CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Camara, S. K. (1999, May). Racisming: A Sense-Making approach to studying how racism is made and unmade in communication. Paper presented at a non-divisional workshop held at the meeting of the International Communication Association, San Francisco.
© Sakile K. Camara (1999).

ESSENCE OF PROJECT:
The essence of my project is to reconceptualize interracial communication in such a way that it is no longer treated as arising from static unchangeable conditions. Interracial and intercultural scholars both treat interracial communication as intercultural communication. This approach is preferred because interracial research relies on the same socialized and biologized paradigmatic theories as intercultural communication. Intercultural communication studies the differences between cultures; interracial communication studies the differences between races. Although both provide a description of difference, both share a common goal—the bridging of differences via improved interactant use of communication skills. Part of my critique implies that we cannot improve interactions by reducing race to culture, culture to race or culture to culture. Both interracial and intercultural must be reconceptualized as verb, as made and unmade in ongoing, ever-changing and at the same time structurally linked practices. Interracial communication, as well as intercultural communication have been studied primarily as static nouns. In order to extract interracial communication from its current immutable state, we need to reconceptualize the interpersonal communication transaction from one focused on the entities that communicate (i.e., people ascribed with static descriptors such as race, class, culture, gender) to a focus on practices and people as carriers of practices. Thus, communication as a human condition will have a present, an anchor in the past, and a possible fluid future.

My exemplar is interracial communication and specifically the sub-set of these encounters judged by one or more participants as exemplifying racism. This critique raises a second issue. Racism, as agreed upon by many scholars, is most usefully conceptualized as an organizing principle, structural condition, which permeates practices and that is partly responsible for communication difficulties (Pennington, 1989). Intercultural communication research has not, however, been so conceptualized and hence has for the most part ignored race as a socio-political dimension of intergroup interactions embedded in social structure. I am in the process of collecting racism narratives from 45 students and various individuals interviewed about their racism experiences using a Sense-Making questionnaire constructed by Dr. Dervin and myself. I am interested in the following questions: (1) How do respondents/informants make and unmake sense out of instances they see as exemplifying racism? (2) How do respondents/informants define the gaps faced? (3) What strategies do the respondents/informants use to bridge the gaps they face? (4) How do the respondents/informants see themselves as connecting the macro-structure to the micro-structure in their everyday encounters with racism? (5) What patterns of practices emerge when difference is situated as verb?

THE REASONS I TOOK THIS ROAD:
(1) Drawing on the work of Smith (1982), I am concerned that focusing on “interpersonal adjustment” with “strangers” will not address the issues germane to everyday citizen interactions and the connection of these interactions with forces of the market place such as unemployment and racial discrimination. (2) As a self-identified African American, lesbian, I have often been interested in how specific cultural practices metamorphosed into racial categories and why race is absent in addressing cultural interactions. The importance of this attention needs to be anchored in the frameworks critical scholarship brings to bear on research. The central concepts rotate around a central focus on power and how individuals are positioned vis-à-vis the flows of power in society. Marginality is, thus, a higher level concept and critical scholarship mandates researchers to public self-reflexivity regarding their own positionins vis-à-vis marginalities and sites of power. (3) There is a need to examine the convergence of race and culture. Culture is most often conceptualized as attributes of society that somehow attach to persons in permanent ways (i.e., their nationalities, cultures, races, ethnicities). (4) There has been no operational difference accepted in the literature between culture as attributes of behavior or cultural practices. This lack of distinction drives communication research at identifying laws of human interaction as independent forces rather than in the context of cultural procedures, ideologies, frames-of-reference and social issues operating at the time of the interaction.

(5) Sense-Making offers a useful framework and critical intervention for verbing intercultural/interracial communication because it advances several important critiques pertinent to the nouning of interracial and intercultural communication that dominates the literature of interpersonal communication. These include: (i) How the dominant transmission metaphor limits the idea of communication to the moving of messages rather than the making, unmaking and remaking; (ii) How the dominant use of demographic predictors in fact accounts for very little significance in studies on difference; (iii) How the studying of difference as static across time-space reifies a portrait of humans as inflexible when a methodology that permits a focus both on flexibilities as well as inflexibilities is required for any research which aims to improve communication practices. I see Sense-Making, then, as a distinctive neo-postmodern logic, which will allow me to situate racism as practices, behaviors and outcomes which link the world of everyday experience to the world of socio-political-economic structure. By neo-postmodern, I mean a perspective that is informed by postmodernism and at the same time retains elements of modernity. Sense-Making, then, offers an opportunity for improvement of interracial communication through the eyes of the ones who experience the phenomena—those who are taught to enact racism in their everyday lives, mimicking, reinforcing, maintaining and extending and at the same who struggle with, resist, and sometimes transcend racism. Finally, I took this road to explore Sense-Making as a dialogic method for discussing racism as communication conflict.

THE BEST OF WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED:
Thus far, I have engaged in a critique that recognizes several indications about interracial and intercultural research: (1) there is an absence of socio-political and historical issues in interracial and intercultural research that addresses the social construction of race, oppression, discrimination and racism. I also understand that not attending to globalized, institutionally imposed categories of people as different, second class citizens and inferior is to disregard everyday lived experiences. Its absence obstructs the potency to interrogate the power structure and its relevance to cultural knowledge and tradition; (2) I have engaged with Dr. Dervin in a quarter long learning process with students in a qualitative research class that focuses on racism and Sense-Making. I have had the opportunity to participate and observe their responses in class, on a Website, and in self-interviews; (3) I am beginning to understand and examine the juxtaposition of racism-ing and Sense-Making.

WHAT HAS BEEN HELPFUL:
The work of several scholars and philosophers have helped me through my process. The neo-positivist and positivist community have been extremely helpful in giving me a community to build my interests. There are many complexities and contradictions in what lies at the center of intercultural and interracial communication. The work of Black feminist and Womanist scholars have given me a new lens to view race and racism through slave narratives and literary methodologies (Toni Morrison, Bell Hooks, Shirley Williams, Patricia Hill-Collins, Alice Walker, Marsha Houston, Toni Kincaid, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, Hazel Carby). These intellectuals have been instrumental in giving me the historical background of race and racism as structural conditions that intersect with class, gender, and sexuality. I understand through African American historians that the logic behind race is constituted through shifting discourses (i.e., ancestry, citizenship, religion, science, dogma to hegemony). These scholars have made a great impact on my learning of society and how race is systemic (Steven J Gould, Andrew Hacker, W. E B. Dubois, Joseph Feagin, Karl Palyani, Ellis Cose, Tuen Van Dijk, Phillomena Essed, etc,.).

The article by Dervin & Atwood (1982-5) was particularly insightful, considering my initial interest in demography as significant predictor information. The two authors argue that demographic data is not a good predictor for information seeking or needs when tested against situation movement state (the questions that people ask when in struggle). Sense-Making created a locus for my interest, as I struggled through my own confusions with demography and exactly what behaviors were significant. Later elaborations of Sense-Making present a more complex attention to demography with what Dervin calls the “render-unto-Caesar principle” (Dervin, 1998, personal communication). Here the hypothesis is that across time-space, predictors such as race will play a more powerful role in communicating under the very conditions that are most controlled by the socio-political-economic order which inscribes humans into those static boxes.

WHAT I HAVE STRUGGLED WITH:
My own trouble is in distinguishing culture and race in my discussions of cultural practices. Although I know the difference, I continue to articulate the terms “blackness” and “whiteness” as if they are the cultural practices of the person. Another struggle is based on my experiences with students in the verbing racism research class. It is a constant struggle to observe the hostility and anger of white students toward victims of racism and scholars who have researched difference. In my observation, many students are not aware of the differences between race, culture, racism, ethnocentrism, stereotyping and discrimination as they try to make sense of difficult interracial interactions and reverse racism. It is much harder to postpone my perception of who they are and what whiteness has represented for me in my experience in difficult interracial interactions. I am struggling with how I might make sense of their interpretation without nouning their realities. I know that I will also struggle in my dissertation with some 120 interviews, 10-20 pages in length.

WHAT WOULD HELP NOW:
Any suggestions, comments or concerns regarding interracial and intercultural theories of difference would be appreciated. Ideas about how I might manage the data and analysis would be helpful since I am interested in producing a study that is both qualitative and quantitative. How do I talk about “positionality” in terms such as Sense-Making’s situation movement state without offending feminists who have made great progress by employing the social structure and its relationship to gender, social class, status group, ethnicity, religion and race? Finally, how might I impact the arena of intercultural communication research by redefining racism as “problematic communication” and as a worthy construct to be studied?

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
Since the 1960s, communication scholars have been studying the difference between strangers. However, in current studies, communicating with “strangers” (i.e., defined as those with exhibiting differences in race, culture, ethnicity, nation-state) is conceptualized as an uncertain and unpredictable process that leads to increased anxiety. Intercultural and interracial scholars have primarily studied culture as race, race as culture and culture as culture, in all cases defining the difference in terms of nouns conceptualized as ascribed to persons as constants across time-space (a person’s race, culture, ethnicity, national origin). This research is both static and limiting in its theorizing of problematic interactions, which are anchored in time and space and moving through time and space. The assumptions made in the usual approaches to the study of these interactions is that whatever data emerges is a pattern of difference and not related to context and history. I see two difficulties with this approach. One is that the approach ignores how the static nouns into which humans are placed by society (i.e., their race, culture, ethnicity, nation-state) are static because they are inscribed in and embody vital social issues. The second is that the approach ignores at the same time how, even while extolling communication as process. In short, the dominant work assumes constancy in communication practices as predicted by the inscribed boxes (i.e., race, culture, ethnicity, national origin) while ignoring how it is communicatings that both make and unmake the boxes.

In short, it is in individual lived experiences that humans learn structurally-enforced practices and it is in individual lived experiences that they reify and maintain them and resist and struggle and change them. My choice of racism-ing as verb as my focus then, is driven not only by my own interests in the topic, but by my choice of it as exemplar par excellence of my phenomenon of interest—how the making and unmaking of difference impacts interpersonal communicating and how communicating plays a role in that making and unmaking. In order to understand the gaps that people face in problematic interracial interactions, 45 students conducted a Sense-Making self-interviews and as many as 3-5 additional interviews with members of their own peer-kin communities (i.e., parents, friends, co-workers). I am interested in the following questions. How do the respondents make and unmake sense out of racism instances? How do the respondents define the gaps faced? What strategies do the respondents use to bridge the gaps they face? How do the respondents connect the macro-structure to the micro-structure in their everyday encounters with racism? What patterns of practices emerge when difference is situated as verb?

REFERENCES:
(For references to works by Dervin and colleagues, see Dervin’s writings: Chronological listing.)

Essed, P. (1991). Understanding everyday racism: An interdisciplinary theory. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Gould, S. J. (1981). The mismeasure of man. New York: Longman.

Pennington, D. (1989). Black-White communication: An assessment of research. In A. Davis, E. Newmark & C. Blake (Eds.), Handbook of intercultural communication, (pp. 383-401). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Smith. A. G. (1982). A symposium: Teaching intercultural communication—Mission and design. Southern Speech Communication Journal, 47, (spring), 251-276.

Williams, S. (1990). Some implications of womanist theory. In H. L. Gates Jr. (Ed.), Reading Black, Reading feminist (pp. 68-75). New York: Meridian.

OTHER MATERIALS BY THIS AUTHOR ON THIS WEB SITE:
See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistcamara.html