This essay offers an in‐depth look at how some national discussions of race serve to heighten divisions and to distort Americans' understandings of racism. First, I contend that these controversies produce questions that create racial and partisan divisions. In other words, they focus on who or which group is guilty of racism. Second, I argue that such questions about racism depart from the kinds of questions that sociologists seek to answer. As such, racial controversies move the public away from applying a sociological imagination to the problem of racism.
This article focuses on racial discourses on political blogs during one of the first racial controversies of Obama's presidency. I examined the interactional dynamics in the comment sections of posts from left and right blogs during the controversy. I found that the majority of participants on partisan blogs either racialized the controversy to promote a racial claim or deracialized the controversy to protect a racial claim from potentially threatening aspects of a controversy. I focus on the ambiguous challenges to racialization and deracialization that occurred in the course of internal debate over the specifics of the case and over nonracial claims. I argue that blog participants preserved racial frameworks by managing the ambiguity that arises from debates. This article contributes to the literature on racial discourse and political polarization by identifying processes that help explain how each "national conversation on race" maintains and perhaps expands the partisan divide on race.
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