‘Of course we’re supposed to move on,but then you still got people who are not over those historical wounds’: Cultural memory and US youth’s race talk

Abstract

Polls indicate that US youth are more racially diverse, and more tolerant of diversity, than were previous generations. Yet recent research documents the rise of a ‘new racism’ discourse among white US youth. The present study extends this research by examining the discursive strategies US youth employ as they talk about race in a multi-racial high school classroom. Using discourse historical analysis, the authors argue that US youth’s race talk is bound up in the construction and contestation of the nation’s cultural memory of race and racism. In particular, the authors examine how the students use the topos of unknowability and the topos of implicature to suppress or confront, respectively, the relationship between past racial injustice and present-day inequalities, and the questions of responsibility and redress it raises.