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

12 Communicating Racism

Thus, the first step must be a clarification of the cognitive dimensions of racism. That is, we must make explicit the ways ethnic attitudes in general, and prejudice in particular, are represented and strategically used in memory, and how such representations and strategies affect intergroup perceptions, evaluations, and interactions.

Second, we analyze how ethnic prejudice becomes manifest in discourse. How does what in-group members think and feel about out-group members influence what they say about such "others," and how is such talk organized at various levels of analysis?

Third, talk is notjust an expression of underlying beliefs or opinions but is also interpersonally and socially constrained in the communicative context. Therefore, we also examine how discourse about ethnic minority groups is monitored by interaction strategies (e.g., those of positive self-presentation and persuasion), as well as by social goals, norms, and values. These constraints may well be conflicting and demand that negative opinions about ethnic minority groups be formulated in tercos of ethnic or racial tolerance, or dissimulated in other, strategically effective, ways.

Fourth, we analyze how prejudiced discourse is understood, evaluated, and represented by in-group recipients who particípate in such talk. This step is essential for our understanding of the persuasive dimension of the communication of ethnic attitudes, and for our insight into the processes of their diffusion and sharing throughout the dominant group as a whole. Here, we also examine which beliefs or opínions people attribute to other sources, such as the media or personal conversations.

And finally, we want to know how the communication and diffusion of prejudiced group attitudes transcend the level of single, isolated, interpersonal conversations. Talk is embedded in more complex, higherlevel systems of social information processing within groups, which also involve institutional discourses such as that of the media, politics, or education. Social members routinely invoke such other discourses, or the inferences based on them, to develop and sustain their own attitudes, and to warrant argumentatively such attitudes in talk, for ínstance, as public, if not as shared, social opinions.

The Discourse Analytical Approach

It is through these steps of this inquiry that we hope to establish a crucial, and hitherto missing, link between the cognitive and the social dimensions of racism. Our perspective on this link is the role of discourse and communication. That is, we do not study patterns of discrimination. Neither do we study the ways majority group members talk to ethnic minority group members. The inquiry is límited

Introduction 13

to the analysis of informal discourse about ethnic minorities and the reproduction of racism within the White majority group. Each step of this analysis can be made through a detailed analysis of the ways the communication process is exhibited in the various structures of conversation. Cognitive representation and strategies of ethnic attitudes are analyzed through their formulation in discourse, and the same holds for the role of interpersonal strategies of self-presentation and persuasion. Similarly, the role of the sociocultural context, of institutional discourses, and of general norms and values, is also studied through members' interpretation and expression in talk. Thus, discourse represents both the object as well as the method and data of this analysis.

The Interdisciplinary Perspective

Despite the emphasis on the discourse analytical perspective in this study, it goes without saying that its theoretical foundation must be interdisciplinary. This is not only because discourse analysis itself, as it has developed in the past two decades, emerged from several disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, such as linguistics, rhetoric, literary scholarship, speech and communication studies, psychology, anthropology, and sociology (van Dijk, 1985a); rather, each of the dimensions of this inquiry is traditionally located and studied in related but autonomous fields of academic scholarship, each with its own goals, methods, theories, and terminology. Thus, conversation has been an important subject of research in many disciplines, first in microsociology and ethnography, later in sociolinguistics, philosophy, and speech communication (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984; Schenkein, 1978; van Dijk, 1985a, vol. 3).

The analysis of cognitive representations, understanding and planning discourse, has been the major goal of recent psychology and Artificial Intelligence (Al) (Schank & Abelson, 1977; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). The persuasive communication of attitudes has been a classic object of attention in both social psychology and the study of speech communication (Petty & Cacioppo, 1981; Petty, Ostrom, & Brock, 1981). Because ethnic attitudes and their reproduction are inherently social phenomena, these approaches need be extended toward a study of social cognition (Forgas, 1981; Higgins, Herman, & Zanna, 1981; Wyer & Srull, 1984). In particular, we are interested in the ways social cognitions of in-group members about ethnic out-groups are formed and communicated (Berger & Bradac, 1982; Roloff & Berger, 1982). That is, we are not interested in personal opinions but in social representations of groups and the processes of their reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Farr & Moscovici, 1984).

14 Communicating Racism

More specifically, the study of ethnic intergroup perception and stereotypes has been a prominent topic of inquiry in the new field of social cognition at the boundaries of social and cognitive sociology (Hamilton, 1981; A.G. Miller, 1982; Tajfel, 1981). And, finally, the study ofprejudice, discrimination, and racism has occupied researchers in several of the social sciences, especially in social psychology and sociology (Apostle et al., 1983; Ehrlich, 1973; Essed, 1984; Jones, 1972; Katz, 1976; Pettigrew, 1987; Wellman, 1977). Although I cannot possibly refer to, let alone survey, all of this research, I try to integrate as much as possible from the most relevant advances in these fields into this approach.

Although there are increasing mutual influences and dependencies among these various disciplines, their methods and theorizing are still rather diverse. It will, therefore, not be easy to integrate these various perspectives on social cognition, discourse, and persuasive communication, on one hand, and on prejudice and racism, on the other hand, into one coherent and unified framework. However, from a methodological and theoretical point of view, social cognitions and their expression in socially relevant talk require such an interdisciplinary framework. Indeed, they may be an ideal illustration of the necessity and the possibility of the integration of the cognitive, communicative, and social sciences. A complex problem such as the reproduction of ethnic prejudice in society can be adequately studied only through such an interdisciplinary approach.

Antiracist Goals

This study is not just motivated by its attractive theoretical or interdisciplinary perspectives, as sketched aboye. The fundamental reason and ultimate goal is to contribute to a more profound and effective understanding of a major social problem of our "Northwestern" societies: racism. Hitherto, linguistics, discourse analysis, speech communication, and cognitive psychology have contributed little to the study of racism. Social psychology often limited its focus to individual prejudices or stereotypes, thereby often ignoring the essential group-based and social dimensions of ethnic cognition and interaction. It is striking that the term racism is seldom used, if not implicitly denied, in that research. Similar reductionism characterizes much of the (White) sociological analysis of race relations and racism (for critique of White sociology, see, e.g., Bourne, 1980; Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies [CCCS], 1982; Ladner, 1973; Lawrence, 1982).

At the same time, the ethnic situation in most countries of Western Europe and North America is such that racism should (still or even increasingly) be taken as a serious sociocultural and political problem (Bowser & Hunt, 1981; Castles, 1984; Miles, 1982; Pettigrew, 1987). That is, it is the problem of White, dominant groups, and not the prob-

16 Communicating Racism

between 1980 and 1985. These projects all deal with the problem of prejudice and racism in various types of discourse. Aside from studies of the representation of ethnic minority groups in textbooks (van Dijk, 1986a), and especially in the media (van Dijk, 1983a), the major empirical data have been collected in field studies on the everyday talk of White majority group members in the Netherlands (van Dijk, 1982b, 1983b, 1984). Additional interview data have also been collected in Southern California, especially with the aim of finding out whether the results of the research in Amsterdam not only hold for the Netherlands or Western Europe but are also relevant in the United States. Therefore, results of work by others about prejudice and racism in Western Europe are briefly discussed.

The Interviews

With the assistance of research associates and students, about 180 free interviews were held, recorded, and transcribed in detail, and then analyzed at several leveis of discourse organization (see the Appendix and below for details and some discussion of the method of interviewing and interviewee selection). The interviews in Amsterdam were held in three different groups and in various periods during the years 1980 to 1984. The California interviews were held in the fall of 1985. In the examples, these interviews are identified by code numbers preceded by an "A."

The interviews held in Amsterdam (overtly or covertly) topicalized the respondents' experiences and opinions regarding the ethnic minority groups in the Netherlands. Most salient of these groups are the immigrant citizens from the "East Indies," now Indonesia (250,000), especially the group of Moluccans (35,000), and, further, Turkish (156,000) and Moroccan (107,000) migrant workers, Black expatriates of the former Dutch colony of Surinam (adjacent to Guyana at the Caribbean border of South America; 185,000), as well as immigrants from the Dutch Antilles (42,000) (data according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, 1983/1984). Aside from these relatively large groups, there are smaller groups of immigrant workers from other Mediterranean countries, as well as Chinese political refugees and the group of Jews who survived the holocaust. These various groups are usually referred to as "foreigners" (buitenlanders) in everyday conversation, even when they have Dutch nationality, as do most immigrants coming from Surinam. Together, these minority groups form an estimated 6% minority, that is, more than 800,000 citizens of a total population of 14 million. Immigrant workers and Surinamese are concentrated primarily in the larger cities, such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague, and Utrecht. Thus, 12% of the 800,000 citizens of Amsterdam belong to ethnic minority groups.

Introduction 17

The interviews held in San Diego, California, focus on several minority groups in the United States, especially Blacks, Mexican Americans (or other Latinos), and Asian Americans (most notably Filipinos), who account for 77,700, 130,610, and 57,207, respectively, of a total city population of 875,504 citizens (according to the 1980 census).

Data from other research about prejudice and racism in Western European countries involve mostly immigrant workers from several Mediterranean or (North) African countries in, for example, West Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, and France, or various Black immigrant groups from the West Indies, South Asia, or East Africa in Great Britain. The main focus, however, will be on the interviews collected in the Netherlands, with occasional examples drawn from the California interviews.

In order to trace the mechanisms of prejudice reproduction, special attention was paid in the interviews and their analysis to references to and interpretations of sources of information and opinions about minority groups. People were informally asked about talk with family members, friends, neighbors, or shopkeepers, as well as about the information they attributed to the media. A fourth group of interviews were conducted with the specific aim of asking people about the sources and targets of their talk and opinions about ethnic minority groups, but these interviews are not analyzed in this book.

Other Data

Additional information and results were drawn from both experimental and field studies, including work by others, of ethnic prejudice in the Netherlands, Europe, and the United States, for instance, from content analysis of the media. Attempts to collect personal diaries in which people recorded their daily communications and information about ethnic minority groups were not very successful. Survey data about ethnic prejudice were used only as supplementary (quantitative) background information, because the main aim of the data collection and analysis was qualitative. We want to know how people talk (or write) in texts and contexts that are as little constrained as possible and how they acknowledge talk and text from other sources about the same topic.

Obviously, each of these discourse and communication types needs analysis in its own right because the structures, as well as the relationships with the cognitive and social embeddings, are rather diverse. Yet, at the same time, each discourse type has also been considered as an expression and reproduction of the same underlying attitudinal, ideological, and social reality, namely, that of the ethnic situation and of racism in our Northwestern countries in the 1980s.

18 Communicating Racism

Methodological Issues

From this brief listing of various types of data, it may already be clear that methodologically also, this study is complex and interdisciplinary. Although it is certainly possible to examine some aspects of ethnic prejudice in the laboratory, we have found that experimental approaches impose restrictions that do not allow an adequate study of the problem. To study everyday talk from people (and not just psychology students) in various neighborhoods, with different opinions and experiences, we obviously need methods that yield more naturalistic data. Although these methods hardly allow control of specific variables (of speakers or talk), we have found that informal, in-depth interviews yield rich data for a qualitative analysis of discourse structures and their underlying ethnic opinions and attitudes. This is also one of the reasons that we did not have recourse to questionnaires with highly prestructured or otherwise controlled interview questions and settings (Hyman, 1975).

Recording everyday conversations is one thing (see Chapter 2, section 10), but collecting "real" conversations about ethnic minority members is quite another. Especially in what we called high-contact, that is, mixed, neighborhoods, people talk about "foreigners," a great deal, but it would still be a very inefficient way of collecting data when we would record hundreds of hours of talk in order to get perhaps a few hours of talk about ethnic groups. This is why we had to resort to interviews that were as natural and informal as possible but that allowed us partially to control the "ethnic topics" we wanted to analyze. The discourse properties of such interviews are attended to in the next chapter, but we have reason to assume that they are sufficiently similar to spontaneous conversations to warrant conclusions about the nature of everyday talk about ethnic minority groups. Thus, we shall see that, of course, people sometimes give socially desirable answers to questions even in informal interviews. Yet, they also do so in ordinary talk, especially with strangers, about a "delicate" issue such as "foreigners." Indeed, we are specifically interested in the strategies of such "socially desirable" ways of selfpresentation.

The same holds for other methods that try to assess the personal and public communication of ethnic beliefs. Thus, we have neither direct access to natural media usage situations nor access to other natural communicative events that have ethnic groups or relations as the main topic. Therefore, we had to work with accounts about such communicative events as they were, often spontaneously, given in the interviews. This also allows us to examine how communicative events in general, and sources, information, or beliefs in particular, are interpreted and reproduced by the interviewees.

Introduction 19

The Relevance of Self-Reports as Data

In the social sciences, such data were traditionally considered incomplete, biased, or unreliable. More recently, however, informal interviewing, self-reports, and pmtocols have received renewed interest and positive appraisal (Ericsson & Simon, 1984).

Another reason for the traditional skepticism toward natural data is that most researchers were primarily interested in the phenomena such reports are about, or in the "objective truth" of reported events. Our aim is quite different, however. For our purposes, self-reports in (informal) interviews may provide precisely what we want to know, namely, insight into the contents, strategies, and structures of "foreigner talk," and insight into the ways people subjectively recall, transform, and reproduce information from previous personal experiences or from other sources, even when such transformations are "biased" or "unreliable." We are not merely interested in what people have actually heard or read, but rather in the ways they have interpreted and further processed that information and how they convey it in conversations with others. Reproduction of talk and opinions is necessarily biased by many cognitive and social constraints, which is a well-known factor of social information processing (see the early work by Bartlett, 1932). That is, we are primarily interested in the self-reports for their own sake, but through their systematic analysis we, at the same time, hope to be able to make inferences about cognitive, interactional, and social processes that constrain such talk. Our discourse analytical methods allow rather subtle assessment of such communicative constraints and transformations.

These methodological considerations also have a firm theoretical basis. From a discourse analytical point of view, interviews are a form of discourse that require and allow analysis that is not fundamentally different from that of other forros of talk (Erickson & Shultz, 1982). Despite the systematic skepticism, in modem experimental psychology, about introspection and hence about self-reports (see, e.g., Nisbett & Wilson, 1977), interviews provide perhaps the most interesting and rich data about the subjective processes at work in the representation, retrieval, recall, and reproduction of information, although such methods and data have not yet been used very often. Current cognitive psychology of discourse production and understanding, however, provides insight into the relationships between cognition and talk that may also contribute to enhanced reliability of the inferences involved (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983).

In social psychology, increasing attention is being paid to the relevance of personal "accounts" as the method and data of research (Harré, 1979; Harré & Secord, 1972). And despite its prevailing experimental approach, attribution theory and its interest in "naive" interpretations of

20 Communicating Racism

action may provide a theoretical basis for the examination of natural talk, for example, stories of the "ordinary explanations" people give about their own and other's actions (Antaki, 1981) or about the language used for such explanations (Hewstone, 1983). The possible "biases" (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) in such explanations, as suggested aboye, are precisely the elements in which we are interested.

In qualitative sociology, interviews and other forms of talk have been analyzed for many years as relevant data about social members' shared, commonsense interpretations of social life. Such talk may exhibit the strategies or rules people apply in their reconstruction of social episodes and how these are relevant for ongoing interactions (Cicourel, 1964, 1973; Schwartz & Jacobs, 1979). We may assume that the current developments in the integration of cognitive sociology and cognitive social psychology in the study of social cognition (cf., e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 1984; Forgas, 1981) may lead to further ínterest in the role of discourse and discourse analysis for the study of social interpretations, interactions, and situations.

Discourse Analysis of Interviews

Similar methodological remarks may be made for the methods of data analysis. Although we do report some quantitative results, our descriptions are predominantly qualitative. This means that, in this stage of research, it is more important to know how people talk about ethnic groups and how they reproduce ethnic beliefs than to show how variation in such talk is a quantitatively assessable dependent variable of a number of context characteristics, such as neighborhood, gender, age, or various sources, such as the media, family members, or neighbors. The same holds for the properties of talk itself: We want to know, for instance, how people tell stories or argue rather than how often they do so. This means that we systematically analyze the respective levels of (interview) talk, such as overall thematic (macro) structures, narrative or argumentative schemata, local semantic strategies, lexical style, rhetorical operations, and more specific conversational properties of talk.

This is done against the background of earlier work on the structures and strategies of discourse (van Dijk, 1972, 1977, 1980a, 1981 a) as well as on that of other work in discourse analysis (see van Dijk, 1985a, for introductions, surveys, and methods).

Finally, it should be stressed that our application of discourse analysis in this book is not autonomous. Rather, we try to interpret features of the structures just mentíoned as expressions or signals of cognitive representations and strategies and of interactional processes, such as those of

Introduction 21

persuasion or self-presentation. In the following chapters, we return to the methodological and theoretical problems of such analyses in more detail.

3. The structure of the problem

Before we go into more detail with the various dimensions of the problem of communicating prejudice and racism in everyday talk, we must further analyze the nature and the structure of this problem. In the first section, there was a general characterization of the goals of this study, as well as a brief summary of the disciplines and notions involved. Exactly how these are mutually related, and, therefore, how the chapters of this book cohere, require further explanation. This is accomplished by discussing and relating the key notions used in the analysis of the interpersonal communícation of ethnic attitudes. Details and references about such notions are provided in the respective chapters.

Discourse and Discourse Analysis

The main object, the data and the method of analysis, are forms of discourse. We focus attention on how people talk about ethnic groups in society, and how they express, convey, or forro ethnic beliefs or attitudes in such everyday conversations. Because discourse plays such a central role in this study, the first task must be a systematic analysis of such taik. This alone would represent a respectable goal for a vast research project, so we must confine ourselves here to the general outlines of such an analysis (for detail, see, e. g., van Dijk, 1982b, 1983b, 1983c, 1984, 1986c).

Following earlier work in discourse analysis, we first distinguish between a global, macro level, and a local, micro level of talk. At the global level, there are the various "themes" or topics, that is, the semantic macrostructures of conversation. If people talk about foreigners, what kind of topics are discussed, whether spontaneously or prompted by questions of the interviewer? At this global level, we also distinguish various sorts of "schematic" organization, such as argumentation structures, or the narrative structures of stories. At the local level, we deal with the structures of individual turns, moves, sentences, and speech acts, and their mutual relationships. Thus, we focus on semantic moves that are accomplished within overall strategies of discourse and interaction, as well as the expression of meaning in style, rhetorical operations, and con-