Abstract
Individuals employ general, cognitively grounded categorization processes to form expectations for interactions with members of other social groups. Such categorizations sometimes surface in the form of racial, ethnic, or other stereotypes. But although much literature describes and/or tests the cognitive nature of stereotyping and categorization, less investigates how stereotypes and categories are formed in casual interaction, through casual discourse. This article analyzes data from 15 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with restaurant servers to investigate how they categorize customers by drawing on racial stereotypes and stereotypes related to class and/or cultural capital to produce two types of discriminatory discourse: ‘racetalk’ and what we term ‘regiontalk’. Our analyses suggest potential differences in the servers’ processes of categorization according to patron type, which we interpret with regard to the larger context of racism and classism in contemporary U.S. society.
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