“Categorizing the Categorizer”: The Management of Racial Common Sense in Interaction

Abstract

Racial Common Sense in Interaction 2 AbstractIn this paper, I consider one mechanism by which racial categories, racial "common sense," and thus the social organization of race itself, are reproduced in interaction. I approach these issues by using an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to analyze a range of practices employed by participants of a "race-training" workshop to manage the normative accountability involved in referring to the racial categories of others when describing their actions, and thus in using racial common sense in talk-ininteraction. This accountability arises in part because a speaker's use of a racial category to explain someone else's actions may provide a warranted basis for recipients to treat the speaker's own racial category as relevant for understanding and assessing the speaker's actions. I describe three main ways in which speakers can manage this accountability, namely generalizing race, localizing race, and alluding to race. My analysis shows that, even in attempting to resist racial common sense in accounting for their own actions and those of others, speakers orient to race as a normative framework according to which individuals will produce their own actions and interpret those of others, and thus reproduce it as relevant for understanding social action. This research contributes to advancing knowledge in the fields of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, racial studies, and categorical inequality.

Discursive Approaches to Race and Racism

“…Some studies have, however, focused on people of color (e.g., Hughey, 2008), or on racial or ethnic categories and identities more generally (e.g., Durrheim, et al, 2011;Hansen, 2005;Verkuyten, 2004;Whitehead, 2009Whitehead, , 2012Whitehead, , 2013aWhitehead, , 2013b.…”

“…As a result, research based on data of this sort has often taken the interactional organization and reproduction of racial and ethnic categories as its primary focus, independently of whether they are associated with phenomena around self-understanding or "selfhood" that typically characterize research grounded in the concept of "identity" (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000), and independently of whether the talk being examined can or should be considered "racist". This focus allows for the examination of the social-structural features of racial and ethnic category systems, and the interactionally situated use and self-administration thereof, without assuming that the participants involved identify with or are invested in them (Whitehead, 2009), while addressing some of the difficulties in defining and using the concept of racism associated with some of the approaches discussed above. Moreover, as Whitehead and Lerner (2009, p. 614) note, although "racist discourse is certainly a crucial object of study, such discourse depends upon the availability of the racial categorization of persons as a resource", and the social organization of racial categories "underpins not just racist discourse, but also any other form of discourse in which race is used, including anti-racist discourse" (Whitehead & Lerner, 2009, p. 614).…”

An Ethnomethodological, Conversation Analytic Approach to Investigating Race in South Africa

“…The application of this approach to the present data corpus proceeded by initially listening to all the recordings, and collecting and producing rough transcripts of all stretches of interaction in which race was treated as relevant, either explicitly or allusively (see Whitehead 2009). This overall collection of race-relevant stretches of interaction was then divided into sub-collections that shared common features in terms of the practices employed by speakers, or speakers' orientations to the contingencies through which race came to be treated as consequential.…”

“…Previous research (Whitehead 2009) has examined speakers' use of list construction practices to formulate race in general, thereby claiming that what they are saying does not apply to any specific racial category. In Excerpt 1 8 below, a speaker produces a similar generalising practice in the course of complaining about crime in South Africa.…”

“…The guest thus interrupts her utterance to parenthetically insert 'doesn't matter which colour they are or which race they are' into it (cf. Mazeland 2007;Whitehead 2009). This serves as a generalising practice by virtue of explicitly claiming that her utterance should be heard as applying to people of all possible racial categories, rather than as alluding only to a particular racial category or set of categories.…”