“Who presents themselves well? Who says things the right way?”

The Paradoxical Professionalism of Activist Rhetoric Against Racism

Abstract

The debatability of racism is a characteristic of post-racial societies where racism is both a source of fascination and the subject of political denial. This notion refers to the excessive noise and media chatter that makes racism an elusive, ambiguous and confusing phenomenon the more it is discussed. In this paper, I adopt a critical phenomenological perspective by focusing on the experiences of anti-racism spokespersons in Quebec who experience this recursive and repetitive media attention and must regularly confront and navigate it. More specifically, I am interested in how professionalism, conceived as a disciplinary mechanism and a set of material, discursive and reflexive processes, enables (or not) spokespersons to communicate about racism, navigate its debatability, and negotiate the communicational constraints of whiteness and racialisation. Thematic analysis of fifteen semi-structured interviews revealed the predominance of a conception of professionalism as ammunition and a protective resource (political, emotional, and rhetorical) that allows one to navigate the shifting sands of the debatability of racism. However, this professionalism is paradoxical since while it empowers spokespersons to play their role, it also contributes to standardising the discourse of anti-racism and establishing a hierarchy among the communication practices that characterise it.