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Article written by 2007 DPDF Rethinking Europe: Religion, Ethnicity, Nation Fellow Crystal Fleming, Michèle Lamont, and Jessica S. Welburn:

Drawing on interviews with 150 randomly sampled African Americans,
we analyse how members of a stigmatized group understand their
experience of stigmatization and assess appropriate responses when asked
about the best approach to deal with stigmatization and about responses to
specific incidents. Combining in-depth interviews with a systematic coding
of the data, we make original contributions to the previous literature by
identifying the relative salience of modalities and tools for responding.
We also examine closely through qualitative data the two most salient
modalities of response, ‘confronting’ and ‘deflating’ conflict, the most
salient tools, teaching out-group members about African Americans, and
‘the management of the self’, a rationale for deflating conflict that is
largely overlooked in previous studies. We find that ‘confronting’ is the
more popular modality for responding to stigmatization among African
Americans.