The Everyday Language of White Racism
Jane H. Hill
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 1405184531
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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
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with the referentialist ideology of words and the conduit metaphor, obscures the way that racism is perpetuated through indexicality, in the intersubjective spaces where meaning is negotiated and inferences are made without ever being made explicit. This intersubjective space, the site where culture is made public and exchanged at every level of interaction, including the most quotidian, is neglected by scholarship on institutional racism with its focus on policy. Thus referentialist and
“races” in everyday interactions and in the workings of national institutions during the twentieth century. However, Jacobson points out that while European immigrants, such as the Irish and people from eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, often faced discrimination (and, in the case of Jewish immigrants, anti-Semitism), they were always recognized as White in legal terms under the Naturalization Act of 1790, which admitted “free white persons” to American citizenship. The Naturalization Act of
Negro! 2006). ¡El Gato Negro! is probably from a Spanish-speaking community (although not necessarily a fluent speaker of the language). I suspect this because of the bilingual pun “Republiculo,” combining “Republican” with culo “ass,” which is much more sophisticated than most Mock Spanish coinages. So this case may exemplify what Chun (2004) called “legitimate mockery,” mockery by speakers licensed as insiders. Another case of this type is the controversial nationally syndicated column “Ask a
Racism Jane H. Hill © 2008 Jane H. Hill. ISBN: 978-1-405-18453-3 Linguistic Appropriation 159 language. The dominant group must control the institutions through which linguistic resources circulate, such as markets, media, schools, and the legal system. It must also control both formal and informal mechanisms through which the linguistic behavior of the donor population can be regulated. White racism in the United States exhibits this kind of dominance. One of the implications of this model
attributed]; Williams 1977) have emphasized that it is never complete. Contradictions, lapses, and interstices in which counter-hegemonic projects can develop are always present, and both residues of older systems and emerging alternative hegemonies may exist alongside dominant cultural formations. The processes of linguistic appropriation are no different, so the shift of linguistic resources may never be absolute. Furthermore, while linguistic appropriation is like theft, it is not exactly like
