#laughingwhileblack: Racial Formation in Perception

• In Event: 3265 - Space and Place

Abstract

This paper uses realist social construction to theorize a recent conflict over perceptions of social activity. The story begins on a winery tour in Napa Valley where a group of eleven women, ten black, are removed from the tour by management: train staff claim these women were being unruly to the dismay of other customers, and then grew abusive toward staff. These claims were soon retracted, as based only the testimony of one white passenger. The women, who joined the tour to celebrate the 17th year of a book club, dispute claims that they were acting uncivil; instead, they claim this is a blatant case of racial discrimination. The altercation reverberated through social media where the hashtag #laughingwhileblack emerged with accounts of discrimination as well as challenges to the phenomenon. Including these testimonials as empirically valid and non-exclusive experiences of social space, I consider how audibility is constructed, enforced and challenged through relations of dominance and routine practice. In this sense, perception includes both the first order work of sensory habits and the second order cognitive processing of this engagement. In conversation with field theory and post-positivist methodology, I argue that subjective experience is the actual product of social processes. Unlike theories of “white” space which suggest space is dominated by racial markers in symbolic interaction, I propose that power defers to interpretive processes inscribed to actual space through practice. These habitual processes set real limits for relativism via social construction. We need not conclude that these women misrecognized the definition of the situation as belonging to the dominant definition of the other tourists; rather, perceptions of civility and the concurrent recognition of justice are inscribed to real places in processes that transcend the mere sum of individual subjectivities. The historical imprint of social fields on a material ecology differently empower interaction therein through a residual social aesthetics -- the association of phenomenal qualia with social norms. Those who would like to understand the formation of race in interaction must then contend with the perspectival biases of perception if they hope to address discrimination and exclusion in everyday life.

Author

• Joseph Klett, University of California-Santa Cruz