Tacit Racism

Anne Warfield Rawls,Waverly Duck

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226703725
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

We need to talk about racism before it destroys our democracy. And that conversation needs to start with an acknowledgement that racism is coded into even the most ordinary interactions.Every time we interact with another human being, we unconsciously draw on a set of expectations to guide us through the encounter. What many of us in the United States—especially white people—do not recognize is that centuries of institutional racism have inescapably molded those expectations. This leads us to act with implicit biases that can shape everything from how we greet our neighbors to whether we take a second look at a resume. This is tacit racism, and it is one of the most pernicious threats to our nation.In Tacit Racism, Anne Warfield Rawls and Waverly Duck illustrate the many ways in which racism is coded into the everyday social expectations of Americans, in what they call Interaction Orders of Race. They argue that these interactions can produce racial inequality, whether the people involved are aware of it or not, and that by overlooking tacit racism in favor of the fiction of a "color-blind" nation, we are harming not only our society's most disadvantaged—but endangering the society itself.Ultimately, by exposing this legacy of racism in ordinary social interactions, Rawls and Duck hope to stop us from merely pretending we are a democratic society and show us how we can truly become one.

CHAPTER ONE

“White People Are Nosey” and “Black People Are Rude”

Black and White Greetings and Introductory Talk

When I acted White she said I was the friendliest Black person she had ever known.

—Black college student

In this first chapter, we examine greetings and introductory talk in interactions between Black and White Americans, treating the differences as an illustration of the conflicting interaction order expectations manifest in tacit racism. We find that African Americans prefer introductory talk to respect a firm boundary between public and private that treats all status information as private, also preferring information to be volunteered rather than asked for. These preferences render introductory talk between Black and White Americans problematic because White Americans place a premium on sharing information about social categories at the very beginning of a conversation or relationship, even between strangers, and they prefer to ask and be asked via direct questions, rather than waiting for information to be volunteered. As Thomas Kochman (1981: 97–101) noted decades ago, White speakers seek information. Black speakers, on the other hand, place a premium on personhood and egalitarianism. This is still the case.

Thus, the title of this chapter: from the perspective of Black interaction order preferences, “White people are nosey”—the name we gave the narrative that initially afforded access to the whole realm of interaction order differences we present in this book. It was a lucky break that a Black colleague finally complained to Anne after a long series of questions about what Race differences look like in interaction: “You are just like every other White person, Nosey.” His reluctance to answer the information questions White speakers prefer made him seem “rude” from a White perspective, whereas he experienced Anne’s White interaction order preferences as “nosey.”

In studying introductory sequences between Americans self-identified as Black and White, we found significant differences in expectations about talk and interaction that render mutual understanding between Americans identified with different Races not only problematic, but impossible in many cases. Because these expectations are largely tacit—unconscious—people don’t realize they have them until they start observing interaction. We refer to these interaction order expectations as constitutive because the meaning of the interaction is constituted, or cooperatively created, using these expectations. We also refer to interaction order expectations as preferred, by which we mean that they are not just the expected way of doing things, but are required and considered better—even morally better—such that violating the preference not only interferes with sense-making, but conveys negative connotations about moral character.

The interaction order preferences about introductory talk that we identify as White take the form of seeking information about social categories: residence, occupation, marital status, and education top the list. White speakers prefer to locate information about these categories as “things in common” that they can then use to build a conversation on. The interaction order preferences we identify as Black, by contrast, protect category and status information, producing a kind of status equality in the Black community that Black Americans do not often experience elsewhere. Even volunteering status information violates this preference unless the information is needed for the clarification of something in the immediate context of an interaction.

Interaction orders have a strong moral dimension because the mutual coordination of interactional practices is necessary for the social achievement of self and mutual intelligibility, both of which are essential human goods without which we are not recognizably human (Goffman 1959; Garfinkel 1963; Rawls 1987, 2017, 2019). Orientation toward an interaction order is therefore a moral obligation of both self and sense. But because the moral demands of the interaction order preferences of Black and White Americans are different, they often violate one another’s moral sense. The Black self faces an additional challenge. As an individual self who is forced to achieve sense and self in two conflicting interaction orders, Black selves are simultaneously held to two different and conflicting sets of moral demands. In order to recognizably construct practices in the White interaction order domain, which is the taken-for-granted mode of interaction in most social institutions in the US, Black Americans need to violate the moral obligations of their own domain. These conflicting moral requirements confront the African American self throughout American society. Satisfying the White Other (as, for instance, by adhering to the expectation to ask for status categories) comes at the expense of violating their own moral commitment to equality. Thus, in addition to racism and exclusion, the Black American experience involves a high degree of moral tension, and this is in addition to the stigma of not having one’s talk and identity recognized and understood by White Americans.

The White practice of seeking category information is not random or individually motivated, and neither is the Black reluctance—even refusal—to answer. Both are social obligations within their respective interaction orders, and each makes sense in historical context. Interaction order expectations render interaction stable and meaningful for those who share them in common. While these preferences are not individually motivated, however, when asking questions or refusing to answer them violates the Other’s expectations, the violation tends to be explained through narratives that focus on individual (and group) motivation. As a consequence, interaction orders themselves and the role they play in tacit racism are obscured, while the motives that are inappropriately attributed to individuals and/or to entire racialized groups rise to prominence—perpetuating stereotypes about motives and the importance we place on them.

Instead of focusing on attitudes and stereotypes about Race that are the consequence of interactional problems, we argue that the key to understanding racism lies in the interactional details that generate those attitudes and stereotypes. The problem can be stated simply: Because African Americans prefer to avoid categorization, while White Americans prefer to build their conversations by eliciting categories from one another, the way White Americans go about formulating their greeting and introductory sequences constitutes a direct violation of African American interactional expectations and their underlying moral commitments. The same is true in reverse—when Black Americans don’t ask and answer questions, White Americans feel they are being rude and unfriendly on purpose. The difficulty is in coming to an understanding of what this looks like, and why it matters so much, that does not lose sight of the unconscious tacit interactional dimension in which it takes place.

The Quest to Document Tacit Interactional Differences

Our search for a way of understanding how and why Race is enacted in social interaction began in the late 1980s. Committed to the idea that all social facts must be achieved during interaction, Anne realized that people must also be enacting Race and challenged herself to find it.1 At Wayne State University in the early 1990s, a research team was assembled to undertake that work.2 After some preliminary field research that proceeded via observation and the collection of narratives about Race, we began making audio and video recordings of the sequential details of the interactional preference orders that were being described in the narratives.

The research proceeded in a number of different ways: we did fieldwork, conducted interviews, held focus groups, led alumni and community groups, and videotaped the interactions. The videos from which the transcripts of Black and White introductory sequences in this chapter were made came from a research project in which student volunteers of the same gender participated. The transcripts of introductory talk are from two pairs of women. We avoided mixed-gender pairs so as to keep the focus on Race. We settled students in a room in pairs—White/White, Black/Black, and White/Black—explained the research design and had them sign a permission waiver for us to videotape. We turned on the camera, told them to get to know each other, and left them in the room to talk for five to ten minutes.

The narratives about “nosey White people” that we had already collected had alerted us to the importance of the very beginning of introductory sequences. The challenge was to create a context in which these beginnings would occur as naturally as possible. We had heard some introductions in passing. But getting them on tape was tricky. For any two people, an introduction only happens once in a lifetime and it goes by quickly. We also knew that because the interactional preference orders in play are largely tacit—and unconscious—only coming to consciousness when they fail, the narratives we had collected were likely to have focused on failures, leaving open the question of what successful introductory sequences would have looked like. We wanted to see what it would look like if two Black speakers did a greeting sequence without violating one another’s expectations. We also wanted to see what it would look like for White speakers. The introductions we contrived for the research project were designed to show us what kind of talk Black and White speakers preferred, so that we could understand why the variations by Race that were reported in the narratives had been so upsetting.

There is an additional bonus to looking at introductions. People meeting for the first time are strangers (unless they have heard about each other before). The meaning of an interaction between strangers must be achieved over the course of that interaction without recourse to prior knowledge. Participants cannot rely on prior knowledge about each other that they do not have or on symbolic meanings they may not share. Grammar and syntax alone are not sufficient to settle on a single meaning in most cases. Under such circumstances, strangers are forced to cooperate in the use of finely tuned (turn-by-turn) interaction order expectations even more than people ordinarily are. Failure to coordinate this interactional dimension can leave an interaction with no mutual meaning and many negative impressions.

If introductory talk is not produced with an orientation to shared interactional preferences—that is, if it doesn’t exhibit an orientation that is recognizable as an orderly practice to all parties—it cannot be mutually understood. This is the strong sense of “local order” involved in the conception of interaction order: a practice is only mutually intelligible insofar as it can be recognized by all parties to an interaction, and mutual recognition requires that a practice be witnessable in its orientation to a preferred order in a way that can be recognized by others. The weak sense of social order, typically indicated by the term norms, says only that aspects of social practice are typical, valued, or representative, not that they are necessary for or “constitutive” of understanding. In this sense, the constitutive expectations we examine are much stronger than norms because the penalty for violating them is built-in: they are self-organizing (Rawls 1989, 2019).

Because the constitutive interaction orders we focus on are local—and emerge from the needs of interaction rather than being imposed on interaction by large-scale “macro” structures—they take a different form in different places and situations. Because Black and White Americans rarely have extended interactions with one another, the interaction orders they are familiar with will have emerged separately without much contact between them. As Du Bois (1903) noted, Black and White Americans inhabit separate worlds side by side. We argued in the introduction that the “doubleness” involved in experiencing both social worlds is something African Americans are aware of, while White Americans for the most part are not. Not only do White Americans typically not see both worlds; they often believe that “seeing” Race is itself racist—committing themselves to pretending they are color-blind—when the society they live in and the practices they engage in every day embed racism at almost every turn. What we need is to see more of the Race in our actions—not less.

White Greeting and Introductory Sequences

We collected many Black and White introductory sequences and narratives we were told about them. For reasons of space, we chose to focus on one transcript of each kind—referring to them as illustrations of a type. Following these illustrations, we examine a selection of the narratives we collected about problems with introductory talk in order to explore the differences further. Obviously every introductory sequence is different in many ways. But we argue that there are preferred characteristics of what we refer to as the Black introductory type and the White introductory type that are essential to achieving mutual understanding.

In presenting and analyzing these transcripts, we follow the conventions of conversation analysis and the Jeffersonian transcription system.3 The first transcript we present illustrates a White introductory sequence of the preferred type that was videotaped during the research project at Wayne State University. As soon as the researcher left the room (line 7), the two White female participants (Sue and Mia—both pseudonyms) began to establish categories that they fit into: Where do you live around here? (line 9); What are you majoring in? (line 21); What year is this for you? (line 25); What are you doing for a job? (line 30); So what do you major in? (line 38).

It is important to note that the information exchange proceeds via asking category questions, not by volunteering information. White speakers do not generally volunteer information that is not asked for. They prefer to ask and be asked. Black speakers, by contrast, prefer to volunteer information. To say that these are preferences means that the occurrence or non-occurrence of “volunteering” and “asking” has implications for both meaning and the assessment of moral character and mutual commitment. Preference means that the expectation is constitutive of understanding such that the implications of the same “move” are different in a Black introductory sequence than they would be in a White introductory sequence.4 White speakers should ask. If they don’t, it means something and is “accountable.” Black speakers should not ask. And if they do, it means something and is “accountable.”

Two White Women (R is the researcher)

1. 1. R: Okay, so why don’t you grab a seat here and just—um—take a
2. 2. few minutes to get t’know each other and I gotta check on the
3. 3. other—um—students and I’ll be back.
4. 4. Sue: Okay
5. 5. Mia: Okay
6. 6. Sue: Allrye
7. 7. Mia: Hh hh hh: ((sound of door closing))
8. 8. (2.0)
9. 9. Sue: So um: (.) do you live around here
10. 10. (1.0)
11. 11. Mia: Ah: (.) yeah (.) no
12. 12. Sue: no
13. 13. Mia: No, I have t’drive but I don’t, like, live here—I live in Canton.
14. 14. Where do you live?
15. 15. Sue: Um, Dearborn.
16. 16. Mia: Oh really?
17. 17. (1.0)
18. 18. Mia: Hmm . . .
19. 19. Sue: On da west side origh:[t hh hhh]
20. 20. Mia: [hh hh hh]
21. 21. Mia: Yeah what you’re majoring in?
22. 22. Sue: Um, I’m not really sure, probably social work
23. 23. Mia: Oh reall[y]
24. 24. Sue: [yeah]
25. 25. Mia: What year is this for you?
26. 26. Sue: Well I have a BFA in, umm, natural Fine Arts in literature (and theater)
27. 27. and I’m just, um, pre- ( ) so I’m (planning) t’hh back to schoo::l
28. 28. I think social work but—um—my job doesn’t allow me
29. 29. to really go full time right now.
30. 30. Mia: What’re you doing for a job?
31. 31. Sue: Um, I work at Second City.
32. 32. (0.5)
33. 33. Mia: Oh do you?
34. 34. Sue: Yeah so I’m tired. It’s just demanding of time and [energy]=
35. 35. Mia: [Right]
36. 36. Sue: =and so is the social work department so I can’t do both s[o]
37. 37. Mia: [hh heh heh heh-hh]
38. 38. Sue...