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

232 Communicating Racism

explain the similarity of description and self-presentation strategies. Vink (1984), in an article intended to counter current prejudices

against foreigners in Germany, lists a number of myths people often believe: they take our jobs, they are lazy or do not want to work, they abuse our social welfare system, and, in general, use too much of the national resources, their children lower the level of education in the schools, they cause the high crime rate, do not want to integrate, and, in general, there are "too many of them." This last opinion especially, which also has dominated ethnic prejudice in Switzerland (Ebel & Fiala, 1983), is usually conceptualized as Überfremdung (which may be loosely translated as overalienization). Again, this list is practically identical to the one we found for the Dutch situation, and this similarity suggests that people in Western Europe react more or less in the same way against the immigration of people from other countries, especially those who are ethnically different. The similarity between prejudices against (White) immigrant workers from other cultures and against Black immigrants from former colonies also suggests that racism, ethnicism, and ethnocentrism are progressively combined into a homogeneous form of negative attitudes against all those who come from elsewhere and who are "different."

A more theoretical approach to Ausliinderfeindlichkeit has been formulated by Hoffmann and Even (1984). They analyze ethnic attitudes and expressions against the background of phenomenological conceptions of society, for example, in terms of Schutz (1971) and Garfinkel (1967). They reject the assumption that such negative attitudes can be accounted for in terms of ideologies, prejudices, or perceived competition. Rather, they try to identify them in terms of taken-for-granted notions that are reproduced in everyday language. The immigration of foreign workers especially has challenged this commonsense conception of German society as culturally and ethnically homogenous. The negative attitude, thus, results in the refusal to grant foreigners equal rights and equal status as long as they have not adopted German identity. Through examples taken from letters to the editors of several newspapers and magazines, Hoffmann and Even (1984) illustrate how Germans express these commonsense "theories" about their own identity, and how they deny or doubt the necessary passage of status and identity into German society.

As a whole, these letters express opinions that seem more extremist than the English and especially the Dutch data we have examined. Many of them have a blatantly racist slant that we did not even find in the "worst" of our interviews. Part of this may, of course, be explained in terms of the interactional moderation typical for face-to-face interviewing, but even in Dutch letters to the editor, we rarely find passages like:

They multiply like rats and they eat everything bare like grasshoppers. (p. 46)

When such a Turk stupidly looks at me, my hand tends to hit him. They show archaic behavior, they are illiterates, from a completely alien "cultural" context, and have Islam as their religion. Did Europe in 1683 conquer the Turks so that they now get children's allowance, rent allowance, social welfare, and return premiums ...? The best policy for these Turks is: kick in the ass and out.

In everyday language as well as in the more formal statements of politicians or other elites, both reported in the press, we find expressions of attitudes such as: There are too many of them, we are losing our German identity, they are Gastarbeiterand, therefore, should behave like guests, they do not want to integrate, they have too many children, they will soon take over here, they take our jobs, houses, and space, and the government doesn't do anything about this. We see that these attitude contents organize around the same basic categories and concepts we found earlier.

As in many studies by White sociologists, the analysis Hoffmann and Even provide seems to imply a tendency to minimize the racist dimension of these attitudes. The confrontation with people from a different culture, and the refusal to change one's commonsense conception of society, is more thanjust cultural conflict and conservatism. Other foreigners, also those with different norms and culture, such as those from other Western European countries, are not conceptualized in this way. The reluctance to draw historical parallels with Nazi fascism, and the justified hesitation to compare actual discrimination against Turks with the holocaust, obscure the fact that similar attitude contents and structures are being formed and enacted against ethnic out-groups. Characteristic of many passages that can be drawn from the current documents of Ausl¿tnderfeindlichkeit (e.g., Meinhardt, 1982, 1984) is not (only) cultural conflict, perceived competition, or a challenged social identity; rather, "foreigners" (Turks) are perceived and treated as inferior in ahl domains of society. Yet, despite the more extremist attitudes shared by parts of the German population, it should be emphasized again that, generally, the prejudices are similar to those in, for example, the Netherlands, Great Britain, or Scandinavian countries such as Sweden (Lange & Westin, 1981; Oberg, Bergman, & Swedin, 1981; Westin, 1984). And, these attitudes are largely independent of the specific target groups: If they are of color, come from abroad, are poor, are many, and/or have a different culture, practically each out-group will be attributed similar characteristics, be evaluated similarly, and be treated similarly. Further comparative research will be necessary to study in detall what variations under what conditions exist between the ethnic attitudes and their racist

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contexts in the respective countries of Western Europe (Castles, 1984). Finally, it should be stressed that our brief review of some tendencies in ethnic attitude formation in severa! Western countries does not pertain to specific opinions of the extreme political right or of explicitly racist parties, such as the National Front in Britain and in France, the NPD in

Germany, or the Centrum Party in the Netherlands. On the contrary, we analyze the common, everyday opinions of the population at large—of people who belong to all political parties, come from all neighborhoods and from al! occupations. In other words, we do not identify racism with individual persons nor with small extremist groups. The prejudices we analyze, whether more blatant or those expressed in more subtle and indirect terms, are part and parcel of (dominant, White groups in) societies of which the underlying structures as well as many of the individual and institutional practices are racist. The fundamental similarities between the ethnic attitudes shared among the dominant peoples of most Northwestern countries against those who are categorized as racially or ethnically different suggest that such attitudes are not just isolated incidents, bigoted opinions of small groups, or frustrations of those who feel socially and economícally threatened. It would be interesting to investigate how such attitudes are reproduced also across national boundaries.

5.Strategies of prejudiced information processing

Ethnic prejudice should not be accounted for only in terms of negative opinions organized in group attitudes. Perhaps more important still are the strategies people use when processing information about ethnic minority groups and their members. Of course, these strategies are themselves fed by information from ethnic attitudes, but it is interesting to analyze exactly how this information is used in different contexts of action and communication. In section 3, for instance, we assumed that operations such as differentiation, exaggeration, or polarization take place. That is, when ethnic groups are attributed certain properties, in-group members tend to stress differences rather than similarities with respect to their own group, while at the same time minimizing the differences between ethnic groups, and between ethnic group members. Let us examine, in somewhat more detail, the strategies that characterize prejudiced opinion formation and use in social information processing.

5.1. THE STRATEGIC INTERPRETATION OF (TALK ABOUT) ETHNIC ENCOUNTERS

In our brief account of information processing outlined in section 2, we characterized strategies as flexible, hypothetical, goal-directed operations that apply to variable information from different sources (see van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983, for detail). Thus, people make use of strategies to interpret sentences without having to go through the complex and cumbersome task of applying, one by one, rules and categories at variable levels of analysis. Rather, they make fast guesses about the most plausible meaning of words, phrases, and clauses and, thereby, rely on some strategically relevant signals from various levels such as lexical units, word order, plausible meaning, overall topic, context, and various sorts of presupposed knowledge.

The same holds for the interpretation of actions and episodes. Within the last decade, many studies analyzed such strategies of (social) information processing, mostly under the label of heuristics (see Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; for reviews). Many of these studies have a normative, rather than a descriptive focus. They show how "bad" observers, judges, or statisticians people are. People judge simply on the basis of availability, representativeness, and vividness of single examples, and ignore base rates, and other criteria for making justified inferences. From a sornewhat different point of view, we also paid attentíon to such normative "deviations" of the social information processor. This deviance is not so much defined, however, in terms of what social members should do as naive scientists, but rather what they do (not do) when interpreting out-groups in contrast to the (also imperfect) interpretation of their own group members and in contradiction to their own norms of adequate social judgment. The deviation, thus, is not from academic norms, but from social norms. And it is not merely a set of expedient cognitive heuristics, but a coherent and cooperating system of socially functional strategies geared toward the maintenance of dominance.

When in-group members interpret "ethnic encounters," their goal in doing so is not primarily to establish a truthful and reliable representation of "what is really going on." Rather, just as in the interpretation of other encounters, people construct a model that is subjectively plausible, which is coherent with previous models of ethnic encounters, and is a partial instantiation of general knowledge and attitude schemata. The overall strategic goal, then, is not so much to test such presupposed models and schemata for disconfirming evidence, but to establish mod-

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els that contain self-confirming information (Gurwitz & Dodge, 1977; Lord, Ross & Lepper, 1979; Rothbart, Evans & Fulero, 1979; Snyder, 1981a, 1981b). Both cognitively and socially, this overall strategy is more effective than having to change general opinions and attitude schemata. The question we must try to answer, then, is what more specific strategies contribute to this overall goal of "biased" information acquisition. Within our framework, we focus here on the biased interpretation of discourse, which is the core of the reproduction of racism, but the strategies are similar for the interpretation of interaction and episodes in general.

Structural and Strategic Constraints of

Modeis

The interpretation, that is, the understanding and evaluation, of (talk about) ethnic events is controlled by a number of structural and strategic constraints. As for interpretation in general, both externa! (observational) and internal (memory) data are strategically combined as input for processes of understanding and evaluation. Episodic models provide the structures and contents of previous personal experiences, real or communicated, with ethnic events. Scripts and attitude schemata supply the general, socially shared, knowledge and opinions that are necessary for the interpretation of observed events. Let us first examine how such models and schemata exercise specific control over ethnic information processing.

Modeis embody our past personal experiences, both particularly and generally. They represent subjectively interpreted situations, that is, both our understanding and our personal evaluation of such situations. Model structures are organized by schematic situation categories, such as Setting, Circumstances, Participants, and Actions/Events, each with their Modifiers, which may contain evaluative propositions (opinions) (van Dijk, 1985d, 1987c). As soon as observers (communicators) are confronted with an event, they search episodic memory for "similar" events. The search cues for this activation and (partial) retrieval of such models of previous experiences with similar events may be variable, depending on the special context, goals, or personal relevancies of the observer. When I go to work, I activate and apply the routine and, therefore, generalized, model(s) of my previous "go to work" experiences. When I visit Athens, Greece, 1 may be "reminded" (Schank, 1982) of my last visit to that city. Apart from the participation of myself, such models may be retrieved through identical Setting, Circumstance, or (other) Participant concepts, and especially by similar Action or Event concepts. Thus, meeting the same people in different situations will usu-

ally lead to the activation of different situation models, even if such models may be "cross-referencing" to each other.

For ethnic encounters, these processes may take particular forms. When observing a Black woman in a supermarket, as is the case in the "bread exchange" story we analyzed in Chapter 3, a White observer may not primarily bring to mind (any) other supermarket situation he or she has experienced, but especially supermarket situations with Black women, or, even more generally, any previous encounter with Black women or Black people. That is, the specific, salient presence of a Black woman in a given situation may actívate "similar" situation models in which similarity is not primarily defined by Setting and Event, but rather by a specific participant category. This implies that irrelevant experiences and evaluations associated with other situation models may transfer to the present model under construction, for example, models of crimes committed by Blacks (even Black males) as reported in the press or communicated through everyday talk. The result is at least threefold:

(a) specific attention is focused on one particular participant category, namely, a minority member, (b) other (irrelevant) ethnic events may be retrieved, and (c) possibly negative evaluations associated with such previous models may transfer to the actual model. The Black woman, indeed, will be seen as "deviant" if not as "criminal" in a situation that otherwise, that is, for a White participant, might have been interpreted as a routine supermarket event. Or, from the perspective of a female shopper, as a specific event in which a woman was forced to take revenge against the arbitrary decision of a (male) supermarket manager.

We see that fragmentary information from a current event, such as the ethnic category membership of one of the observed participants, may lead to specific ("biased") forms of model search, retrieval, and application. This means that the current situation is interpreted on the basis of other possibly irrelevant models featuring ethnic participants, and if such models are globally or locally negative, then this evaluation may be transferred to the actual model. This is probably one of the theoretical explanations for the concept of illusory correlation (Chapman, 1967) as it has been applied to biased ethnic information processing (Hamilton, 1981; Hamilton & Gifford, 1976; Hamilton & Rose, 1980). Also, the very negative evaluation and possibly negative emotions associated with the perception of ethnic group members, or with previous models, may by itself act as a powerful cue for similarly coded previous models (Bower, 1980).

Similarly, the salience of the ethnic group member in both the actual and the previous models will also lead to higher-level representation of that participant as well as of his or her (negative) evaluations by the observer, even when such a participant only plays a subordinate role in

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the situation, such as a passenger on the bus. This higher-level representation will again facilitate later retrieval, which is one of the reasons why memory for ethnic encounters is better than for comparable other encounters (Howard & Rothbart, 1980). It is approximately in this way that we theoretically rer')nstruct the well-known concept of availability (Taylor, 1982; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) that has been used to explain differential memory status and access of ethnic inf nation and evaluation (Duncan, 1976; Hamilton & Rose, 1980; Rotnbart, 1981; Rothbart et al., 1979).

The Role of Ethnic Attitude Schemata

Unlike most other researchers on social cognition (see Fiske & Taylor, 1984), we do not attribute all processing monitoring to (often ill-defined) schemata, ►-, it clearly distinguish between the role of episodic models, on the one hand, and the role of schematic belief and opinion schemata in social memory (see, however, a brief passage in Rothbart, Dawes, & Park, 1984, p. 130).

Search, access, activation, and application of models and schemata, similarly, are also different, and the same holds for processing "ethnic" information. Whereas models have structures that are abstract representations of situations, knowledge schemata, and especially attitude schemata, may have quite different forms of organization. Thus, for prejudiced attitudes, we have assumed a categorial structure that renders the relevant dimensions of intergroup perception and interaction. Especially for well-developed and frequently used schemata (scripts or attitudes), it may be assumed that they are easier to access than episodic models: They are more general, fit the current data better (due to their default values), are better organized, have more general concepts and propositions, and are systematically related to other knowledge and attitudes (e.g., within ideologies). Only recent or salient models that satisfy specific criteria may be retrieved nearly as fast in ongoing situation analysis. On the whole, however, "reminding" is a more difficult process. Therefore, we assume that ethnic attitudes are accessed first, and help search and retrieve actual models. Indeed, to understand and categorize a minority group member in the first place, general belief and opinions about appearance and group category must be retrieved first, that is, from social memory schemata, which may be prejudiced. Possibly negative "associations" in such schemata, therefore, become directly available (because they dominate the attitude schema at the macro level), and may be used again for the retrieval of other "negative" instances, that is, of other models of ethnic encounters. Here we find another strategic move that contributes to dominantly negative interpretation.

Next, the respective categories of the ethnic attitude schema may become operative as interpretation and retrieval information. Thus, in order to understand a supermarket scene, not only the supermarket script has been activated, but also the relevant attitude catégory related to sociocultural behavior of ethnic groups. If such a category features high-level propositions that summarize out-group actions as "strange" or "deviant," routine supermarket events, such as exchanging purchased items, may also tend to be interpreted in that way. And if an action can be seen as an instantiation of a general stereotype, such as "they steal," this will be the preferred interpretation of possibly ambiguous actions (Duncan, 1976; Sagar & Schofield, 1980). In fact, people do report events that are only instantiations of such ethnic opinions, and that have not actually been represented in models. In other words, schema activation, such as in storytelling, may lead to "fake" models. People tell about these "as if' they were real, and in many respects they are cognitively real, even when they are not derived from real experiences. The consequences for further comprehension, talk, and communication, are even more real (Thomas, 1928/1966).

Not only the prejudiced contents but also the structure of prejudice schemata may play a role in ethnic information processing. We have already seen that highest-level negative opinions associated with prejudiced attitudes may be the first that are accessed, retrieved, and applied. The same holds for constituent schema categories, such as about appearance, origin, socioeconomic position, sociocultural and personal properties. Depending on context and on the specific dominant subgroups, any of these categories may be assigned special relevance. After their identification as "Third World" and "Black," the primary focus of attention, both for the authorities and for newspaper readers, in the "understanding" of the Tamil immigration to the Netherlands was on their socioeconomic position: Do they perhaps come and profit from our social system? This is one of the dominant opinions of this category. In this initial phase of processing, at least, the opinion that "it is difficult to find good housing for them" is probably much less relevant. We may even assume that high-level attitude contents may be used also as special search and activation cues for (nonevaluative) schemata, such as scripts. The refugee script in this case, for instance, may be less accessible than the "living on welfare" script.

We have found that prejudiced models and schemata closely collaborate in the ongoing interpretation of ethnic encounters, and the way the structures and strategies of their representation and application lead to specific focus on ethnic minority participants and on the construction of negative evaluations. Several concomitant processes have been postulated that each contribute to the negative "biases" in prejudiced interpretation, such as irrelevant model retrieval (illusory correlation) and

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differential availability, search, recall, and application of models and schemata. Against the background of this overall framework of ethnic information processing by prejudiced group members, we briefly discuss sorne strategies that characterize such interpretations, and then turn to the cognitive consequences of this kind of "biased" processing.

Selection and Focus

One of the most effective strategies of biased information processing is selective focusing and attention allocation. Incoming information is generally monitored by personal or contextual relevance criteria. Information that is recognized as being socially or affectively relevant may be assigned special cognitive treatment. The mere use of words such asforeigners, Surinamese, or Turks may be sufficient signals to trigger the selection strategy: This message (or fragment of the message) needs more attention. These processes of attention distribution and selection are not much different from those of social information processing in general (McArthur, 1981; Taylor & Fiske, 1978; Taylor et al., 1978). People or groups that are novel, do unusual things, or that are relevant to one's goals are assigned higher salience. Selection procedures can be applied if the relevance criteria they are based on are defined in tercos of cognitively prominent ethnic attitudes or models. For attitudes that are highly developed and salient, such relevance in principie may hold in any situation, whereas salient models may be more context-dependent and define specific relevance criteria. In the latter case, an unexpected agent or action, unusual properties of an unknown situation-actor relationship, defined relative to previous models (experiences) may require special attention.

In the interpretation of ethnic encounters, similarly, there may be selective attention for minority actors, such as by the very difference of their appearance or because there are "fewer" of them than majority participants. This special attention may also involve more focused processing of their verbal and nonverbal actions, which may enhance identification of actors and better recall of who did/said what (Taylor, 1981; Taylor et al., 1978). According to our processing model, this differential encoding of minority groups, group members, and their actions, both activates and results in different models of the situation. Minority actors in such models are accorded special properties, such as "different" characteristics, a more active role in action (from victim they may be promoted to agent role), and occurrence in higher-level (macro)propositions: What they do is thus assigned more importance. We have seen that negative evaluations in that case become more promi-

nent and (therefore) more memorable. Such models may in turn confirm and be confirmed by stereotypical attitude schemata that focus on differences and negative properties.

These processes at the same time imply that less attention is paid to in-group members and their properties or actions, so that negative actions of less salient in-group members tend to be represented in a less prominent way in the model and, therefore, tend to be less retrievable. We assume that this also happens in the understanding and representation of stories about foreigners. We have seen in the previous chapter that whatever their attitude, dominant group members recall and reproduce especially negative facts and opinions about foreigners from other sources.

Negativization

We see that negativization may be a (general) processing result of the special attention accorded to minorities. However, salience and attention as such only lead to better organization and enhancement of evaluations. That is, negativization requires previously stored negative models and attitudes. It follows that these processes are more pronounced for those observers or recipients who already have negative models and schemata, which contributes to the self-confirmation of negativization in social encounters and communication. This assumption is confirmed by our analysis of the data in Chapter 3.

In the discourse strategies of interpersonal communication, this special processing may also involve meaning (Eiser & Stroebe, 1972; Eiser & van der Pligt, 1984; van der Pligt & Eiser, 1984). Meanings may associate with negative implications, in accordance with the overall negative "bias" in models and attitudes about ethnic groups. Thus, if an in-group member sees or hears that a Black Surinamese drives a big car, the negative association may be made that the car was stolen, according to the general prejudices about the criminal nature of Blacks. The stereotype of poor Black people (typically on welfare) is inconsistent with an expensive car. Hence the inference that the car was probably stolen, or the inference that (unexpectedly much) money must have been made in illegal ways (typically in drugs or prostitution). And, when information is obtained that a Turkish family has moved into a large apartment down the street, the inference may be drawn that they have probably been favored by the housing authority.

In this way, nearly any neutral attribute or action may be associated with negative conditions, consequences, or other implications that are derived from the general attitude. "Neutral" or "normal," let alone