spreading misinformation.In my master's thesis, I could have used this experience as affirmative evidence that conservative campus groups are alt-right indoctrination hubs, willing to invite a terrible person to share terrible ideas.I might have come to conclude that the speaker's views and goals aligned with most club members' thoughts and opinions.But having lived my life as a Black man in the United States, I understood firsthand the experience of being seen as the victimizer and rarely the victimized.Moreover, my position as a community outsider, a graduate student, and a person with ten more years of life experience than the community members shaped the possibilities of my interaction.Ultimately, my own cultural memory allowed me to actively choose to look beyond the surface of this encounter to see the humanity of the white students in this situation.
This incident caused me to see the research I was doing in an entirely different light.I had come to my ethnographic work out of curiosity, assuming participants' beliefs were sincerely held.And I believe that the majority of the people I encountered in my research were indeed sincere in their conservative principles.But through my interaction with Brock, I saw that there was also clear and conscious exploitation at work in conservative spaces.My initial impression was that the conservative students were colluding in this exploitation, but I came to see that, to a large extent, they themselves were its targets.These students were (and are) being preyed upon by older, ostensibly conservative men to gain their support.Such men purport to have political or philosophical principles, but many are, in fact, merely opportunists.For these "influencers," conservatism is a con that often utilizes social media in platforming and rebranding patriarchy, sexism, and racism in plain sight (see Muwwakkil 2019 regarding plausible deniability and memeing).
I am not suggesting that philosophical conservatism is necessarily a bad-faith project.However, much of the contemporary incitement to activism in the younger generation toward conservative talking points, especially alt-right positions, are disingenuously argued.My attention to my positionality afforded me enough perspective to see, in context, what might have been obscured if I had taken a different approach.In all three of these examples, overtly engaging my positionality informed my ethnographic analysis, revealing nuanced insights that might have otherwise escaped me.

CONCLUSION
The panel discussion I describe in the introduction stands as a microcosm of where we are and where we are going as a discipline.As those white panelists demonstrated, within anthropology, it is still permissible to assume whiteness as unmarked, but, as the audience response showed, it is also true that more and more scholars are willing and able to admonish scholars against doing so.As anthropology, like many other disciplines, confronts its legacy of anti-Blackness and increases participation among racialized ethnographers, more attention will be called to practices that uphold white supremacy-as well as intersecting forms of oppression such as misogyny.In-depth, on-record discussion of the interaction between the researcher's subject position and the ethnographic context in which they work is one such practice.
No one has lived a day outside their own body.We as researchers necessarily bring that same body and its attendant histories to the research context.While we may hope for the ability to describe anthropological phenomena through our disciplinary training and scholarly expertise, all we observe is necessarily contextualized by who we are, where we look, and what questions we ask.This limitation ought not to be seen as a shortcoming but rather as a recognition of reality.shying away from this point, or leaving it at the margins of our writing, we might more meaningfully embrace it for richer, more insightful ethnographic engagements.I have recounted just three of many instances where my positionality interacted with the research context of my ethnographic work.There were many more examples.My hope is that this article will serve to encourage ethnographers to consciously consider how their body influences the research context.I also hope that we will not only discuss these impacts in conference presentations, personal communications in hallways, or behind office doors, but also ensure that these issues make it into our manuscripts and emphasize how they shape our analysis.Doing so will normalize active attention to researcher positionality as part of scholarly inquiry and provide models for how ethnographers from different subject positions might approach ethnographic research in potentially precarious contexts, especially where their positionality is marked as non-normative.
Jamaal Muwwakkil Department of Education, UCLA Education & Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095 E-mail: jamaal1313@ucla.eduACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the editors and reviewers.Their constructive, insightful, and kind input was invaluable.Many thanks to members of my scholarly community who have patiently thought through with me many of the ideas represented in this article: Kendra Calhoun, Joy Garza, and deandre miles hercules.Thanks to Mary Bucholtz, Anne Charity Hudley, Lynn (Lina) Hou, and Lal Zimman for their mentorship and guidance.I appreciate the feedback I received on presentations of this work at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association and UC Santa Barbara's Language, Interaction, and Social Organization (LISO) research focus group.Lastly, I am deeply thankful to the participants in this study for their hospitality and generosity.

NOTES
1. Arturo Escobar's "The Limits of Reflexivity: Politics in Anthropology's Post-writing Culture Era" (1993) provides a thorough historical genealogy of this moment in anthropology, aptly centering the text Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Fox 1991).
2. In the following description of these ethnographic encounters, the participants are not quoted directly, as the interactions were not recorded and I do not have access to the speakers' exact wording.All speakers' names are pseudonyms.Because my participants were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, I did not want them to be identifiable in case they came to regret some of their words and/or behavior once they were older.
3. The "great replacement" theory has gained significantly more mainstream attention in the years since this study began.Promoted by prominent figures like Tucker Carlson on the Fox News channel as well as alternative media sources, the "great replacement" is based on the fear that Black and Brown people will supposedly replace the political power and culture of white people living in Western societies, including the United States and Europe.
4. None of these were ever answered in the moment.The club president went on to call on other club members who tangentially engaged with the broader subject matter.While no one overtly engaged me during the meeting, many club members talked to me about the questions I posed when the group went out to eat after the meeting.
5. While the term has fallen out of favor as of 2023, the "alt-right" validated rhetorical political pathways performed through antagonism.The acceptance and validation of this approach has been closely tied to the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
Who we are necessarily shapes what we see and how we see it.Instead of 134 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL.31(2)