"Everyday Racism" in a Culture of Political Avoidance: Civil Society, Speech, and Taboo

This ethnographic study brings together theories of civil society and race scholarship, to ask how people talk about race in conversations that are not exclusively devoted to talking about race. In theory, civic participation in voluntary associations expands citizens' horizons; but in practice, thoughtful conversation about race can be impossible in public. In showing this process, the two U.S. civic groups studied here become springboards for refining theories of civic culture and ideology. Recent race scholarship examines racial discourse as a language that structures thought; few have asked how the very act of speaking about race can mean something in itself. The whites in these two groups were “doing things with words” together, using references to race as “moves in games.” Avoidance of public speech was not just a result of participants' way of “thinking through race,” not primarily the symptom of a bond of shared, secret racism. It was a bond of interactional norms, that revealed members' understanding of the very meaning of public speech itself, showing what they assumed the nature of the civic forum itself was. Paradoxically, in the two voluntary associations, members who could voice anti-racist sentiments in private, “backstage” settings could not do so in more public, “frontstage” settings. The very act of speaking carried meaning itself; theorizing this meaning-making can help us understand civic life and the reproduction of racism in it.