Broaching questions of race and racism through personal journals: an analysis of the reflections of students who self-identify 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.