DISCOURSE AND RACISM
RUTH WODAK AND MARTIN REISIGL
Introduction
Before
we discuss more about racism, we have to know what the racism is. Racism is a
stigmatizing headword and political (fighting word). There is talk of a genetic,
biological, cultural, ethnopluralist, institutional, and everyday racism, of a
racism at the top, of an elite racism, of a racism in the midst, of and old and
a new or neo-racism, of a positive racism, and of an inegalitarian and a differentialist
racism.
Racism
adalah dimana orang dari kelompok atau lebih ke individu membagakan apa yang
ada di dalam dirinya atau menjelekken orang lain yang berbeda atau kelompok
lain yang berbeda. Biasanya jika suatu kelompok itu melakukan Racism, kelompok
tersebut lebih banyak populasinya dari pada yang di racism kan.
The
starting point of a discourse analytical approach to the complex phenomenon of
racism is to realize that racism, as both social practice and ideology,
manifests itself discursively. On the one hand, racist opinions and beliefs are
produced and reproduced by means of discourse; discriminatory exclusionary
practices are prepared, promulgated, and legitimated through discourse. On the
other hand, discourse serves to criticize, delegitimate, and argue against
racist opinions and practices, that is, to pursue antiracist strategies.
The
Concept of “Race”: A Historical-Political Etymological Overview
It
is currently an undeniable fact for geneticists and biologists that the concept
of race, in reference to human
beings, has nothing to do with biological reality. From a social functional
point of view, race is a social
construction. On the one hand, it has been used as a legitimating ideological
tool to oppress and exploit specific social groups and to deny them access to
material, cultural, and political resources, to work, welfare services,
housing, and political rights.
On
the other hand, these affected groups have adopted the idea of race. They have turned the concept
around and used it to construct an alternative, positive self-identity; they
have also used it as a basis for political resistance and to fight for more
political autonomy, independence, and participation. From a linguistic point of
view, the term race has a relatively
recent, although not precisely clear, etymological history.
The
Italian razza, the Spanish raza, the Portuguese raça, and the French race (thirteenth century onwards). Beginning
in the sixteenth century: (1) The field of ordinal and classificational notions
that include such words as genus, species, and varietas, (2) The field that includes social and political group
denominations such as nation and Volk (in German), and more rarely, dynasty, ruling house, generation,
class, and family and (3) The field that includes notions referring to language
groups and language families such as “Germanen”
(Teutons) and “Slavs. Up to the
eighteenth century, meaning of race
in regard to human beings was mainly associated with aristocratic descent and
membership, to a specific dynasty or ruling house. The term primarily denoted nobility and quality, and had no reference to somatic criteria yet. However, in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pseudobiological and anthropological
systematizations soon conformed its meaning to overgeneralized, phenotypic
features designated to categorize people from all continents and countries.
How
to Explain Racism
Social
cognitive accounts focus on social categorization and stereotyping, relying on
the cognitive concepts of prototypes,
schemas, stereotypes, and object
classification. Hamilton and Trolier (1986), “Argue that the way our minds
work, the way we process information, may in itself be sufficient to generate a
negative image of a group. They point to several strands of evidence but most
notably to the illusory correlation studies” (Wetherell and Potter 1992: 38). Their
concepts of society and social environment are quite static, and they assume
that prejudicial apperceptions and categorizations (inherent in all persons)
are inevitable and cognitively useful.
Social
identity theory (Hogg and Abrahams 1988; Tajfel 1981; Tajfel and Turner 1985;
Turner 1981, 1985; Turner and Giles 1981; Turner et al. 1987) places the
concept of social identity in the center of its social psychological theory of
intergroup relations. In contrast to the above-mentioned approach, it
recognizes the importance of socialization and group experiences in the
development and acquisition of social categories. From the perspective of
social identity theory, the social structures individual perception, identity,
and action. Categorizations are assumed to be necessary for reducing the
complexity of the social world. Individual perception is formed by patterns
aligned with group memberships and nonmemberships. These learned patterns of
perception tend to favor the in-group and to derogate the out-groups. The image
of the in-group is more differentiated than the images of the out-groups,
which, all in all, are much more characterized by “internal attributions” than
the ingroup.
Racism
and ethnocentrism are, in large part, seen as the interpersonal result of group
membership and as the psychological effects of identifying with a specific group
in economic and social competition with other groups. Some of the causal
assumptions of this theory are rather too simple and reductionist. Apart from
the simplistic frustration–aggression hypothesis, and the hasty analogical
generalization of the results of small-group experiments, the relationship
between experiences, thinking, and practices is simply assumed without any
closer differentiation. Like the social cognition approach, social identity
theory suffers from “a tendency to universalize the conditions for racism and a
lingering perceptualism” (Wetherell and Potter 1992: 47). The implications for
antiracism are therefore very pessimistic ones.
Five
Discourse Analytical Approaches to Racism
1.
Prejudices and Stereotypes
Quasthoff distinguishes
between attitudes, convictions, and prejudices. She defines attitudes
as the affective position taken towards a person one relates to and to whom one
can express dislike or sympathy. Convictions
ascribe qualities to others and often provide rationalizations for negative
attitudes (e.g. that blacks smell bad). Prejudices are mental states defined (normally)
as negative attitudes (the affective element) toward social groups with
matching stereotypic convictions or beliefs.
Quasthoff defines the
term stereotype as the verbal expression of a certain conviction or belief
directed toward a social group or an individual as a member of that social
group. The stereotype is typically an
element of common knowledge, shared to a high degree in a particular culture.
It takes the logical form of a judgment that attributes or denies, in an
oversimplified and generalizing manner and with an emotionally slanted tendency,
particular qualities or behavioral patterns to a certain class of persons.
2. The
Sociocognitive Approach
According to Van Dijk, prejudice is not merely a characteristic
of individual beliefs or emotions about social groups, but a shared form of
social representation in group members, acquired during processes of
socialization and transformed and enacted in social communication and interaction.
Such ethnic attitudes have social functions, (e.g. to protect the interests of
the ingroup). Their cognitive structures and the strategies of their use reflect
these social functions.
Van Dijk focuses on the
rationalization and justification of
discriminatory acts against minority groups. He designates the categories
used to rationalize prejudice against minority groups as “the 7 Ds of
Discrimination”. They are dominance, differentiation, distance, diffusion,
diversion, depersonalization or destruction, and daily discrimination.
3. Discourse
Strands and Collective Symbols
Collective
symbols are designated as cultural stereotypes in the form of metaphorical and synecdochic
symbols that are immediately understood by the members of the same speech
community. Water, natural disasters
like avalanches and flood disasters, military activities like
invasions, all persuasively
representing immigration or migrants as something that has to be dammed, are examples of collective
symbols, just as are the ship
metaphor, symbolizing the effects of immigration as on an overcrowded boat, and the house
and door metaphor that metaphorizes
the in-groups’ (e.g. national) territory as house
or building and the stopping of
immigration as bolting the door.
4. The
Loughborough Group
In the manner of Billig
(1978, 1985, 1988) and Billig et al. (1988), Wetherell and Potter (1992: 59)
posit that racism must be viewed as a series of ideological effects with
flexible, fluid, and varying contents. Racist discourses should therefore be
viewed not as static and homogeneous, but as dynamic and contradictory. Even
the same person can voice contradictory opinions and ideological fragments in
the same discursive event.
The Loughborough group
stresses the context dependence of racist discourse. Mapping the language of racism in New Zealand, and draw up a racist topography by charting themes and
ideologies through exploration of the heterogeneous and layered texture of
racist practices and representations that make up a part of the hegemonic
taken-for-granted in this particular society. Similarities between the
Loughborough and Duisburg approaches go beyond emphasis on context dependence
and poststructuralist alignment. Somewhat similar to the Duisburg concept of interdiscourse is the Loughborough
concept of interpretative repertoire.
However, in its concrete analyses, the Loughborough group mainly focuses on
narratives and argumentation and does not pay as much attention to metaphors or
symbols and their associates.
5. The
Discourse-Historical Approach
Discourse
can be understood as a complex bundle of simultaneous and sequential
interrelated linguistic acts which manifest themselves within and across the
social fields of action as thematically interrelated semiotic (oral or written)
tokens that belong to specific semiotic types (genres).
Discourse
about a specific topic can find its starting point within one field of action and
proceed through another one. Discourses and discourse topics spread to different fields and
discourses. They cross between fields, overlap, refer to each other, or are in
some other way sociofunctionally linked with each other (some of these
relationships are often described under such labels as textual chains, intertextuality,
interdiscursivity, orders of discourse, and hybridity).
Discursive practices
are socially constitutive in a number of ways: first, they play a decisive role
in the genesis and production of certain social conditions. This means that
discourses may serve to construct collective subjects like races, nations, ethnicities, etc. Second, they might perpetuate,
reproduce, or justify a certain social status quo (racialized, nationalized,
and ethnicized identities related to
it). Third, they are instrumental in transforming the status quo (and racializing concepts, nationalities,
ethnicities related to it). Fourth, discursive practices may have an effect on
the dismantling or even destruction of the status quo (and of racist,
nationalist, ethnicist concepts related to it).
References:
Discourse And Racism - Ruth Wodak And
Martin Reisigl
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