прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - Communicating Racism

Communicating

Racism

Copyright o 1987 by Sage Publications, Inc.

AH rights reserved. No part ofthis book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any mearas, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information address:

SAGE Publications, Inc.

2111 West Hillcrest Drive

Newbury Park, California 91320

SAGE PUBLICATIONS India Pvt. Ltd.

M-32 Market

Greater Kailash I

New Delhi 110048 India

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dijk, Teun A. van (Teun Adrianus), 1943-

Communicating racismo

Bibliography: p.

Includes indexo

I.Racism. 2. Communication. 3. Prejudices.

4.Ethnic attitudes. 5. Race discrimination

ISBN 0-8039-3627-3

Contents

Preface

Racism and ethnocentrism are major problems in our society, requiring permanent and persistent critical inquiry. This book reports on a study of a crucial, and hitherto neglected, dimension of these problems: How are ethnic prejudices expressed, communicated, and shared within the dominant, White ingroup? The answer to such a question should tell us something about the everyday reproduction of racism in society. Whereas most other work on racism has a more abstract, macro-level nature and focuses on historical or socioeconomic aspects, this study examines some of the micro phenomena of racism or "ethnicism." And whereas earlier work on prejudice is often limited to individual social psychology, we extend its analysis to a more explicit study of social cognition and communication. We analyze how White people think and talk about ethnic minority groups, and how they persuasively communicate their ethnic attitudes to other members of their own group. Such an analysis requires a multidisciplinary framework. Therefore, I try to integrate and apply new theoretical developments from such disciplines as discourse analysis, cognitive and social psychology, microsociology, and communication.

The research reported here is part of an ongoing project being carried out at the University of Amsterdam about the expression of ethnic prejudice and racism in various types of discourse. This book focuses on everyday conversations and interpersonal communication. Interview data for this study were collected in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and in San Diego, California. Whereas some of our earlier studies of these interviews focus on their discourse properties and on the cognitive structures and strategies of prejudice, this book integrates and further expands these results in a more social-psychological and communicative direction. Thus, we are specifically interested in the cognitive, discursive, and communicative strategies White people use during the positive selfpresentation and negative "other-presentation" that characterize talk about "foreigners." Also, the sources, such as the media or personal contacts and experiences that people mention in their discursive reproduction of prejudiced beliefs are examined.

Although the interviews have been held mainly in the Netherlands, as well as in California, there is reason to assume that the results have a more general nature, and also hold for other countries in Northwestern Europe and Northern America where racial or ethnic minorities always

8 Communicating Racism

have been or recently have become prominent. For Europe, the rise of racism in the last decade has been spectacular, and overtly racist parties are obtaining increasing support among a White population that feels both superior to, as well as culturally or economically "threatened" by, the new citizens. Yet, racism should not be identified only with such relatively small extremist groups. On the contrary, more widespread and subtle forms of prejudice, discrimination, and ethnicism occur among all groups and all institutions of our societies. The interviews that were conducted and analyzed bear witness to the content and forms of this more general and structural type of everyday racism and its reproduction in thought and talk.

The serious and widespread social problems of prejudice, discrimination, and racism, as well as the multidisciplinary approach of this study, should make this book relevant for students and scholars in most of the humanities and social sciences. To make it more accessible to all those interested, each theoretical analysis has been prefaced by a brief introduction for nonspecialists. At the same time, this study also provides many new theoretical and methodological proposals for the study of discourse, cognition, persuasion, and communication, aside from its results for the study of prejudice and racism in society. It may, therefore, be useful as an advanced text in upper-division and graduate courses in, for example, linguistics (discourse analysis), cognitive and social psychology, microsociology, anthropology, speech and communication, as well as in ethnic studies.

This research has been accomplished in collaboration with, and with the assistance of, many people of whom only a few can be mentioned here. First, I would like to thank my students, both at the University of Amsterdam and at the University of California, San Diego. They are the ones who helped me collect and transcribe more than 150 interviews during the past five years, and also contríbuted to the interviews' analysis. The narres of these students are mentioned separately in a list of acknowledgments. Next, I am indebted to the earlier members of the Amsterdam project, funded by the Netherlands Organization of Pure Research (ZWO), on the expression of ethnic prejudice in conversation:

Eva Abraham-van der Mark, Rob Rombouts, Martijn den Uy1, and Adri van der Wurff. As always, Piet de Geus, my assistant, has provided invaluable help with administrative and computer chores. To Mark Knapp, I am grateful for considering the manuscript for publication in his series on interpersonal communication, and for his magnanimous acceptance to have the book published by Sage outside of his series, so that the book could reach a wider public in other disciplines as well.

For extensive discussions on the nature of racism, on its theoretical analysis as well as on the sociopolitical fight against it, I am particularly

Preface 9

indebted to Chris Mullard, one of the first and few Black professors appointed at the University of Amsterdam, and director of its new Center for Race and Ethnic Studies.

I am grateful for the help Luis Moll gave in stimulating students from his classes at UCSD to participate in this research. The Center for Human Information Processing at UCSD, its director, George Mandler, and especially its secretary, Arlene Jacobs, provided me with the necessary home-base and assistance for my research in San Diego, for which Aaron Cicourel also provided important help.

Finally, more than gratitude and indebtedness are due to Philomena Essed, my wife, whose pioneering work on everyday racism and the experiences of Black women, has been a stimulating, instructive, and revealing background to this study. Without her advice, her comments upon the first version of this book, our innumerable discussions about racism, and without her permanent support for my work, this book would undoubtedly have had less value, if it could have been written at all.

—Teun A. van Dijk La Jolla, California

Acknowledgments

1 am indebted to the following students who helped me collect, transcribe, and analyze the interviews on which this study is based:

Group I (Amsterdam):

Nico Hergaarden, Marianne Pruis,

Jan Krol, Marion Oskamp, Henk Verhagen, Giovanni Massaro, Leny

Schuitemaker.

Group II (Amsterdam):

Marion Algra, Wilmy Cleyne, Hans Deckers, Trudi Konst, Lyanne Lamar, Myra Kleindendorst, Arghje de Sitter, Evelien van der Wiel.

Group III (Amsterdam):

Cees Braas, Annette Berntsen, Gerrie Eickhof, Rob Hermes, Martin van Iersel, Robertine Luikinga, Ton Maas, Monica Robijns, Margriet Schut, Eva Stegemann, Evelien Tonkens, Saskia Ven, Bep van der Werf.

Group A (San Diego):

Laurie Ambler, Linda De Leon, John Gjerset, Larry Green, Chiaki Ishimura, Jennifer Keystone, Teenie Matlock, Molly Schwartz, Susan Wallace.

In general, interviews or interview fragments recorded and transcribed by these students are identified in this book by the group number (I, II, III, or A) followed by the initials of the student (except in Group II, where a combination of last name initial and street name initial was used), followed by the interview number of each student, followed by "a," "b," or "c," in case more people were interviewed, and (for group III) sometimes followed by an "x" when the "ethnic topic" was eXplicitly mentioned during presentation.

lo

1

Introduction

1. Background and goals of this study

In this book, the way racism is reproduced through everyday talk is analyzed. Dominant group members regularly engage in conversations about ethnic minority groups in society, and thus express and persuasively communicate their attitudes to other in-group members. In this way, ethnic prejudices become shared and may form the cognitive basis of ethnic or racial discrimination in intergroup interaction.

Whereas racism is usually studied as a structural, macro-level phenomenon of society, we are interested in its micro-level, interpersonal enactment in everyday communicative situations. This does not mean that we conceive of prejudice and discrimination as individual properties of people. On the contrary, ethnic attitudes, their formulation in discourse, their persuasive diffusion, as well as their uses as the cognitive basis for actíon, are all essentially social. They characterize groups and intergroup relations and exhibit sociocultural, historical, political, and economic dependencies. They embody and signal dominance and power. It is the task of this study to show how these group-based properties of racism are cognitively represented in and reproduced among dominant group members. An analysis of these links between macro and micro levels of racism is crucial for our understanding of ethnic prejudice and discrimination in the daily interethnic encounters of multiethnic societies.

Obviously, the task just sketched is exceedingly complex. It would require a whole series of books, not just a single book, to unravel the many details of such an intricate problem. Therefore, the focus is on a few main lines of inquiry, sketching its theoretical outlines, and reporting results from empirical (field) studies carried out in the Netherlands and the United States.