Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T21:16:04.336Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Membership categorization analysis of racism in an online discussion among neighbors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Natasha Shrikant Open the ORCID record for Natasha Shrikant [Opens in a new window]
Natasha Shrikant*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Natasha Shrikant Department of Communication University of Colorado, Boulder Hellems 96 UCB 270 Boulder, CO 80303-0270, USA[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article addresses relationships between micro and macro aspects of language use through analyzing online interactions among neighbors discussing racism in their neighborhood. Membership categorization analysis supplemented with critical theory highlights how the ways neighbors name, characterize, and position categories orients to their rhetorical and identity goals (to construct reasonable stances, to seem not racist), which in turn motivates alignment with critical, folk, or colorblind ideologies of racism. Thus, ideologies do not determine interactional choices participants make, but rather are constituted by those choices. Findings also illustrate how discursive strategies such as reported speech, absurdity, three-part lists, and metadiscourse support ways that neighbors organize categories and achieve their aims. Additional contributions to this study include demonstrating the utility of membership categorization analysis for analyzing discourses of racism and providing practical insight into how racially diverse groups can have productive conversations about racism. (Racism, ideology, membership categorization analysis)*

Type
Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 237 - 258
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

My greatest thanks to Karen Tracy for providing feedback on an earlier version of this work. This article was also extremely improved through the feedback provided by the Language in Society anonymous reviewers. Last, I would also like to thank the conference reviewers and attendees for their feedback at the 2017 Annual International Communication Association conference in San Diego, CA.

References

Alim, H. Samy; Rickford, John R.; & Ball, Arnetha F. (eds.) (2016). Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625696.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Almasy, Steve; Yan, Holly; & Holcombe, Madeline (2020). Protesters feel joy after four former officers hit with new charges in George Floyd's death. CNN, June 3. Online: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/03/us/us-protests-wednesday-george-floyd/index.html.Google Scholar
Antaki, Charles (2003). The uses of absurdity. In van den Berg, Harry, Wetherell, Margaret, & Houtkoop-Steenstra, Hanneke (eds.), Analyzing race talk: Multidisciplinary perspectives on the research interview, 85–102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Augoustinos, Martha, & Every, Danielle (2007). The language of ‘race’ and prejudice: A discourse of denial, reason, and liberal-practical politics. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 26:123–41. Online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X07300075.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bailey, Benjamin (2001). The language of multiple identities among Dominican Americans. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10:190–223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, Rusty (2006). Language ideology and racial inequality: Competing functions of Spanish in an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant. Language in Society 35:163–204. Online: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404506060088.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Billig, Michael (1999). Conversation analysis and the claims of naivety. Discourse & Society 10:572–76. Online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926599010004007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Billig, Michael (2001). Humour and hatred: The racist jokes of the Ku Klux Klan. Discourse & Society 12:267–89.10.1177/0957926501012003001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackledge, Adrian (2006). The racialization of language in British political discourse. Critical Discourse Studies 3:61–79. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17405900600589325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo (2003). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary (2010). White kids: Language, race, and styles of youth identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511975776CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary (2011). ‘It's different for guys’: Gendered narratives of racial conflict among white California youth. Discourse & Society 22:385–402. Online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926510395832.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buttny, Richard (1997). Reported speech in talking race on campus. Human Communication Research 23:477–506. Online: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1997.tb00407.x.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carbaugh, Donal (2005). Cultures in conversation. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Craig, Robert T. (2008). Metadiscourse. In Donsbach, Wolfgang (ed.), International encyclopedia of communication, 1–3. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Online: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405186407.wbiecm078.Google Scholar
Collins, James (2017). Dilemmas of race, register, and inequality in South Africa. Language in Society 46:39–56. Online: https://doi.org/10.1017/S004740451600083X.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberlé; Gotanda, Neil; Peller, Gary; & Thomas, Kendall (eds.) (1995). Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Cresswell, Catherine; Whitehead, Kevin A.; & Durrheim, Kevin (2014). The anatomy of ‘race trouble’ in online interactions. Ethnic and Racial Studies 37:2512–28. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.854920.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delgado, Richard, & Stefancic, Jean (2001). Critical race theory: An introduction. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Dori-Hacohen, Gonen (2020). The ‘long list’ in oral interactions: Definition, examples, context, and some of its achievements. Pragmatics 30(3):305–25. Online: https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.19007.dor.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Derek (1994). Script formulations: An analysis of Eeent descriptions in conversation. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 13:211–47. Online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X94133001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Derek (2003). Analyzing racial discourse: The discursive psychology of mind-world relationships. In van den Berg, Wetherell, & Houtkoop-Steenstra, 31–48.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman (2013). Language and power. London: Routledge.10.4324/9781315838250CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fitzgerald, Richard, & Housley, William (2015). Advances in membership categorisation analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.10.4135/9781473917873CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flores, Lisa (2018). Critical race theory. In Kim, Young Yun (ed.), The International encyclopedia of intercultural communication, 378–83. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Online: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118783665.Google Scholar
Foster, John D. (2009). Defending whiteness indirectly: A synthetic approach to race discourse analysis. Discourse & Society 20:685–703. Online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926509342062.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaudio, Rudolf P., & Bialostok, Steve (2005). The trouble with culture: Everyday racism in white middle-class discourse. Critical Discourse Studies 2:51–69. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17405900500052119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffin, Rachel A. (2010). Critical race theory as a means to deconstruct, recover and evolve in communication studies. Communication Law Review 10:1–9.Google Scholar
Hansen, Alan (2005). A practical task: Ethnicity as a resource in social interaction. Research on Language & Social Interaction 38:63–104. Online: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327973rlsi3801_3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hansen, Alan, & Milburn, Trudy (2015). Enacting cultural identities in conversation: Managing collaboration in two nonprofit organizations. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 8:224–36. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2015.1057906.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herron, Rachael (2018). I used to be a 911 dispatcher. I had to respond to racist calls every day. Vox, May 30. Online: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/5/30/17406092/racial-profiling-911-bbq-becky-living-while-black-babysitting-while-black.Google Scholar
Hester, Stephen, & Eglin, Peter (1997). Culture in action: Studies in membership categorization analysis. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.Google Scholar
Hill, Evan; Tiefenthäler, Ainara; Triebert, Christiaan; Jordan, Drew; Willis, Haley; & Stein, Robin (2020). 8 Minutes and 46 seconds: How George Floyd was killed in police custody. The New York Times, May 31. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html.Google Scholar
Hill, Jane H. (2008). The everyday language of white racism. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodges, Adam (2015). Ideologies of language and race in US media discourse about the Trayvon Martin shooting. Language in Society 44:401–23. Online: https://doi.org/10.1017/S004740451500024X.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jefferson, Gail (1991). List construction as a task and resource. In Psathas, George (ed.), Interactional competence, 63–92. New York: Irvington.Google Scholar
Jia Lou, Jackie (2010). Chinatown transformed: Ideology, power, and resources in narrative place-making. Discourse Studies 12:625–47. Online: https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445610371055.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Lucy (2016). ‘If a Muslim says “homo”, nothing gets done’: Racist discourse and in-group identity construction in an LGBT youth group. Language in Society 45:113–33. Online: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404515000792.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitzinger, Celia (2000). Doing feminist conversation analysis. Feminism & Psychology 10:163–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lippi-Green, Rosina (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lo, Adrienne (1999). Codeswitching, speech community membership, and the construction of ethnic identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3:461–79. Online: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00091.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maheux-Pelletier, Geneviève, & Golato, Andrea (2008). Repair in membership categorization in French. Language in Society 37:689–712. Online: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404508080998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendoza-Denton, Norma (2014). Homegirls: Language and cultural practice among Latina youth gangs. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Modan, Gabriella (2002). ‘Public toilets for a diverse neighborhood’: Spatial purification practices in community development discourse. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6:487–513. Online: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murray, Tom; Woolf, Beverly P.; Xu, Xiaoxi; Shipe, Stefanie; Howard, Scott; & Wing, Leah (2012). Towards supporting social deliberative skills in online group dialogues. Paper presented at the 7th Annual Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research Conference (InGroup). July 12, 2012. Chicago, IL.Google Scholar
Omi, Michael, & Winant, Howard (2014). Racial formation in the United States. London: Routledge.10.4324/9780203076804CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reynolds, Edward, & Fitzgerald, Richard (2015). Challenging normativity: Re-appraising category bound, tied, and predicated features. In Fitzgerald, Richard & Housley, William (eds.), Advances in membership categorisation analysis, 99–122. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robles, Jessica S. (2015). Extreme case (re)formulation as a practice for making hearably racist talk repairable. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 34:390–409.10.1177/0261927X15586573CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosa, Jonathan, & Flores, Nelson (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society 46:621–47. Online: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404517000562.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey (1972). On the analyzability of stories by children. In Turner, Roy (ed.), Ethnomethodology, 216–32. Middlesex: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey (1989). Lecture six: The M.I.R. membership categorization device. Human Studies 12:271–81.Google Scholar
Sambaraju, Rahul; McVittie, Chris; Goodall, Karen; & McKinlay, Andy (2017). ‘Just an excuse people are just using these days’: Attending to and managing interactional concerns in talk on exclusion of immigrants. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 36:654–74.10.1177/0261927X17706939CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emauel (1987). Between micro and macro: Contexts and other connections. In Alexander, Jeffrey C., Giesen, Bernhard, Münch, Richard, & Smelser, Neil J. (eds.), The micro-macro link, 207–34. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Shrikant, Natasha (2014). ‘It's like, “I've never met a lesbian before!”’: Personal narratives and the construction of diverse female identities in a lesbian counterpublic. Pragmatics 24:799–818.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shrikant, Natasha (2015). ‘Yo, it's IST yo’: The discursive construction of an Indian American youth identity in a South Asian student club. Discourse & Society 26:480–501. Online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926515576634.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shrikant, Natasha (2018). ‘There's no such thing as Asian’: A membership categorization analysis of cross-cultural adaptation in an Asian American business community. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 11:286–303. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2018.1478986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shrikant, Natasha (2019). ‘Who's the face?’: Communication and white identity in a Texas business community. Ethnic and Racial Studies 42:254–71. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.an2018.1430842.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shrikant, Natasha (2020). Cultural difference as a resource for arguments in institutional interactions. Communication Monographs 1–18. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2020.1776351.Google Scholar
Shrikant, Natasha, & Musselwhite, Jeanette (2018). Indexing neoliberal ideology and political identities in a racially diverse business community. Discourse & Communication 13:119–37. Online: https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481318801627.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stokoe, Elizabeth (2012). Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: Methods for systematic analysis. Discourse Studies 14:277–303. Online: https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445612441534.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stokoe, Elizabeth, & Edwards, Derek (2007). ‘Black this, black that’: Racial insults and reported speech in neighbour complaints and police interrogations. Discourse & Society 18:337–72. Online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926507075477.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Subtirelu, Nicholas C. (2015). ‘She does have an accent but…’: Race and language ideology in students’ evaluations of mathematics instructors on RateMyProfessors.com. Language in Society 44:35–62. Online: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404514000736.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tileaga, Cristian (2005). Accounting for extreme prejudice and legitimating blame in talk about the Romanies. Discourse & Society 16(5):603–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tracy, Karen (1990). The many faces of facework. In Giles, Howard & Robinson, W. Peter (eds.), Handbook of language and social psychology, 209–26. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Tracy, Karen (1999). Research on language and social interaction in 1999: An introduction. Research on Language & Social Interaction 32:1–4. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.1999.9683601.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Urciuoli, Bonnie (1996). Exposing prejudice: Puerto Rican experiences of language, race, and class. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.Google Scholar
Urciuoli, Bonnie (2009). Talking/not talking about race: The enregisterments of culture in higher education discourses. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19:21–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van den Berg, Harry; Wetherell, Margaret; & Houtkoop-Steenstra, Hanneke (2003). Analyzing race talk: Multidisciplinary perspectives on the research interview. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. (1993). Elite discourse and racism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.Google Scholar
Wetherell, Margaret (2003). Racism and the analysis of cultural resources in interviews. In van den Berg, Wetherell, & Houtkoop-Steenstra, 11–30.Google Scholar
Wetherell, Margaret, & Potter, Jonathan (1992). Mapping the language of racism: Discourse and the legitimation of exploitation. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Whitehead, Kevin A., & Lerner, Gene (2009). When are persons ‘white’? On some practical asymmetries of racial reference in talk-in-interaction. Discourse & Society 20:613–41. Online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926509106413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitehead, Kevin A., & Wittig, Michele A. (2004). Discursive management of resistance to a multicultural education programme. Qualitative Research in Psychology 1:267–84. Online: https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088704qp018oa.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, & Meyer, Michael (2009). Methods for critical discourse analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.Google Scholar
Zentella, Ana C. (1997). Growing up bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar