Rawls2000

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Rawls2000
BibType ARTICLE
Key Rawls2000
Author(s) Anne Warfield Rawls
Title “Race” as an interaction order phenomenon: W. E. B. Du Boi's “Double consciousness” thesis revisited
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Race, Discrimination, Interaction order, Racism
Publisher
Year 2000
Language English
City
Month
Journal Sociological Theory
Volume 18
Number 2
Pages 241–274
URL Link
DOI 10.1111/0735-2751.00097
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

This article reports on a study of interaction between Americans who self-identify as Black and White that reveals underlying expectations with regard to conversation that differ between the two groups. These differences seem not to have much to do with class or gender, but rather vary largely according to self-identification by “race.” The argument of this paper will be that the social phenomena of “race” are constructed at the level of interaction whenever Americans self-identified as Black and White speak to one another. This is because the Interaction Order expectations with regard to both self and community vary between the two groups. Because the “language games” and conversational “preferences” practiced by the two groups are responsive to different Interaction Orders, the “working consensus” is substantially different, and as a consequence, conversational “moves” are not recognizably the same. It will be argued that a great deal of institutional discrimination against African Americans can be traced to this source.

Notes