“Fractured Reflections” of High-Status Black Male Presentations of Self: Nonrecognition of Identity as a “Tacit” Form of Institutional Racism

ABSTRACT

This article examines the effects of “tacit” expectations about race, which are institutionalized in an Interaction Order that frames how we “see” high-status occupational identity. There is an essential moment in presenting Self before Other(s) when it is the turn of the Other(s) to recognize, respond to, and ratify that presentation. The Self is a social accomplishment that requires mutual cooperation from others. Failure to recognize and ratify competent presentations of self, reported frequently by black men, can strip those presentations of the social identity they claim and the dignity, power, and authority associated with that identity. We argue that these “tacit” expectations about identity follow black men wherever they go—no matter how successful they are. Using accounts drawn from interviews, we examine the persistent failure of Others to recognize and ratify high-status black male identities and the legitimate authority they carry.

Notes

¹ “Definition of the Situation” is a foundational theoretical idea of interactionism. Originating with W. I. Thomas, it was picked up by Garfinkel in the 1940s and then by Goffman in 1959. In addition, Goffman (1974) did an extended analysis of the relevance of frames and framing to sense-making in Frame Analysis.

² Although race is a social category and not a biological classification, the cultural norms about race that frame the ways of “seeing” race that produce the racialized interactions we analyze often incorporate outmoded conceptions of race as a genetic or biological category. All of these meanings are implicated in our data.

³ Conversation Analysis documents a set of conversational resources used across many situations and cultures. For a good summary discussion, see Suchman (2007). See Rawls (2015) for an application to designing digital information systems.

⁴ Such Fractured Reflections constitute a natural occurrence of the violation of Trust conditions—and the ensuing meaninglessness—that Garfinkel (1963) tried to produce experimentally for the Trust paper. No trust—no shared meaning—no resources for resolving problems.

⁵ It was suggested by one of the reviewers that null-responses may be playing a role in interactions between black men and the police. This may be the case. Having viewed some of these data, it seems that the police often begin by being nonresponsive to black men: ignoring whatever they say. But, then yes. Null-response to nonrecognition would describe much of what comes next. It is enraging to all participants as shown by Rawls and David (2006).

⁶ In cases where the nonrecognition is occasioned by gender or stigma, the effects can be similar. But the problem would be definitions of the situation involving gender and stigma, and the recipient will belong to a different community of shared narrative about the event, which will have adopted its own type of response. See Goffman (1961) for an extended discussion with reference to stigma.

⁷ Two reviewers suggested that this may also happen with gender. The men we talked with made the analogy to gender themselves. But, although one of the authors is female and has experienced gender bias, the descriptions these men give of how they understand the problem are not familiar to me, and even though I might agree that I sometimes give a null-response, I would not have described either the response or the problem in the same way. One reviewer suggested that the difference might have something to do with colorblindness. It might. As a woman, I am free to dismiss the responses of others that I believe are sexist. It can be openly said. The men we talked with were not dismissing the nonresponses to their self-presentations as racist. They were even reluctant to mention race. So—yes—the colorblind taboo character of race was likely hampering their efforts to sustain self in the face of nonrecognition. They could not name the problem. I can. Earlier generations of black men could.

⁸ If we had asked them simply whether they had experienced racism on the job (as in a conventional survey), they might have said “no.” With a large sample, this might have led to the conclusion that high-status black men are not experiencing racism on the job. We are certain that this sort of false result occurs.

⁹ All names have been changed to protect the identities of the informants.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne Warfield Rawls

Anne Warfield Rawls is Professor of Sociology, Bentley University, Professor of Socio-Informatics, University of Siegen, Germany, Associates Researcher, Centre d’Etude des Mouvements Sociaux (CMS) EHESS, Paris, Senior Research Fellow, Yale University Center for Urban Ethnography, and Director of the Garfinkel Archive. Professor Rawls is the recipient of the Charles Horton Cooley Award from the Michigan Sociological Association and a Senior Research Laureate from the City of Paris. She is the author of books and articles on Durkheim and has edited and introduced several volumes of Garfinkel’s work. Her work has focused on the importance of equality in everyday “constitutive” practices for grounding modern democratic public life. Her research shows how inequalities of race and gender interfere with achieving mutual understanding in modern contexts. She has also published on the importance of constitutive practices—their origin in Durkheim and elaboration in Garfinkel—in French, German, Italian, and Russian, with a forthcoming book on the Division of Labor (Developing a Sociological Theory of Justice: Durkheim’s Forgotten Introduction to The Division of Social Labor) to be published by Le bord de l’ eau: Paris.

Waverly Duck

Waverly Duck is an urban sociologist and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing, which was a finalist for the 2016 C. Wright Mills Award. His research examines the social orders of poor black neighborhoods, as well as manifestations of race and gender among the upwardly mobile. He may be reached via E-mail at [email protected].