Discursive Psychology and the "New Racism"

Discursive Psychology and the "New Racism"Author(s): Kevin McKenzieSource: Human Studies, Vol. 26, No. 4 (2003), pp. 461-491Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20010350 .

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U Human Studies 26: 461-491, 2003.

P* ? 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 461

Discursive Psychology and the "New Racism"

kevin McKenzie University of Cyprus, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, P.O. Box 20537,

CY-I678, Nicosia, Cyprus (E-mail: [email protected])

Abstract. This paper addresses a range of theoretical issues which are the topic of recent social

psychological and related research concerned with the "new racism." We critically examine

examples of such research in order to explore how analyst concerns with anti-racist political

activism are surreptitiously privileged in explanations of social interaction, often at the ex?

pense of and in preference to the work of examining participants' own formulations of those

same activities. Such work is contrasted with an ethnomethodologically-informed, discursive

psychology which seeks to the explore how participants' talk is responsively oriented to fore?

closing the same sort of critique implicitly made available in new racism research as a way

for speakers to account for their own and others' activities within the controversy which that

same body of research seeks to settle. More specifically, we examine how the rhetorical con?

text of controversy surrounding race and racism is imminent to the situated activities whereby

speakers provide for its relevance and not, as assumed in new racism research, some inde?

pendent factor affecting that interaction. Finally, we conclude with an analysis of an episode

of talk recorded in a social science interview having as its topic the nature of cross-cultural

contact in which the participants take up the issue of racism as a way of managing the con?

flicting demands with which they are confronted in accounting for their involvement as

Western expatriates living in the Middle East. Throughout our analysis of these materials,

the issue of racism is approached for how it features as a participant concern, raised by speakers in the course of attending to the immediate situated interactional business in which they are

engaged.

1. Introduction

This paper is concerned to explore research about racism and the psychology of racist activity. In particular, it explores the theoretical and methodological

implications of a range of analytic work which takes as its topic discourse

referred to variously with the terms new racism (Barker, 1981), symbolic rac?

ism (Kinder and Sears, 1981), aversion racism (Gaertner and Dovidio, 1986), and modern racism (McConahay, 1986) (see also Gilroy, 1987 and related

discussions in Gabriel, 1994, pp. 184-194; Solomos and Back, 1996). This

work will be contrasted with efforts in the ethnomethodological tradition of

research, especially as these have been extended within recent developments in discursive psychology (Edwards, 1997; Edwards and Potter, 1992, 1993).



462 KEVIN MCKENZIE

As we will see, a great deal of work in the new racism paradigm attempts to

make use of the analytic techniques employed by ethnomethodologically informed work. Nevertheless it often overlooks the more essential question of how racism itself features as an accountable matter in everyday talk. That

is, new racism research overlooks the more fundamental sociological ques? tion of how what-it-is-that-counts-as-racism is itself the accomplishment of

complex, situated negotiations between speakers in mundane social settings. In turn, this leads it to overlook the range of interactionally consequential business that participants pursue in the course of negotiating the relevance of

racism to the events and circumstances they discuss. In seeking to adjudicate

upon the negotiations which constitute participants' own business, new rac?

ism research often misconstrues the work which that topicalization itself ac?

complishes in the circumstances where it occurs.

1.1. Ethnomethodology ys Approach to Mundane Social Theorization

One aspect of ethnomethodological work that distinguishes it from other para?

digms in the social sciences is its principled insistence upon the distinction

between participant and analyst concerns. This particular feature was origi?

nally made explicit in the work of Garfinkel and his colleagues starting in the

late 1950s and early 1960s as a way of setting itself off from the then-domi?

nant, Parsonian paradigm in sociology.1 This latter school of sociological functionalism was concerned to uncover the norms and values that were pre? sumed to determine social behavior across a range of different settings. Among other things, the objective was to identify mechanisms of socialization that

inculcated the expectations and sense-making apparatuses with which mun?

dane social actors perceived their relations with the world and each other. In

contrast, Garfinkel set out to explore how such explanatory conventions were

themselves an integral part of the interactional resources that social actors

assembled in seeking to justify their actions on any particular given occasion.

Rather than assuming from the outset that norms and values somehow de?

termine social behavior, Garfinkel instead took a step back, as it were, from

this analytic stance and began to explore how participants themselves work

to make sense of their behavior as normatively constrained. Especially rel?

evant in this regard was the way that speakers account for their own and oth?

ers' activities in explanatory terms which invoke social categories (Sacks,

1972, 1974, 1992). So, for example, in examining talk where jury members deliberated upon

their decisions with reference to a set of norms regarding what constitutes ad?

equate veridical reasoning, Garfinkel was not concerned with whether those

members' actions were determined by the norms of decision making which

they invoked, but rather with how assembling of such norms was itself em



DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND THE "NEW RACISM" 463

ployed to accomplish the situated work of rendering their decisions meaningful to and for one another in the setting of the deliberative proceedings (see

Garfinkel, 1967, pp. 104-115 and related discussion in Heritage, 1984, pp. 4-5). Here, the issue is that of how normativity is imminently accomplished in (rather than independently determinative of) the situated activity where its

relevance is provided for. Rather than taking normativity as an essential pre? condition for social action, then, Garfinkel's concern was to explore how the

issue of what either is or is not normative itself features in the mundane ac?

counting practices by which social actors make sense of their world.

It was this concern with people's own sense-making methodology - or their

ethnomdho?ology, as Garfinkel (1974) glossed it - that lead him to explore the ways in which social reality is an accomplishment of the situated social

practices by which actors formulate their sense of meaning. In contrast, Par?

sons' functionalist approach failed to make this distinction between the ana?

lytic concerns of participants and those of sociological theory in its exploration of those settings where the question of norms-and-values feature for partici?

pants. Participant actions were thus regarded as determined by processes of

which social actors themselves were largely unaware. It is in this sense that

Parsonian functionalism was seen to regard mundane social actors as "cul?

tural dopes" (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 68). More importantly, however, by seeking to reveal the transcendent norms of behavior, such analyses neglected to con?

sider the situated business that social actors work to accomplish in and through their assembling of explanatory accounts. What do speakers make relevant in

accounting for some activity or event? What is at stake for them in the cir?

cumstances where they do so? How, if at all, might that be consequential to

the situated circumstances in which norms are invoked? These are all ques? tions that define the project of ethnomethodological inquiry.

1.2. Discursive Psychology as an Extension of Ethnomethodology

More recently, this approach to the mundane explanations of social actors has

been extended in the work of discursive psychology?, a project which sets out

to investigate everyday accounts of psychological processes and mental struc?

tures (Edwards and Potter, 1992,1993). Within such research, psychological

explanations are considered for how they feature in speakers' accounts of their

own and others' activities, and with how such explanations are employed to

make available a range of inferences in various circumstances of social ac?

countability. For instance, talk about the nature of emotion has been explored for the way that differences in emotional state are theorized as a way of man?

aging the blameworthiness that various parties have for, say, the failure of an

intimate relationship (Edwards, 1997, pp. 170-201). Similarly, claim making about one's own cognitive-perceptual (in)abilities has been examined for the



464 KEVIN MCKENZIE

way that attribution of attitude, knowledge states, memory, etc. is directed

toward either foreclosing or else occasioning a particular inference on the part of some interlocutor(s) regarding the social accountability of specific actions

(Buttny, 1993; Edwards, 1997; Middleton and Edwards, 1990). This and a range of related research emphasizes the way that psychologi?

cal explanations feature as a means by which social actors make sense of

various circumstances and events, thereby attending to the accountable na?

ture of their own and others' behavior. The analytic concern is not that of ei?

ther warranting or sanctioning the distinction between professional and "lay" or "folk" models of psychology (Keesing, 1987), but of considering how these and related claims feature as a part of the everyday business of conducting social interaction. The hallmark of such research, like that of the ethno?

methodological tradition of investigation to which it is a contribution, is its

insistence on the principle of analytic indifference to the questions that speakers raise as their own concern (Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970). A rather succinct

definition of what this means is provided by Lynch (1993, p. 190) in his com?

parison relating ethnomethodology to more conventional modes of analysis

employed in the social sciences (the latter of which he refers to with the term

constructive analysis):

By remaining indifferent to the aims and achievements of constructive

analysis, ethnomethodologists try to characterize the organized uses of in

dexical expressions, including the various lay and professional uses of for? mulations. Inevitably, ethnomethodologists engage in formulating, if only

to formulate the work of doing formulating, but unlike constructive ana?

lysts, they "topicalize" the relationship between formulations and activities in other than truth-conditional terms. That is, they do no treat formulations

exclusively as true or false statements; instead, they investigate how they act as pragmatic moves in temporal orders of action.

Discursive psychology's related insistence on remaining indifferent to the

truth-conditional aspects of speaker claims concerning psychological reality is not, as some have mistakenly assumed (Burman and Parker, 1993; Burman

etal., 1996; Parker, 1990,1998), a plea for some form of behaviorist psychol?

ogy grounded in the demands of empirical purism (see Edwards and Potter,

1992, p. 100). Instead, it is a principled effort to give serious analytic atten?

tion to the interactional business that speakers themselves set out to accom?

plish in and through the formulation of categories which invoke psychological

explanations. Discursive psychology neither accepts nor rejects the claims of

the speakers who employ such psychological accounts. Rather, it adopts an

agnostic stance with regard to the content of those accounts,2 opting to ex?

plore the interactional business that participants undertake in the claim mak?

ing activity itself.




2. The Spectre of Racism

It follows on from this that discursively oriented, psychological research which

explores the issue of racism is concerned to consider the work that speakers undertake in talk where the definition of racism is at issue. A discursive psy?

chological investigation of talk about racism would thus explore how speak? ers take up the issue of what constitutes racist activity or racially discriminatory behavior as well as what is at stake for speakers when and where such a defi?

nition is at issue in their talk. In contrast, a great deal of research that exam?

ines such talk, often incorporates a set of assumptions about the nature of

racism into its analysis. Further, those assumptions are often implicitly invoked

as a way of rendering a judgement on the adequacy of speaker claims. Para?

doxically, such work brings to bear a presumption of what racism consists of

in an analysis of talk where it is precisely that issue which is the object of

negotiationfor the participants themselves. From the outset, then, such research

precludes considering the occasioned basis on which various definitional cri?

teria of racism feature for participants.

2.1. Hidden Thoughts and Meanings: On the Real and the Apparent

This failure to take seriously the situated, interactional business that talk about

racism is employed to accomplish is seen in analyses of at least two different

sorts.3 In the first of these, the analyst's implicit assumptions are made avail?

able in claims concerning a set of underling mental structures which are stipu? lated to determine participants' perceptions and representations of the social

reality to which they (those participants) refer in their talk. For example, work

of the sort which purports to examine "the denial of racism" proceeds on the

assumption that racist motivation is involved in talk where racism gets taken

up as a topic of discussion by participants themselves. This is especially so

where assumptions concerning the accountable nature of racism are made

relevant as a way for speakers to foreclose the potential for their own contri?

butions to be construed as racially motivated (van Dijk, 1984, 1987, 1991,

1993a; Kleiner, 1998a, 1998b). For example, in the distinction he draws be?

tween the real and the apparent, van Dijk (1987, p. 91, emphasis added) in?

troduces the assumptions upon which this sort of analysis depends:

One of the most stereotypical moves used in prejudicial talk is Apparent Denial, which usually contains a general denial of (one's own) negative opinions about ethnic groups, followed by a negative opinion: "I am not a

racist, but...," or "I have nothing against foreigners, but...."[...] We call this Apparent Denial because it is not a real denial of what was said, but only a denial of possible inferences the recipient may make, as well as a statement that is inconsistent with what is actually stated in previous or next assertions.



466 KEVIN MCKENZIE

What is particularly interesting about these remarks is the ambivalent way in

which they pose the issue of speaker orientation in the talk. Here the author

gives analytic consideration to the interactional work that the speaker under?

takes to resist the imputation of racism. That is, he acknowledges the action

orientation of the talk by pointing out how that talk is designed to foreclose

the negative inferences with which it might be met ("possible inferences the

recipient may make"). Once having done this, however, he then proceeds to

interpret that work as confirmation of the very sort of inferences it is designed to foreclose. In other words, the speaker's efforts to resist a reading of his or

her own intent are simply dismissed as disingenuous, and the basis of that

dismissal is the analyst's own reading of the second part of the remark ("but

...") upon which the first part ("I'm not a racist") is a participant gloss. The

speaker's gloss is thus simply rejected as inconsistent with what the analyst himself assumes the meaning of the talk in the second part to be (i.e., "what

is actually stated"). Note also that this involves eliding the distinction between

denying the negative character of one's evaluation - referred to as "a general denial of (one's own) negative opinions"

- and denying the basis for that evalu?

ation. In other words (and in spite of van Dijk's reading to the contrary), the

quoted remarks do not constitute a denial by the speaker of his or her own

negatively evaluative opinion. Rather, they constitute a denial that that nega? tive opinion has its basis in racist discrimination. This is quite a subtle dis?

tinction. However, eliding that distinction is crucial to the author's own

analysis of the talk. Such a reading not only neglects to provide any princi?

pled criteria with which to arrive at the analytic conclusions that it does (other than the analyst's own arbitrary predilection, see Potter and Wetherell, 1988), but it also fails to give due consideration to how such a response is itself oc?

casioned in and on the circumstances of the talk.

What those circumstances might consist of is not made explicitly available

with the rather brief extract of data that the author provides. However, it seems

fairly evident that the data was researcher-prompted. In other words, the talk

was generated in an investigative setting the business of which was to explore the very definitional issues which the speaker's own remarks there address.

The tension between the real and the apparent which the author points out is

thus itself an effect of an interactional encounter which is designed to gener? ate that tension.4 In van Dijk's reading, this very feature of the analysis is it?

self obscured through an appeal to social constraints on what is or is not deemed

acceptable to articulate explicitly. The idea is that rather than articulate his/

her racism overtly, the speaker modulates the expression of his/her underly?

ing beliefs in deference to independent constraints on what is socially accept? able to say (see also related analyses in van Dijk, 1984,1987,1991,1993a). There are a number of problems raised by just such an analytic approach. These

relate both to the nature of conversational interaction as inherently dialogic

(Gardiner, 1992; Holquist, 1990; Morson and Emerson, 1990), and to the way




that the conclusions are circularly related so as to inform the analytic grounds from which they are drawn (see Potter and Litton, 1985 for a related critique of work in social representation theory). Quite apart from these difficulties,

however, for an ethnomethodologically-informed analysis, this approach is

problematic because it fails to explicate the different ways that such concerns

(over the real-apparent tension) feature for the participants themselves.

In more recent work addressed to the question of ideological representa?

tion, van Dijk (1998) further develops his approach with an appeal to: (1) mental structure, (2) social constraint, and (3) discursive representation. Here, he argues for a multidisciplinary theory relating the three modes of analysis within a single, integrated model:

[A] theory of ideology first of all needs to be multidisciplinary. [...] [M]y approach will therefore be located in the conceptual and disciplinary tri?

angle that relates cognition, society, and discourse. There are worse sites of inquiry when dealing with the notion of ideology. First, even among those who deny it, ideologies are at least implicitly taken as some kind of 'sys? tem of ideas', and hence belong to the symbolic field of thought and be?

lief, that is, to what psychologists call 'cognition'. Second, ideologies are

undoubtedly social, and often (though not always) associated with group interests, conflicts or struggle. [...] And third, many contemporary ap?

proaches to ideology associate (or even identify) the concept with language use or discourse, if only to account for the way ideologies are typically expressed and reproduced in society. [...] Having staked out this very broad and multidisciplinary field of inquiry, it is my contention that precisely the

complex relationships involved here - namely, those between cognition,

society and discourse - are needed in an explicit theory of ideology, (van Dijk, 1998, p. 5, italics in original)

My own research on talk about cross-cultural contact has been concerned to

examine precisely how speakers themselves address the relationships that van

Dijk stipulates as a part of his own eclectic approach (McKenzie, 1998). We

shall have occasion to examine an episode of talk from that research below.

As we shall see there, speakers work to manage the tension between their en?

titlement to warrant the claims they make and the potentially damaging infer?

ences which that entitlement raises for their own moral accountability through an appeal to the relationships between just such analytic components. In other

words, speakers address themselves to the same theoretical concerns (regard?

ing the nature of prejudice) and employ the same analytic categories (relating to mental structure, social groups, etc.) that van Dijk stipulates in his model

of ideology. Further, they do so in order to attend to the situated business of

rendering cross-cultural contact meaningful to an investigative undertaking which has that precise task as its concern. Rather than attempting to account

for their use of those analytic resources as independently motivated, an

ethnomethodologically-informed, discursive psychology seeks to respecify the



468 KEVIN MCKENZIE

questions involved, by working to explicate how such theoretical constructs

feature as resources in the sense-making practices of participants.

2.2. Discourse and Anti-Cognitivist Social Psychology

The previous section was concerned to address the psychological assumptions

implicitly made available in an ideological approach to the psychology of

racism. A second approach to the analysis of talk about racism that we will

consider here is one which seriously attempts to redress the analytic reduc?

tion of social action to underlying mental representation. In some respects, this work has an advantage over the sort of integrated or eclectic approach discussed above because where that model invokes each of the constituent

analytic components (the mental, social and discursive) to explain each of the

others at various points in its analysis, research of the second kind sets out to

counter such reductionist explanations.5 In particular, it is concerned to redress

efforts that reduce the analysis of social action to underlying mental structures

(see also Gergen, 1985, 1989; Parker, 1989; Parker and Shotter, 1990). This

sort of analysis thus shares ethnomethodology's and discursive psychology's concern with the action orientation of participants.

There is a quite subtle but crucially significant difference here, however,

because this body of work (unlike discursive psychology) elides the distinc?

tion between the responsive orientation of speakers in the circumstances of

the talk with that of situation external social structure, glossed under the ru?

bric of context. Often the appeal to such structure is articulated in terms of

racism. For instance, in a recent programmatic statement addressing these

issues, Nick Hopkins and his colleagues critically examine research in social

cognition for how it obscures the social and material basis of racism through its claims to identify certain mental structures underlying novel expressions of racial prejudice (Hopkins et al., 1997, pp. 310, 311, 312, italics added):

[TJhere is a real sense in which the new racism's account of the psycho?

logical dynamics of racism functions as a counter-argument to those who

would combat racism through transforming social structure. [...] If the

practical effect of the 'new racism' is the way in which its account of the

dynamics of racism counters analyses which identify the role of power in

the construction and dissemination of racialized understandings of social

problems, any commonality between it and contemporary social psychol? ogy must raise questions about the degree to which our discipline is able to act as a critique. [...] [A]s 'race' is not a natural category but rather

racialized categories are socially constructed, we need a social psychology which focuses upon the social processes through which categories are con?

structed (and racialized). And such a social psychology must pay proper

regard to action and social practice. Simply put, the effective categoriza? tion of people is not 'just' a matter of mental representation or classifica




tion (Jenkins, 1994). Rather, it entails action interventions into, and indeed

constitutes, other people's experience of the world and their place in it

(Jenkins, 1994; Keith, 1993; Reicher, 1993). Thus we need a study of power relations and social practices which affect who is able to act on the basis of their category constructions and so make them heard and count for oth? ers.

The authors are concerned to reveal how mainstream social psychological research (especially work in social cognition) marginalizes alternative ac?

counts of racism that emphasize the interactional, social and (by extension) material conditions that they take as an instance of racist exclusion and injus?

tice. Of interest here, however, is the way that these authors have replaced the

one form of reductionism (to cognitive-perceptual processes) with another

which they gloss with the phrase "power relations and social practices". In

other words, like the analysis of the first sort, such research privileges its own

explanatory account of actions (glossed in terms of power relations). How?

ever, in place of the psychological, they instead employ assumptions concern?

ing the social as the analytic presupposition informing their examination of

the talk that they consider. Their chief objection to research in social cogni? tion would seem, therefore, to be that it privileges an analysis of the mental at

the expense of the social.

Hopkins et al. go on to develop the implications of this in their analysis of

talk produced in an interview with a representative of an (unidentified) Eng? lish metropolitan police force (transcript reproduced in Hopkins et al. [1997,

p. 320] as extract 8). Here, the speaker sets out to account for his work as a

police public relations agent, or "police-school liaison (PSL) officer", and to

discuss the controversy surrounding his attendant role at promoting the po? lice's profile among the community of Afro-Caribbean students at state-sup?

ported secondary schools:6

And there is a small minority who have no intention of sort of conforming to the standards that we have in our society, who are very, very anti-police.

And who, in their, who, I think are totally racist in their attitudes. They're totally sort of anti-white as well. They take their resentment out on what? ever form of authority they can see, which in the case of the police is the natural outlet for their anger really, I mean, the police are on the streets and it is the only authority that is visible to them and sort of represents, you

know, sort of, what the country stands for, so they sort of take it out on the

police. And it is very, very, difficult to get through to that sort of person. I mean they are so biased and so 'anti' and we can try reasoning with them but you know they sort of just verbally attack you all the time and do not want to listen to what you have to say.

Hopkins et al. go on to analyze this talk as expressive of an effort to render

racial discrimination accountable through an appropriation of its original criti?

cal force (ibid., p. 320):



470 KEVIN MCKENZIE

According to this construction, the charge of police racism is but an ele? ment of a more generally intolerant refusal to conform 'to the standards that we have in our society'. Indeed the accusations about police racism are

doubly delegitimated. On the one hand their charge is but a specific instance of a general 'anti-white' prejudice from those that 'are totally racist in their attitudes'. On the other, because the police symbolize 'what the country stands for', they are specially singled out as targets and are 'the natural outlet for their anger'. Again, this category construction means that the charge of

police racism is construed as saying nothing about police racism and eve?

rything about the problematic nature of their presence. And in doing so,

Lloyd [interviewee pseudonym] is clearly reproducing key elements of the 'new racism'. Culture is defined in relation to 'race' and cultural difference

construed as problematic. Further, the racialized other is construed as hav?

ing no respect for 'our' way of life and 'the standards that we have in our

society', and the charge of racism turned around, (cf. Barker, 1981; Billig et al, 1988)

Let us take up some of the points that the authors raise here. It seems fairly

plausible on the basis of the talk they consider that both racial discrimination

and in particular racism-as-an-accountable-matter get taken up as participant concerns. Furthermore, it seems obvious that the speaker (the PSL officer) is

indeed making the accountable nature of racism relevant in this context as a

way of explaining (and, by implication, finding fault with) the argumentative

position of those who are opposed to the presence of police in schools. What

is not so clear, however, is that he is eluding or otherwise working to evade

the charge of police racism in the way that the Hopkins et al. suggest. To be

sure, it is possible to relate the PSL officer's remarks to institutional racism

in precisely the way that Hopkins et al. do. Alternatively, however, one could

just as easily argue that police racism indeed does exist without that fact un?

dermining the account that the PSL officer provides for opposition to police

presence. In other words, just because the police are overwhelmingly racist

(the argument might go), that still does not account for why there is opposi? tion to police presence on the part of Afro-Caribbean community members.

Police racism could be seen as incidental to such opposition.7 In the talk

Hopkins et al. consider, however, the officer's remarks do not explicitly ad?

dress either of these concerns. That is, he neither denies nor argues in support of the view that institutional racism exists among the police.8 What he does

instead is to argue that racism is a principle motivating factor behind opposi? tion by members of the Afro-Caribbean community to police presence in

schools. Note how Hopkins et al.'s analysis ignores this deconstructive work

on the part of the speaker, except perhaps insofar as it contributes to their own

objective of rendering social psychology into a "discipline [which] is able to

act as a critique" (ibid., p. 311, quoted above). Note here that it is not so much for reasons of what the speaker says as much

as what he does not say that Hopkins et al. read his remarks as working to




exclude the interpretation of police racism.9 This particular approach to talk, in which the unrealized argumentative potential of conversational contribu?

tions are incorporated into the analysis, is one that involves a sort of negative

analytic which looks to the unspoken to account for what is said. Hopkins et

al. themselves formulate this heuristic in their remarks concerning argumen? tative context, or context of controversy (ibid., p. 321):

[T]he wider implication of our analysis is that categories are constructed in and through language and must be analysed as arguments against alterna? tives (cf. Billig, 1985,1987). Indeed, they must be located in the context

of controversy and analysed for the work that they do in such controver?

sies (e.g., as arguments about the justice of certain forms of policing).

From the perspective of an ethnomethodological approach like discursive

psychology, what is problematic about this way of analysing talk is that it

leaves unanswered the question of exactly how one is to decide upon what it

is that is not said, which renders that which is said meaningful. In other words,

there is a potentially infinite range of concerns which the speaker did not

address but which nevertheless could have been made relevant for an inter?

pretation of the topic under discussion. How is an analyst to decide upon which

interpretation from among this infinite set the speaker's remarks are working to exclude?

For ethnomethodology and discursive psychology, questions of this sort are

posed in reference to the relevances provided for by participants of the then

present circumstances of the conversation. Here, the issue is not which of the

accounts the analyst finds more appealing on independent grounds, nor is it

which can be made the more convincing on subsequent consideration (as in

an analysis of the sort Hopkins et al. formulate). Rather, it is a matter of which

account the speaker him- or herself orients to as relevant in the actual circum?

stances of the conversation itself (Edwards, 1997, p. 100; Schegloff, 1999). Note too that this is not the same thing as attempting to exclude from analytic consideration the concerns that speakers work to make inferentially available.

Ethnomethodological analyses provide for such implicitly available assump? tions in work to show how inferences are oriented to by participants as dis?

played in the details of their talk. The upshot here is that analytic conclusions

would need to appeal to what is demonstrably made relevant by participants of the encounter itself, and not by others in some setting independent of that

encounter. (Even where some not then-current situation-setting is provided for by speakers themselves, an analysis of same must show how that situa?

tion-external reference is made germane by the participants in the then-cur?

rent situation where its relevance is provided for). For the analyst ofthat talk

subsequently to choose one from among an infinite set of possible relevancies

which could have been made available in the setting is not the same thing as



472 KEVIN MCKENZIE

showing how it is that participants go about doing that in the setting under

analysis.

Returning to the analysis that Hopkins et al. provide in their approach to

the PSL officer's talk, their own reading necessarily takes on a somewhat

convoluted form since the speaker's efforts to attend to concerns with racism

are themselves interpreted in terms that Hopkins et al. develop independently of those provided for by that speaker in the setting of the interview. Thus, where

the PSL officer quite explicitly does orient to racism as a relevant concern in

making sense of the tensions between the police and the Afro-Caribbean com?

munity of students in the schools that he visits, Hopkins et al. set about to trans?

form that orientation into something else, to make out of the PSL officer's

efforts a manifestation of his underlying motivation in terms which he him?

self does not addresses (but, as mentioned before, could have addressed as

incidental to an understanding of racism on the part of the Afro-Caribbean

community). Hopkins et al. thus transform the police officer's explanation and

its conspicuous object of reference into their own object of reference, one that

happens to implicate their speaker-subject in the demands for accountability which they seek to promote.

To push the point further here, the gloss that Hopkins et al. attach to the

context of controversy (viz. "arguments about the justice of certain forms of

policing," ibid.) is one which assumes that the substance of that controversy inheres in the injustice of police activity. It takes as given the illegitimate nature

of police intervention and provides for that assumption as a backdrop against which that talk is rendered meaningful. A more plausible reading in reference

to the details of the PSL officer's talk would approach the relevant contro?

versy as involving the legitimacy of implicit accusations of racism as themselves

necessarily resistant to counter-argument and as motivated by subversive in?

terests on the part of those wishing to escape responsibility for upholding the

law. In other words, the context of controversy provided for by the PSL of?

ficer here inheres in whether the school-goers to whom he refers merely bandy the accusation of police racism about in order to detract from their own reluc?

tance to fulfil other, quite different demands for social accountability. Here,

subversion - that is, the duplicitous representation of activities and events -

/toe//features as a concern that the speaker takes up in his own situated analysis

(see Edwards, 1997, pp. 96-100). An ethnomethodologically-informed analy? sis will set out to examine not only how duplicity is imputed to speakers, but

also how the analytic practices by which this is accomplished themselves

feature as a part of mundane sense-making intrinsic to the setting under in?

vestigation.

Again, these observations here are not an attempt to weigh in on either side

of just this question regarding whose racism is appropriately made relevant

for an account of the tensions that both Hopkins et al. and the PSL officer take

as their topic. Instead, it is a plea to examine the details of how just such a




question gets taken up by participants themselves. What is at stake for the

speakers in the conversational circumstances in and through which the prob? lematic nature of an account's vested interest features as an object of their own

situated analysis (see Edwards 1995, pp. 332-335; Potter 1996, pp. 124-132)? How are the various "sides" of an argument themselves made to feature as a

part of the business of making sense of the activities in which speakers are

involved (especially where those activities involve accounting for speaker behavior in other situations to which the talk refers)? It is the failure to distin?

guish between the different analytic levels entailed in these questions that

ethnomethodologically-informed research finds so problematic in the work

of "new racism" and similarly "critical" modes of analysis (see van Dijk,

1993b, 1994, as well as related discussion in Potter et al., 1990).

3. Making Sense of Cross-Cultural Contact

In what follows, I want to explore further how ethnomethodology and dis?

cursive psychology would approach talk where racism is at issue by turning to another example of interaction. This is taken from a social science inter?

view that was originally conducted as part of a project to explore everyday

understanding of cross-cultural contact in talk among British and American

residents of the Middle East (McKenzie, 1998). In the conversational encoun?

ter represented here below, a young British couple in their early to mid-twen?

ties relate their observations of racism encountered while living in the Arabian

Gulf country of Kuwait (interviewer contribution is indicated with abbrevia?

tion Tnt,' otherwise pseudonyms are employed throughout, see Appendix below for full details of transcription conventions employed):

1 Jim And plu:s: >especially for a Bri:t< colonialism comes into i:t uh because you

2 are treated lik:e: you're so much better than: your fellow workers >be they 3 Indian Thai Filipino what?evier<a:n:d [Tso:-]

4 Sarita [?That's going to make] a noise

5 on the tape,0 ((refers to Jims fidgeting)) 6 (1.0)

7 Jim I suppo::se lots of people do: start to feel that they tajare themselves better

8 than thei:r Indian workmates or whatever.

9 (1.0) 10 Sarita I think it- it also makes a lot of people more racist. Because you could come

11 from a- a background in wherever u: :h and- and be quite ?hapipy having lived

12 in- a lot of your life with >whatever< different races. Because most countries

13 >most Western countries< now have got a mix of >many different races<. But

14 you come out here and all the sudden you're put on this uh- this pedestal 15 "beCAUSE YOU ARE WHITE OR WHATEVER". A:nd u:m even someone

16 who probably wasn't racist before because he hears everyone else say "Oh

17 bloody Arabs" or "Bloody Indians or whatever" he' 11 start t- to behave that way



474 KEVIN MCKENZIE

18 as well. And you can end up being a racist person when you started off not

19 being so at all. Because everyone else says "Well all Arabs are stupid so: they

20 must-" y'know that sort of thing. You start to believe it. And tali so u:[:h]

21 because

22 Jim [It's true.] (smiley voice) 23 Int @@.hhhh 24 (0.2) 25 Sarita and also maybe that because you have a certain way of living and uh you' ve

26 eh you' ve always been accustomed to the other races in your country having

27 the same sort of way of Tliife. But you come here and the Arabs and the

28 Indians here really are tdififerent. They think differently, they do everything 29 differently, so you jus:t assume that they're Tstuipid because they don't do

30 things the way ?you ido. 31 (0.5) 32 Int ?Mm hm.?

33 (0.5) 34 Jim In fact I had a tfriend of imine who worked in university, u::mhh he:

35 reckoned >I don't know what he feels now (about- he's still in the) country<

36 [but-] 37 Sarita [Who,] Lyle? 38 (.) 39 Jim >Yeah, Lyle.< When he first came ou::t after the first year or so he thought

40 Kuwait was more racist than South Africa was, or more segregated.

41 Sarita Yeah, he (should-) lived in South Af@ri@ca@ as well. 42 (.)

43 Jim Yeah. Than South Africa was.

44 Int In:: what way. I don't understand. I mean

45 (0.5) 46 Sarita It's the tway everything's natio?naility in this country.

47 (0.5) 48 Jim Yeah.

49 Sarita The minute you meet someone the first thing they want to know is where

50 you're from. They'll always:- they'll always ask you that, it's like the second

51 question they ask you. Whereas: somewhere else >certainly in England< they

52 don't even bother to ask you. They just take you for what you Tai:re. In this

53 country they have to know, and that changes their enti:re perspective on- on

54 YOU and what you're like, so if you say "Well I'm from England", Okay.

55 That's good. If you say "Well F m from PhilipPINES" it's a completely different

56 attitude, they'll change the way they react towards you. A:nd it's that sort of

57 society where everything depends on: where you're- where you're from.

58 Int Who changes their attitude. Who are you talking about. (I mean)

59 Sarita I'd say mainly it's u:m- oh I've always had this with uh- with probably Arabs

60 and Kuwaitis. They always want to know where you're from.

There are a number of different features about this talk that we might com?

ment upon. Perhaps the most prevalent aspect to notice from the outset is how

the speakers are oriented in their undertaking to the doing of an investigative interview which has as its concern the defining of racism in the Middle East

as well as the determining of how that definition is relevant for an understand




ing of their own interpersonal relations in the region. The production or ac?

complishing of this conversational encounter as just so oriented is the out?

come of concerted work on their part (Edwards, 1997, pp. 84-113). Like Poe's

purloined letter (see M?ller and Richardson, 1988), this is almost so obvious

as to escape notice, but here the encounter is patently not about their marriage, their sense of job satisfaction, the weather, the physical environment in which

they live, or any of an infinite number of other topics which they might have

addressed in accounting for their experience of living in the region. Instead, it is about racism. So pervasive is the concern for racism to their discussion

that it would be easy here to assume that the relevance of racism is the au?

tonomous precedent or premise that determines the understanding of cross

cultural contact they formulate, rather than to regard the establishing ofthat

precedent as an achievement of interactional work in the then-present moment

of the encounter. Indeed, it is this very feature where a disjunction is intro?

duced between the object and the work-of-its-objectification that makes the

object of reference seem conspicuously non-contingent, "natural," "real,"

"factual" (Potter, 1996; Smith, 1978); rather than a construction, an effect of

talk, an interactional accomplishment. The speakers' orientation to racism as relevant for an understanding of the

relations that they consider does not exist along or outside of the business of

pursuing a social science investigation into those relations. Rather, it consti?

tutes that business (Schegloff, 1991, 1992). The investigation is imminently

accomplished in that orientation, with the paradoxical gesture by which the

regard for the relevance of racism to the social relations that it is employed to

decipher is formulated as distinct, as different, as separated by an interpellative moment in which the terms of ontological dichotomy are made available. In

a great deal of conventional social sciences research, the failure ultimately to

reduce one term into its opposite is often regarded as an aberration - as a prob? lematic to be resolved in a subsequent analysis of the participants' own failed

efforts, rather than as a situated accomplishment, as the purpose or design of

the interaction. Thus, the objective of a conventional social science analysis to the questions that Jim and Sarita raise would likely entail privileging one

of their explanations at the expense of the other. In this way, the productive ambivalence in their account would be missed. Jim and Sarita would be con?

strued either as racists or not, rather than both depending on the argumenta? tive trajectory either such construal makes available at a given place in their

talk. For a reworked social science (such as ethnomethodology), however, the

failure to privilege either explanation is explored for how it features as a way to provide for the intelligibility which the reduction of any one term into its

opposite makes possible. In the encounter with Sarita and Jim, this involves the situated management

of conflicting demands for accountability such that the speakers concurrently attend to a set of different assumptions which, though mutually incompatible,



476 KEVIN MCKENZIE

nevertheless simultaneously inform the sense-making by which the topic of

discussion is rendered meaningful (Billig et al., 1988). For instance, consider

how the speakers manage the ambivalent nature of their identity status in re?

lation to its significance for enhancing the credibility of their contributions to

the investigative encounter. Specifically, by providing for the relevance of their

own status as expatriate residents of the region, speakers broker their entitle?

ment to comment on the circumstances which they describe since, as expa? triates impacted by the effects of social contagion, they "own" the related

knowledge (Sharrock, 1974). This is not merely a matter of their possessing first-hand experience as a warrant for their specific claims (though of

course that is involved as well, see Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Geertz,

1988; Hammersley, 1992); but is related more to the specific claims they make

about social contagion and their own experience of having adopted a racist

outlook as a result of their having lived in a racist environment (see esp. Sarita's

remarks in lines 10-30). After all, who best to know about the reprehensible nature of racism than a racist him- or herself? Who best in a position to under?

stand the limiting effects of a racist perspective on one's social perceptions than

one who has adopted just such a viewpoint (see McKenzie and van Teeffelen,

1993)? The very demands for accountability in which the speakers are poten?

tially implicated as a corollary of their expatriate identity are here transmuted

to provide for their entitlement in further warranting anti-racist claims.

At the same time, this transmutation of the social into the individual (lines

18-21) is also extended in the opposite direction as well. Specifically, where

the speakers might otherwise be held blameworthy for their racist outlook

(described as such by them, line 10), they are exonerated from responsibility

since, being the product of social influence, racism is beyond their individual

control.10 The social explanation here abrogates the need for an individual

accounting. Thus, speakers can provide for their status as racists and have that

status enhance their entitlement to comment upon the nature of racism with?

out this, however, implicating them in the moral demands for accountability to anti-racism that would otherwise be entailed. This dual movement in which

racism is made relevant to the interview encounter is a function of the com?

peting demands for accountability by which the investigative setting is con?

stituted.

Note also how this ambivalence works in a very subtle way to insure the

credibility of the initial gesture whereby the interviewees attend to the topic of their discussion. That is, if Sarita and Jim were to be held individually re?

sponsible for their racism, this could potentially undermine their contribution

to the overall business of the encounter that they also paradoxically pursue

(i.e., the business of formulating an account of cross-cultural contact which

is necessarily informed by the demands for a tolerance of difference). That is,

their contribution could be undermined on the basis of duplicity, on the basis

that underlying their expression of cultural sensitivity (lines 28-30) is "really"




a desire to obscure their racist sentiments. Put another way, the interviewees

are working here to manage the dilemma between the competing demands to

be sensitive to cultural difference without reducing others to racist stereotypes. The working-up of their own status as actors affected by a racist social envi?

ronment is a way in which they are able to negotiate between these otherwise

mutually exclusive gestures without denying the validity of either. The prob? lem for them here is to provide for their own forthrightness and sincerity

without that effort itself b?ng regarded as duplicitous, and without references

to cultural variation necessarily being construed as prejudicially reductionist.

By broaching an explanation in terms of social contagion, they are able to

formulate a description of cultural variation which nevertheless eschews the

use of stereotypes. In this way, the speakers are able to extend the terms which

render racism meaningful through the back-and-forth translation of the di?

chotomy between social and individual, between the very premises by which

the notion of cultural difference is initially rendered meaningful.

Understanding the situated work that the speakers do in the way that I have

just described renders the contributions of the participants with an entirely dif?

ferent significance than they might otherwise have. This extends to various

other moments in the encounter as well. For instance, the contrastive exam?

ple of the South African regime that Jim relates in order to bolster his assess?

ment of Kuwaiti racism (lines 34-41) need not be seen as contrived to detract

from or obscure his own underlying racism. Rather, the Kuwaiti racism of

which he speaks can be regarded as incidental to his own racism. This is so

even when we acknowledge that his anecdote is formulated in such a way as

to insulate it from further scrutiny, given that it is rendered as a third-party account (that of a "friend", see Potter 1996, ch. 5, esp. pp. 134-135). The ques? tion here is not whether his conversational contributions are rhetorically de?

signed to foreclose possible negative inferences. Rather, the pressing analytic concern here is how we will regard that orientation when we encounter it:

whether it is to be seen within the modern analytic idiom as evasive or whether

instead it is to be seen as adequate to the purposes of the participants as pro? vided for in their own account. In terms of this particular encounter, the prob? lematic of these speakers is again to display an orientation to the relevance of

racism for an understanding of Western involvement in the Middle East while

also attending to the reflexive implications which the activity of so doing raises

for them in a setting where they are potentially implicated in the negative in?

ferences it raises.

Yet another way that this is accomplished here is through the speakers' reflexive commentary on their own activities. Specifically, consider the

ironizing remarks that Jim and the interviewer engage in with their shared aside

to Sarita's first lengthy contribution. Here Jim's affirmation of the third-party assessment which Sarita works up in support of her formulation of expatriate racism is responded to with affiliative laughter on the part of the interviewer.



478 KEVIN MCKENZIE

18 Sarita start t- to behave that way as well. And you can end up being a racist person

19 when you started off not being so at all. Because everyone else says "Well all

20 Arabs are stupid so: they must-" y'know that sort of thing. You start to believe

21 it. And Taliso u:[:h] because 22 Jim [It's true.] (smiley voice)

23 Int @@.hhhh

Again, considering this talk in the terms I have been developing means that

rather than see this exchange as an expression of Jim's and the interviewer's

genuine sentiments (which are otherwise obscured in contradictory statements

made elsewhere), its significance could be taken to lie in the more subtle and

complicated work by which Jim is oriented to the potential for Sarita's third

party rendition (of what everyone else says) itself to be construed as motivated.

In other words, his remarks are directed to making conspicuous the constructed

nature of Sarita's anecdotal account (and its orientation in providing the war?

rant for her claims), and to foreclosing the potential accusation of duplicity

through the intrusive breach of the spurious aside. In turn, the interviewer's

responsive laugh token could also be seen as an acknowledgement of precisely such a ironizing gesture, a sort of assurance that Sarita's contribution will not

subsequently be described in his analytic write-up as a mere contrivance de?

signed to hide her true racist feelings. Stated differently, the issue here is how

to understand this interlude. Rather than seeing it as the crude and direct ex?

pression of racist sentiment on the part of the speakers, it can instead be regarded as a carefully managed intrusion that is reflexively oriented to limiting the in?

terpretative parameters that are applicable in the encounter. With this momen?

tary interlude, the speakers are able to manage the very complicated interactional

business of the situation at hand. Thus, not only do they attend to the demands

for accountability to assumptions concerning racism as well as their own epis?

temological warrant to comment thereupon, but they also work reflexively to

foreclose the potential for that work itself 'to be construed as motivated through an act of self-referential parody.11 Such is the subtlety of managing the tensions

of accountability in an investigative endeavour of this sort, where participants face the risk of having their contributions understood in terms that are alien to

the understandings they work to provide for within the encounter itself.

Another aspect of this talk that relates to the concerns Hopkins et al. raise

is that entailed by the contribution recorded at lines 49-60, in which Sarita

elaborates on the racist nature of the social environment. If nowhere else, here

at least it would appear is an example of talk that expresses the "new racism"

since it seems fairly obvious how the charge of racism levelled against "Ar?

abs and Kuwaitis" (lines 59-60) is "really" just a matter of blaming the vic?

tim, a sort of pre-emptive retaliatory strike designed to head-off the accusation

of racism potentially directed at the speaker herself. An alternative reading,

however, would again be one that sees these remarks as oriented to extending the demands for an anti-racism to domains where they are not otherwise taken




to be relevant. This is not just a question of turning the accusation of racism

around, but rather of further extending it in such a way that what-is-taken-to

constitute-racism gets defined in terms that simultaneously attend to the de?

mands for an awareness of and sensitivity to cultural difference. Rather than

regarding this as a matter of merely paying lip-service to such demands, and

of dealing with them so that the speakers can then get on with the real business

of placing the blame for racism back on the victims, an ethnomethodological

approach would see this as a matter of their attending to a range of otherwise

conflicting and mutually exclusive premises by which the notion of racism is

rendered meaningful in the first place. Here in this setting, this means formu?

lating an account in which both the social and the individual (structure and

agency) are mutually elaborative in a way that forestalls the accusation of

individual blame while nevertheless attending to the accountable nature of

racism as a social phenomenon. Put another way, it is not that these devices

are not oriented to resisting the accusation of racism. Rather, they are so ori?

ented in the very specific context where racism has already been rendered

intelligible through reference to a particular understanding of the structure

agency dichotomy in which structure is seen to determine agency.12 A final point of comparison with Hopkins et al. worth noting here is the

variable way that attention to matters of national identity is made relevant in

the analysis of action that these speakers formulate. Consider, for example, how Sarita approaches the regard for national origin as an instance of racist

discrimination. That is, the distinguishing of individuals on the basis of na?

tional identity is seen as an instance of racist behavior.

49 Sarita The minute you meet someone the first thing they want to know is where 50 you're from. They'll always:- they'll always ask you that, it's like the second

51 question they ask you. Whereas: somewhere else >certainly in England< they 52 don't even bother to ask you. They just take you for what you Tai:re. In this

53 country they have to know, and that changes their enti:re perspective on- on

54 YOU and what you're like, so if you say "Well I'm from England", Okay. 55 That's good. If you say "Well I'm from PhilipPINES" it's a completely different

56 attitude, they'll change the way they react towards you. A:nd it's that sort of

57 society where everything depends on: where you're- where you're from.

Note the contrast between this and the work that Hopkins et al. (1997, p. 319) do to make the details of birth, education and place of residence accountably relevant in determining national identity:

[H]e [the PSL officer] represents black people born, educated and living in Britain as "West Indians" and ascribes to them a set of cultural values and

practices that sharply differentiate them from people "over here". Further, not only do black people constitute an alien other whose way of life is no different from that "over there", but their cultural difference is used to ex? onerate the police from the charge of racism.



480 KEVIN MCKENZIE

As Hopkins et al. point out, the PSL officer's gloss ("West Indians") ignores critical details concerning birthplace and country of upbringing in assigning

-

or, in this case, failing to assign - national identity. The suggestion here is that

this failure to make the proper connection between such details and national

identity constitutes an expression of racism. In contrast, for Sarita, exactly the

opposite is the case: it is attention to national identity in the first instance

(however determined) that constitutes racist discrimination. The point here is

that what gets regarded as an instance of racism is itself contingent on the

interactional work that is pursued in the specific circumstances of the analy? sis. Sarita's interpretation of attention to national origin contributes to her

overall depiction of social contagion as an account of racism. Likewise,

Hopkins et al.'s approach to the question of how birth, details of residence, etc. are made relevant in determining national identity here contributes to their

inverse reading of the PSL officer's talk as directed to foreclosing the accusa?

tion of institutional racism.13 Thus, we can see that broaching the implicit distinction between the social and the individual (structure and agency) in?

volves a directional component where the one is seen to originate in the other, the social in the individual (where the PSL officer "exonerates" the social body from accountability) or else the individual in the social (where Sarita abne?

gates individual responsibility for social action). Instead of attempting to

determine the direction of origin, we note how the dichotomy is a resource

whereby accountability is managed through the specific formulation of this

directional orientation. The modern assumption of a distinction between the

two is the background against which the formulation of that problematic is

rendered meaningful in the first instance.

Note again how this way of analysing the talk contrasts markedly with, say, the approach that van Dijk develops in his account of ideology discussed

above. Where there he seeks to explore how the mental, the social and the

discursive are interrelated, here we can see how that interrelationship itself

gets taken up (in part, at least) as the concern of the participants themselves.

Thus, where van Dijk works to develop an account of talk in terms of shared

social influence and common group interest (often as distinguished from in?

dividual, personal interest; see van Dijk, 1998, ch. 3, pp. 28-52); it is just such

an account which is employed by these speakers to manage the tricky situ?

ated business of the interview setting where attending to the demand of their

category entitlement is potentially in conflict with that of working to condemn

racist discrimination. This is a feature of the talk which is simply missed in

an analysis of the sort that looks to substantiate such a distinction rather than

examining how that distinction features as a part of the situated interactional

business of participants. All of these features of the talk we have examined here indicate that the

question of racism, of the definition of racism and ofthat definition's relevance

for an understanding of circumstances to which some speakers may or may




not themselves be a party are complex matters of impending relevance to those

speakers themselves in the circumstances of their talk. Instead of seeking to

adjudicate upon the issue which those speakers raise there, my objective has

been to demonstrate that a far more interesting and insightful approach is one

which explores how the adjudication of this (or, for that matter, any other) issue

by speakers is a situated accomplishment.

4. Discussion

Having examined the example of talk reproduced in the previous section, we

are perhaps now in a better position to return to the issue of the social psy?

chological study of racism with which we began this paper (and which, to

varying degrees, both van Dijk and Hopkins et al. direct their own contribu?

tions). One of the things we have seen in considering how racism features as

a topic of talk is that the failure to distinguish between analyst and participant concerns is a significant difference between ethnomethodological analyses and

those with which they have been contrasted. From an ethnomethodological

perspective, one of the most serious shortcoming of this latter work is that it

overlooks the sense-making practices by which the notion of racism is ren?

dered meaningful to and for participants in circumstances where it features as

their own expressed concern. This is a serious oversight given the definitional

objective and charge of a social psychology to investigate social actors' un?

derstanding of their own and others' interactional relationships. For the participants whose talk we considered in the previous section, the

issue was not one of whether racism is itself defensible. Instead, it was an issue

of deciding upon what particular circumstances and events constitute racist

behavior. Thus, for those speakers, the work they pursued was to establish the

nature of the activities they discussed as an instance of racism. Moreover, we

saw that the potential for their own behavior itself to be construed as racist

was paradoxically employed in the service of formulating specific activities

(like attention to national identity) as accountably racist. Throughout, racism

was seen to feature as an accountable matter, and speakers proceeded in the

interactional business which they pursued with that assumption pervasively

being made relevant to their talk.

It might be tempting to say that by exploring these participant concerns, we overlook the more obvious point. Specifically, we would be overlooking how the speakers work to obscure their racist intentions, thereby reproducing elements of the "new racism" in much the same way that Hopkins et al. claim

with regard to the PSL officer. After all, is it not readily apparent how the charge of racism levelled against "Arabs and Kuwaitis" (lines 59-60) merely serves

to distract from the speaker's own racist intentions? But how are we to know?

On what basis are we to decide whether the events that Sarita and Jim refer to



482 KEVIN MCKENZIE

are accurately depicted by them or are, instead, distorted versions of the events,

formulated thus in order to hide their own true opinion? Put another way, if

the individuals to whom Sarita and Jim refer are indeed motivated by racism

when distinguishing between different people on the basis their national iden?

tities, then an analysis which attributes those speaker claims to an effort at

obscuring racism would be completely misdirected. But, if we were to assume

that this were the case, then how would we recognise a charge of racism which

was not turned around, one which was genuine? On what basis would we be

able to distinguish between the two?

As I have tried to argue above, we do not need to answer such questions

precisely because they are questions that the speakers themselves do not ad?

dress. While such questions may appear for us to have immediate and compel?

ling relevance to the talk under scrutiny, this is not the same thing as showing that they have the same relevance for the participants here in this setting. What

an ethnomethodological approach calls for in an investigation of the concerns

which speakers actually do address. So, for instance, what van Dijk might take

to be a "denial" of racism here is talk which is itself oriented to accomplish?

ing some rather complicated interactional business. That business has to do

with ratifying the moral demands of anti-racism in the setting of the talk's

production. This is because it is precisely there in the circumstances of that

talk that the speaker's remarks have the potential to be construed as an en?

dorsement of sentiments with which that speaker does not agree. Where van

Dijk's analysis would look to the speaker's intentions to account for that ex?

pression of anti-racism, ethnomethodology looks to the conflicting demands

inherent in the occasion of the talk for such an account.

Why would we need to look anywhere else other than in the demands of

the setting to account for the talk that takes place there? In other words, what

is to be gained by the sort of analysis which looks outside (beyond, beneath

or above) the demands of the setting to account for the talk which constitutes

that setting? Presumably, if I understand the claims of the new racism approach, one thing to be gained is that we would be able to uncover the source of rac?

ism. We could gain insight into factors which would otherwise be obscured.

For instance, we could reveal how asymmetrical power relations are system?

atically obfuscated in accounts, or how cognitive structures influence or de?

termine some speakers' perceptions of the social realities which they describe

(or any combination of these factors). If this is the case, then, why not seek to

develop the methodological resources with which to contest the validity of

such accounts.

The answer that ethnomethodology gives is that by doing so, we neglect to

consider the more fundamental order of business concerning what it is that

participants themselves work to accomplish when and where they provide for

such analytic resources. In other words, we lose sight of how the mundane

theorization of social action is itself oriented to the accomplishment of




interactionally consequential business (like attributing blame, justifying ac?

tions, etc.) precisely because we seek to intervene upon the questions that

speakers raise. This prevents us from examining what it is those speakers

actually do in those settings because our intervention there constitutes another

and entirely different order of business than the investigation of the setting. On the whole, then, we can see that ethnomethodology works to respecify

the domain of inquiry in the analysis of talk. In so doing, it seeks to explore areas of activity which are otherwise entirely overlooked. These areas are

nothing less than the situated business which social actors themselves pursue.14 That business can be quite complicated, to be sure. As I have tried to argue in

my analysis above, speakers are oriented in their remarks to foreclosing the

potential to be found accountable as racist. Yet I have also tried to show how

attending to the accountable nature of racial discrimination is itself a constitu?

tive feature of the situated undertaking in which cultural difference is rendered

meaningful to begin with. In other words, sensitivity to cultural difference and

the resistance to racial discrimination are mutually co-implicative. They are

two gestures by which the meaning of cross-cultural contact is rendered avail?

able. By seeking to adjudicate between these two gestures - to mitigate the

dilemmatic tension between them - we overlook the more fundamental issue

of how it is that that tension provides for the sense of cross-cultural contact in

the first place (Latour, 1993). Managing and sustaining the tension between

the two gestures, it would seem, is the business of the participants in the talk

considered in the previous section - not simply the "denial" or "turning around"

of the charge of racism.

5. Conclusion

This paper has been an attempt to articulate some of the key differences be?

tween ethnomethodologically-informed approaches to talk-in-interaction and

other approaches which also employ talk as an object of analysis. One of the

principal differences that distinguishes such schools are the respective under?

standings of the phenomenon under investigation. For ethnomethodologically informed work, talk is regarded as the sole analytic object with the emphasis

being on how conversations are activities wherein participants ongoingly work

to manage complex and often contradictory demands for accountability. Those

demands, in turn, are seen as imminent to the situated circumstances of the

conversational setting. We reviewed two selected examples of analysis to contrast with ethno?

methodology. These examples were chosen because they are quite direct in

their claims to develop a "critical" approach with the view of having a posi? tive effect in reversing (or, at least, contesting) social injustice and oppres? sion. I pointed out that this same concern for social justice is itself taken up



484 KEVIN MCKENZIE

by participants as a part of their own efforts to establish the matter of what

such injustice consists in, of how it is manifest, of what details of activity it is

constituted by. In this regard, both the critical approaches to such talk and the

participants ofthat talk share the same concerns to redress social wrong. The

difference is in whose activity each of the respective parties looks to elabo?

rate its critical claims.

I also pointed out that ethnomethodologically-informed research (includ?

ing, especially, discursive psychology) seeks to respecify traditional domains

of inquiry such that the practice of analysis itself is examined. This was con?

trasted with critical approaches which regard talk as a vehicle for some other

independent feature (such as structural racism, some cognitive mechanism,

etc.) which is said to manifest itself in (or "interface" with) the activity of talk.

Because such approaches regard talk as heuristic tools with which to gain access to some independent domain, they forego exploring how that gaining of-access is itself the work of participants. In considering this work, I noted

that like ethnomethodological research, such work too stresses the action ori?

entation of talk. However only ethnomethodological approaches look exclu?

sively to the then-present activities of participants as providing for the relevant

concerns with which to understand those activities.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following individuals for their useful comments on

earlier drafts of this paper: Teun van Dijk, Mary Horton-Salway, Howard

Mortley, Jean-Francois Prunet and Margaret Wetherell. Thanks is also due to

anonymous journal referees for their valuable input.

Appendix: Transcription Conventions

The transcription of talk that appears above is based on the well-known set of conventions

initially developed by Jefferson (1985; see also Sacks et al., 1974), and extended by Du Bois

(1991; Du Bois et al., 1993). Included among these conventions in the extracts above are the

following:

pause timing between turns-at-talk (1.0)

in tenths of second, indicated in

single parentheses

full stop indicates completion it also makes a lot of people

intonation more racist.

comma indicates continuing intona- they do everything differently,

tion

underlining indicates additional even someone who probably wasn't

stress racist before




prolongation of sound indicated

with colon(s)

false starts indicated with a

dash followed by a single space

quotation as a presentational

feature

arrows precede marked rise or fall

in intonation

talk delivered with an increase in speed indicated with inward

pointing guillemot

audible inhalation

audible exhalation

syllable of laughter

whispered passage quieter than

surrounding talk

ALL CAPS indicate passage that is louder than surrounding talk

speaker overlap indicated with

square brackets

non-overlapping, contiguous talk

between speaker turns indicated

with no line space

doubtful or uncertain transcrip? tion in single parentheses

editorial comment in double

parentheses, italicized

I suppo::se lots of people do: start to feel

he'll start t- to behave that way

because he hears everyone else say

"Oh bloody Arabs" or "Bloody Indians or whatever"

assume that they're Tstuipid

>certainly in England< they don't even bother

.hh

hh

@

?That's going to make a noise on

the tape0

you're put on this pedestal beCAUSE YOU ARE WHITE OR WHATEVER.

Sarita u:[:h] because

Jim [It's true.]

Jim Yeah. Sarita The minute you meet

Who are you talking about. (I mean)

((refers to Jim's fidgeting))

Notes

1. For a review of these developments in the history of sociological inquiry, see Garfinkel,

1952,1967,2001; Heritage, 1984; Hubert, 1992,1995; Schegloff, 1991,1992; Sharrock and Anderson, 1986.

2. Though see the remarks in Edwards (1997, p. 95) concerning the subtle distinction be?

tween a position that is agnostic on the ontological question of the psychological domain

and one that exclusively regards reference to the mental as merely another form of talk

(where he cites Coulter [1989] and Rorty [1980] as examples of this latter position). Potter and Edwards (in press) address this in greater detail in their response to Jeff Coulter's

(1999) recent critique of discursive psychology, and work there to distinguish their project from the body of analyses with which Coulter confuses them.



486 KEVIN MCKENZIE

3. I have referred to both of these under the broad rubric of new racism research because,

like the related work cited in the introduction above, they share an approach to the ex?

pression of an anti-racist argumentative position as concealing racist intent under a novel

or "new" guise. I will confine my discussion here to these specific examples of work which

seek to analyze talk-in-interaction, though the general point I will make could be extended

to related work, including that which employs other analytic heuristics such as the ex?

amination of statistical findings generated from questionnaire responses, etc. (see Potter

and Wetherell, 1987). 4. Schegloff (1998) makes a similar point in his response to Wetherell's (1998) recent cri?

tique of conversation analysis. Similarly, Widdicombe and Wooffitt (1995) develop the

point at considerable length in their investigation of the language of youth subcultures.

Providing a detailed examination of the accounts produced in interviews with punks, goths,

hippies, rockers, etc., they explore how speakers reflexively attend to the significance of

their own contributions to the interviews in which they take part for the analytic findings to be generated by the investigation. For related discussions from different domains of

research, see Atkinson and Silverman, 1997; Brannigan, 1997; Hester and Francis, 1994;

Osborne and Rose, 1999.

5. A comparison along these lines is somewhat complicated by the fact that van Dijk states

explicitly that his approach is one which sets out to avoid reductionism of precisely this sort (see esp. 1998, pp. 10, 26). From the perspective of an analysis which looks to the

situated demands of the interactional setting to account for the talk, however, such claims

merely beg the question. Rather than an account which avoids reductionism (through an

appeal suggestive of analytic triangulation), this might instead be seen to constitute a

threefold proliferation of reductionist explanatory resources, resulting in the potential

for no less than six reductionist accounts of talk-in-interaction.

6. Hopkins et al. describe that controversy as "especially heated because of black youths'

experiences of police racism .. . with PSL's critics arguing that it [the public relations

campaign] brings police racism into the school environment. . ." (1997, p. 313). Notice

that such a description entails a range of analytic presuppositions regarding the nature of

the investigative object. That is, implicit in their description is the assumption: (1) that we know beforehand what it is that racism consists of (versus, its definition being a

contentious matter of some concern to the participants), and (2) that the professional

activities of the interviewee, the PSL officer, are ones that constitute an instance of rac?

ism (versus this contention being a matter for negotiation in the talk under considera?

tion).

7. Along these lines, it might even actually support the speaker's version of opposition to

police presence for him to argue that there exists police racism and to provide evidence

of its prevalence since doing so would potentially foreclose the inferential trajectory that

Hopkins et al. pursue in their analysis (in which the contribution is taken to imply eva?

sion on the speaker's part). In the following section, we shall have occasion to consider

talk where this is precisely the kind of argumentative work that speakers undertake.

8. Indeed, Hopkins et al. themselves remark upon how "the charge of police racism is con?

strued [by the PSL officer] as saying nothing about police racism" (ibid.). 9. One could, of course, reason that it is the inexplicit nature of the inferential aspect of

such talk that renders its racist character so insidious (and therefore dangerous). This is,

of course, essentially the analytic position by which the new racism paradigm of research

is characterized. Billig (1991, pp. 107-121) and others (Shotter and Billig, 1998) argue

along similar lines and it is principally this feature that distinguishes their project of

rhetorical psychology from the more ethnomethodologically-informed project of discur?

sive psychology.




10. Along these lines, Mulkay notes how "it is precisely the symbolic separation of humour

from the realm of serious action that enables social actors to use humour for serious

purposes" (1988, p. 1; quoted in Edwards and Potter, 1992, p. 113).

11. There is nothing, for instance, to preclude the argument that "Kuwaitis and Arabs" are

as much the victims of social contagion as are the speakers themselves. Elsewhere

(McKenzie, 2000), I touch on how this argument features in talk about cross-cultural

contact where accounts of acculturation are employed to exonerate individual blame of

cultural Others referred to in a narrative (with remarks such as "but she can't help her?

self, I mean she's been raised that way"). Similarly, Garfinkel (1967) takes up the issue

of how individual action is rendered meaningful with reference to structural constraint

in his discussion of bureaucratic record keeping. The opposite tack, of course, would be

to hold structural constraint accountable to individual implementation -

as, for example,

where one is accused of "hiding behind the rules," or of implementing bureaucratic policy in ways that manipulate individual action.

12. Another interesting thing about this talk is how Sarita's characterization of the contras

tive case of England here is formulated in such a way as to foreclose the possibility of its

being interrogated or otherwise undermined through the vocal speed-up in delivery, its

effect being to introduce the point as an aside which is beyond the main argument being

made regarding the case of Kuwaiti racism ("somewhere else >certainly in England< they

don't even bother to ask you," lines 51-52). The business she is about here is, of course,

to make attention to national difference accountable as an instance of racism, and not to

open-up for scrutiny the question of relative difference. The contrast is thus made rel?

evant only insofar as it contributes to her main point, and that delicate foreclosure work

is attended to in the subtle details of delivery.

13. This same point has been made elsewhere, of course. For instance, in a previous issue of

this same journal, Scott Harris (2000) develops a similar theme regarding the in situ constitution of meaning in his discussion of theorists working in the phenomenological

and pragmatic traditions of philosophy. The implications of their work are clearly reso?

nant with the concerns of ethnomethodology's program, as Harris himself points out. One

of the ways that ethnomethodology's program departs from that philosophical tradition,

however, is in its development of the methodological implications for exploring partici?

pant business. Unfortunately, Harris fails to carry through on this aspect in his discus?

sion. Thus, where he raises the question of how equality features as a participant concern

(and where, like me, he calls for analytic attention to how this takes place), he neverthe?

less ends up looking to an independent source to decide the question of what constitutes

equality (grounding it in the claims of Dewey), all as a way to provide a rationale for his

own research. Harris' ultimate concern in this article would seem to be that of appropri?

ating participant constructions of equality (or inequality) in order to employ them in

pursuing the same issue which they (those participants) do on different and independent

grounds. This begs the very question Harris himself raises regarding the in situ determi?

nation of the phenomena at issue (equality). As a procedural method it entails abandon?

ing ethnomethodology's approach of analytic indifference at just the moment when that

approach promises to yield insights into how social phenomena are produced (Garfinkel,

1967, 1974, 2001 ; Bogen and Lynch, 1990; Lynch, 1993). Harris' efforts to situate ana?

lytic findings in relation to Dewey's philosophy (no matter how compelling on other

grounds) constitutes an a postiori appropriation of ethnomethodology's procedures in

order to privilege a potentially competing definition of the matter under consideration in

the talk being investigated, much in the way that I have argued Hopkins et al. do in their

analysis of the PSL officer's talk.



488 KEVIN MCKENZIE

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