Tacit Racism - Outside of a Dog

Published June 2020 by University of Chicago Press.

ISBN:: 978-0-226-70372-5

We need to talk about racism before it destroys our democracy. And that conversation needs to start with an acknowledgement that racism is coded into even the most ordinary interactions.

Every time we interact with another human being, we unconsciously draw on a set of expectations to guide us through the encounter. What many of us in the United States—especially white people—do not recognize is that centuries of institutional racism have inescapably molded those expectations. This leads us to act with implicit biases that can shape everything from how we greet our neighbors to whether we take a second look at a resume. This is tacit racism, and it is one of the most pernicious threats to our nation.

In Tacit Racism, Anne Warfield Rawls and Waverly Duck illustrate the many ways in which racism is coded into the everyday social expectations of Americans, in what they call …

We need to talk about racism before it destroys our democracy. And that conversation needs to start with an acknowledgement that racism is coded into even the most ordinary interactions.

Every time we interact with another human being, we unconsciously draw on a set of expectations to guide us through the encounter. What many of us in the United States—especially white people—do not recognize is that centuries of institutional racism have inescapably molded those expectations. This leads us to act with implicit biases that can shape everything from how we greet our neighbors to whether we take a second look at a resume. This is tacit racism, and it is one of the most pernicious threats to our nation.

In Tacit Racism, Anne Warfield Rawls and Waverly Duck illustrate the many ways in which racism is coded into the everyday social expectations of Americans, in what they call Interaction Orders of Race. They argue that these interactions can produce racial inequality, whether the people involved are aware of it or not, and that by overlooking tacit racism in favor of the fiction of a “color-blind” nation, we are harming not only our society’s most disadvantaged—but endangering the society itself.

Ultimately, by exposing this legacy of racism in ordinary social interactions, Rawls and Duck hope to stop us from merely pretending we are a democratic society and show us how we can truly become one.

3 editions

Ben Waber reviewed Tacit Racism by Anne Rawls

A Unique But Limited Look at Modern Anti-Black Racism

4 stars

This book focuses on how social expectations and conversational dynamics build on top of institutional racism to lead to even greater anti-Black bias. Warfield Rawls and Duck combine deep, painful analyses of racist interactions and rich interview data to paint a troubling picture of the current environment in the US, but also present some fairly straightforward ways to combat this seemingly intractable issue. I think this book could have been better by either focusing exclusively on anti-Black racism (which is ~95% of the content anyway) or expanding the aperture to cover more groups and go beyond the modern period. Their thesis also gets muddled when they fail to distinguish between different classes of racism, as some sections focus on what I would consider to be pretty clearly institutional or overt racism. That being said, this is still a unique, important analysis of an important facet of modern US society. Highly …

This book focuses on how social expectations and conversational dynamics build on top of institutional racism to lead to even greater anti-Black bias. Warfield Rawls and Duck combine deep, painful analyses of racist interactions and rich interview data to paint a troubling picture of the current environment in the US, but also present some fairly straightforward ways to combat this seemingly intractable issue. I think this book could have been better by either focusing exclusively on anti-Black racism (which is ~95% of the content anyway) or expanding the aperture to cover more groups and go beyond the modern period. Their thesis also gets muddled when they fail to distinguish between different classes of racism, as some sections focus on what I would consider to be pretty clearly institutional or overt racism. That being said, this is still a unique, important analysis of an important facet of modern US society. Highly recommend

Ben Waber

rated it

March 1

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