Abstract
This article utilises the concept of ‘race trouble’ as an overarching framework for examining an interview between Ms Vanessa Nakate and a South African news broadcaster. The interview describes an incident involving Ms Nakate’s attendance at a global climate change conference and her exclusion from a media report about a press briefing that she held along with four other youth activists at the conference. The analysis focuses on the collaborative and interactional production of Ms Nakate’s claim that her exclusion was racially motivated and the discursive mechanisms by which race is mobilised as a common-sense explanation for the incident that occurred. My analysis demonstrates the sanctionability of producing an accusation of racism and identifies the rhetorical functions of stake and facticity in its production, and concludes with a discussion of the relevance of these findings in the context of studies on race and racism in interaction.
The present study concerns an incident involving Ms Vanessa Nakate, a youth climate activist from Uganda who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2020. Ms Nakate was one of five youth climate activists invited to the conference and, while all five activists were females, four of them were Caucasian, with Ms Nakate being the only person of colour in the small group. During the World Economic Forum, the group of youth climate activists held a joint press briefing where each gave a short presentation on the climate work being done in their respective countries. The Associated Press (AP), an American-based media reporting company, was present at the Forum and provided a short article detailing the presentations given by the group of youth activists including a photograph to caption the article. Ms Nakate was noticeably absent from both the photograph and the information in the article. She subsequently sent a Tweet to the AP challenging the article and photograph they had released and asking why she had been excluded from the report. The AP responded to her by claiming that the exclusion was ‘insensitive’ and a ‘journalistic error’ (Bauder, 2020). The editor apologised via email to Ms Nakate, but an acknowledgement of racist behaviour was noticeably absent from the AP’s response.
In an online interview, Ms Nakate described this exclusion from the report as ‘a form of silencing’ (Evelyn, 2020), a claim supported by her well-known fellow group member, Greta Thunberg, who claimed that the AP ‘didn’t just erase a photo. . . [they] erased a continent’ (Bauder, 2020). Although Ms Nakate actively resisted her silencing by calling out the actions of the media platform, the task of claiming that the erasure was racially motivated was treated by Ms Nakate as requiring a significant amount of work order to ensure that the accusation itself was treated as legitimate.
Although climate change is a global crisis, its effects are uneven and disproportionately felt in certain areas of the global South (Sealey-Huggins, 2018; Weber et al., 2018). In addition, existing structural inequalities unique to areas of the global South reinforce and exponentially exacerbate the material effects of climate change such as water shortages and food insecurity (Baarsch et al., 2020; Tumushabe, 2018). Climate activism is thus a form of social activism which seeks to effect material changes in people’s lives. Nevertheless, the voices of climate activists are often suppressed and marginalised (Björnberg et al., 2017; Civicus: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, 2019; Skanavis and Sakellari, 2012). The present research contributes to understandings of the production of accusations of racism, and thus to a broader literature on race-talk in interaction. It also forms part of a bigger study on race, racism and climate activism and is thus important in highlighting and reversing the erasure that takes place in climate discourse, by focusing specifically on making heard the voice of a black female climate activist whose voice was silenced on the global climate stage.
Critical social studies have focused much of their attention on race and racism in social life (Augoustinos and Every, 2007a, 2007b, 2010; Durrheim et al., 2015; Whitehead, 2009, 2015; Whitehead and Lerner, 2009; Van Dijk, 1992). In the present article, I utilise Durrheim et al. (2011) conceptualisation of ‘race trouble’ as an approach to studying race as a discursive matter accomplished in the course of social life. This approach foregrounds participant understandings about what counts as racism, and analyses the production of race in interaction. Although race talk is an ubiquitous part of social life (Whitehead, 2009) Billig (1988: 137) notes that there is a ‘general cultural norm against “prejudice”’, with speakers observably orienting to this norm by mitigating or denying remarks that may be seen as overtly racist (van Dijk, 1992). Explicit racist discourse is therefore treated as a violation of the normative and moral order, and as such, accusations of racism are accountable and potentially sanctionable actions (Augoustinos and Every, 2007b; Durrheim et al., 2015; Whitehead, in press). In fact, as Durrheim et al. (2015: 4) note, ‘accusations of racism can be criticised for illegitimately playing “the race card”’, so that the accuser him- or herself, rather than the ostensibly racist occurrence, becomes the focus of the discussion. Making an accusation of racism is thus a potential breach of a ‘social taboo’ (Augoustinos and Every, 2007b: 234) more extreme even than racism itself. What this means is that the onus of ‘proving’ racism may ultimately rest with the individual who ‘claims racism’, and thus accusations of racism are carefully negotiated and produced, often relying on allusions and suggestions rather than explicit assertions in order to manage the claimant’s accountability. The ‘norm against prejudice’ (Billig, 1988) ensures that, furthermore, accusations of racism are typically met with strong denials and defences that use ‘discoursive deracialisation’ (Reeves, 1983) in order to accomplish these countering narratives. As Augoustinos and Every (2010: 251) note, ‘contemporary race talk is strategically organized to deny racism’. Speakers will thus produce competing accounts that are deracialised and rely on alternative explanations or justifications in order to account for the problematic behaviour.
In the following exchange, Ms Nakate is being interviewed by a news presenter on a South African television channel. The interviewer tackles the incident with Ms Nakate in front of a live audience. Consistent with Durrheim et al.’s (2015) findings, the ‘race trouble’ in this interaction is alluded to, with explicit references to racism occurring only in the final moments of the interaction. These allusions and suggestions invite the listeners to formulate their own understandings about the possible motivations for the incident, while maintaining the deniability of an explicit racial accusation and thus managing the moral accountability of the participants.
My analysis focuses on the methods by which Ms Nakate consistently attends to the elements of facticity and stake (Edwards and Potter, 1992) in her description of the events that took place. Facticity refers to the production of an account that is grounded in external reality and thus verifiable by others, rather than originating from the perceptions of the speaker (Edwards, 1997). Stake, on the other hand, refers to the degree of personal investment (what Goffman (1967) termed ‘face’) in producing a given account, in order to minimise any kind of motivated basis for a claim (Edwards, 2005; Edwards and Potter, 1992).
It is important to note that although Ms Nakate provides a description of these events, in this analysis I treat this description as a version: as a discursive and interactional accomplishment, inspectable for the methods by which it is produced as ‘uninterpreted and unmotivated’ (Edwards and Potter, 1992: 90). Furthermore, I emphasise that this analysis does not seek to undermine Ms Nakate’s description of events: rather the opposite; it seeks to demonstrate her methods for producing a particular version of events that stands up to scrutiny by a public that might otherwise denounce her claim as unreasonable, when in fact the very opposite is true.
Data and method
In the days and weeks following Davos, Ms Nakate held a number of interviews where she discussed the incident that had taken place and her response to it. The data for this analysis comes from a single interview hosted by African Perspective, a nightly news programme hosted by SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation), the South-African state-owned public broadcaster. The African Perspectives programme is known for delivering credible and up-to-date Africa-relevant news content. While the African Perspectives programme is a 50-minute show, the interview with Ms Nakate was 12 minutes long. This analysis focuses on the portion of the interview in which the incident at Davos was topicalised. The interview was conducted remotely via a video-conference technology, with Ms Nakate in Uganda and the interviewer in the studio in South Africa.
Schegloff (1987: 102) notes that ‘there is a constitutive order to singular occasions of interaction, and to the organization of action within them’. In this instance, the analysis of the sequential progressivity of a single interaction provides some profound insights into the organisation of talk about race and specifically about the turn-by-turn collaborative production and management of an accusation of racism jointly formulated and ratified by the speakers.
The data have been transcribed using a Jeffersonian transcription method (Jefferson, 2004a) and carefully analysed using discursive psychological and conversation analytic guidelines. Discursive psychology investigates the formulation of accounts and events as discursive objects (Edwards and Potter, 1992). Conversation analysis provides the tools for analysing the sequential organisation of the interaction (Schegloff, 2007a), and an examination of the local, moment-by-moment collaborative production of talk-in-interaction, which provides a methodological scaffolding for the analysis of a joint accusation of racism undertaken by the two participants in the following interview.
Analysis
The interviewer has given a brief description of the incident, but begins his interaction with Ms Nakate by requesting some information about how she first became aware of the report. Ms Nakate provides three separate accounts for how she came across the news report; in each account, she emphasises the fact that she had not intentionally sought out the article but rather had chanced upon it involuntarily. The relevance of her ‘happening upon’ the article, rather than seeking it out, turns on the rhetorical function of demonstrating her lack of ‘stake’ – in other words, she had no personal motivation to discover anything negative, and thus, such a finding cannot be tied to her expectations or preferences but rather can only be grounded in the external world.
The interviewer begins the interview process by suggesting that it matters how she learned of the report, and Ms Nakate’s response demonstrates her awareness of this relevance. Thus, the significance of establishing ‘how she came to know about the report’ is emphasised in the interviewer’s selection of this as the starting point for his interview, and in Ms Nakate’s utilisation of the opportunity to constitute the event in factually accurate terms that externalises and therefore bolsters the sequence of events that took place (Edwards and Potter, 1992).
Ms Nakate thus begins by providing a description of the precursors to the moment of discovery. In her description, she notes that she went out ‘for lunch’ ‘with some of the activists from the Arctic base camp’ (lines 06–08). The presence of these additional factual details are themselves a potential indication of the rhetorical concerns of the speaker by grounding her description in externally verifiable details that buttress the description that she is formulating. The description of lunch with fellow activists can also be read as a script formulation (Edwards, 1994) whose basis in normative knowledge situates this occasion as an informal, group-based activity; while further establishing Ms Nakate as demonstrably ‘belonging’ to the category from which she was later publicly excluded (Schegloff, 2007a). Finally, the building up of ‘ordinariness’ (Sacks, 1984) in this description of ordinary activities provides evidence for the speaker’s commitment to perceiving the world as predictable and unproblematic.
Ms Nakate continues by noting that ‘at that moment, [she] decided to read what they [media in general] had written about’ the conference (lines 08–10). The rhetorical function of ‘at that moment’ is apparent: it implies an absence of premeditation; while the use of the plural pronoun ‘they’ suggests an interest in any and all media reporting on the incident, rather than an interest in a particular media platform. These discursive choices further establish Ms Nakate as motivated by general curiosity rather than any other agenda, and confirm the absence of stake in any particular media story.
The extended description of a search process (lines 12–16) discursively functions to produce this account as factual. Simultaneously, the consistent reference to the spontaneity of the search (‘I saw’, ‘I decided’; lines 13–14) confirm the lack of ‘stake’ in Ms Nakate’s endeavour. Significantly, she mentions that she saw a hashtag of Greta Thunberg (arguably the most well-known youth activist in Ms Nakate’s group) and followed this hashtag in order to read further about the conference. In other words, she makes it explicit that she was not pursuing information about herself or her own role in the conference. Furthermore, she describes how she ‘landed’ (line 16) on that article, denoting an unplanned and accidental discovery, and stresses explicitly that she ‘actually landed on it by mistake’ (line 16). Although she receives affiliation from the interviewer at this point, she nevertheless continues her turn by emphasising even further how she had not ‘really expected to’ arrive at that article since she does not personally ‘follow the news company [AP]’ (lines 18–19); providing explicit evidence for her lack of personal interest in arriving at this particular article.
Thus far, Ms Nakate has established a number of important details that matter significantly for securing affiliation (from the interviewer and the audience) with her forthcoming accusation of racially-based discrimination. She has utilised a number of rhetorical tools to establish both the facticity of the account and its grounding in the external world rather than in her own psychology, and the absence of personal stake or interest which might make her vulnerable to being heard as ‘looking for trouble’ (Whitehead, 2009). These interactional and discursive resources are analytically relevant because they demonstrate that the speaker treats her description as vulnerable to being heard in that way in the absence of the given accounts and her normative orientation to the forthcoming accusation of racism as a dispreferred and potentially sanctionable action.
Ms Nakate continues by describing the moment that she first saw the cropped photo, and notes that her initial assumption was that her exclusion from the photograph was unintentional (‘it couldn’t fit’, line 21). She utilises a common story-telling device of ‘at first I thought’ (Jefferson, 2004b) to outline her initial, innocuous formulation of the incident. As Jefferson (2004b) notes, this device is used to provide an initial, mundane perspective on a given occurrence which might otherwise be socially or morally disruptive. However, when speakers provide their initial (wrong) ‘thoughts’ about an incident, they are demonstrating their ‘commitment to the normal’ (p. 155) by preserving this original alternative in the account despite the fact that it was ultimately rejected. Ms Nakate’s recounting of this experience demonstrates her ‘commitment to the normal’ by suggesting that her original interpretation of the incident was the most innocuous interpretation, situating herself as a ‘normal mundane reasoner’ (Pollner, 1974). Essentially, Ms Nakate demonstrates rhetorically her rationality as a witness: by orienting to the ‘unusualness’ of her conclusion, by demonstrating discursively that it was not her initial interpretation, and by providing evidence that, in this instance, her normative perception of the world and her orientation to a rational and plausible explanation were defeated by the eventual ‘realisation’ of all the evidence to the contrary. Once again, the significant discursive work being done here demonstrates Ms Nakate’s orientation to the potential sanctionability of this conclusion, by providing evidence of the cognitive rationality that accompanied her final account of an intentionally discriminatory act.
This eventual conclusion, however, is not immediately reached. Ms Nakate notes that upon seeing the photograph, she went ahead and read the article: a further demonstration of her wish to explore all the evidence before coming to her eventual and problematic conclusion. In the article, two powerful pieces of evidence emerge that prohibit her fidelity to her original, ordinary interpretation. Firstly, she had not been introduced as one of the activists at the press conference. Secondly, her presentation at the press conference had not been included in the article. Thus, her initial (and normative) account for why she had been excluded from the photograph (that it ‘didn’t fit’) can no longer stand up in the face of this additional evidence. These three erasures provide strong evidence that her exclusion from the photograph was not an oversight, but rather part of a larger pattern of exclusion of her very presence from the conference. Thus, despite her demonstrated commitment to a rational and innocuous explanation, these three facts have forced her to arrive at a far more disruptive and problematic conclusion: she was intentionally excluded from the report.
Ms Nakate confirms that, after reading the article, she was ‘really uh shocked’ (line 24) that the ‘photo had been what [she] was fearing to see’ (lines 24–25). The assertion that the outcome was ‘what [she] was fearing’ suggests an initial acknowledgement of a commitment to an interested interpretation, and one that is potentially racialised. Ms Nakate thus demonstrates an understanding of the fact of racism ‘out there’ in the world, and by using the past tense (‘was fearing’) displays a confirmation of a prior fear (that this was a racist act) that she had had about the photograph. Her ‘shocked’ reaction is thus a response to her fears being proved accurate.
The use of these particular emotion words (‘shocked’, line 24; ‘fearing’, line 25) also suggest some further considerations about Ms Nakate’s reaction. The word ‘shocked’ and the preceding intensifier ‘really’ denote a negative form of extreme surprise, suggesting the unexpectedness of the eventual conclusion. The word ‘feared’ suggests that the quality of the discovery was unnerving and frightening, confirming a reality that was disruptive and scary. In addition, neither of these terms holds the connotative weight of a stronger emotion term such as ‘anger’ or ‘outrage’, terms which might situate her as emotionally volatile and thus interpreting from an irrational or instinctive approach (Edwards, 1999).
Lines 29–30 are the interviewer’s formulation of the preceding account, which performs some important discursive work (Edwards and Potter, 1992). Aside from demonstrating understanding of the upshot of her preceding account (i.e. her being cropped out of the photograph was part of the larger insult of being excluded from the entire report), the interviewer’s formulation works to ratify her prior account and thereby collaboratively constitutes this summarised version as consensual and final.
Ms Nakate’s affiliative response (‘Exactly’, line 31) confirms this formulation of the incident, and she continues by noting that the article was subsequently edited to include additional photographs and information from her presentation. These edits only occurred ‘after all the complaints’ (line 32), further establishing the culpability of the AP. In other words, the very presence of edits to the original story is an implicit acknowledgement of its initial errors; while the fact that the edits were done in light of, or in attribution to, ‘all the complaints’ suggests that the edits were made for superficial, rather than morally appropriate, reasons.
The interviewer continues by asking for information about how her communication to the AP was responded to, using the phrase ‘what was’ (line 36) to indicate the normative expectability of their providing at least some response. Since the interviewer ostensibly knows that the AP had not initially responded to Ms Nakate’s tweet, by asking this question, he foregrounds the dispreferred response that, in fact, Ms Nakate did not receive any immediate communication from them. The formulation of this question to highlight the failure of the AP’s response is an important example of the interviewer’s role in collaboratively working up to an eventual explicit claim of racism against the AP.
Ms Nakate’s observation that the AP had not responded to her ‘not even via DM’ (direct message) (lines 38–39), in other words that they had not reached out to her privately, further contributes to the establishment of the AP as concerned predominantly with their public image; she explicates this further by stating that it was ‘just an outrage [sic]’ (line 39) from Twitter and negative media reports that caused them to finally respond to her original question. She concludes by noting that the fact that her video ‘went so viral’ (line 44) is what ‘pushed them to actually respond to what they had done’ (lines 45–46).
While Ms Nakate is concerned with building the facticity of her claim and attending to the lack of stake in its production, the interviewer has demonstrated alignment with her account and has produced his questions in such a way as to foreground the moral failings of the AP. Jointly, they have produced the Associated Press as not only having intentionally excluded her from the report, but also as mercenary in their response to the incident: their ‘edits’ and responses have been largely in response to public outcry rather than to any indication of a moral compass; and significantly, no public or private acknowledgement of their error has thus far been provided.
Significantly, until this point, neither participant has given a possible account for why this all might have happened, and race has not been topicalised (Whitehead, 2009) by either speaker, either directly or indirectly. The first indication that Ms Nakate has interpreted the incident in terms of race occurs in lines 49–55, after she is asked by the interviewer how she felt at that time. She provides two additional emotion words for her affective experience during the time: the first is ‘frustrated’ and the second is ‘very disturbed’ (line 49). In line with the emotional descriptors that she employed previously (lines 24–25), both are arguably mitigated emotional responses to what is a potentially powerful insult, and are analysable as positioning their speaker as rational rather than emotionally volatile or overwrought (Edwards, 1999). Discursively, these mitigated responses to an explicit solicitation for a description of her emotional state demonstrate her fidelity to providing a rational and reliable account of the incident.
Ms Nakate further bolsters her deployment of these emotion terms by providing a powerful account for the basis of these emotional responses. She suggests that these emotions are motivated by the content of her speech, which concerned the climate challenges confronted by people in Africa (lines 53–55). This is important for a few reasons. Firstly, it introduces a significant social category (‘climate activists from Africa’, line 58) and demonstrates at least some affiliation between her and this membership category. Secondly, it suggests that what the media have done in erasing her speech is erase the visibility of the problems of an entire group of people, rather than just one person. This works to respecify the incident as a much larger issue than a single activist’s exclusion from a news report, but rather as something that ultimately affects an entire continent of people. The use of the social category ‘Africa’ also works to implicitly mobilise a range of common-sense knowledge about the category (Schegloff, 2007b), such as its status as a part of the global South and thus under-resourced, impoverished and subject to many climate injustices perpetrated by the global North (Sealey-Huggins, 2018). Finally, this information re-establishes the source of Ms Nakate’s frustration: that her exclusion was not a personal slight, but rather that it performed the erasure of a large group of people and the challenges that they face in light of the climate crisis: further evidence for her lack of personal stake in this particular interpretation of the incident.
In addition to establishing herself for the first time as affiliated with the ‘African’ membership category, Ms Nakate performs her initial claiming of the incident as a racially motivated one by describing it as something that happens routinely to others in this particular membership category: ‘and yet um media keeps cropping them out’ (line 60). The use of the racial category is thus treated as a resource for the production of this (delicate) action (see Whitehead, in press). Furthermore, the conversion of the incident into a larger typology of similar occurrences works to respecify it as a class of incidents whose verifiability is thus much more robust than a singular case. In a powerful discursive move, the words ‘cropped out’ are treated by Ms Nakate as a metaphor for a general African experience of erasure, and are thus reclaimed by her here as an African experience of oppression rather than as a passively experienced form of silencing by a Western-dominated media source.
Ms Nakate’s intial deployment of the ambiguous social category of ‘African’ is treated by the interviewer as a potential basis for exploring the racial implications of the incident, despite the fact that Ms Nakate has not explicitly affirmed her take of this particular incident as a racist one. Thus, the interviewer provides a formulation of the evidence given until now about the intentionality of the act (lines 61–64) as a basis for his following question, in which he explores the moment at which Ms Nakate began to consider the potential racial motivation behind the incident. The question ‘did it dawn on you at that particular point that this could have just been a racist act’ (lines 64–66) is of central importance as a demonstration of the interactional collaboration of an accusation of racism. This formulation affirms Ms Nakate’s success in demonstrating the absence of her investment in a racist interpretation up to this point, and further displays that the accomplishment of stake inoculation (on Ms Nakate’s part) is treated as a basis for the legitimate (co)production of an accusation of racism (on the interviewer’s part).
Nevertheless, the interviewer orients to the delicacy of this formulation by providing two explicit accounts to bolster it (i.e. the photograph and the article), and by using the phrase ‘did it dawn on you’ (line 64) to imply that this conclusion was certainly not part of the mundane range of conclusions that could be reached about the incident. The two pauses within his formulation (line 65) also demonstrate his orientation to the delicacy of the question, as does the conditional phrasing (‘could have just been’, line 65) utilised in formulating the question. In taking care to calibrate his turn to these interactional concerns, the interviewer provides evidence of two powerful norms: the first, that acts of prejudice are problematic and non-normative (Billig, 1988); the second, and more significant, that ‘the treatment of race as an account for action is vulnerable to sanctioning’ (Whitehead, in press: 4) if significant discursive work is not done in order to demonstrate the legitimacy of the racialised account. Notably, by alluding, rather than explicitly referring, to race during this discussion, Ms Nakate mobilises race as a possible account for the actions of the AP, without explicitly claiming as much. This absence of an explicit claim ensures that Ms Nakate is not heard as using race as an account for the AP’s actions, which might in turn position her as engaging in racism (by using race as an account for another’s behaviour) (see Whitehead, 2009). Thus, the production of race as a possible account for the incident is taken up by the interviewer, who then provides the opportunity for Ms Nakate to align (or not) with his candidate answer to the puzzle that she has presented. This is another example of the interviewer’s role as co-collaborator in producing a claim of racism: by being the one producing the claim, the interviewer ensures that any potential dispositional attributions made about the claimant are therefore made about him, rather than Ms Nakate, thereby maintaining the moral character of his interviewee. Conversely, Ms Nakate is seeable as someone who does not gratuitously make accusations of racism, but rather presents all the evidence and allows her hearers to formulate their own conclusions.
Ms Nakate orients to the delicacy of this proffered account for the incident by providing a further mitigated response. In using corresponding conditional terminology (she ‘believes’ it ‘could have been’ a racist act, line 67), Ms Nakate provides weak alignment with the interviewer’s candidate account. The conditional formatting and lack of strong affiliation demonstrate her own cautiousness about this type of accusation and its status as a social taboo. Together, these discursive functions display that ‘racism’ is a cautiously arrived at possible conclusion, in the absence of an alternate account.
Ms Nakate further bolsters her alignment with this (albeit mitigated) claim by providing an additional powerful account for such a racialised reading of the occurrence. She notes that ‘they’ had done the ‘same thing’ to the ‘President of South Africa’ and goes on to explicate that the ‘same thing’ was that he was called an ‘unidentified person’ at a conference the previous year (lines 68–73). A common-sense reading of the parallel she draws between her story and this one suggests that she is an incumbent of a same relevant category as the President, with the most obvious membership category shared between these two individuals being their racial identity. In referring to the President of South Africa, and demonstrating that the ‘same thing’ had been done to him, Ms Nakate makes explicit that the basis for this absence of her identification in the report is unequivocably her membership in the ‘black’ racial category. Furthermore, by providing evidence of a ‘second story’ (Sacks, 1992) occurring to a person occupying a far higher status category than herself, Ms Nakate demonstrably is left with no choice but to interpret the incident in racialised terms. In other words, it cannot be anything other than her blackness which has motivated her erasure in the media: it is part of a larger pattern applied to members of her racial group, with clear evidence that it matters not who occupies these categories: they receive the same treatment. Significantly, by respecifying the incident as part of a larger and more general set of occurrences, and specifically by noting that the black person receiving the treatment could be a youth activist from Uganda or the President of South Africa, Ms Nakate demonstrates that regardless of the individual characteristics of the person, what is at stake is their membership in the racial category being invoked. Thus, the attribution of the occurrence is lodged firmly in relation to race rather than in regard to any other possible characteristic.
Finally, Ms Nakate makes explicit her accusation of a racially motivated incident (lines 75–76). While numerous hesitation markers and pauses demonstrate her orientation to the delicacy of this potentially sanctionable claim, her final conclusion, despite all her attempts to formulate a mundane, ordinary or unproblematic one, is that ‘they have an issue with black people’, to which she receives affiliation from the interviewer (line 77). It is important to note, however, that the legitimacy of this explicit claim hinges on its sequential position in the interaction, and the significant discursive work that has been done to situate Ms Nakate as moral, rational and committed to the normal, and the AP, conversely, as morally problematic, mercenary and disingenuous.
Conclusion
This analysis examines Ms Nakate’s account of an incident as a set of methods for managing the accountability of producing an accusation of racism. Because racism (and other forms of prejudice) is seen as unenlightened and irrational (Billig, 1988), contemporary discourse is normatively and strategically organised against it. This means that blatant and explicit forms of prejudice are rarer than they may have been in the past and thus, ironically, claiming that one has been treated prejudicially has become a social taboo itself. Specifically, claiming that a particular occurrence is racially motivated may implicate the claimant as someone who uses race as an account or explanation for ordinary events and may thus result in the claimant him- or herself being labelled as ‘racist’ (Whitehead, 2009). All in all, claims or accusations of racism are morally-laden social actions that require significant amounts of discursive work in order to be successfully brought off.
By studying the incident at the World Economic Forum as an occasion of ‘race trouble’, my analysis circumvents deliberations on fault, blame and intentionality and instead privileges participant orientations regarding what counts as racism and how to go about managing it in interaction. My study has therefore drawn on a broad literature on race and its treatment as an interactional resource in order to analyse this incident. Specifically, this analysis provides evidence for the ‘norm against prejudice’ (Billig, 1988), the sanctionability of producing explicitly racialised accounts for others’ behaviour (Whitehead, in press) and the discursive and rhetorical functions available to those producing (necessarily) racialised accounts of action in order to legitimise and strengthen the claims that they are making.
This article contributes significantly to current literature on race trouble by demonstrating the difficulties, even in a facilitatory context, associated with explicitly utilising race as an account for action. This analysis examines how the management of the rhetorical functions of stake inoculation and facticity can provide legitimacy to racialised accounts and interpretations.
The stakes are high in climate activism, and the erasure of African voices is a real and material concern for the African continent. Ensuring that climate activism in all its forms is legitimised and made visible will ensure that the effects of the climate crisis are not disproportionately relegated to the global South. As a large and influential social institution, the media has the potential to hold accountable those most responsible for the effects of climate change. Failures to do so must be acknowledged and rectified in order to ensure that the voices of marginalised communities are not ‘cropped out’ from the global climate conversation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) and the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) for the postdoctoral funding that has supported this research. The author would like to acknowledge Professor Brendon Barnes for his invaluable feedback on previous drafts of this manuscript.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.