Participants — Facing Whiteness

On this page, you will find information about the residents in the three sites who participated in face-to-face interviews: Battle Creek, MI; Cheyenne, WY; and Richmond, VA. In total, there are 110 participant profiles for you to explore. Whiteness Project creator Whitney Dow conducted all of the video interviews, while INCITE researchers conducted the audio interviews.

Within each participant’s page is a curated excerpt of the video or audio from their interview that we chose for its narrative qualities and relevance to each participant’s entire interview. You may view and download each participant’s entire interview transcript. Each page also has a participant-submitted biography, in addition to any participant-submitted photographs. When a biography was not submitted, we created one for a participant based on the biographical information available in their transcript. The tags at the bottom of each page reflect common themes discussed during that interview.

Dow’s interviewing approach draws from a variety of sources, including life history interviews. Life history interviews use a methodology that allows the interviewer and interviewee to have an extended conversation that touches on many aspects of the interviewee’s life story. Because the personal details discussed during such interviews makes guaranteed anonymity difficult, interviewees use their actual names. As such, interviewees are given more control over their interviews: one hallmark of the life history interview process is that interviewees have a chance to review and make edits to their interview transcript before it’s made public. As a result, some of the interview transcripts here have been edited for content, while a very small number were removed entirely.

Participants | Battle Creek, Michigan