Black servants soft-pedaled their true feelings in interviews with white researchers
Evidence
Much of the current scholarship by white women focusing on relationships between black women domestics and white female employers presents perspectives that highlight positives, obscuring the ways negative interaction in these settings have created profound mistrust and hostility between the two groups. Black female servants interviewed by white women often give the impression that their relationships with white women employers had many positive dimensions. They say what they feel is the polite and correct version of reality, often suppressing truths. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 192
Categorization
- QUESTION: Methodological point worth chasing: how do interview power dynamics systematically distort oral-history records across other asymmetric relationships? Ironic that this mirrors the very interviewer-subject inequality being studied.
- SEED: Angle for an essay: the suppressed truth in ‘grateful subject’ interviews as a general research pitfall, not just a race issue.
- XREF: connects to: Interviewed black servants suppressed negative truths out of politeness