Felt understandings- Affective Forces That Encourage Students To Continually Understand Racism As Individual Prejudice

• In Event: 4467 - Section on Social Psychology Refereed Roundtables (Cosponsored with Section on Sociology of Emotions)
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 6: Race and Bias

Abstract

This paper outlines the role that affects and public feelings of race (i.e., ineffable feelings, named emotions, and sensations that exist both at and above the level of the individual body and social subject) play in shaping college students’ understandings of racism after taking an introductory sociological course. While the heretofore study of affects and public feelings about race has been a theoretical conversation mostly outside of sociology, I draw from data-driven analysis of ethnographic field notes from six classrooms at a racially-diverse and politically liberal college campus in California, as well as interview and qualitative survey data from students in those classrooms. This paper demonstrates how discourses about race are inextricably tied to feelings about race—feelings that are both expressed by racialized individuals and that circulate with particular ideas about racism at the cultural level. The terms “felt understandings” and “affective-discursive repertoires” are introduced to account for the mutual formation of affects and discourses, as well as the multitude of affects and discourses that shape students’ consciousness. More specifically, I focus on a common felt understanding of students— racism as intentional, individual prejudice and show how public feelings of race—specifically erotics (Holland 2012) and paranoia (Jackson 2010)—bolster that knowledge formation, encouraging students in particular, and America at-large, to repeatedly select this understanding from their repertoires and recirculate it in their interactions. I conclude by encouraging sociologists to further develop and emphasize knowledge that accounts for the affective components of race and racism in order to render a more sophisticated understanding of how racism—something that simultaneously operates through institutional, interactional, symbolic, and psychological mechanisms—functions in society.

Author

• Christie Grace McCullen, University of California Santa Cruz