The Everyday Language of White Racism E-Book

Jane H. Hill

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 487

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

In The Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane H. Hill provides an incisive analysis of everyday language to reveal the underlying racist stereotypes that continue to circulate in American culture. * provides a detailed background on the theory of race and racism * reveals how racializing discourse--talk and text that produces and reproduces ideas about races and assigns people to them--facilitates a victim-blaming logic * integrates a broad and interdisciplinary range of literature from sociology, social psychology, justice studies, critical legal studies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines that have studied racism, as well as material from anthropology and sociolinguistics * Part of the Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

1 The Persistence of White Racism

Introduction: Racism, Race, and Racial Disparities

Two Theories of Race and Racism: Folk Theory and Critical Theory

Race is a Social and Political Fact, Not a Fact of Human Biology

2 Language in White Racism: An Overview

Introduction: Discourse

Linguistic Ideologies

Indexicality and Covert Racist Discourse: Invisible to Linguistic Ideologies?

The Metacultural Function of Linguistic Ideologies

An Overview of Chapters to Come

3 The Social Life of Slurs

Introduction

The Legal Status of Slurs

Naming the Peak: Attacking and Defending a Racial Slur in Arizona

Conclusion: Slurs and White Privilege

4 Gaffes: Racist Talk without Racists

Introduction: Gaffes, Personalism, and Moral Panics

The Case of Senator Trent Lott: Personalist Discourse in the Media in a National Moral Panic

Does Personalist Linguistic Ideology Insulate Speakers from Accusations of Racism?

Conclusion: The Function of the Label “Gaffe” in White Racism

5 Covert Racist Discourse: Metaphors, Mocking, and the Racialization of Historically Spanish-Speaking Populations in the United States

Introduction: What is Covert Racist Discourse?

The Spanish Language in the United States

Mock Spanish: Covert Racist Discourse and Indexicality

Indexicality and the Multiple Functions of Mock Spanish

Conclusion

6 Linguistic Appropriation: The History of White Racism is Embedded in American English

Introduction to Linguistic Appropriation

Native American Languages and White Linguistic Appropriation

African American English and White Linguistic Appropriation

US Spanish and White Linguistic Appropriation

Conclusion

7 Everyday Language, White Racist Culture, Respect, and Civility

Above-Ground White Racism and the Evidence of Language

White Racist Culture as a System of Contradictions, Erasures, and the Intersubjective Creation of Meaning

Respect, Civility, and Equality: Interrupting the Everyday Language of White Racism with Foundational American Values

Notes

References

Index

Linguistic anthropology evolved in the twentieth century in an environment that tended to reify language and culture. A recognition of the dynamics of discourse as a sociocultural process has since emerged as researchers have used new methods and theories to examine the reproduction and transformation of people, institutions, and communities through linguistic practices. This transformation of linguistic anthropology itself heralds a new era for publishing as well. Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture aims to represent and foster this new approach to discourse and culture by producing books that focus on the dynamics that can be obscured by such broad and diffuse terms as “language.” This series is committed to the ethnographic approach to language and discourse: ethnographic works deeply informed by theory, as well as more theoretical works that are deeply grounded in ethnography. The books are aimed at scholars in the sociology and anthropology of language, anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics, and socioculturally informed psycholinguistics. It is our hope that all books in the series will be widely adopted for a variety of courses.

Series Editor

James M. Wilce (PhD University of California, Los Angeles) is Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University. He serves on the editorial board of American Anthropologist and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. He has published a number of articles and is the author of Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural Bangladesh (1998), Language and Emotion (forthcoming), and Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament (forthcoming), and editor of Social and Cultural Lives of Immune Systems (2003).

Editorial Board

Richard Bauman – Indiana University

Eve Danziger – University of Virginia

Patrick Eisenlohr – Washington University in St. Louis

Per-Anders Forstorp – Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm

Elizabeth Keating – UT Austin

Paul Kroskrity – UCLA

Norma Mendoza-Denton – University of Arizona

Susan Philips – University of Arizona

Bambi Schieffelin – NYU

Lukas Tsitsipis – University of Thessaloniki, Greece

In the Series

1. The Hidden Life of Girls, by Marjorie Harness Goodwin

2. We Share Walls: Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco, by Katherine E. Hoffman

3. The Everyday Language of White Racism, by Jane H. Hill

Forthcoming

Living Memory:The Social Aesthetics of Language,by Jillian R. Cavanaugh

This edition first published 2008 © 2008 Jane H. Hill

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LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData

Hill, Jane H.The everyday language of white racism/Jane H. Hill.p. cm. 𔃱 (Blackwell studies in discourse and culture)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4051-8453-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-8454-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Racism in language. 2. Racism–United States. 3. Discourse analysis–Social aspects–United States. I. Title.

P120.R32H55 2008 306.44089–dc222008013078

Preface and Acknowledgments

Some members of audiences for talks about the topics I treat in this book have accused me of presenting an overly negative view of the state of race relations in the United States. I do insist that racism remains an active force in White American culture in the twenty-first century. However, I write this in my 69th year. I grew up in segregated schools and neighborhoods, listening to the frankly racist talk of friends and family members. My dear grandmother and grandfather, my beloved father and his three brothers and their wives, my delightful aunts, all of them (except a couple of the aunts) highly educated, could hardly be together for half an hour without the conversation turning to “the jigs” – their preferred epithet for African Americans. My mother and my husband and my sister and brothers and I dreaded these offensive conversations and we did our best to steer the talk toward harmless topics, but it often seemed that no theme existed that did not provide new openings to return to their obsession. While my life is still spent almost entirely among other White people, I rarely hear that kind of talk today. And I have found that White Americans are today relatively honest in talking and thinking about the place of race and racism in their own lives, compared to people of similar class and status in many other countries I have visited. Furthermore, people of color now encounter opportunities in the United States, including positions at the very highest levels of power and visibility in government, business, and the professions, that were unthinkable 25 or 30 years ago, and that would be unlikely in most White-dominant countries today, even in Europe. So there has been positive change. But every serious study shows that White racism continues to be a deadening and oppressive fact of life for the vast majority of people of color in the United States. This book is an effort to understand why this is so. Why does racism persist in so many forms in a country where to call a person “racist” is a deep insult, and where “equal opportunity” is a universally articulated value? In this book I use the tools of my trade – linguistic anthropology – to try to understand this puzzle. Linguistic anthropologists believe that to use language – to speak, to write, to sing, to joke, to listen, to read – is the most important way that human beings make the world, and make it meaningful. So everyday talk and text should be the single most important way that White Americans come to understand the world in terms of race, to practice racism, and to learn to tolerate its effects, sometimes in full consciousness of what they are doing, and sometimes in reduced consciousness or denial. So I focus on the ways that White racism is, as anthropological jargon has it, “produced and reproduced” through everyday talk and text. Many examples in this book come from language in mass media, but, given the way that American lives are utterly saturated with talk and text from such media, I insist that media language must count as yet another form of “everyday language.”

This book is about White racism, for two reasons. The first is that I live in a White world, and I have not undertaken formal fieldwork in order to observe everyday discourse about race among Americans of color. I have benefited enormously from conversations with colleagues who can offer insight into White racism from a non-White perspective, and from writing by anthropologists of color, from W. E. B. Du Bois to Audrey Smedley, Faye Harrison, and Ana Celia Zentella, who have made significant contributions to theorizing racism. The second reason is that I believe that the (understandable) distrust and even hatred that many non-White Americans feel when they think of or interact with White Americans, sometimes called “racism,” is not very important in the great scheme of things. Of course this distrust and hatred is painful for Whites at an individual level. Like most White Americans, I can think of times when I or my children have suffered pain in interactions with people of color who disliked and distrusted us, or even abused us, just because we were White. But these experiences have been both few and ephemeral. They have occasioned no enduring withdrawals of privilege, no consequences beyond a moment of hurt and anger. These experiences cut deep, and I continue to remember a few with some pain. But they have very limited structural consequences. When a White person chooses to avoid a “bad neighborhood,” this choice has few costs for her. In contrast, should a person of color choose to avoid all of the environments where she is likely to be hurt emotionally or even physically, the costs would be devastating, since these environments – the admissions office of a school, the reading room of a library, the human resources department of a corporation, the aisles of a discount store, the sidewalks of a neighborhood – will include nearly all of the sites where significant symbolic and material resources are distributed in our society. And, since she cannot possibly avoid these, the moments of painfully unjust rejection – like those that sometimes trouble me, even though they were minor incidents that occurred years ago – are multiplied and multiplied into an endless and acute source of stress that it is difficult for any White person to imagine. I try to think about how I would feel, about what kind of person I would be, if the half-dozen very negative experiences in my entire long life that happened because I am White were multiplied into threats that would loom for me every single day. When we consider this, we are required to conclude that, among the many appalling consequences of life in a racist society, the occasional discomforts and restrictions felt by Whites because they are stereotyped by people of color surely rank very low. And we must also be struck by the extraordinary toughness, courage, and fundamental strength of character that must be shared by the vast majority of people of color.

Because I have not conducted research on racism in other countries, this book is about White racism in the United States. Furthermore, I will focus here on the way it plays out among the people I know best – middle- and upper-middle-class White professionals, the kinds of people who read newspapers and use the Internet, and who produce the kind of talk and text that might be heard or read beyond the sphere of immediate family and neighbors. For want of a better term, I will refer to these people as White elites, even though only a very few of them are movers and shakers at the highest level. While the comparative literature shows that there are many kinds of racism, I believe that elite White racism in the United States is the most important and influential form of racism in the world. The global power of elite White Americans means that everyone in the world must reckon with what they think and do. The forms of racism that they accomplish – and, indeed, their forms of anti-racist practice – influence how people think and act around the globe.

White American racism is an inspiration for racists globally, but it is also one of the great puzzles for people in other countries. Most White American anthropologists who have worked outside the United States have been asked about it, in tones ranging from the accusatory to the merely curious, by interlocutors at all levels of society. Doing fieldwork in Mexico, I have had conversations about racismo norteamericano with interlocutors ranging from illiterate peasants to distinguished professors (working-class Mexicans, who have to navigate White racism as part of the trick of coming to the United States as undocumented migrants, are especially knowledgeable and aware about it). I speculate that around the world White American racism is considered to be at least as typical a feature of life in the United States as is American wealth. People in other countries measure their own local experiences of racism against what they believe to be American patterns, deplore the global influence of American racism, and wonder how it is that American life can encompass such a contradictory combination of the best and worst in human nature.

Regrettably, this book does not treat anti-Semitism, which is obviously closely linked to racism, shares much of its logic, and figures in the prejudices of most racists. Anti-Semitism around the world is apparently on the rise, and must be carefully watched. But this is a vast subject in its own right, and falls beyond the scope of this book.

One last warning. In speaking, I do not use racist epithets. As a teacher, I have learned that uttering them, even when they are carefully framed as examples, may cause great pain to students. However, writing and reading are a different kind of context. I am concerned that the moment of collusion between writer and reader when the reader encounters “k..e” or “n....r”may be an even more powerful site for the reproduction of racializing practice than is the moment of shock when the reader encounters the words spelled out. With the ellipses, both writer and reader share a false comfort – we are not the sort of people who would ever spell these words out – that is immediately contradicted by what is silenced in a deep presupposition – we both know these words. So racist epithets, spelled out, will appear in this book. I prefer the shock, the confrontation with ugliness, the recognition that these words and what they mean are in our world. I have thought carefully about the fact that writing the words out may be, at a deep level of self-construction for me, a moment of shamefully pleasurable catharsis, as much as it is a conscious choice made on theoretical grounds; I accept that responsibility. I also accept responsibility for the pain that seeing these words will bring some readers, and I apologize.

I owe thanks to many people for helping me develop the ideas in this book. I thank the many students, including especially Laura Cummings, Elizabeth Krause, Jacqueline Messing, Andrea Smith, Gayle Shuck, Elea Aguirre, Barbara Meek, Adam Schwartz, and Elise DuBord, who have found these ideas exciting and have encouraged me to work on them, and who have themselves contributed both new materials and exacting criticism. Among colleagues to whom I owe special gratitude are Ana Alonso, Barbara Babcock, Charles Briggs, José Cobas, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Susan Philips, Jennifer Roth-Gordon, Carlos Vélez Ibáñez, Kathryn Woolard, and Ana Celia Zentella. Other colleagues and students, too numerous to mention, have sent me e-mails and clippings for my collection of materials, and I thank them all. I should especially mention Greg Stoltz, Luis Barragan, and Lori Labotka, who have checked bibliography and transcribed interviews, and Dan Goldstein, who did most of the interviews cited in Chapter 5.

My husband, Kenneth C. Hill, and my sons Eric and Harold, have as always contributed sustaining love and patience. I thank especially the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences for a residential fellowship in 2003–04, and the University of Arizona for granting me sabbatical leave during that year, permitting me to pull together the many scraps of more than a decade of attention to the questions developed in this book.

Chapter 1

The Persistence of White Racism

Introduction: Racism, Race, and Racial Disparities

I began to write this chapter in the early months of 2004, 140 years after the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1864, 80 years out from the establishment of citizenship for Native Americans in 1924, and during the 50th anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s great decision of 1954, Brown v. Board of Education, which ended official segregation in US public schools. The US Civil Rights Act of 1964, which proscribed racial discrimination in broad areas of American life, was 40 years old.

The people who made these landmarks live in daguerreotypes, in flickering black and white film, in reunions of graying veterans of the Civil Rights movement. Today most Whites see White racism as a part of the American past, and anti-racist struggle as largely completed. Yet people of color – African Americans, Native Americans, Americans of Latin American or Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry – consistently report that they experience racism (Alter 2004; Bobo 2001; Feagin and Sykes 1994). These reports are not the product of oversensitivity or paranoia. Instead, they may even understate the impact that White racism has on the everyday lives of people of color (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Feagin and Vera 1995).

While American workplaces and public institutions are increasingly integrated, very few Whites have social friends among people of color (BonillaSilva 2003:107–111). White isolation makes it easy for them to dismiss the complaints of people of color as “whining” and “playing the race card.” Whites do not themselves experience harassment for “driving while Black,” or the stony inattention encountered when “ordering a restaurant meal while Indian.” Their conversations with family and friends are never interrupted by perfect strangers telling them to “Speak English! This is America!” Nobody has ever tried to seduce them by confessing that they’ve “always wanted to make it with a hot Asian chick.” And they don’t have the kinds of conversations with people of color where they would hear about such incidents, which are so frequent as to be stereotypical. Everyday moments of discrimination are only part of the picture, though. Statistics for a wide range of indicators stratified by three major racial groups in the United States, shown in Table 1 , reveal a consistent picture of gross disparities.1

Table 1 Disparities in economic, health, and social indicators by “race” in the United States