Black Visions through Colorblind Frames: Opposition in the Obama Era - A Discursive Exploration of Black Urban Adolescent Ideology.

Abstract

This dissertation applied a discourse analytic method to a body of text gathered through semi-structured in-depth interviews with 24 self-identified African American/Black adolescents finishing their senior year at a college preparatory public high school academy in Detroit. The goal of this exploration was twofold: to identify the frames or grounding assumptions underlying these young peoples’ articulations of racial stratification and to assess the extent to which the frames of colorblind racism – the dominant racial ideology in the US – were operative in their articulations.

Stratification was conceptualized in three dimensions. The interview texts were coded for instances where the participants were speaking to the following topics: (1) understandings of oppression or the ways youth discussed the domains and nature of race-related oppression; (2) explanations of racial disparity; and (3) future visions of America’s racial hierarchy.

The analysis revealed two sets of frames, one set operative in each of two emergent categories of youth distinguished by post-secondary plans and related experiential factors around family and schooling. Both groups of youth rely upon colorblind frames to make sense of racial stratification, to different extents, in varying combinations, and in ways that vary across dimensions of stratification talk.

While abstract liberalism inspires HI-SET youth to imagine and work toward a tangible notion of racial equality, LO-SET youth invest little in this vision, adhering to a weakened liberalism that is not concerned with altering the racial status quo so much as individual and collective preservation. Both groups rely upon naturalizing and biologizing frames to characterize white and black Americans. HI-SET youths combine these with abstract liberalism and minimization in ways that construct whites as salvageable and racism as entrenched but changeable. LO-SET youth, conversely, produce versions of whites and racism as fixed in rigid opposition to black dignity. HI-SET youth rely on minimization to maintain a belief in the dream, while LO-SET youth turn to an internal critique due in large part to an inability to penetrate racism. The current trend suggests that race will continue to recede in its effectiveness to provide a central foundation for organizing and mobilizing political interests.