Zaid Jilani was right to criticize Lauren Farrell’s oversimplified and buzz-word filled post on the Urban Institute blog. But I think he also missed a different problem that it promoted. Writers like Farrell create a false dichotomy pitting “objective” research that supposedly reinforces historical power dynamics, exploits and harms communities of color, and aggrandizes white researchers against power-sharing research that “centers” communities and where researchers “check their bias” and “recognize their power.” This dichotomous thinking is patently silly, but what neither Farrell or Jilani acknowledge is that objectivity in research is a fool’s errand. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t rely on data collection or dismiss all facts as “perspectives.” But at every stage of research, humans are involved. We notice some things and discount others. We choose how to draw trend lines. We make human decisions about what data mean.

The idea, then, that we should support or reject “objective” research misses the point. Harvard Professor Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot has illuminated this challenge poignantly in her writings, explaining that when we attempt to remove ourselves from our research, what we are really doing is not trusting our readers to understand context. By revealing more of who we are as researchers (our starting assumptions, the biases we hold, what surprised us along the way, etc.), we give our audience the tools to separate us from our research and therefore see our subjects more clearly.