Durrheim-Greener-Whitehead2015

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Durrheim-Greener-Whitehead2015
BibType ARTICLE
Key Durrheim-Greener-Whitehead2015
Author(s) Kevin Durrheim, Ross Greener, Kevin A. Whitehead
Title Race trouble: Attending to race and racism in online interaction
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Discursive Psychology, Racism, South Africa, delicates
Publisher
Year 2015
Language English
City
Month
Journal British Journal of Social Psychology
Volume 54
Number 1
Pages 84–99
URL Link
DOI 10.1111/bjso.12070
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

This article advocates the concept of race trouble as a way of synthesizing variation in racial discourse, and as a way of studying how social interaction and institutional life continue to be organized by conceptions of ‘race’ and ‘racism’. Our analysis of an online discussion at a South African University about the defensibility of a characterization of (black) student protesters as ‘savages’ revealed a number of familiar strategies: participants avoided explicit racism, denied racism, and denied racism on behalf of others. However, the aim of this analysis was not to identify the ‘real’ racism, but to show how race and racism were used in the interaction to develop perspectives on transformation in the institution, to produce social division in the University, and to create ambivalently racialized and racializing subject positions. We demonstrate how, especially through uses of deracialized discourse, participants’ actions were observably shaped by the potential ways in which others could hear ‘race’ and ‘racism’. Race trouble thus became manifest through racial suggestion, allusion, innuendo, and implication. We conclude with a call to social psychologists to study the ways in which meanings of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ are forged and contested in relation to each other.

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