Extreme Case (Re)formulation as a Practice for Making Hearably Racist Talk Repairable

Abstract

This paper investigates the interactional organization of racism through participant production and uptake of explicit racial membership categories across a corpus of 50+ hours of audio/videorecorded interaction in three U.S. states. The discourse analysis examines one participant method for addressing "hearably racist" talk: echoing extreme versions of the problematic utterance to provide opportunities for repair work on inferable associations between membership categories and category-bound activities. Orienting to implicit inferential material as the source of trouble licenses participant account-seeking; treating the racism as a repairable downgrades its status as an overt instance of racism. KeywordsRacism, membership categorization, extreme case formulations, repair, conversation analysis,Communication is proffered as the solution to a variety of social problems. Parents are told to "talk to your kids about drugs" 1 (Craig, 2005). Youths are encouraged to "use your voice" and "speak up" 2 in bullying situations (e.g., Bhat, 2008). "Just say no" 3 is a common strategy urged for refusing drugs or unwanted sexual advances (Kitzinger & Frith, 1999). And advice about responding to racist comments not only suggests there is an obligation to reply 4 , but that replies should convey disapproval and question speakers' reasoning 5 . Yet these well-intended admonitions often fail to account for how people actually interact and the multiple (at times contradictory) functions that talk serves. For example, Kitzinger and Frith (1999) showed that refusals are complex conversational actions accomplished by many tactics besides saying "no";and van Dijk (1992) illustrated how talk about race makes racist identities salient. Studies such as these demonstrate that the societal ideal of directly addressing social problems can be at odds with how and why talk unfolds in particular ways.This paper takes a discourse analytic approach to interpretations of racism in ordinary conversation. Two difficulties in pinning down "racism"-for participants and analysts-include(1) explicitly racist stances are rarely espoused, indeed, potentially racist discourse is often delicately introduced; and (2) "calling out" or otherwise obviously disaligning may be dispreferred, sanctionable, or face-threatening (e.g., van Dijk, 1992; Stokoe, 2015 [this issue];Whitehead, 2009; Whitehead, 2015 [this issue]). This paper analyzes examples in which participants explicitly name a racial category, associate it with a negatively-assessed activity, and they or their interlocutors orient to that as problematic.Drawing on conversation analytic membership categorization analysis (Stokoe, 2012;Bushnell, 2014) and grounded practical theory (Craig & Tracy, 1995), the analysis describes a practice deployed in response to naturally-occurring possibly-racist talk in recordings of private 4 face-to-face conversations. The practice involves jokingly taking the hearably racist utterance seriously/literally and reformulating it back to the speaker in such a way ...

Discursive Approaches to Race and Racism

“…Discursive research on racial subjectivities, identities and categories proceeding from a range of theoretical and analytic perspectives has, unsurprisingly, tended to be framed primarily in relation to racism and anti-racism (e.g., Goldberg, 1993;Hughey, 2007Hughey, , 2008Lewis, 2004;Robles, 2015;Verkuyten, 1997;Verkuyten, et al, 1995;Whitehead, 2015;Zajicek, 2002).…”

“…However, a number of studies based on naturally occurring interactions have focused on phenomena relating to racism (while approaching it as a participants' rather than an analysts' category), including studies of denials of racism (Barnes, Palmary, & Durrheim, 2001) reports of racist insults (Stokoe & Edwards, 2007) and responses to and resistance of racism (Robles, 2015;Whitehead, 2015).…”

Admissions of racism in discourse on migration in Greece: Beyond the norm against prejudice?

“…A strand of discursive research that draws explicitly from conversation analysis (CA) and ethnomethodology has attempted to uncover the ways in which participants themselves treat discourse on prejudice and racism as potentially problematic as well as the different strategies they mobilize in accounting for prejudice (Antaki, ; Edwards, ; Rapley, 2001; Whitehead & Stokoe, ). Robles (), for example, examines how people manage hearably racist talk by echoing previous turn extreme case formulations in order to do repair work in discourse. She discusses how participants orient to racist talk and problematizes treating racism as repairable insofar as it downgrades its status as an overt instance of racism.…”

Responding to -isms

“…Therefore, potential -isms are "often delicately introduced" (Robles, 2015) and managed in ways that show speakers' "orientations to a (relatively contemporary) set of norms proscribing open expressions of" prejudice (Whitehead, 2015). As Stokoe notes, "'Real' -isms are designed to be withdrawable-from" and members "build turns that are defeasible; that is, they are possibly and accountably not -isms but 'mere description,' or something else."…”

“…As Stokoe notes, "'Real' -isms are designed to be withdrawable-from" and members "build turns that are defeasible; that is, they are possibly and accountably not -isms but 'mere description,' or something else." These strategies can work to avoid or discredit accusations of prejudice, making it hard for speakers to address and challenge possible -isms (Robles, 2015).…”