The Discourse of Perceived Discrimination

Perspectives from Contemporary Australian Society

Sol Rojas-Lizana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138367388
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429771064
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers a way forward toward a better understanding of perceived discrimination from a critical discourse studies perspective. The volume begins with a discussion of quantitative studies on perceived discrimination across a range of disciplines and moves toward outlining the ways in which a discourse-based framework, drawing on tools from cognitive linguistics and discursive psychology, offers valuable tools with which to document and analyze perceived discrimination through myriad lenses. Rojas-Lizana provides a systematic account, grounded in a critical approach, of perceived discrimination drawing on data from discourse from two minority groups, self-identified members of an LGBTIQ community and Spanish-speaking immigrants in Australia, and explores such topics as the relationship between language and discrimination, the conditions for determining what constitutes discriminatory acts, and both the copying and resistance strategies victims employ in their experiences. A concluding chapter offers a broader comparison of the conclusions drawn from both communities and discusses their implications for further research on perceived discrimination. This volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in critical discourse studies, social policy, gender and sexuality studies, and migration studies.

1 Introduction

‘…To Make Me Feel Like the Outsider’

I think discrimination can be really, really obvious and really aggressive and I think it can be part and parcel of really clever policy and really clever laws. I think it can be really subtle and really so engrained in the fabric of jokes or the fabric of our society that it’s just really almost unnoticeable, but it’s definitely there.

(Jordan)

In our vastly interconnected and changing world, assessing the weight, meaning, and consequences of discrimination remains a major societal challenge, considering that it has increased its visibility because of globalisation, the virtual world, and ultra-neo-liberalism. This book aims to contribute a more comprehensive and situated understanding of discrimination, its participants, and its everyday impact, by studying it through a lens and from a perspective that has scarcely been systematised together before: the lens of Discourse Studies applied to the accounts of people who have experienced discrimination at a personal, everyday level. Discrimination as a social practice, and as part of an ideology, manifests itself discursively; since discourse is the place where ideas are contested, promoted, and perpetuated, its analysis opens novel ways to explore this phenomenon.

Discrimination is also a cognitive phenomenon we all practice in order to make sense of our context and ourselves; as such, it can be associated with the less charged term categorisation. The first definitions of discrimination found in the Oxford English Dictionary point to its cognitive nature and therefore do not foreground moral judgement. This book is concerned with the sixth definition, which relates to inequality, exclusion, and stigma: “unjust or prejudicial treatment of a person or group.” In the social sciences, discrimination is classically defined as a phenomenon that involves “deny[ing] to individuals or groups of people equality of treatment which they may wish” (Allport 1979, 51). Similarly, Üçok et al. define it as “the behavioural consequences of stigma which act to the disadvantage and social exclusion of the people affected” (2012, 77). Discrimination has related to the concept of prejudice and stereotyping, for they are all part of common cultural processes resulting from the beliefs that sustain the system. It can be said that, at the interpersonal level, discrimination is the result of prejudice and stereotyping. This is because discrimination is an act (behavioural), whereas the mental state of prejudice is preconceived (negative) opinions about the other based on stereotyping, that is, a general view of the out-group. More specifically, stereotyping is about forming images and judgements of social groups that are generally not our own and applying them to individuals (Plous 2003).

Discrimination can be assessed in different ways: quantitatively, by evaluating trends in the economy, for instance; through experimental observation of behaviour towards stigmatised people; measuring its connection with health, or, qualitatively, as in this study, working from the victims’ perspective. This book uses as its corpus co-constructed interviews, facilitated by in-group members, with two minority groups who have reported experiences of discrimination: people self-identifying as LGBTIQ members of the community in Australia, discriminated against because of their sexuality and gender performance; and Spanish-speaking immigrants in Australia, discriminated against because of their status as immigrant/ethnic minorities. As a Western society with a colonial history, Australia provides an interesting example of the type of social relations that coexist in its urban spaces and the covert forms of discrimination that emerge from these interactions.

Now one caveat: although I understand discrimination as connected to a system of domination (racist, patriarchal, heteronormative, neo-colonial), well explained in the proposals of Decolonial Thought and Border Thinking (e.g. Mignolo 2012; Grosfoguel 2016), this book is not about explaining the causes of discrimination. Discrimination is manifested at several levels, the institutional, the structural, and the interpersonal. This book examines the latter: that is, discrimination as manifested in the everyday discourse of the victims who experienced it in their (commonplace) interactions, to show how their view of the phenomenon and the ways in which they deal with it are expressed in their discourse. To do this, I use discursive tools from Discursive Psychology and Cognitive Linguistics as they account for psychological phenomena in discourse and in everyday situations.

What Is Perceived Discrimination?

Until recently, most studies on discrimination and prejudice have centred on the attitudes and behaviours of the perpetrators; however, to understand discrimination towards minorities better, we also need to examine the perspective of their victims (e.g. Essed 1991, 1992; Lalonde and Cameron 1993; Swim and Stangor 1998; Mellor 2003, 2004; Merino et al. 2009; Rojas-Lizana 2014; Salgado et al. 2014; Dobai 2018). Perceived Discrimination (PD) is the study of discrimination that centres on the victim’s experience through the analysis of their accounts. The first studies of PD were of a quantitative nature in the field of clinical and social psychology. Qualitative studies increased this century, offering another view of the phenomenon of discrimination and its effect on the experiencers.

The online search engine Google Ngram Viewer charts the presence of words/concepts when they start appearing in the literature. Google uses a database that contains over five million books published up to 2008. The n-gram in Figure 1.1 indicates that the concept of PD only started to appear in the literature (in English) after the 1970s at the time when the change of paradigm (called the linguistic turn, post rationalism, or social constructionism depending on the field) was manifesting in most areas of study. This change marks the questioning of ‘reality’ and of the objective observer. More and more, it became accepted that reality is constructed, situated, fluid, and built in discourse, giving space to the view that the reality of all groups was worth studying. This also helped to reduce a scholar bias against the ‘ordinary’ and the study of everyday life experiences (Essed 1991).

The term ‘perceived’ is employed here to highlight the situated nature of the experiences under investigation, which is ultimately the only way to talk about reality (Maturana 1997). Its usage may be problematic if the reader holds a modernist view that assumes that Truth is something independent of the actors. In that sense, ‘perceived’ seems to be associated with an imagined experience, in opposition to a ‘real’ one. Some authors, for instance, distinguish between ‘perceived’ and ‘actual’ cases of tolerance, or claim that PD should not be considered an accurate indicator in ‘actual’ experiences of discrimination because it is a subjective evaluation of ambiguous situations (Driscoll, Kelley and Fassinger 1996; Diehl and Liebau 2017).

Figure 1.1 Google n-gram viewer for ‘perceived discrimination’.

That discussion about the reality of discrimination is, in this case, irrelevant for two reasons. First, I aim to characterise the discourse of PD itself, not to assess it as an indicator of a trend or evaluate it as being an informed judgement. Second, this book holds a social constructionist view regarding reality as constructed in language. That is, one cannot say that an experience is more or less real or true than others in an interactional domain in which experience is everything (Maturana and Dávila 2015). If the experiencer believes that unacceptable behaviour was directed towards them, this occurrence influences relevant outcomes in a cognitive, emotional, and behavioural form (Stangor et al. 2003). Moreover, studies have proved that discrimination in its many forms and degrees can seriously affect the mental and physical well-being of people who perceive it. Finally, I agree with Dussel’s ethics of liberation (2013), in which he proposes that knowledge and knowledges need the epistemic resources found in the lives of victims’ everyday experiences to assess, understand, and modify reality.

Perceived Discrimination and Discourse Analysis

Discourse Analysis (DA) is a method of carrying out linguistic and social research that has its basis in the ancient study of rhetoric (van Dijk 1996). Generally speaking, DA studies language in use in the form of text, written or spoken, and within a context, to help understand human systems. DA assumes two elementary assertions: first, that language is ‘constitutive,’ meaning that language is not considered static and referential only, but as “the site where meanings are created and changed” (Taylor 2001, 6). Second, discourse needs to be understood in its situated context as linguistic activity brings forth cognitive and cultural resources (Fauconnier 2004).

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has traditionally studied elite discourse in order to expose unequal power relations and manipulation (Fairclough 1995, 2002; van Dijk 1997; Wodak and Meyer 2009). It centres on those who have the power to impose their views, and how their discourse is used to perpetuate and ‘normalize’ dominant ideologies. This book belongs to a small number of studies that have focused on the perspectives of the victims of discrimination to develop a greater understanding of the phenomenon and their discourses by classifying their accounts and examining how people who have experienced discrimination convey these stories (Mellor 2003, 2004; Merino 2006; Merino et al. 2009; Rojas-Lizana 2014, 2017).

Since PD is a psychological occurrence, this study adopts an integrationist approach to DA that combines the principles of CDA with analytic tools from the fields of Cognitive Linguistics and Discursive Psychology (see Chapter 3). By adopting such an approach, many of the complex aspects that participate in the emergence of texts as social processes become evident. For example, examining PD from a discourse analytical perspective

• Reveals the connection between language and reality construction.
• Evidences the transformative power of words.
• Evidences the important role of language in the reproduction of, and resistance to, social inequality.
• Reveals the concealed, subtle, symbolic instances of contemporary discrimination.

The articulation of an experience involves ‘re-membering’; that is, to bring again or call something to mind (or to the ‘heart,’ depending on the language). Analysing the way people recall their experiences reveals not just that words are loaded and that they may have a performative effect related to hurting or shocking, but also that words can be used to protect the self, to resist, to explain, and to learn from that very experience. This analysis will show that most of the experiences reported involved verbal forms of discrimination. Some of these were overt, such as name-calling and insults, while others, such as microaggressions, were subtler and covert. In some cases, perpetrators did not know they were committing an act of discrimination. These are just some of the details that DA can bring forth and that may help our understanding of discrimination, while creating awareness of its extent and complexity.

Focusing on Sexuality and Migrants in the Australian Context

The data for this book comes from Australia, a settler-colonial country where the dominant group is ‘white’ Anglo, much like New Zealand/Aotearoa, the United States, and Canada. More specifically the data comes from the conservative state of Queensland, where I am based. These accounts of PD provide great insight into the experiences of discrimination as faced in a country which has a (British) colonial past and that is considered part of the ‘conservative’ first world. They can serve as a comparative example for the study of PD in other parts of the world with similar and different historical experiences. The case of LGTBIQ discrimination is interesting at a time when marriage equality was passed in 2017, only after resorting to a referendum, which reveals a mentality that considered it legally valid (and normal) to deny this basic human right to people who are not heterosexual. On the other hand, in 2018 discussions at Commonwealth level started about the right of religious schools to “turn away gay students” (Moulds 2019, 12). According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, LGBTIQ people are three times more likely to experience depression and are a common target of discrimination in many aspects of everyday life. This is aggravated in some cases from having experienced it from their own family and from early years. On the other hand, this group features a tradition of political activism, which is not found in other discriminated groups in Australia, except for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.

The case of the Spanish-speaking migrants is framed within a national context of cultural discrimination; first against Aboriginal people, later reflected in their racist colonial policies, such as the ‘White Australia’ policy, which was valid until the 1970s an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• 1 Introduction: ‘…To Make Me Feel Like the Outsider’
• 2 Situating Perceived Discrimination studies
• 3 Analysing Perceived Discrimination in the Area of Discourse Studies
• 4 ‘He Called Me It.’ Perceived Discrimination in the Discourse of People Identifying as LGBTIQ in Australia
• 5 ‘She Said No Because I Talk Funny.’ Perceived Discrimination in the Discourse of Spanish-Speaking Immigrants in Australia
• 6 Coping with Discrimination: From Resistance to Avoidance
• 7 Discussion and Conclusion: ‘…They Have No Idea What this Is Like’
• Index