Language Racism

J. Weber

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137531063
• eBook ISBN: 9781137531070
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book discusses a new breed of racism, namely language racism, which is spreading both in the USA and in Europe, as well as other parts of the world. The book is a manifesto promoting a more positive view of linguistic and cultural diversity.

1

Introduction

Abstract: The Introduction explains the nature of this book as a kind of manifesto advocating a progressive approach to issues of language and society. It briefly describes how the book is based on Wilhelm Reich’s Listen, Little Man! and how it is related to previous academic research in this area. Furthermore, Weber discusses how race and racism are frequently erased in contemporary discourses (with as an example the August 2014 events in Ferguson, Missouri) and how racist elements can underlie seemingly commonsensical views.

Keywords: common sense; language; race; racism; Wilhelm Reich

Weber, Jean-Jacques. Language Racism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137531070.0002.

Since the 2008 election of President Obama in the United States of America, we are increasingly told that we are witnessing the end of racism. I would argue, on the contrary, that racism is still all-pervasive but that it has been normalized, it has become part of everyday common sense, so that often we do not even notice it any longer. We do notice it at certain times, as when in Europe and elsewhere, Far Right parties score electoral victories, with increasing numbers of people voting for them, and their elected representatives sitting in the European Parliament, or in national parliaments and local communes, whether in Austria, France, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Finland or many other countries.

It is easy, at times like this, to construct those who vote for such parties as the racists and us, by implication, as non-racist. In fact, however, it shows how these seemingly opposed views actually exist on a continuum, on which it is easy to slide from softer to harder forms of racism. None of us is immune from racist views and in particular the language racist views that our Western societies are steeped in and that are the primary focus of this book. Language racism refers to the manifold ways in which language is increasingly used nowadays as a proxy for race in order to exclude people. The aim of the book is to deconstruct the language racist views by first raising them to the level of awareness and then showing to what extent they are based on erroneous assumptions about the nature of social and linguistic reality.

I need to point out right at the beginning of the book that I follow sociologists such as Balibar and Bonilla-Silva (and many others) in that I see racism as not only cognitive but also structural and institutional. Racism is not just a matter of individual beliefs, which can be abolished by changing these beliefs. There are also structures and institutions that are bolstered by the racial ideology and that help to maintain and reproduce racial privilege and inequality. Therefore, it is important for this book to examine not only the language racist beliefs and ideologies, but also the institutional structures that have been spawned by them. There is no attempt to cover the whole domain of racism, as the focus of the book is on language racist beliefs and ideologies, and on the related practices and institutions, primarily in the areas of integration and education.

One of my favourite books as an adolescent was the famous psychologist Wilhelm Reich’s Listen, Little Man! In it, he explores how we forge our own chains through our uncritical submission to repressive social norms. This is what the Romantic poet William Blake, in his poem ‘London’, calls the ‘mind-forged manacles’ that limit our lives. Or, if you prefer reggae music to Romantic poetry, you might be reminded of Bob Marley’s ‘Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery’. As a way of showing my admiration for Reich, I take over his Little Man and use him in Part I of this book in order to present the language racist mindset that also limits our lives and causes a lot of social harm in our contemporary world. Then in Part II, I discuss the erroneous nature of the Little Man’s assumptions and critique the related practices and institutions. Finally, Part III builds on Reich’s characterization of the Great Man (here transformed into the Great Woman, who is not a language racist) to advocate an alternative mindset that is informed by a different set of assumptions based on social justice. But first of all, in the remainder of this Introduction, I deal with four questions in an endeavour to better explain what this book is about.

Who was Wilhelm Reich?

For readers not familiar with Wilhelm Reich, let me briefly introduce him and his work. Reich (1897–1957) was a leading contributor to modern psychology, but at the same time a highly controversial thinker who attempted to bring together psychoanalysis and Marxism. He not only influenced numerous writers such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and William Burroughs, but posthumously he also became an iconic figure during the student protest movement of the 1960s, mostly because of his advocacy of a new society founded (among others) on the principle of love, or ‘orgastic potency’ as he called it. While his promotion of a form of sexual permissiveness ensured his posthumous popularity, it was highly controversial – and much criticized and even suppressed – in the conservative Vienna of the 1920s, where he worked with Sigmund Freud, and also in the 1950s when he lived in the United States at the time of the Cold War and McCarthyism. While he managed to escape from the Nazis just in time when they came to power, he became a victim of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunt in the United States, with his books being burnt and he himself being incarcerated.

Apart from his Listen, Little Man!, which was written in 1945–1946, Reich is probably best remembered for his earlier book The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), published just after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. In it, he explores how and why the fascists came to power, and he interprets the rise of fascism as a symptom of sexual repression. Many people – those he refers to as Little Men in Listen, Little Man! – are afraid of freedom and in need of authority structures, such as the authoritarian family and the authoritarian state, and it is to these fears that Far Right politicians, then and now, often appeal quite successfully.

Is the analysis of language racism in this book substantiated by academic research?

This book does not exist on its own; on the contrary, it is based on extensive research in the area of language racism. The major studies will be referred to in later chapters and, since they cannot be discussed in the necessary depth in this book, it is hoped that the reader will be sufficiently interested to continue reading in this area. Here in the Introduction, I would already like to mention a few key readings. Thus, for readers mostly interested in the United States, I would recommend the following excellent books: Hill’s The Everyday Language of White Racism, which looks at racist stereotypes circulating in American culture; Lippi-Green’s English with an Accent, which explores language ideologies and accent discrimination; Alim and Smitherman’s Articulate While Black, which is an insightful account of the politics of language and race in the era of President Obama. For Europe, a widely influential book is Blommaert and Verschueren’s Debating Diversity, which studies newspaper data in Flanders and shows how individual multilingualism is encouraged and promoted while, almost paradoxically, societal multilingualism is viewed with suspicion and discursively constructed as a threat to social cohesion. Readers will be able to judge for themselves whether Blommaert and Verschueren’s results apply not only to Flanders but also to many other parts of Europe and of the world. More specifically for the United Kingdom, there is Blackledge’s Discourse and Power in a Multilingual World, a fascinating study of the complex ways in which language beliefs and ideologies can function as symbolic means of discrimination against particular minority languages and their speakers. Finally, for readers with worldwide interests, a good book to look at is Skutnabb-Kangas’ Linguistic Genocide in Education – or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights, which focuses on education and human rights. However, it almost single-mindedly promotes mother tongue education, whereas I will argue in Chapter 7 that flexible multilingual education is a more promising alternative in today’s world of globalization, migration and superdiversity.

Do the beliefs and ideologies about language discussed in this book discriminate in racial terms, rather than in terms of social class or gender?

The answer to this question is an emphatic yes: these discriminations are racial ones, as well as often being about social class or gender. The point is precisely that different types of discrimination overlap, and that race, class, gender and language issues intersect in all sorts of ways. Critical race theorists have coined the word ‘intersectionality’ for this (see e.g., Crenshaw 1991), and one of their key aims is to explore the extent to which these factors are enmeshed in each other.

However, mainstream contemporary discourses are marked by what is usually referred to as ‘colour-blind racism’ (Bonilla-Silva 2010), which consists in the denial (or erasure) of race and racism. A recent example would be the events in Ferguson, Missouri, a small town located within the metropolitan area of St Louis. Long-standing spatial, economic and cultural segregation in Ferguson has involved a high level of distrust between the largely black community and the mostly white police force, which culminated in the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on 9 August 2014, which in turn sparked off massive protests on the streets of Ferguson and all over the United States.

One widely reported comment after this tragic event was that of the white Republican mayor of Ferguson, who insisted that we need to ‘blame poverty, not race’ (Guardian, 23 August 2014). In this way, he attempted to shift the blame away from white supremacy and the structural racism of the social system and upon poor people, who could then be looked upon as responsible for their own poverty. This is the common neoliberal strategy of blaming the victim. Goldberg (2014: 179) calls it ‘racial reversibility’, such that ‘victims become victimizers and victimizers victims’, though in relation not to the Michael Brown shooting but the killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin by neighbourhood vigilante George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, in 2012. In this case, too, the racial element was denied by prominent commentators (see Goldberg 2014: 182); moreover, another thing these two cases have in common is that Zimmerman as well as Wilson were acquitted of both murder and manslaughter charges.

Thus we can see that the erasure of race and racism involves a number of factors:

an emphatic assertion that we, or a particular individual (George Zimmerman, Darren Wilson), are not racist

an inability – or unwillingness – to see the wider picture of structural racism in the social system

a mistaken belief in the one factor that explains it all: it is not about race, but only about social class, or gender, or language

These are the attitudes of colour-blind racism that Chapters 3–7 set out to deconstruct; as for the academic understanding of race and racism, readers are referred to Chapter 8.

How can racist beliefs become part of common sense?

Every day we are confronted with a wide range of discourses, both spoken and written, verbal and visual. Among others, they include discourses of the traditional and digital media, as well as interactions with friends, colleagues, relatives, strangers and others. Note that these people have in turn also been influenced by media and other discourses circulating in the society. In this way, the more widely discourses circulate in the society, the more they are ‘naturalized’, that is, they seem natural to us; and, inversely, the more they become part of the common sense, the more they will be circulated among people.

However, in these processes, certain beliefs are more likely to become part of the culture’s common sense than others. Chomsky and Herman (1988) have developed a well-known ‘propaganda model’ to explain how and why the mainstream media tend to push a certain line, refracting (in the sense of both constructing and reflecting) the dominant world-view and marginalizing dissenting voices. This is because most of the mass media are ideological institutions owned by large corporations, run for profit and dependent on revenue from advertising (among other factors). In the words of Chomsky and Herman, they therefore tend to ‘manufacture consent’ on controversial issues such as globalization, migration, linguistic and cultural diversity and the like. At the same time, it may be worth noting here that there is a greater opening with the Internet nowadays, which provides a wider access to different kinds of news reporting than ever before.

Even the smallest linguistic details can help with the continual (re)production of a sense of normality as well as a sense of otherness. Thus the boundary between the two is (re)constructed every day in such seemingly ‘banal’ words as ‘we’ and ‘they’ (see e.g., Billig 1995). According to Link (2013), the media focuses in particular on moments of loss of normality. He explains how this loss of normality is frequently experienced as a cause for concern or even fear, so that it can lead to the construction of more fixed boundaries and the stigmatization of the ‘abnormals’, who are seen as constituting a danger for the ‘normal’ society. As a result, people will also be readier to accept the need for special measures to re-establish normality, such as the War on Terror (2013: 103).

As an integral part of these processes, particular cultural representations of specific groups of people are naturalized and conventionalized, and are fully integrated into the culture’s common sense. In fact, these representations are not natural, not necessary in any way; on the contrary, they are historically constructed and highly ideological. There is therefore an urgent need to become aware of the ideological nature of these representations and, if they have pernicious effects, of the possibility of constructing alternative – perhaps less pernicious – representations.

In this way, our commonsensical representations can easily include racist elements. At the same time, it is important to add that such representations are never fully hegemonic. Typically, incompatible or contradictory representations co-exist within a particular culture, since they are produced by a society which is itself full of internal conflicts and contradictions. Hence it should not surprise us that cultural representations are being fought over, contested or su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• Part  I
• Part  II Separating Fact from Fiction
• Part  III
• References
• Index