“Fractured Reflections” of High-Status Black Male Presentations of Self: Nonrecognition of Identity as a “Tacit” Form of Institutional Racism

Problems Establishing Identity/Residency in a City Neighborhood during a Black/White Police–Citizen Encounter: Reprising Du Bois’ Conception of Submission as “Submissive Civility”

“…As with other aspects of Black/White interaction that we have documented, in which Interaction Order differences by Race are mirror opposites (e.g., volunteering vs. being asked in greetings, Rawls ; being confronted with responses that misrepresent your identity and doing a “nonresponse,” Rawls and Duck ), the mirror opposite Interaction Order expectation we find here is that the Black American preference for being civil, while at the same time asserting one's identity and rights, is interpreted as resistance, which is convenient for the police as a pretext for arrest. Without an understanding of Interaction Order differences, and how police and other authorities enforce deviations from White norms, such injustices will continue.…”

“…This account performs a nonresponse to PO2's use of Black slang, and what it implies about CR's identity (Rawls and Duck ). PO2 follows up with a direct accusation, phrased as a question, “Do you actually live here?” (line 66): “actually” proposes a contrast (Clift ) between CR's version of events and “reality.” While PO2's subsequent repair, “I mean still?” downgrades the challenge (allowing that CR may have lived there at one point), it preserves an accusatory edge.…”

Racist Encounters: A Pragmatist Semiotic Analysis of Interaction

“…Second, because the interactions captured here are extreme, the danger of confusing racism as a category of practice versus a category of analysis (Brubaker 2012) is practically solved. As readers will appreciate, there can be general agreement that these episodes are, in fact, racist (Jackson 2008; Rawls and Duck 2017). Again, our primary analytic aim is to use these naturalistic examples to lay out the different semiotic structures of up- and downshifting and to explore how actors can use these modalities—this mode of analysis specifies and further unpacks notions of categorization and typification.…”

Activating Controlling Images in the Racialized Interaction Order: Black Middle‐Class Interactions and the Creativity of Racist Action

“…While Anderson's () research is U.S.‐based, the scarce research on Britain's black middle‐class has highlighted how black professionals are also subject to such a deficit of credibility—what Wallace (:467) refers to as a process of “class‐imaging” (see Meghji ; Rollock et al ; Wallace ). In response to this class‐imaging, research in both the United States and Britain has shown that the black middle‐class engage in strategies of impression management to “prove” their class status, such as wearing smart clothes and speaking in refined manners (see Anderson ; Lacy ; Meghji ; Rawls and Duck ; Rollock et al ; Wallace ). Nevertheless, this impression management is often not enough to overcome the combined strength of white ignorance and controlling images, and black professionals continue to be subject to racial microaggressions regardless of their impression management strategies…”

“…Rawls and Duck () argue that this failure of whites to recognize “high‐status” black people's impression management signals the breakdown of an interaction order, given that interaction orders are supposedly built on the shared trust in other actors' performances. However, in this paper I argue that such nonrecognition of black professionals' impression management is essential to the racialized interaction order.…”