Broaching questions of race and racism through personal journals: an analysis of the reflections of students who selfidentify as black
Abstract
This article reports on a study of the reflective journals
produced by a sample of undergraduate university
students in which they consider the relevance of
questions surrounding race and racism to their own
lives, based on their engagement with post-colonial
literature. Using a discourse analytic framework, the
article focuses on the discursive frames that structure
respondents’ reflections on the different manifestations
of racism after 1994. We discuss the influence of the
politeness protocol across the findings, based on
Sue (2013), and interpret the findings by drawing on
narratives of ambiguity in Soudien (2010). Finally, we
make suggestions as to the pedagogic implications
of the results by linking our study with Leonardo and
Porter’s (2010) theorisation of safety in race dialogue.