The Everyday Language of White Racism: 2 (Wiley Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture) - Hardcover

Hill, Jane H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 140518454X ISBN 13: 9781405184540

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author

Jane H. Hill is Regents' Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Arizona. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has served as President of the American Anthropological Association, and was awarded the Viking Fund Medal in Anthropology in 2005.

From the Back Cover

In The Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane H. Hill explores the myth that White racism is fading in the western world. Instead she reveals it to be a pervasive and highly adaptive cultural system, one that has endured in various forms for hundreds of years. Hill’s incisive analysis of everyday talk and text shows how language that purports to be anti-racist is framed almost entirely by a folk theory of racism, one that continues to contain overt and covert racist discourses, slurs, and epithets.

This prominent linguist offers a penetrating summary of critical theories of racism and introduces the concept of "linguistic appropriation", as a new theoretical dimension to the study of language contact and linguistic borrowing. Hill draws on her internationally-acclaimed work on "Mock Spanish”, and delves into two important new case studies of public debates around racist slurs, providing a fresh and incisive analysis of the relationship between language, race, and culture.

This prominent linguist offers a penetrating summary of critical theories of racism and introduces the concept of "linguistic appropriation", as a new theoretical dimension to the study of language contact and linguistic borrowing. Hill draws on her internationally-acclaimed work on "Mock Spanish”, and delves into two important new case studies of public debates around racist slurs, providing a fresh and incisive analysis of the relationship between language, race, and culture.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Everyday Language of White Racism

By Jane H. Hill

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2009 Jane H. Hill
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4051-8454-0

Chapter One

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 (Bonilla-Silva 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.

The numbers in Table 1 capture quantitatively what is obvious to anyone who drives through an American city, attends a college graduation, visits a corporate headquarters, sits in a hospital emergency room, or accomplishes any other kind of everyday engagement with the world. What might explain these vivid inequalities? Brown et al. (2003) argue that they result from two opposing dynamics, "accumulation" that favors Whites, and "disaccumulation" that continues to disadvantage people of color. Yet we know that ordinary White people do not feel that they enjoy any benefit due to their race. Nor do they believe that people of color continue to face disadvantage. So, how do White people explain these numbers, and the visible evidence that they quantify, given that they think that racism has ended in the United States?

Most White Americans do admit that isolated pockets of White racism persist - perhaps in northern Idaho, or southern Georgia. However, the disparities charted in Table 1, which are consistent across every region of the United States, are unlikely to result from the actions of those very few members of the White community - openly declared White supremacists - that all Whites categorize as "racists." A few thousand Ku Kluxers can hardly claim responsibility for the fact that the average household net worth of African Americans is less than one-tenth that of White households.

Since common sense requires White Americans to reject the idea that these racial disparities are due to racism as they understand it - that is, as overt expression of White supremacy - they often conclude that they result from some fault of those who suffer. So they are credulous when the long-discredited idea that there might be a biologically based difference in intelligence among the races was revived in the last years of the twentieth century, in the bestseller The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1994). However, while differential intelligence might explain the disparities in educational accomplishment seen in Table 1, it hardly accounts for the twofold disparity in figures for unemployment. Surely the labor market offers enough grunt jobs that this difference should be no more than 11 percent or so, as predicted by The Bell Curve's figures for differential intelligence. Instead, the table shows a 100 percent disparity, with African American unemployment twice that of Whites. Nor can the alleged average difference in IQ explain an African American infant mortality rate two and a half times that of Whites. The Hispanic figures contradict such an association: Hispanics have rates of school completion similar to those of African Americans, and yet exhibit lower rates of infant mortality even than Whites. A White American trying to account for these statistics might turn to ideas about cultural differences among ethnic groups, believing, for instance, that Hispanics typically enjoy large, close-knit extended families that provide good support for expectant mothers, explaining their low figures for infant mortality. Or they might believe that African Americans do not value higher education, but seek success in fields like sports and popular music, thus explaining their low rate of completion of bachelor's degrees. But, as we shall see below, these ideas about "culture" do not survive critical attention from an anthropological point of view.

Of course we cannot ignore the weight of history. African Americans were never compensated for their exclusion as slaves from the wealth of the nation built with their labor, for being terrorized by Whites out of such small property as they might accumulate in the dark years of Jim Crow, for their formal exclusion from resources distributed by twentieth-century government programs such as the GI Bill, FHA mortgage assistance, aid to small businesses, and support for farmers, through the mid-1960s and even later (Lipsitz 1998). Disparities in household net worth, or life expectancy, might be a residue of this history. But "history" does not explain differences in short-range phenomena such as median per capita income, unemployment, college graduation, or incarceration. If discrimination has been largely vanquished for the last 40 years, two generations, the racial stratification of these factors should surely have disappeared.

Along with many other scholars who have investigated the question, I suggest that what does account for these numbers is the persistent culture of White racism in the United States. White racism is not just part of American history. Instead, White racist culture today organizes racist practices in White-dominated institutions such as schools and health-care facilities, and everyday choices and behaviors by the vast majority of Whites operating as individuals. White racist culture is shaped by a "White racial frame," "an organized set of racialized ideas, stereotypes, emotions, and inclinations to discriminate" (Feagin 2006:27), along with interpretations that rationalize the discrimination against people of color that is indeed old (dating back to the earliest stages of the oppression of people of African descent by Whites in the New World), but continues as a vivid fact of life in the contemporary United States. The impacts shown in Table 1 are of such generality, and such a magnitude, as to suggest strongly that racism must be practiced in some way by a very substantial number of Whites, at every level of class and status. To render their practices invisible, and to tolerate or to discount their effects, Whites must share negative stereotypes of people of color, permitting them to blame these victims. How are such stereotypes produced and reproduced among people who deny that they are racist and who claim to abhor racism in word and deed (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Feagin and Vera 1995)? How does White racism actually work today? This book aims at a partial answer to these questions by examining how White Americans produce and reproduce the culture of White racism through their use of language, from high literary text, to language in every sort of mass media, to everyday talk and text produced by ordinary people.

Before turning to my main topic, the reproduction of White racism in language, I want to introduce the theories that anthropologists and other scholars today find most productive in thinking about race, and about White racism. These critical theories challenge what I call the "folk theory" of racism. The folk theory is an interpretation, a way of thinking about racism, that is crucial to the perpetuation of White racist culture. Since for most White people the folk theory is undeniable common sense, ideas that contradict it require careful discussion. The folk theory interacts with the linguistic ideologies discussed in Chapter 2 in intricate ways that make possible the simultaneous reproduction and denial of White racism. Since one of the goals of this book is to show how this works, we need to know what the folk theory of racism is, and why it is inadequate to explain racial disparities in American society today. And we need to understand the critical theory of White racism as culture, which underlies the ideas presented in this book.

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

Cognitive anthropologists (e.g. D'Andrade 1995) use the term "folk theory" or "folk model" to label the everyday understandings of the world, found in all societies, that are revealed by ethnographic analysis. Folk theories influence scientific theories, and vice versa. But real differences exist between folk theorizing and the theories developed by scholars and scientists. Folk theoreticians are not unreflective, but they have not been trained in the tough discipline of searching for contrary evidence. Instead, folk theoreticians often handle contradictions by "erasure" (Gal and Irvine 1995), a kind of inattention that makes contradictory evidence invisible. Consider a sentence invented by the sociologist Stanley Lieberson: "Americans are still prejudiced against blacks." Lieberson found that, even though about 12 percent of Americans are Black, Whites seldom notice the contradiction in this statement. This is erasure. In contrast, Lieberson's respondents were startled by another sentence: "Americans still make less money than do whites" (Lieberson 1985:128). For these subjects, "Whites" could stand metonymically for "Americans," but "Blacks" could not.

Folk theorizing uses what scholars call "ad hoc" or "stipulative" explanations for contradictory evidence. For instance, Bashkow (2006) found that Orokaiva people in New Guinea were acquainted with White people who did not match their stereotypes of "Whitemen" (for instance, as very soft-skinned, or as never doing hard physical labor). But they did not conclude from this evidence that their stereotypes were mistaken. Instead, they decided that these White people were simply untypical. Some Orokaiva said that they were probably not real "Whitemen," but reincarnations of dead Orokaiva relatives, returned in disguise.

People use folk theories to interpret the world without a second thought. They are a part of everyday common sense. But they are also more than this. Since common sense is valued, folk theories and categories are not only taken for granted, they are the objects of considerable intellectual and affective investment. I have found on many occasions, in teaching and lecturing, that to question the folk theory of racism elicits from my fellow White Americans a defense of it that is acutely felt and even angry. To challenge this common sense is to become an oddball or a divisive radical.

The folk theory of race and racism

While anthropologists usually prefer to emphasize diversity, my research suggests that most White Americans share a single set of folk ideas about race and racism. These ideas, which I refer to as the "folk theory of race and racism," attend to so much that is irrelevant, erase so much that is important, and create so many traps and pitfalls that it is probably impossible to develop anti-racist projects within their framework. The folk theory shows up in the talk and text that I will analyze in later chapters. Even more importantly, it shows up in classes and courtrooms, in the deliberations of legislative bodies, in programming on television. Most White readers of this book, and their friends and families, will have invoked it in their own talk and text. It is ubiquitous, and it is taken for granted. So I outline the folk theory here in order that readers can learn to recognize and critique its terms.

The first part of the folk theory holds that "race" is a basic category of human biological variation, and that each human being can be assigned to a race, or, sometimes, to a mixture of races. The folk theory holds that these races are biologically real, the obvious trace of the origins of the American population in historically and biologically distinct geographical populations formed in human evolution. Folk theoreticians do argue that these races may not be permanent, because intermarriage and biological mixing will gradually erase their differences. Thus racism will disappear by itself, since there will be no differences left for racists to notice.

In contrast, most human biologists and social scientists find that the everyday-language category of "race" labels a sociopolitical phenomenon, not the dimensions of human biological diversity that are revealed by research in human genetics and related fields. The everyday-language "races," as products of history and culture, are very real, and they can even have biological effects. But categories like "White" and "Black" are not categories of biological evolution.

The second part of the folk theory holds that racism is entirely a matter of individual beliefs, intentions, and actions. In the folk theory, a racist is a person who believes that people of color are biologically inferior to Whites, so that White privilege is deserved and must be defended. Racism is what this kind of White supremacist thinks and does. The folk theory holds that such people are anachronisms, who are ignorant, vicious, and remote from the mainstream. Their ignorance can be cured by education. Their viciousness can be addressed by helping them to enjoy new advantages, so that they can gain self-esteem and will not have to look down on others. Since education and general well-being are increasing, racism should soon disappear entirely, except as a sign of mental derangement or disability.

One of the most difficult exercises that this book recommends is to move away from thinking of racism as entirely a matter of individual beliefs and psychological states. White Americans generally agree that things happen in the world because individuals, with beliefs, emotions, and intentions, cause them to happen. They consider this understanding to be the most obvious kind of common sense. Yet not everyone approaches the world from this perspective, and it is very interesting to try to think about racism from outside the framework that it imposes. Critical theorists do not deny that individual beliefs figure in racism. But we prefer to emphasize its collective, cultural dimensions, and to avoid singling out individuals and trying to decide whether they are racists or not. Furthermore, critical theorists insist that ordinary people who do not share White supremacist beliefs can still talk and behave in ways that advance the projects of White racism. I will try to show, in chapters to come, how racist effects can be produced in interaction, in an intersubjective space of discourse, without any single person in the interaction intending discrimination.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 140518454X
• ISBN 13: 9781405184540
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240