“Who’s the face?”: communication and white identity in a Texas business community

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between whiteness and communication through analysing how white business community members acknowledge their own, usually invisible, white identity. Discourse analysis of interactions in a Texas organization shows how white members construct white identity as intersecting with Texan, masculine, age and professional identity categories. Members mark the overt construction of white identity as a dispreferred action through using disclaimers, formulations, pauses, humour and non-racial terms. Analysis of minority business member talk illustrates how minorities orient to white members’ talk as exclusive towards minorities because they do not overtly and directly discuss race and because they orient to regional identity in a way that ignores racial diversity among Texans. Thus while white members attempt to acknowledge their raced position in the Texas business community, their communicative actions repeatedly index white identities and reproduce the hegemonic position of white, male, Texan professional identities in this community.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• discourse analysis
• identity
• colour-blind ideology
• Texas
• institutional talk

Acknowledgements

I am thankful to the reviewers of this manuscript for their helpful and insightful suggestions. I would also like to thank Dr Benjamin Bailey for reading early versions of this paper and thank Drs Gonen Dori Hacohen and Donal Carbaugh for their feedback. Last, I presented a version of this paper at the 2016 National Communication Association conference in Philadelphia, PA, and would like to thank participants at this event for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.