Every time we interact with another human being, we unconsciously draw on a set of expectations to guide us through the encounter. What many of us in the United States do not recognize is that centuries of institutional racism have inescapably molded those expectations. This leads us to act with implicit biases that can shape everything from how we greet our neighbors to whether we take a second look at a résumé. This is tacit racism, and it is one of the most pernicious threats to our nation. This talk is about Race in the US and how it has become embedded in the taken-for-granted structures of day-to-day interaction, to produce unconscious forms of racism that go on every day – yet remain hidden. This presentation is both theoretical and empirical. Using data derive from fieldwork, as well as audio and video recordings of interactions between participants who self-identify as Black and White; these recordings illustrate underlying differences in expectations about racial interactions. I identify a set of interrelated phenomena called "Interaction Orders of Race," "Race Pollution," "Fractured Reflections," and "Submissive Civility," that provide novel ways of understanding race in everyday interactions.
About the speaker:
Waverly Duck is an urban ethnographer and the North Hall Chair Endowed Professor of Sociology. He is the author of No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing (University of Chicago Press, 2015), a finalist for the Society for the Study of Social Problems 2016 C. Wright Mills Book Award. His second book on unconscious racism, Tacit Racism, co-authored with Anne Rawls (also with the University of Chicago Press), was the 2021 winner of the Charles Horton Cooley Book Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and the 2022 Book Award winner for the North Central Sociological Association. He also co-authored and curated a new book with Anne Rawls and Kevin Whitehead, titled Black Lives Matter: Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Studies of Race and Systemic Racism in Everyday Interaction (Taylor and Francis, 2020). Like his earlier work, his current research investigates the challenges faced by socially marginal groups. However, his work is more directly concerned with the interaction order of marginalized communities and how participants identify problems and what they think are viable solutions.