Abstract
This paper examines members’ practices involved in accounting for discrimination against their own group in interaction. Applying membership categorization analysis to interviews conducted with Chinese international students in Japan, I show that membership categories and category-based knowledge constitute crucial resources for target-of-discrimination group members’ making discrimination intelligible and reasonable. Specifically, interviewee accounts for discrimination by bounding certain activities/traits to the membership category being discriminated against. Meanwhile, those activities/traits are displayed as sanctionable given the social relation the discriminating and the discriminated sides are embedded in. Consequently, discrimination becomes reasonable and understandable in its given context. Interviewer, drawing upon common-sense knowledge about social categories, regularly challenges interviewee’s account by problematizing the association between the proposed activities/traits and the membership category and by contending the proposed sanctionable nature of those activities/traits. Interviewee can either persist through such challenges by further categorization work or modify their original account of discrimination. As such, target-of-discrimination group members’ accounting for discrimination as reasonable and intelligible is collaboratively accomplished through participants’ categorization work in interaction.
Introduction
Studies have long shown the tendency for societal members to deny or mitigate existence of discrimination in discourses (Augoustinos and Every, 2010; Whitehead, 2020). The majority of this research examines how members of majority groups manage to avoid sounding prejudiced towards the target-of-discrimination group (referred to as the target group for the rest of this paper), while legitimizing negative views of those groups and/or supporting agendas that maintain group inequality (Van Dijk, 1992; Wetherell & Potter, 1992). In addition to guarding themselves from potential accusations of being -ist (e.g., sexist, racist, . . .) (see Stokoe, 2015), societal members also engage in face-work for each other when their in-group members could be seen/heard as being -ist towards out-group members (Condor et al., 2006). People manage emergence of potential -isms in interactions, so as to suppress them without overtly accusing others as being problematic (Robles, 2015; Stokoe, 2015; Whitehead, 2015). On the other hand, people who accuse others for being -ist can be held accountable themselves, indicating a norm against calling-out in interactions (Goodman & Burke, 2010; Goodman & Lowe, 2014).
The potential repercussion of overtly accusing others of being problematic is especially acute when members of one group accuse members of another group. Such accusations often invoke common-sense knowledge of existing group relations. A person can be reversely accused of being prejudiced themselves by accusing a member of another group as problematic (Whitehead, 2009). The limited body of existing research on target groups’ discourses has shown that denial and mitigation of discrimination or prejudice are prevalent (Verkuyten, 2005). Rather than directly accusing dominant groups for being -ist, which is often only used as the last-resort for accounting for hostility, members of target-groups often attempt to explain away encounters with potential discrimination as reasonable or understandable (Kirkwood et al., 2013; Rojas-Sosa, 2016).
Building upon existing research, this paper explicates the detailed practices involved when members account for discrimination against themselves and their groups. For the purpose of this study, I focus on incidences where interviewees explain discriminatory acts as done based on ordinary reasons, without morally aligning with the acts themselves. By emphasizing ordinary reasons, I exclude practices such as attributing a discriminatory act to ignorance or exceptionality of the perpetrators from the analysis (see Kirkwood et al., 2013; Rojas-Sosa, 2016). I also exclude cases where members invoke universality of discrimination to account for discrimination (see Verkuyten, 2005). I focus on practices involved in cases where perpetrators’ actions are explained to be based on common-sense reasoning from their perspectives, thereby reasonable and intelligible.
Membership categories and discrimination
This paper examines the membership categorization work done by members of the target group when accounting for discrimination. In his pioneering work which later develops into a branch of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research called membership categorization analysis (MCA), Sacks observes that invoking membership categories and/or their associated common-sense knowledge is fundamental to societal members’ making sense of and communicating about their social world (1972a, 1972b). Using rules of application, some categories are seen by societal members as going together, thus belonging to the same membership categorization device (MCD), that is, a collection of categories (Sacks, 1972b, Stokoe, 2012). For example, the categories of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Japanese’ belong to the ‘nationality’ MCD, the collection of nationality categories. Some categories also form standardized relational pairs (SRPs), which are ‘pairs of categories that carry duties and moral obligation’ to each other, such as ‘tenant-landlord’ (Stokoe, 2012: 281). In addition to the common understanding of relations among categories, there are also activities and characteristics common-sensically linked to categories, which are termed by Sacks as category-bound activities (1972b) and also referred to as category-bound predicates in later development of MCA (Hester & Eglin, 1997). Using Sacks’ example, we can see that while ‘crying’ is bound to the category of ‘babies,’ ‘caring’ is bound to the category of ‘mommies’ (1972b).
Because of these common understandings about categories and their relations, membership categories are crucial resources for members’ interactions. People use category-based knowledge to do all kinds of things (see Fitzgerald and Housley, 2015; Hester & Eglin, 1997). On the other hand, common-sense knowledge that link activities or predicates to specific membership categories can be seen as similar to stereotypes or even prejudices. Indeed, both social scientists and lay members of society associate category-based perceptions with prejudices and stereotypes to some extent (see Figgou & Condor, 2006). Therefore, although social scientists who study the use of membership categorization in interactions (Schegloff, 2007a) emphasize that category-bound activities or predicates are common-sense knowledge for members’ use, regardless of its truthfulness or moral connotations, actual applications of category-based knowledge in interactions can still come off as problematic and conveying stereotypes or prejudices (Robles, 2015; Stokoe, 2015).
Such potential sanctions of application of category-based knowledge in interactions are understandable, given that categorization work can be seen as intrinsic to various forms of discrimination and -ism. For example, racism and racial and ethnic discrimination in the United States have historically been legitimized through institutionalized categorization work which bounded undesirable features and activities to minority groups (Ngai, 2004). Similarly, studies have shown that members of dominant groups explain ethnic and racial inequality through the practice of linking negative traits to minority groups, despite the normative trend towards less racism and greater equality (Bonilla-Silva, 2014; Wetherell & Potter, 1992). Therefore, categorization work of bounding (especially negatively assessed) traits to targets of discrimination is widely recognized and studied as one fundamental practice involved in perpetrating groups’ legitimization of discrimination and inequality. On the other hand, however, even for MCA studies examining members’ practices against – isms (Robles, 2015; Stokoe, 2015; Whitehead, 2015), little attention has been paid to members’ categorization work when accounting for discrimination against themselves individually and against their co-members as intelligible and reasonable. This study addresses this gap in literature by closely analyzing how category-based knowledge also constitutes important resources for members’ accounting for discrimination in interactions.
Such an analysis will contribute to our understanding of how discriminatory practices are sustained in everyday life. Legitimation of group inequality and discrimination depends not only on the dominant group’s justification but also on the practices of making discrimination reasonable and understandable by the members of the target group in their everyday lives. A close analysis of target group members’ work of rendering discrimination reasonable and understandable and its common-sensical base can provide insights for understanding why discriminatory practices are often not problematized.
Data and method
Analysis for this study is done with the MCA approach with transcripts of interview interactions produced according to the conversation analytic transcription conventions (Jefferson, 2004). The data corpus is based on 65 audio-recorded in-depth interviews with Chinese international students studying in Japan. The interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese from 2017 to 2018 and lasted from 2 to 4 hours with an average of 2 hours and 40 minutes. Sequences of interactions which topicalize encounters with discrimination or prejudice are collected from the interviews. Sequences where the interviewee is hearably making discrimination intelligible and reasonable are further selected to constitute the data corpus for this study.
According to a Japanese Ministry of Justice survey, discrimination against foreigners is widespread in Japan: 40% of foreigners reported having been rejected housing, and 25% of respondents claimed that they had been denied job offers due to being foreigners (Center for Human Rights Education and Training, 2017). However, such discriminatory practices are rarely problematized as serious public issues (see Kawai, 2015). Scholarly attention to how target-group members make sense of such discriminatory practices is needed.
Studies of talk-in-interaction, including MCA, have prioritized naturally-occurring talk as data over researcher-induced talk, with the aim to treat seriously what members orient to as relevant for their interactions (see Sacks, 1984). However, the distinction between ‘contrived’ and ‘natural’ data is argued to be not sustainable since many researcher-induced data, such as that of qualitative interviews, are also produced locally through interactions between researchers and participants (Hester & Francis, 1994; Speer, 2002). Research interviews can be seen as a type of institutional talk that follows a specific turn-taking organization with the omni-relevant categories of ‘interviewer’ and ‘interviewee’ (Roulston, 2006; Schegloff, 1991; Whitehead & Baldry, 2018). Consequently, interview data can be analyzed as ‘institutional talk’ where accounts are collaboratively produced by both interviewer and interviewee who orient to and manage local relevancies emerged through talk and set by the interview setting (Baker, 2002; Heritage, 2005). While a large body of research on various forms of discrimination or -ism relies on interview data, it often treats the interviewee’s talk as a factual report of their experiences and opinions, produced independently of interviewer’s involvement (Potter and Hepburn, 2005). This can be especially problematic given the tendency for researchers to present such findings as evidence for de-contextualized existence of discrimination or -isms in general (see Bonilla-Silva, 2014; for an exception, see Van den Berg et al., 2003).
Following the MCA approach (Stokoe, 2012), I analyze when and how membership categories and category-based knowledge are used by both interviewee and interviewer in the sequences of offering, challenging, maintaining, and modifying their accounts for discrimination against themselves and their group in the interview setting. Mandarin Chinese transcripts and their English translations are presented in the paper. The translations are done in a way to maximally maintain original features of the talk (e.g., pauses, ordering of words). Findings are divided into two sections. In the first section, I demonstrate the categorization work involved in interviewee’s initial offering of an account that makes discrimination intelligible and reasonable. In the second section, I explicate how interviewer challenges the account by invoking membership categories and category-based knowledge. Challenges proposed by interviewer can lead to both insistence and modification of the initial account by interviewee. Regardless of the outcome, such challenges are again accomplished collaboratively through categorization work. Excerpts are from different interviewees, and their similarity shows that the phenomenon observed in this study is quite systematic.
Offering an Account
In this section, I focus on the practices involved in the initial offering of an account that makes discrimination or prejudice reasonable. Specifically, I demonstrate that participants propose bound-ness between certain activities or predicates and the category that is being discriminated or prejudiced against. The bounded activities or predicates with that category are formulated as sanctionable given the SRP that the parties of the encounter are embedded in (e.g., ‘tenants and landlords’, ‘employees and customers’). As a result, the discriminatory or prejudicial treatment of the member(s) of that category becomes reasonable and intelligible in that specific context.
Prior to the interaction transcribed in excerpt 1, the interviewee (IE) talked about multiple unpleasant encounters with individual Japanese due to her being a foreigner, which were stated as morally wrong by IE. The interviewer (IR) asks for more examples (lines 1–5). The topic of housing discrimination is finally brought up (lines 12–13) after multiple mitigated responses denying existence of such discrimination (lines 7 & 9). IR aims to have IE expand on the topic by registering the information as news and repeating the words with a rising intonation (line 14) (Jefferson 1981; Heritage 1984). In confirming to the question, IE says that they (she and her roommate) were ‘very unwelcomed,’ which is a mitigation of ‘treated unfairly’, and that they were rejected by ‘many houses’ during their search (line 18).
IR attempts to gauge how IE knows that ‘being a foreigner’ caused the difficulty. IR proffers a candidate explanation: housing agents or landlords openly said that foreigners were not welcomed (lines 21–22). IE confirms this explanation and then emphasizes that the discrimination is not against individuals (lines 23–24). By using a generic ‘you’ in stating that it is not personal, IE is hearably not only discussing her cases but the phenomenon of not renting to foreigners in general. IE then explicitly claims it has no implications for individual ‘foreigners’ who are refused housing: foreigners are being rejected as a ‘group’ (lines 26–27).
IE immediately offers her explanation for discriminating against ‘foreigners’ as a group. Specifically, IE bounds ‘mistreating the house’ to ‘foreigners,’ which causes ‘foreigners’ to have ‘bad credit with regard to renting’ (line 29–30). IE does not explain why ‘mistreating the house’ is a problematic behaviour with regard to renting. Commonsense knowledge about ‘landlords’ and ‘tenants’ are used. Houses are owned by landlords, who would not want their properties mistreated. Houses are also a means to generate income, and mistreated houses can incur loss to landlords. Therefore, ‘foreigners’, a category bounded to the activity of ‘mistreating the house’, are bad candidates for ‘tenants.’
By applying categorical knowledge associated with ‘landlords’, ‘tenants’, and ‘foreigners,’ IE is able to explicate the intelligibility and reasonableness of housing discrimination against foreigners without personally endorsing the discriminatory act. IE accounts for why the act is justifiable from an ordinarily reasonable ‘landlord’ perspective, while leaving out the moral implications of such acts. In addition, foreigners’ ‘mistreating the house’ is not always sanctionable in any social relations with Japanese. The practice of accounting for discrimination or prejudice as reasonable is contingent on its specific context, where different MCDs and SRPs become relevant.
Prior to the sequences shown in excerpt 2, IE was describing one recent incident that went viral on the Internet. A local shop of a famous Japanese cosmetic brand posted a flyer on its door, saying ‘no Chinese allowed.’ IE then said that the company immediately responded to the incident by closing down that specific shop.
IE proceeds to elaborate more on the issue. By suspecting that there are more shops that would like to have ‘no Chinese allowed,’ IE tacitly constructs a possibility that this specific shop is not the only responsible party for this explicitly discriminatory act. If ‘it’s not just this one shop’ who does not want ‘Chinese customers,’ then maybe ‘Chinese customers’ themselves are responsible for being discriminated against (lines 1–3).
After IR’s go-ahead token ‘why’ (line 4) (Schegloff, 2007b), IE starts her account by linking traits to the category of ‘Chinese tourists’ (line 9–10). While the ‘no Chinese allowed’ sign makes relevant the ‘nationality’ MCD, IE divides ‘Chinese’ into two sub-categories that are relevant in the Japanese context: Chinese who are tourists and Chinese who are not. IE proposes that the ‘Chinese tourist’ category is what the sign is really caused by and addressing to. However, since IE occupies a different category than that of ‘tourists’, her bounding of negatively assessed traits to ‘tourists’ can sound problematic. She orients to this potential problem by emphasizing that it is just ‘some of’ or ‘a part of a part of’ them who are like that (line 9, 12). IR seems to be orienting to this potential problem in her following turn: she tries to return to the specific incident, rather than continue discussing the hypothetical scenario construed by IE (lines 20–21). In her response, IE emphasizes that she is just speculating (lines 22–23). She then lists a range of activities that were done by Chinese and caused the shop to not want Chinese customers. While IE does not explicitly say ‘tourists’ in her response, these listed activities are hearable as done by ‘tourists.’ (lines 23–32).
Similar to the previous excerpt, bounding ‘disturbing orders’ and ‘buying too much’ to ‘Chinese tourists’ only works to make discrimination reasonable given the specific SRP made relevant: ‘shop assistants and customers.’ Shop assistants’ job is to keep order and make sure that customers receive good services and have good experiences in the shop. Customers who ‘disturb orders’ are unwelcomed. Customers who stay too long or buy too much may cause inconvenience to other customers. Therefore, it is reasonable that ‘customers like that’ – which are ‘Chinese tourists’ – are unwelcomed from the perspective of ‘Japanese shop assistants.’ Just like the previous interviewee, by assuming the perspective of the perpetrator and using its associated categorical knowledge, IE is able to demonstrate the intelligibility of the discriminatory act without either endorsing or disproving it morally. In addition to bounding activities directly to the category being discriminated against (as in excerpt 1), participants can bound problematic activities or predicates to a sub-category and treat the sub-category as responsible for discrimination or prejudice received by members in the more general category (as shown in excerpt 2).
Membership categories being discriminated against are obvious in the incidents described in previous excerpts. In excerpt 3, IE describes an encounter with a shop employee, where he can only indirectly infer that he was being treated badly due to being a ‘foreigner.’
Prior to the interaction transcribed here, IE said that European and American foreigners are more welcomed in Japan. Thus, IR invokes the categories of ‘Asian’ and ‘Chinese’ in her question. (lines 1–3) IE finishes the sentence for IR by filling in the word ‘discrimination.’ (line 4) IR agrees with this completion, and proceeds to include ‘unpleasant experiences’ – a downgrade in severity from ‘discrimination’ – as suitable responses. IE provides a type-conforming response ‘yes’ to IR’s question without conforming to the question wording: his ‘yes’ comes after changing the relevant category from ‘Asians’ or ‘Chinese’ to ‘foreigners.’ (line 7) (Raymond 2003) It shows that getting the relevant membership category right can be one of the priorities in telling about an experience with discrimination or prejudice, as each category enables and constrains what can be said and done about it.
After reporting the exact place, time, and situation when this happened (lines 10–15), IE describes the interaction between him and an employee at the shop (lines 15–21). The potentially discriminatory nature of this interaction is established through category-implicative description: while IE asked for help in Japanese (line 17), the employee responded in English (line 18). The employee’s response is problematic because it refuses to align with IE’s self-identifying as a Japanese speaker and rejects IE’s considerateness and effort to speak to Japanese in Japanese. Moreover, it highlights IE’s generalized ‘foreigner’ status, which can be seen as the explanation for the employee’s ‘aggressive’ and ‘mean’ response (lines 18–19). IE’s active voicing the employee’s response ‘no, no no no,’ (line 21) an unmitigated and repeated rejection of IE’s request, further conveys the ‘aggressiveness’ and the ‘meanness’.
IR responds by asking ‘what does that mean.’ (line 23) IR can be seen as distancing herself from solving the proposed puzzle, which can easily lead to the answer that the employee is prejudiced and discriminating against foreigners (see Whitehead 2009). IE further elaborates the problematic nature of the employee’s behaviours and speculates the motive behind employee’s behaviour. (lines 27–28) Different from previous excerpts, IE explicitly displays a negative stance towards the perpetrator and is hearably producing a complaint. (lines 31–32)
After acknowledging IE’s complaint, IR is about to ask another question (line 32). However, IE initiates another turn, further explicating the reason behind the employee’s behavior. After self-categorizing as ‘a foreigner,’ (line 33) IE states that he ‘didn’t speak Japanese very well,’ (line 34) which is not mentioned in previous sequences. IE then suggests that the employee ‘didn’t want to serve the kind of people with difficulty communicating.’ (lines 34 – 35) This departs from earlier description of the encounter in three crucial ways: (1) employee’s hostility is formulated as directed to a category of people – ‘the kind with difficulty communicating;’ (2) the term ‘serve’ is used to describe employee’s behaviour rather than ‘speak’ or ‘respond;’ (3) IE replaces the description of ‘not speaking Japanese well’ with ‘with difficulty communicating.’ In other words, IE bounds ‘foreigners’ to ‘not speaking Japanese very well.’ Assuming the perspective of an employee, IE claims that ‘foreigners’ consist of the ‘kind of people with difficulty communicating.’ The job of employees is to ‘serve’ customers, and customers’ job is to ‘communicate’ their needs to employees. Customers who cannot communicate properly are incompetent. Therefore, it is reasonable that employees ‘don’t want to serve’ such customers.
Following a pause after IR’s acknowledgement of this statement, IE produces what can be heard as the upshot of his story (lines 37–38): ‘acting more like Japanese’ is the way to ‘having fewer annoyances’ caused by the ‘things like’ this encounter (lines 40–43). IE is attributing the causes of such encounters at least partially to the side that is being discriminated or prejudiced against. Similar to previous excerpts, using common-sense knowledge associated with the categories of ‘foreigners,’ ‘employees’ and ‘customers’, IE demonstrates the reasonableness of the discriminatory act from the perspective of the perpetrator. Since IE is not defending the discriminatory act from his own perspective, his account does not implicate himself as someone who thinks it is reasonable to discriminate against foreigners.
Challenging the Account
The previous section shows that cases of making discrimination intelligible and reasonable observed in my data all involve bounding certain activities or predicates to the category (or a sub-category) being discriminated or prejudiced against. These attributes are implied as sanctionable given the SRPs the parties are embedded in, which makes the discriminatory or prejudiced act as at least partially reasonable and understandable from the perspective of the perpetrator.
This categorization work makes possible two unique ways to challenge such accounts. In this section, I show that first, the proposed association between the category and the activities or predicates can be challenged (excerpt 4); second, the sanctionable nature of the bounded activities or predicates can be challenged (excerpt 5). Interviewees can either persist through the challenge (excerpts 4 & 5) or modify their original accounts (excerpt 6).
Similar to IE in excerpt 1, IE in excerpt 4 also offered an account for housing discrimination against foreigners immediately after reporting that he had been rejected housing due to being a foreigner. For him, ‘being likely to run away’ without staying through the lease is associated with the category of ‘foreigners’. (untranscribed) In this excerpt, IR works to challenge this proposed association.
In answering IR’s question about why some ‘foreigners’ would ‘run away,’ IE explicates common-sense knowledge about ‘foreigners,’ such as their ability to return to home country and their lack of connections in the host society, to explain why it is possible for them to do so (lines 7–17). Meanwhile, IE suggests that it is morally wrong to ‘run away’. He explicitly distances himself from ‘running away’, implying that his morality is strong enough to prevent him from doing that. Even though, as a foreigner, he could get away with it easily (line 14).
IR accepts this categorization work without challenging the accuracy of all the assumptions involved. Instead, IR proceeds to challenge the implied association between ‘unlikely to run away’ and ‘Japanese’ (line 20). If ‘Japanese’ could also ‘run away’, then it would make no sense to only reject ‘foreigners’. Note that by proceeding to challenge this aspect of IE’s categorization work, IR tacitly agree to IE’s treatment of the likelihood of ‘running away’ as a sufficient reason to reject someone housing.
However, rather than answering the question, IE returns a counter question ‘where could he run?’ (line 21) (Schegloff 2007b). This counter is delivered with a smiley voice followed by laughter, mitigating its non-conforming nature and possibly pointing out the improperness of IR’s question. IE has turned the table around, holding IR account for her obvious lack of competency in doing categorization analysis. IR answers the question in a similarly smiley voice, conceding to IE’s characterization of her questions as improper (lines 22–23). However, she merely suggests the possibility of some unspecified ‘other places’ for a ‘Japanese’ tenant to go to in a questioning tone, thereby restating her previous question and restoring the proper turn-taking organization within a research interview.
IE explains why ‘Japanese could not run away’ by using common-sense knowledge about nativity and citizenship (lines 24–29). Interestingly, these explanations are constructed so as to show that ‘Japanese’ and ‘foreigners’ have the very opposite qualities (i.e., Japanese are socially integrated and have no other country to return to). Therefore, they are unlikely to do so because they would not be able to get away with it. In this case, IR’s challenges seem to only validate IE’s original account that treats landlords’ discrimination against foreigners as reasonable by allowing more common-sensical elaborations on the implicated categories.
IE in excerpt 5 talked about how her Japanese co-workers at a big shopping center used to make fun of Chinese tourists who shopped in their store. Her co-workers would also treat ‘tourists’ differently such as ‘telling them things were out of stock’ when they were not. Similar to the interviewee in excerpt 2, IE justified such behaviors by suggesting that ‘tourists’ were ‘buying a lot of stuff’, being ‘very loud’, and ‘not following Japanese rules of shopping’ (untranscribed). In excerpt 5, IR focuses on the proposed sanctionable nature of the activity of ‘buying a lot’.
Drawing upon common sense knowledge about customers and business, IR suggests that customers who ‘buy a lot’ should be welcomed by the shop since they are contributing to sales (lines 1–4). IE responds by separating ‘benefits’ for ‘the shop’ and workers’ individual ‘benefits’, implying that workers does not benefit as much as the shop does from ‘tourists buying a lot’. (lines 6 – 8) The category-pair ‘employer and employee’ is made relevant by IE. Common-sense knowledge tells us that employers (glossed as ‘the shop’ here) benefit from ‘increased sales’ much more than employees (‘workers’) who are just working for the employer. IE mitigates this response by suggesting that it’s her personal guess (line 10).
Before further explicating her reasoning using categorical knowledge, IE first works to establish that her reasoning is based on her first-hand experience of working with Japanese co-workers and Chinese tourists (lines 13–16). IE then proceeds to describe how she has witnessed that the influx of all the Chinese tourists’ shopping sprees caused Japanese workers’ workload to multiply (lines 18–29). IE continues to explain how ‘tourists buying a lot’ negatively affects her co-workers, even though the workers may ‘have more income’ by ‘earning more commissions.’ (lines 28–30) IE is drawing upon common-sense knowledge about ‘workers’: workers not only care about monetary income, they also prefer to have a reasonable workload. Therefore, tourists’ ‘buying a lot’ when no additional staff are added is worsening workers’ job quality, therefore a sanctionable activity.
IE then introduces two sub-categories of ‘workers’ at the shop – ‘part-time workers’ who are people like her and ‘formal employees’ who are hearably her Japanese coworkers – and suggests that members in the latter category are even more affected by tourists’ ‘buying a lot.’ (lines 33–35) This statement again relies upon common-sense knowledge about the rights and obligations associated with the two sub-categories of workers: part-time workers often have more flexibility and can ‘leave easily’ without incurring many problems, while formal employees are expected to be loyal toward the employer and have more obligations. This sequence of challenging IE’s account ends with IE further explaining her coworkers’ discrimination and prejudice against ‘Chinese tourists’ as reasonable from their perspectives. In addition to elaborating categories already implicated in the initial justification (‘tourists’ and ‘workers’), IE introduces new categories and uses their associated common-sense knowledge to resist the challenge posed by IR.
While the interviewees in previous excerpts are able to persist through the interviewer’s challenges, sometimes interviewees do end up modifying their initial accounts. Prior to the interaction shown in excerpt 8, IE suggested that when Japanese landlords say they do not want to rent to ‘foreigners’, they mostly mean ‘Chinese’ by ‘foreigners’. She then went on bounding the predicates of ‘having different habits and customs from Japanese’ and ‘causing conflicts with regarding to fees’ to ‘Chinese’, aided by anecdotes she heard from others and saw on news (untranscribed).
IR suggests that ‘compared to Chinese’, other foreigners such as ‘Europeans’ and ‘Americans’ probably are more different from ‘Japanese’ in terms of habits and customs with regards to living (lines 1–4). By saying this, IR implies that IE’s account for housing discrimination against ‘Chinese’ by claiming they ‘have different living habits and customs’ from Japanese is inadequate. IE recognizes IR’s statement as a challenge to her account: instead of agreeing or disagreeing with IR’s assessment, IE modifies her initial account. The stretched ‘mm’ can be heard as IE assessing the problem and searching for a solution. IE then says that, instead of not renting to ‘Chinese’ specifically, the landlords just ‘won’t rent to foreigners’. (line 6) Her rising intonation indicates lack of certainty in this initial modification. She then makes a repeat ‘won’t rent to foreigners as a whole’, this time ending with a falling intonation and concluding her modification (line 7). By invoking categories of ‘Europeans’ and ‘Americans’ and their associated common-sense knowledge, IR successfully challenges IE’s initial accounts and leads IE to expand the category being targeted against from ‘Chinese’ to ‘foreigners’ in general in her modified account of housing discrimination.
This final excerpt shows clearly how the work of accounting for discrimination as intelligible and reasonable is accomplished by both IR and IE supplying their common-sense knowledge about membership categories. IR sees no need to explain why she thinks, when talking about distance from ‘habits and customs’ of ‘Japanese’, ‘Europeans and Americans’ are further away than ‘Chinese’. IE also does not ask for clarification for this statement. While the attempt to account for the intelligibility of housing discrimination against ‘Chinese’ based on cultural differences is challenged and consequently abandoned, the reasonableness of housing discrimination against ‘foreigners as a whole’ based on cultural differences between ‘foreigners’ and ‘Japanese’ is more readily accepted.
Conclusion
This paper contributes to the literature in discourses on discrimination by explicating the detailed categorization work done by members when making intelligible and reasonable the discrimination against themselves. While categorization work is often understood as done by dominant groups to legitimize group inequality or discrimination against the target groups (Robles, 2015; Stokoe, 2015), this study highlights that membership categories and their associated common-sense knowledge constitute crucial resources for the target group members’ accounting for discrimination in interactions as well. Potentially discriminatory acts against one’s own group are explained as at least partially reasonable and intelligible using category-based common-sense knowledge. Specifically, participants bound certain traits to the category being discriminated against and show that those traits are sanctionable given the SRP the two parties are embedded in. Such categorization work is done to make both more institutionalized forms of discrimination (e.g., housing discrimination) and single occurrences of a potentially discriminatory nature (e.g., being treated badly by a shop employee) intelligible and defensible from the perspective of the perpetrator. Doing so, members of the target groups leave out moral implications in their accounts. The work of making discrimination reasonable is entirely done through using common-sense knowledge that is also reproduced through such work.
As pointed out by the reviewer of this paper, the kind of categorization work done by members of target group in accounting for discrimination is similar to what Sacks called ‘partitioning’ (1992: 592–596). Parties of potentially discriminatory encounters are consistently recategorized from ‘Japanese’ and ‘foreigner(s)’/‘Chinese’ to ‘landlord(s)’ and ‘tenant(s)’ or to ‘employee(s)’ and ‘customer(s).’ Such recategorization allows the account to be more legitimately done: it is more ‘comfortable’ for participants to argue for the reasonableness and intelligibility of ‘landlords’ or ‘employees’ rejecting certain kinds of ‘tenants’ or ‘customers’ than to explain away ‘Japanese’ discrimination against ‘foreigners’ and/or ‘Chinese’ as understandable (Sacks, 1992: 317 & 593). It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore why participants may find it easier to argue for the reasonability and intelligibility of the former kinds of discrimination than discrimination based on nationality or ethnicity. Future research in this direction is needed to provide more insight on how discrimination in everyday life can be more readily problematized.
Future research can also explore whether the practices involved in accounting for discrimination against one’s own group varies across the types of discrimination under consideration. On the other hand, although not discussed in this paper, interviewees in this study do use categories and category-based knowledge when formulating condemnations of discrimination. It would be of great interest to examine how category-based knowledge, despite its affinity to stereotypes or prejudice, also constitute great resources for acting against discrimination.
By analyzing interview data, I also show that the categorization work involved in accounting for discrimination is collaboratively accomplished by interviewer and interviewee in the interview setting. While both parties orient to and in general follow the turn-taking organization of interviews (e.g., question – answer – question – answer), the actions accomplished are much more than soliciting and providing information. Both parties actively supply, elaborate, challenge, and modify categorical reasoning to arrive at a satisfying resolution of the sequence of accounting for discrimination. The interactional nature of research interviews and co-production of talk as highlighted in this paper has important implications for interview studies. Interviewers’ talk should not be assumed to be neutral and left out of data analysis. Instead, arguments about interviewers’ neutrality or reflexivity need to be grounded in actual analyses. This is especially important for studies on various forms of discrimination and -ism, where researchers tend to present quotes from interviewees’ responses as evidence for de-contextualized discrimination and -ism and, to various extents, imply the types of people the interviewees are (see Bonilla-Silva, 2014).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank Ryo Okazawa, Kevin Whitehead, and Adam Lilly for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewer and the editor for their feedback.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.