Contesting Reports of Racism,Contesting the Rights to Assess

Abstract

Analyzing a thread of online interaction, I apply conversation analysis and discursive psychology methods to explicate how experiences of racism are reported and contested by participants in interaction. The person reporting their experience of racism (the reporter) applies commonsense knowledge to assess the perpetrator's racist intent. Recipients of the report contest the reporter's rights to assess the perpetrator's intent while managing their lack of independent access to the reported encounter. In milder contestations, they cast doubt while avoiding assessing the situation themselves, which leads to negotiations over the accusation without contesting the correctness of the reporter's assessment. In aggravated contestations, recipients explicitly contest the reporter's assessment of the perpetrator, which leads to interactional breakdowns where moral culpabilities of both sides are implicated. Implications for understanding the moral difficulties involved in accusing racism, the interactional contingencies involved in responding to and contesting such accusations, and members’ understandings of racism are discussed.

Making accusations of racism is a moral matter. While accusers make moral condemnations of whoever is being categorized as “racist,” they can also be held accountable for their own moral culpability: discursive studies on reporting racism have highlighted a norm against making direct accusations of racism in interactions such that making such accusations can lead to accusers themselves being seen as prejudiced and morally deficient (Augoustinos and Every 2007; Durrheim, Greener, and Whitehead 2015; van Dijk 1992). This potential moral trouble involved in accusing racism can be consequential: even for members of groups subjected to racial discrimination, they rarely make direct accusations of racism when narrating experiences of potential racial discrimination (Goodman and Rowe 2014; Kirkwood, McKinlay, and McVittie 2013; Rojas-Sosa 2016). To better understand the moral difficulty involved in making accusations of racism, this article analyzes practices of reporting experiences of racism and of contesting such reports in online forums, where morality is evidently being oriented to by participants.

Two aspects regarding reporting and responding to experiences of racism need to be considered when studying how such reports can be contested. First, experiences of racism include negative moral evaluations, with evaluations being done by invoking commonsense knowledge about what counts as racism (see also Essed 1988). To convincingly make an accusation of racism, the reporter needs to demonstrate that their assessment is based on a normative application of commonsense knowledge (Sacks 1984). Therefore, even though the reporter “owns” the experience, reporting the experience as an instance of racism is subject to social regulations: the success of such reports is contingent on whether recipients agree on the knowledge of what counts as racism and its applicability to the given situation.

Second, recipients of reports of racism often lack independent access to the reported encounters. They can only know about a reported racist encounter to the extent that it is described by the reporter, which is already constructed as the reporter's assessment of the encounter. This lack of independent access to the reported experience can then become a practical issue for recipients to manage when affiliating or disaffiliating with the reporter's claim (see Heritage 2011). Do recipients simply trust the reporter's assessment of the encounter because the latter was directly involved in the incident? If not, what practices are employed by recipients to contest an assessment of an experience to which they lack direct access?

Building on these observations, I suggest that examining practices involved in reporting and contesting accusations of racism can shed light on the fundamental question, “What is racism?” from the perspective of everyday societal members and, accordingly, how the rights to claim experiences of racism are socially regulated. Experiences are often not self-evidently racist, given that contemporary forms of racism are arguably more covert and shown to be defeasible in interactions (Bonilla-Silva 2014; Durrheim, Mtose, and Brown 2011; Whitehead 2015). Consequently, evaluating a particular incident as racist can require substantial sense-making that mobilizes knowledge about normative and racially motivated interactions (Essed 1988). What counts as sufficient grounds for evaluating an experience as racist, however, can vary for different people, which can lead to contestations of reports of racism. This research demonstrates that examining practices deployed by members in contesting and defending reports of racism can provide insights into how members negotiate the meaning of racism in everyday lives. Instead of attempting to answer the question “why” some people contest racism reports while others do not, this study examines “how” contestations are done when people do contest such reports. By answering the “how” question, we can see how members themselves are concerned with the “why” question. For instance, how do they understand why some people contest such reports? Do they attribute it to certain personal traits? Therefore, the “why” question is treated as something that members themselves are dealing with in contesting and defending racism reports. That is, members’ understanding of the “why” question can be observed in their practices of contesting racism reports. By examining such practices, this article contributes to an empirically grounded understanding of the moral difficulties involved in making accusations of racism.

Background

Reporting Experiences of Racism

Making accusations of racism can be morally delicate. Participants in interactions generally work to avoid looking prejudiced (Edwards 2003). Meanwhile, the dominant contemporary racial ideology has been observed to be “color-blind” or “laissez-fair”: it emphasizes that race is no longer a fundamental force structuring our social lives and that existing disparities can be explained away without invoking racism (Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith 1997; Bonilla-Silva 2014). If being color-blind is the normative way to perceive our social world, making accusations of racism can then be readily seen as a normative breach that reflects accusers’ own racially motivated prejudices.

Nevertheless, accusations of racism are made. Attending to the norm against seeing race as shaping our social lives, reports of experiences of racism may be collaboratively constructed by the accuser and their coparticipants in interaction to diffuse moral culpability of the former (Rafaely 2021; Whitehead 2009). Such collaborative constructions of experiences of racism often involve a distribution of work: the person who owns the experience describes the experience; their coparticipants then apply commonsense knowledge about racism to assess the reported experience as one of racism (Rafaely 2021; Whitehead 2009). Despite their important insights, these studies have focused on interactions where participants affiliate with one another's evaluative stances toward the experience of concern. To fully understand why making accusations of racism is interactionally delicate and how people manage moral culpability, we also need to study cases where accusations of racism are contested (see also van Dijk 1992).

Although commonsense knowledge of what constitutes racism is necessary for assessing whether one has encountered it (see Essed 1988), racism has always been a contested concept (Doane 2006). Scholars have conceptualized racism differently, including as individual psychological phenomena such as hatred and prejudices, as structural phenomena sustained through institutionalized practices that reproduce racial inequality, or as a combination of both (see Bonilla-Silva 2014; Bourabain and Verhaeghe 2021; Doane 2006). Similarly, everyday members can contest proposed commonsense knowledge about race and racism (Cresswell, Whitehead, and Durrheim 2014; Robles 2015; Whitehead 2018). For example, members can disagree on whether racism is mainly an individual psychological issue or has to be understood at the group level (Cresswell et al. 2014). They can also dispute whether associating a group with negative traits in everyday talk constitutes racism (Robles 2015). Consequently, reported experiences of racism can be contested potentially by members disagreeing on what counts as racism, which in turn implicates participants’ moral culpability in making such accusations.

Despite scholarly discussions on contestations over the conceptualization of racism, everyday members’ contestations about experiences of racism are rarely examined. This lacuna partially results from the dominant approaches’ focus on collecting self-reported experiences of racism through methods such as interviews (see Bourabain and Verhaeghe 2021). While these studies offer great insights to people's experiences of racism, there is limited use of self-reports when examining the interactional dimensions of accusing racism and responding to such reports in mundane settings. Thus, self-reports are ill-fitted for studying the potentially contested nature of racism reports in interaction. In addition, while the focus on self-reported experiences of racism may fit with a conceptualization of racist encounters where the potential perpetrators’ point of view is treated as largely irrelevant (see Bonilla-Silva 2014), examining contestations over racism reports can reveal how members conceptualize racism in different ways.

To summarize, it is important to examine how reports of racism are contested in interactions to understand what racism means to everyday members and how its meanings are negotiated through such contestations. Such a focus can shed further light on potential mechanisms through which accusations of racism become morally culpable in interactions. Given that such accusations are assessments of experiences produced by applying commonsense knowledge and that recipients of such reports often lack independent access to those experiences, in developing my analysis, I draw on studies of participants’ orientations to differential entitlements to assess experiences in interactions.

Experience, Knowledge, and Morality in Doing Assessments

Sacks (1984:426) observes that people who own an experience are privileged in their entitlement to “perceive and feel about” the experience. Studies have shown that participants who have firsthand experiences are treated as having more rights to narrate and assess those experiences in interactions (Heritage 2011; Pomerantz 1980; Pomerantz 1984a). Participants systematically orient to their epistemic status, which is the shared understanding of their relative knowledge in a given domain, when assessing and affiliating with assessments of matters to which they have differential access (Heritage and Raymond 2005). The lack of direct access to others’ experiences is carefully managed by participants when affiliating with co-participants’ telling of personal experiences through practices such as telling a “second story” to provide a “parallel assessment” of a similar personal experience (Heritage 2011; Jefferson 1978; Sacks 1992:764–72; Stivers 2008). These studies show that respecting people's entitlements to their experiences is treated as a thoroughly moral issue, so that violations can be sanctioned as “epistemic trespassing” by co-participants (Stivers, Mondada, and Steensig 2011:19).

Experiencing something directly, however, is not always associated with privileged rights to assess those experiences in everyday interactions (Raymond and Heritage 2006; see also Stivers et al. 2011). In an interaction examined by Schegloff (2007b:480), a teenage daughter assesses her peers as “gwaffs,” a term her mother does not know; once the daughter explains the term, her mother attempts to assess the daughter also as a “gwaff,” which is immediately rejected by the daughter, who claims more expertise in applying the term to assess individuals. This example shows that even when participants have direct experiential access to what they are assessing, they may not be ratified as having knowledge of the standard for a convincing assessment. In another interaction examined by Drew (1991:28–29), a speaker assesses her friend's marriage: even though the friend invokes firsthand experience of his own marriage to reject her assessment, the speaker uses knowledge about marriage that “anyone knows” to defend her assessment. This interaction exemplifies that commonsense knowledge can be used by participants to circumvent their limited rights to assess others’ experiences.

Applying these findings to the case of reports of racism, we can anticipate that while recipients are constrained by their limited access to the reported encounter in responding to the reporter's assessment of it, they are not completely deprived of resources such as commonsense knowledge to challenge such reports. Recipients and the original reporter can negotiate and contest their relative rights to assess the encounter, and the question of who has rights to assess which part of the encounter further depends on participants’ definitions of a racist encounter. For instance, if participants see the racist “intent” of the potential perpetrator as a defining feature of a racist action, then there is the question of who has rights to assess the perpetrator’s subjectivity, to which the reporter also has no direct access. By examining the practices used by participants to manage their limited experiential access and to contest each other's rights to assess while contesting reports of racism, the following analysis demonstrates how ordinary people may deal with ambiguity of racial matters in everyday life and how meanings of racism are negotiated through such practices.

Methods

The data consist of a thread of forum posts on 1point3acres, the largest Chinese online community based in North America where Chinese immigrants discuss various topics. The original post of the thread, titled “today encountered racist three-question-in-a-row by white old woman in apartment complex” with the hashtag “stopasianhate,” was posted on May 9, 2021, by a user named ReadingEveryDay (henceforth “OP”). The post generated more than 200 responses from at least 100 unique users, making it the most popular post reporting experiences of racism on the forum. About 40 percent of users positively interacted with OP's accusation through practices such as praising OP's actions, suggesting ways to fight against racism, and defending OP from users who challenged OP's report. Roughly half of the users showed ambivalence toward OP's accusation of racism: some focused on discussing whether questions such as “where are you from” are racist, whereas others joked about what they would do differently. The remaining 10 percent of the users explicitly challenged OP's accusation as wrong. Posts that disagreed with OP occasioned further responses from OP and other users. After examining all posts, those that tacitly or explicitly challenged OP were collected for further analysis. The majority of the posts are written in Mandarin Chinese with English words and sentences in some of them. I present English translations of the posts, with italicization of text originally written in English, and thus untranslated.

The analytic approach draws on principles and concepts from conversation analysis (CA) and discursive psychology (DP; Edwards 2003; Sacks 1992; Schegloff 2007a). While CA has conventionally examined talk-in-interaction, recent studies have demonstrated the utility of applying CA to online interactions (see Meredith 2019). Online forum interactions differ from conversations in various ways, including participants’ inability to monitor the progressive realization of turns, the lack of access to writers’ editing practices concerned with potential trouble sources, and unbounded numbers of possible participants (Meredith 2019). Nonetheless, similar to contemporaneous talk, the coherence of online interactions is largely maintained through participants’ paired actions (Meredith 2019). Therefore, participants in online forums are also concerned with issues such as recipient design, intersubjectivity, affiliation, and moral accountability when methodically producing actions with written posts. In addition, given the moral sensitivity about making and contesting claims about racism in the contemporary social world, online forum interactions can serve as a strategic site to access members’ naturally occurring discourse about racism. Drawing on CA's insights, I focus on practices used by members to accuse racism and to disaffiliate with such accusations while also orienting to differential normative entitlement to experience (Heritage 2013; Stivers 2008). This approach is also consistent with DP's interest in examining how mental and psychological concepts such as knowledge and experience are accomplished through talk (Edwards 2003).

• #1 ReadingEveryDay 2021-5-9 13:04:12

• 1 Today as I was washing my car in my apartment complex, I encountered a white old

• 2 woman, who parked one parking space away, asked me: will you

• 3 wash my car? I felt very strange, I wasn't getting in her way,

• 4 so I said excuse me?

• 5

• 6 She then asked: Where are you from?

• 7 Heard that typical opening, I didn't bother to respond,

• 8 Sure enough she started asking racist three-question-in-a-roll:

• 9 Are you from China?

• 10 Do you speak English?

• 11 So I rolled my eyes, said: I speak English, but I don't speak to racist.

• 12

• 13 She paused a bit, continued asking: Where are you from? I didn't want to respond, she

• 14 kept mumbling

• 15 So I had to say in a loud voice: Where do *YOU* come from?

• 16 she said I’m from here

• 17 So I said You live your whole life in America, but you are still a racist, shame on you!

• 18 (56 lines omitted)

• 19 You really can't be less spirited, picking on weaklings is exactly what racist do, I hope from now 20 on everyone will yell back to them if asked racist-three-question-in-a-row, how

• 21 dare they shamelessly ask Where are you from just by seeing an Asian face.

In my analysis, I first examine how commonsense knowledge about racism is proposed and used by OP in their original post to justify assessing the perpetrator as motivated by racist intent. I then examine practices adopted by participants to manage their lack of direct access to the encounter while contesting the accusation. In milder contestations, participants show ambivalence toward OP's assessment of the perpetrator's racist intent while agreeing on a downgraded accusation where OP felt discriminated against. This is contrasted with aggravated contestations where participants directly challenge OP's assessment of the perpetrator as biased, leading to interactional breakdowns where both sides’ moral culpabilities are implicated.

Results

The Original Post

In this section, I analyze the original post, focusing on parts where OP makes the accusation of racism and examining how presumed commonsense knowledge about racism underpins OP's accusation. I show that OP treats the question “Where are you from?” as commonly known evidence of racism when directed to an Asian person. This knowledge provides for OP's interpretation of the woman who asked this question being unambiguously racist toward them,despite some evident ambiguity at the beginning of the incident. Importantly, OP uses such knowledge to assess the woman as being intentionally racist.

In lines 1 through 4, OP describes the beginning of the incident. OP reports themself as being engaged in a mundane activity while portraying the perpetrator's action as out of the ordinary. They display their own ordinariness by indicating that their first reaction was to come up with a nonracialized account of the woman's seemingly strange action (that they were “getting in her way”), thereby producing a designedly ordinary reaction (lines 3–4; Jefferson 2004; Sacks 1984). That is, OP shows that they did not immediately arrive at the interpretation of the woman as being racist while leaving such an interpretation available to their audience. Notably, OP characterizes the perpetrator as a “white old woman,” which helps establish the evaluation of the encounter as potentially racially motivated: it relies on shared knowledge about the connection between certain social categories, especially “old” and “white” and being racist.

OP reports more speech from the perpetrator: the woman asked “where are you from?”, which then becomes a key evidence for OP to evaluate the woman as being racist (line 6). OP refers to this question as a “typical opening” without explicitly stating what it is typical of (line 7). OP could be heard as either insinuating their recurrent experiences with such a question and its implied race-based motivations or as referring to the presumed known-in-common knowledge that the question is racially motivated when being directed at an Asian person (see Garfinkel 1967). Up to point, OP has only alluded to the implied racist intent of the woman in their narration of the encounter. In the following sentence, however, OP explicitly categorizes the woman's questions as “racist.” By using the evidential adverb “sure enough,” OP confirms the correctness of their unsaid evaluation of the question: they have already predicted the onset of the following “racist” questions (line 8). By asserting that they have anticipated further racist questions, OP implies that the woman's action reflects an underlying pattern of her being a “racist” individual such that the question was not incidentally asked by a nonracist. Having produced accusations of potential racism tacitly so far, OP now explicitly characterizes the reported questions as “racist” without any form of mitigation despite the common reluctance of directly alleging racism (Durrheim et al. 2015; Goodman and Rowe 2014; Whitehead 2009). The questions “Are you from China?” and “Do you speak English?” are presented as unequivocally racist (lines 9–10), potentially drawing on the commonsense understanding that questions that more explicitly refer to one's physical appearance are more explicitly racist. This claimed certainty in recognizing the racist nature of the questions is further indicated in their response to the woman's question where OP directly called the woman “racist” (line 11). Therefore, by presenting their evaluation of the woman's action as based on known-in-common knowledge about racism, OP formulates the encounter as between a racist “white old woman” and an Asian victim, which then serves as the context for the rest of the report.

In lines 13 through 15, OP depicts themself as uninterested in engaging with the woman, but the woman's continuing attacks leave them with no choice but to respond with a counter question (Schegloff 2007a). Despite the indexicality of the word “here” in the woman's response (line 16), OP treats “here” as meaning “America” in their next reported response (line 17). Again, the certainty of this interpretation is treated as justified by the claimed shared knowledge that when racist individuals ask Asians the question “Where are you from?,” the “where” refers to a foreign country because Asians are racialized as foreign in the United States (see Kim 1999). Therefore, once OP has assessed the woman's action as being racist by referring to commonsense knowledge, they continue to draw on such knowledge to justify their actions during the encounter.

OP ends the post with an upshot of the story: everyone should yell back at racists who ask such questions (lines 19–21). OP uses script formulations (Edwards 1994) to highlight general dispositions of “racists” as “picking on weaklings” (line 19) and as asking “where are you from” by “seeing an Asian face” (lines 20–21). Such formulations convey that what is being stated is commonsensically known as true (Edwards 1994). Formulating the end of the post in this way further works to justify OP's actions by invoking the truism of the knowledge they have drawn on to see the woman as racist and to design their own course of action. In addition, these formulations also apply to the specific woman: OP is assessing the woman's action as driven by her subjective intent of “picking on weaklings” and asking racist questions upon “seeing an Asian face.”

To summarize, this section has shown members’ orientation to knowledge about racism in evaluating potentially racist encounters. Specifically, OP draws on ostensibly commonsense knowledge to justify their assessments of the woman's questions as being racially motivated. As will be revealed in the following sections, however, OP's rights to assess the woman's racist intent by invoking such “known-in-common” knowledge may be a more contingent matter than OP evidently anticipated. Despite lacking independent access to the original encounter, other users can contest OP's report, rejecting the assessment of the potential perpetrator's subjective experience during the encounter.

Milder Contestations

In this section, I show that some participants cast doubt on OP's accusation by claiming that the “racist” questions mentioned by OP are only situationally racist. They focus on debating the generalizability of OP's interpretation of those questions while avoiding assessing the specific woman's intent. In doing so, they avoid claiming that OP's assessment of the reported encounter is necessarily wrong. Instead, contesters give examples of similar encounters that they have directly experienced and explain why those encounters were not “racist.” Such responses are ambivalent toward the original post by virtue of suggesting that there is no definite evidence that the woman asked those questions as a “racist” while still orienting to the normative expectation of not making assertions about experiences to which they have no independent access (Heritage 2011). In this way, both parties can maintain their stance with some compromises: OP's feelings of being discriminated against by the woman can be ratified without taking a position on whether the woman was intentionally being racist toward OP. These contestations are much milder compared to exchanges that will be examined in the next section: they are less argumentative and do not escalate to claims about each other's moral flaws. To illustrate this possibility, I examine exchanges between user legend313 and OP.

#91 legend313 2021-5-9 20:09:14

• 1 setting aside this person, only looking at this sentence.

• 2

• 3 I don't think “where are you from” is racist. I would also ask where are you from in

• 4 normal chatting. It is just ni naer ren? Right? If it's from the same country, just

• 5 say which city, if not the same country, just say which country.

• 6

• 7 In the movie Captain America 3, Captain America also asked spider man “Captain

• 8 America: You got heart, kid. Where are you from? Spider-Man: [straining] Queens!”

• 9 Captain America: [chuckles in mild disbelief] Brooklyn!”

• 10

• 11 Do you speak English, this has to be put in the context, many people in the US

• 12 speak Spanish not English.

• 13

• 14 Using sentences without context to define racist is meaningless, it's like literary

• 15 inquisition.

• 16

• 17 #94 ReadingEveryDay 2021-5-9 20:13:49

• 18  context: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/…-where-are-you-from

• 19

• 20 #109 legend313 2021-5-9 20:34:09

• 21  This is LA times’ opinion article, anyone can write it. Even if it's from

• 22  formal media, you can't treat it as settled, information from media

• 23  is also not first-hand. When you write a paper, your teacher should

• 24  have taught you to try your best to cite first-hand information rather

• 25  than citing media coverage.

• 26

• 27  So is Captain America racist?

• 28

• 29 #112 ReadingEveryDay 2021-5-9 20:35:32

• 30   This question was also mentioned in the internal email sent out by

• 31   our company, that this might be offensive to other people,

• 32   if the person is evidently unfriendly, this sentence can be

• 33   used as support evidence to report them

• 34

• 35  #121 legend313 2021-5-9 20:43:31

• 36    I think what your company said is quite correct, if

• 37    there is other evidence, this definitely can be used as support

• 38    evidence.

• 39

• 40    However, if it's only this sentence, I don't think it's racist.

• 41    Chinese and foreigners are all humans, as long as you are

• 42    human, you have homeland, but if according to what you

• 43    said, even asking where are you from when I am talking to

• 44    others makes me racist, whom can I explain myself to.

In line 1, legend313 announces that the post is not about this specific woman's action, which shows their orientation to their lack of independent access to the encounter. It does not assess whether the woman's conduct amounts to racism. Instead, the post is about the question “Where are you from?” in general, which has been treated by OP as unequivocal evidence of racism that is known-in-common. In other words, while legend313 acknowledges OP's epistemic primacy (Heritage and Raymond 2005) over this specific encounter, they claim rights to contest this knowledge about racism.

In line 3, legend313 states that from their perspective, the question “Where are you from?” is not racist. Instead, it is presented as a common question in “normal chatting” that legend313 themself, implied as a nonracist, would ask (line 4). They compare this question to the Chinese equivalent “ni naer ren?” (literally translated as “you where person”; line 5). This comparison works to distance the question from being racially motivated by changing the context to an implied intraracial interaction. They proceed to emphasize the indexicality of the word “where” by suggesting that depending on the context, either “city” or “country” can be a normal response (lines 4–5). Legend313 then offers another example where the proposed “racist” question is being asked by someone who is not normatively seen as racist in an intraracial interaction: Captain America asks Spiderman “where are you from” (lines 7–9). These all work to dispute OP's treatment of the question as unequivocally “racist”: Captain America cannot racially discriminate Spiderman just like Chinese people cannot racially discriminate each other.

After having presented this alternative understanding of “Where are you from?,” legend313 proceeds to address another question labeled as “racist” by OP: “do you speak English.” Legend313 presents their basis for not treating the question as always “racist” as a fact (Potter and Wetherell 1988): “many people in the US speak Spanish not English” (lines 11–12). They conclude with a perceivably strong disagreement with the OP's unequivocal treatment of certain questions “without context” as being “racist”: they compare such treatment to “literary inquisition,” which refers to historical violence conducted by Chinese rulers who arbitrarily persecuted intellectuals by taking expressions from their written work out of context to make them appear problematic (lines 14–15). Thus, legend313 shows a reluctance to accept OP's assessment of the woman's intent without explicitly voicing their disagreements.

In responding to legend313, OP writes “context:” and links an LA Times OP-ED article titled “The question every Asian American hates to be asked: ‘Where are you from?’” (line 18). In doing so, OP provides a source to show the supposedly known-in-common basis for reasonably treating the question as “racist” (Edwards and Potter 1993; Pomerantz 1984b). Moreover, the post disagrees with legend313 by pointing out that such an understanding is actually contextualized correctly (i.e., when directed at “Asians” in the United States) and that legend313 fails to address this context. Therefore, OP maintains their stance of treating the “Where are you from?” question directed at Asians as “racist.”

In response, legend313 highlights that the article shared by OP is an opinion piece, which can be written by “anyone” (line 21)—an extreme case formulation deployed to underline the lack of authority of the article (Pomerantz 1986). By stating that “anyone can write it,” legend313 implies that the article cannot be seen as representing a common understanding of the question among Asians in the United States. Consequently, if this is not a common understanding, then just asking the question does not automatically make someone a racist. By rebutting the objectivity and authority of the source provided by OP (lines 21–25), legend313 retains their stance that the question is not commonsensically understood and deployed as racially motivated, which is evident in their returning to the example of Captain America (line 27).

OP responds to legend313 by providing another source: their company's internal emails (line 30). The company is hearably an “American” company, and the messages are presented as not just any specific individual's opinion. This works to counter legend313’s claim that the article could be written by “anyone” and that the view could be idiosyncratic. Importantly, the reported messages downgrade the certainty of the question as racist in multiple ways. The question “might” be felt as “offensive” to “some people,” instead of being definitely motivated by racism against Asians (line 31). Furthermore, asking the question can be “support evidence” of someone being reportably problematic when co-occurring with other offenses (lines 32–33). In other words, whether someone asks the question is not the determining evidence of them being intentionally racist.

In lines 36 through 38, legend313 affiliates with OP's response while displaying that what the company said was already known by them: the evidential adverb “definitely” upgrades their epistemic status when agreeing with OP, which claims their independent access to the knowledge being agreed on (Heritage and Raymond 2005). In doing so, they also imply that “other evidence” is an important element of what they mean by “context.” Meanwhile, legend313 treats the company's stance as essentially distinct from OP's stance, which is treating someone as being racially motivated once they ask the question “Where are you from?” (line 42). The response ends with a hearable complaint about the unfairness of calling people “racist” without taking into their intention by pointing out that they themself can very well be called a “racist” without being able to “explain [them]self” according to OP's reasoning (lines 43–44).

In responding to legend313’s claim about the fundamental difference between the company's and OP's stances on the question, OP in post#123 actively affiliates with the company's stance by modifying the commonsense knowledge about racism that they originally draw on. Instead of presenting the question as definite evidence of the questioner being racially motivated, they reformulate it as a “red flag” that “alerts” people that they “may be facing a racist” (lines 1–2). Instead of fully agreeing with legend313, however, OP highlights the moral culpability and incompetence of whoever asks such a question (lines 2–5). This is based on the downgraded knowledge: people may feel “uncomfortable” when being asked the question, even though the questioner is not unequivocally “racist.” This treatment of the question leaves room for the domain of experience in interpreting this question: people can experience it differently. Therefore, neither OP nor legend313 are necessarily wrong in their interpretations of the question.

• #123 ReadingEveryDay 2021-5-9 20:45:21 (responding to #121)

• 1. That’s why this sentence is a redflag, one should be alerted when it appears, you

• 2. maybe facing a racist, for people with high emotional intelligence, if they are aware

• 3. that a sentence might make other uncomfortable, they will try hard to avoid it, or

• 4. ask in a different way

• 5. If one really encounters someone asking it, whether the other person is wicked or

• 6. careless, it can only be judged by the person involved.

• 7.

• 8. #124 legend313 2021-5-9 20:48:49

• 9.    I won't think it's offensive when others ask me where are you from, I will tell

• 10.    them. The other day someone in the gym was talking to me, also asked me,

• 11.    that person has black skin, also asked me where are you from. I told him

• 12.    openly that I am Chinese, I didn't feel embarrassed or anything. He was

• 13.    Puerto Rican.

• 14.    (lines omitted; legend313 reiterates their points)

Building on this, OP states that “only the person involved” can “judge” whether someone has racist intent when asking the question (line 6). OP explicitly orients to their normative entitlement to assess firsthand experiences (Heritage 2011; Sacks 1984) while tacitly defending their assessment of this specific perpetrator and preemptively blocking any direct challenge against it. This invocation of the norm can be seen as effective: in response, legend313 recounts a personal experience where they were asked the same question by a person of another race but were not offended (lines 9–13). Legend313’s assessment of their own experience does not directly undermine OP's assessment about the encounter. Rather, it shows legend313’s reluctance to either fully accept or contest OP's assessment of the woman's intent without independent access to the encounter. Consequently, legend313 accepts that OP felt offended without agreeing that the woman was intentionally being racist.

Another example of how this practice is adopted to show ambivalence toward OP's accusation is shown in the next excerpt. In responding to the original post, blue88128XZGO describes experiences similar to the reported incident (lines 1–3). Assessing those encounters, blue8812ZCGO asserts that their neighbors are “not racist” and that those questions were being asked out of positive intentions such as being friendly and/or humorous (lines 4–5). They then state explicitly that the intent behind these questions needs to be assessed in “context,” and no one interpretation should be “generalized and applied” to all (line 6). This statement works to avoid being seen as directly challenging OP's assessment of the woman's intent or suggesting that the woman was just being friendly like their own neighbors while implicitly disagreeing with OP's treatment of such questions as unequivocally racist. Similar to legend313, blue88128XZGO focuses on assessing individuals they have encountered directly as not racist while being ambivalent toward OP's assessment of the woman's racist intent.

In this section, I have shown how users carefully manage their own moral accountability when responding to accusations of racism to which they lack independent access. Specifically, they refrain from challenging OP's assessment of the woman's racist intent or assessing the encounter themselves. They focus instead on emphasizing that the potential racist undertone of the questions asked by the woman is situational and that they assess individuals who have asked them similar questions as not racist. Thus, they imply that OP's report lacks decisive evidence needed for them to endorse OP's assessment of the woman's intent without explicitly stating that OP is wrong. Meanwhile, still orienting to their privileged access to the encounter to maintain their assessment about it, OP also shifts to a compromised position where they agree on the importance of context and argue that people can get offended by such questions even though asking those questions is not necessarily racist. In this way, the participants collaboratively work toward a downgraded accusation where OP feels racially discriminated against by the woman despite a lack of agreement on the woman's intentions. As such, neither side is presented as morally culpable, and the contestations remain mild.

Aggravated Contestations

In this section, I examine exchanges where contestations over OP's report become rather aggravated. Unlike milder contestations, where recipients only cast doubt on OP's assessment and avoid assessing the encounter themselves, contesters in aggravated contestations explicitly challenge OP's assessment of the incident by advancing their own alternative assessments of the woman's actions. In such contestations, commonsense knowledge about what counts as normal versus racist actions is used by both sides to support their assessments of the woman's intent and treat each other as incompetently assessing it (also see Pollner 1987). The other side's incompetence in assessing racism is argued to be arising from more general moral deficiencies: contesters assert that OP is prejudiced and oversensitive and imply that their report is partial while OP treats contesters as being provocative and overconfident. Essentially, these participants contest OP's rights to narrate the ostensible perpetrator's subjective experience and demand objective evidence for OP's claims. They thereby treat OP's claims as biased while portraying their own assessments based on the report as nonbiased. In response, OP highlights contesters’ lack of independent access to the encounter and, thus, the lack of experiential base of contesters’ claims. Contesters’ claims are treated by OP as motivated by their ill intents. In this way, the contestations escalated rapidly from disagreements about the encounter to claims about each other's personal flaws.

• #42 Minted 2021-5-9 18:19:15

• 1. I think this is gonna be thumbed down, but I still want to say, you are too sensitive.

• 2.

• 3. At the beginning she asked whether you could wash her car, it was just that she saw you

• 4. were washing your car and wondered whether you could also wash hers, if you didn’t

• 5. want to you could just say it and it would be over

• 6.

• 7. “Where are you from” itself is just small talk, it is only inappropriate if they continue

• 8. asking “where are you REALLY from?” after you respond with US

• 9.

• 10. You did not say anything after she asked you two questions, it was very normal

• 11. to ask you whether you knew English, and then you remained silent, and suddenly

• 12. put a racist label on her, I really don't get it

• 13.

• 14. do not always have a chip on your shoulder in real life, don't be someone who would

• 15. burst into anger every time an elderly asks you “Where are you from?”

• 16.

• 17. # 52 ReadingEveryDay 2021-5-9 18:40:08

• 18.   Bro I immediately asked her Excuse me? Are you too blind to see?

• 19.   How was I not responding to her

• 20.

• 21.   She asked me about washing her car, I responded with excuse me, she followed up

• 22.   with: Where are you from? Are you from China?

• 23.

• 24.   Does this sound like she wanted to chat? She didn't understand Excuse me?

• 25.   Don’t always assume you are wiser than others, okay?

In post #42, user Minted responds to the original post. In line 1, Minted orients to the disaffiliative nature of their response by displaying awareness of possible negative reactions from others (Pomerantz 1984a). Nevertheless, they proceed to state that OP is “too sensitive,” implying that OP's assessment of the incident is incorrect and potentially a result of OP's own prejudices. In lines 3 through 5, Minted explains the woman's intent of asking the first question as requesting help and proposes a normative way of ending the encounter, which goes against OP's treatment of this question as the beginning of a potentially problematic interaction. Notably, this assessment is asserted by Minted without downgrading their epistemic status despite having no direct access to the encounter. Minted proceeds to challenge OP's treatment of “Where are you from?” by claiming that the questioner is only “inappropriate” if they take “US” as an inadequate response and ask “where are you REALLY from?” (lines 7–8). Thereby, Minted implies that OP's assessment of the woman as racist is not based on a correct application of commonsense knowledge.

Minted then explains that asking the question “do you speak English” is “very normal” in this instance (lines 10–11). This assessment relies on a common understanding that one ordinary account mobilized by someone not receiving responses for simple talk can be that their recipient does not speak the language. In characterizing the woman's question as “normal” in this way, Minted implies that their understanding of the woman's question is ordinary and that OP's understanding of the question is extraordinary and abnormal (see Sacks 1984). Minted further portrays OP's actions as unreasonable and departing from normative expectations, which can be read as indicating personal flaws (lines 11–12). Minted concludes the post by giving two pieces of advice to OP that suggest that OP is the kind of person who “always have a chip” on their shoulder and who “would burst into anger every time” when asked the question by an elderly person (lines 14–15). By using such script formulations, Minted treats OP's assessment and their actions during the encounter as inappropriate and resulting from flaws in OP's general disposition.

In response, OP launches a harsh complaint against Minted's characterizations of their actions during the encounter by asking whether Minted is “too blind to see” what the original post said (lines 18–19). This highlights that Minted's access to the encounter is only through OP's report and that Minted has failed to adequately read and/or understand OP's report of the incident—both of which implicate potential moral failings on Minted's part. After highlighting Minted's misapprehension of the incident (lines 21–22), OP appeals to commonsense understanding about normal interactions to assert that the woman was not just being friendly (line 24). OP then also gives out advice through a script formulation of Minted's disposition as someone who would “always assume” they know better than others (line 25). OP implies that Minted's confidence in their assessment of the encounter results from their general disposition of overconfidence rather than from sound reasoning based on experiential facts and/or common knowledge. Thus, OP defends their assessment of the woman as racist and their actions during the encounter.

In post #137, Minted responds to another user who affiliates with OP's assessment of the woman's intent as being provocative. Minted specifies that a speaker's “tone,” which is not discussed in the original post, needs to be considered when determining whether they were being provocative (line 1). Minted therefore tacitly questions what happened in the specific incident. OP responds by declaring that Minted was “not there” (line 4). This response highlights Minted's lack of independent direct access to the woman's actions, thereby undermining their challenges against OP's assessment of the woman. Responding to OP, Minted asks “so what was her tone like” (line 7). While conceding to OP's epistemic primacy over the woman's actions, this question also pursues a response by OP to the substance of Minted's prior claim about “tone,” thereby implying OP's failure to provide facts that may undermine OP's account (also see Romaniuk 2013).

• #137 Minted 2021-5-9 21:31:48

• 1. still have to look at the tone, conversation is not just words

• 2.

• 3. #139 ReadingEveryDay 2021-5-9 21:34:35

• 4.  You were not there.

• 5.

• 6.  #142 Minted 2021-5-9 21:45:29

• 7.   So what was her tone like

• 8.

• 9.   #182 ReadingEveryDay 2021-5-10 01:34:19

• 10.    Does it matter to you?

• 11.

• 12.    You just want to get more details so that you can spin it and sabotage me.

• 13.

• 14.    On the other side, you are trying to provoke people so that you can

• 15.    report them.

• 16.

• 17.   #190 Minted 2021-5-10 04:35:59

• 18.    I am very curious why, I am just talking normally, and for no reason

• 19.    you have to say I am provoking you, hope you can be more

• 20.    reasonable in real life

OP rejects this request by asserting that Minted's true intent for soliciting more facts is to continuously frame OP's assessment as wrong (lines 10–12), thus treating Minted's question as rhetorical rather than sincere. OP states that Minted has been purposefully provocative (lines 14–15). Both formulations point to underlying immorality in Minted's repeated challenges against OP's and other users’ assessments of the woman's racist intent. This accusation is in turn treated by Minted as evidence for OP's general unreasonableness (lines 18–20), thereby implying that their own assessment is objective rather than arising from negative intent.

• #176 ReadingEveryDay 2021-5-10 01:21:51

• 1. When others rebut you, you say they don't understand the situation;

• 2. When I, as the person involved, explained the situation to

• 3. you, you say I misunderstood the old woman's intention.

• 4. you know everything, tut-tut, really great

• 5. You are just spinning it

OP’s treatment of Minted's challenges as transgressing their normative entitlement to assess their experience is most evident in post # 176, in which OP writes a series of script formulations of Minted's actions: Minted “always” rebuts others’ assessments of the “old woman's intention,” including that of OP (lines 1–3). Using the additional self-reference, “as the person involved,” to highlight Minted's epistemic trespassing, OP invokes the norm that people are entitled to assess their firsthand experiences. OP then summarizes the implication of Minted's actions with an extreme case formulation “you know everything,” followed with an admonishing “tut tut” and a sarcastic “really great” (line 4). This highlights the literal impossibility of Minted's knowing how to better assess “everything” than everyone else, which includes things that they do not have epistemic access to (Edwards 2000; Pomerantz 1986). OP thereby claims their privileged rights to assess the woman's intention while undermining Minted's rights to challenge their assessment given their lack of access to the encounter.

A similar set of practices is evident in the following exchange between OP and xnvst. Like Minted, xnvst orients to the disaffiliative nature of their comment by prefacing it with “to be honest” (line 1). After stating that they do not find any evidence of the woman being discriminatory, xnvst formulates OP's reaction as immediately “lashing out” at the woman (lines 1–2). This formulation portrays OP as the one acting hostilely during the encounter and implies flaws in OP's temperament, such as being short-tempered and excessively aggressive. OP again protests xnvst's characterizations of themself by calling xnvst “blind” and redescribes their action during the encounter to resist those negative implications (lines 5–6).

• #104 xnvst 2021-5-9 20:29:00

• 1. to be honest, I don't see discrimination from this conversation, that old woman just

• 2. asked one thing, and OP lashed out

• 3.

• 4. #108 ReadingEveryDay 2021-5-9 20:32:14

• 5.   you are blind I only shouted at her after she had been muttering for half an

• 6. Hour

• 7.

• 8.  #118 xnvst 2021-5-9 20:40:38

• 9.    calm down, don't get excited, in your original post the old woman at

• 10.    first only said a few sentences, and you got triggered, she started muttering

• 11.    only after you lashed out, why don't you just say she cursed at you right

• 12.    from the start, I am just objectively assessing based on your post,

• 13.    why don't you upload a video and let everyone assess it objectively

• 14.

• 15.    But given the way you respond to people, I have kind of got it already, I

• 16.    am stopping here, you keep on being crazy

OP’s response is then treated by xnvst as further evidence of both their moral deficiencies and the biased nature of their report. Specifically, by telling OP to “calm down” and not get “excited” (line 9), xnvst implies that OP's response was motivated by excessive emotion. Xnvst identifies contradictory details presented in OP's response and the original post to cast doubt on the objectivity of OP's report (lines 9–11; also see Pomerantz 1988). This skepticism over objectivity is most overt in line 11, where xnvst suggests that OP could have just said the woman cursed at OP from the outset. This suggestion implies that OP is willing to narrate the encounter in whatever ways best support their assessment of the woman as racially motivated. Xnvst then emphasizes that their assessment of the woman is “objective” and asks OP to provide a “video” to let “everyone assess it objectively” (line 12–13). In doing so, xnvst implies that OP's narration alone does not reflect what actually happened and may undermine “everyone’s” ability to assess it without being biased by OP's account. Xnvst proceeds to block further response from OP, however, claiming that OP's actions during the encounter and in the thread arise from general moral deficiencies by characterizing OP as “crazy” (lines 15–16; also see Dersley and Wootton 2001).

This section has shown how some users directly contested OP's assessment of the woman's intent. Specifically, they deployed proposed commonsense knowledge about normal versus hostile interactions to corroborate their own interpretations and undermine others’ assessments: OP defends their rights to assess the woman's intent by highlighting contesters’ lack of independent access to the encounter while contesters criticize OP's account as being biased and demand more objective facts about the encounter. Contesters in these exchanges read OP's original description of the encounter and OP's subsequent responses to find expressions unintentionally “given off” by OP to infer about OP's problematic moral character (Goffman 1959), such as bad temperament and aggressive tendency. In finding problems with OP's moral character, these contesters justify their lack of trust in OP's assessment of the woman's racist intent.

Unlike exchanges examined in the previous section, aggravated contestations move quickly from disagreements about how to assess the encounter to negative claims about both sides’ personal characters. First, by directly contesting each other's interpretation of the encounter, both sides necessarily treat the other side's assessment of the woman as incorrect (Pollner 1987). The inability of the other side to correctly assess the encounter is then quickly attributed to their general moral flaws. The moral aspects of such exchanges are exacerbated by contesters’ lack of independent access to the encounter. Consequently, contesters’ challenges are sanctioned as not grounded in experiential facts but rather in ill intent while OP's account is argued to be biased and dishonest.

Discussion

My analysis has examined how participants apply commonsense knowledge to assess the perpetrator's intent in reporting racism and contesting such reports and how recipients manage their lack of independent access to the encounter when responding to such accusations. Specifically, two different sets of practices used by contesters to rebutt a racism report and their corresponding consequences are observed. In milder contestations, contesters merely cast doubt on the original reporter's assessment of the encounter while avoiding claiming that the original reporter is necessarily wrong in their assessment. They do so by shifting focus away from the reported encounter to talking about other situations where the reported “racist” remarks do not constitute racism, thereby emphasizing the importance of context in interpreting those remarks. Frequently, these contesters give examples from their own experiences where they have been asked directly similar questions by members of other races. In doing so, they orient to the normative expectations of people's privileged entitlements to narrate and assess their own experience. Consequently, these contestations are much less argumentative and do not escalate to claims of each other's moral flaws. Neither side's assessment of their own experience is argued to be wrong. Therefore, in such interactions, contesters carefully manage their lack of independent access to the reported encounter when responding to the original report. While they are reluctant to affiliate with OP's assessment of the woman's intent, they do not explicitly challenge it. Rather, they focus on challenging the implied generalizability of OP's interpretation of the questions.

In aggravated contestations, recipients overtly challenge OP by proposing alternative assessments of the perpetrator as not being racist. Despite their lack of independent access, contesters do not hesitate to assert their own interpretations of the encounter and claim that OP's interpretation is wrong. In such exchanges, contesters imply that OP has overextended their rights to assess the perpetrator's subjective experience, and they insist on the objectivity of their alternative assessments. Such challenges against OP's assessment are in turn treated by OP as not grounded in experiential knowledge to which only OP has access. The contestations escalate rapidly to claims of each other's moral characters as both sides of the contestation treat each other as too morally flawed to assess the encounter correctly. Contesters read expressions given off in OP's posts to infer about OP's personal deficiencies while OP holds contesters accountable for trespassing their normative entitlement to assess the reported encounter.

The escalations of contestations examined here stand in stark contrast to interactions in which participants collaboratively construct experiences of racism, where recipients are tacitly granted the right to assess reported experiences (Rafaely 2021; Whitehead 2009). These contrasting responses reveal how normative expectations associated with members’ differential entitlements to assess certain experience are resources for members to contest and/or defend accusations of racism in interactions without necessarily determining what members do in any given moment. Consequently, the collaborative construction of experiences of racism is a contingent accomplishment: it is only achieved when participants align with each other with respect to who has primary rights to narrate the encounter and assess the perpetrator and what commonsense knowledge should be applied in what ways to assess the encounter. When it is not achieved, disputes can rapidly escalate to claims of each other's general moral deficiencies. Therefore, the moral difficulty involved in reporting experiences of racism is contingent on the moment-to-moment unfolding of the interaction. In moments where participants affiliate with each other's stances, the problem of participants’ own morality remains beneath the surface. When participants actively disagree with each other, however, morality becomes a central concern of the interaction, emerging from participants managing moral issues such as claiming or defending their rights to assess. Meanwhile, participants can also be seen as involved in solving the question “why” contestations arise, and they attribute the reason to each other's personal moral flaws.

Furthermore, practices involved in reporting and contesting experiences of racism also reflect and negotiate members’ meanings of racism. Specifically, it shows how members orient to an understanding of interpersonal racism that is heavily concerned with the ostensible perpetrator's intent. While the reduction of racism to individual psychology is treated by race scholars as a popular misconstrual and the “intentionality” of individual whites is argued to be “irrelevant” when discussing racism (Bonilla-Silva 2014:102), everyday members’ accusations of racist encounters are organized around assessing the intentionality of the potential perpetrator. Moreover, members systematically treat potential perpetrators’ racist intent as evident only if adequate objective information about the encounter is provided. Contestations then center around issues such as who has privileged rights to assess the perpetrator's intent and whose assessment is therefore most defensible.

This study highlights that answers to questions regarding racial matters, such as "What is racism?" and "Who has the right to assess experiences of racism?," are contested and negotiated by members through interactions (also see Durrheim et al. 2011). Essentially, any claim on how racial matters should be understood is subject to contestations by both scholars and everyday members, who share a similar set of resources at their disposal, such as the appeal to knowledge, facts, and morality, to engage in contestations. Rather than simply acknowledging that members' understanding of racism may vary, this article shows that it is both important and possible to empirically analyze how racial matters are contested in interactions to uncover how meanings of race and racism are understood and negotiated by members living their social lives.

Supplemental Material

sj-pptx-1-spq-10.1177_01902725221117834 – Supplemental material for Contesting Reports of Racism, Contesting the Rights to Assess

Supplemental material, sj-pptx-1-spq-10.1177_01902725221117834 for Contesting Reports of Racism, Contesting the Rights to Assess by Tianhao Zhang in Social Psychology Quarterly