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

22 Communicating Racism

versational formulation. Chapter 2 is devoted to the systematic analyses of these various discourse structures of prejudiced talk.

Initially, this systematic discourse analysis has a "structural" bias. That is, we take talk about ethnic groups simply in its own right and survey its major properties as we would do for other discourse forms. Especially within a social science perspective, however, such an approach is incomplete. Discourse is notjust a form of language use but is also a cognitive and social accomplishment within a communicative context. Talk is itself a form of interaction, and many of its properties can be understood and analyzed only when their interactional relevance is taken into account. It will become clear, for example, that at several levels of analysis, talk about ethnic groups involves complex strategies and moves aiming at positive self-presentation within the overall goal of negative other-description. Especially when delicate topics are discussed, and when social norms are rather strict, face-saving is essential: The expression of even the most racist opinions tends to be embedded in moves that are intended to prevent the inference that the speaker is a racist. In our discourse analysis, then, we already pay attention to this interactional dimension of everyday talk about foreigners.

The same holds for the further social dimensions of discourse. Although we focus on interpersonal communication, talk about other ethnic groups is not merely an "individual expression of individual emotions," as the Romanticists claimed about literature. Rather, people are talking as members of a White, dominant group about other people as specific outgroup members. In this way, they enact, at the same time, various forms of intergroup conflict, dominance and power, and other macro social dimensions of racism. The topics of talk, for instance, reflect the social position of the speaker as a group member and, conversely, the social dimension enables us to understand why people discuss certain topics, such as competition, and not others.

Discourse structures as well as their interpersonal and social functions are cognitively interpreted, programmed, planned, monitored, and executed. From its overall topics, narrative or argumentative organization, to its local moves and lexical style, talk expresses cognitive representations of knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes, as well as the mental operations or strategies that are applied in their retrieval, storage, and usage in discourse production. In other words, we also pay attention to the cognitive relevance of such discourse characteristics. Because we have no direct access to mental structures and strategies, discourse structures are the only empirical data that may reveal what people think about ethnic groups. In other words, discourse analysis also allows us to account for the structures of ethnic prejudice and, conversely, shows us how ethnic attitudes are expressed and formulated in talk and interaction. It now

Introduction 23

becomes clear why, in our view, discourse plays such a central role in this study: It not only represents an important social phenomenon by itself, but it also enables us to link the cognitive dimensions of ethnic prejudice with its interactional and societal functions.

Reproduction

When White majority group members talk about ethnic out-groups, they do not merely express their personal beliefs and attitudes. In different senses of the term, they reproduce ethnic opinions of their in-group as a whole, such as shared stereotypes or prejudices and information they have heard or read from other sources. These processes of communicative reproduction are very complex and involve an interaction of personal experiences and beliefs, representations of information from a variety of discourse types (both public and interpersonal), and more general, socially shared, belief and opinion structures about ethnic minority groups. This means that people seldom act as passive reproducers of personal or social information derived from previous communicative events. As we indicate, below, for the analysis of cognitive processes, recipients apply a number of discourse comprehension strategies resulting in mental representations that may be rather distant transformations of the original source messages. Similarly, people may also have biased memory for the very communicative events themselves and, for example, attribute beliefs or opinions to plausible rather than to the true sources of their information. In fact, after longer delays, recipients often no longer remember concrete communicative events and their messages but tend to abstract and generalize and thus form decontextualized meanings, beliefs, or opinions.

An empirically adequate analysis of such reproduction processes, however, is rather difficult. We seldom have access to the original discourses, so that it is not always possible to study the various transformations involved in reproduction. But again, discourse analysis does enable us to describe what people say and to infer from even vague references to other sources how people subjectively construct their own version of events or input opinions. In Chapter 3, we analyze how people refer to and interpret such communicative events and source messages about ethnic groups.

Reproduction is not just the active transformation and expression of concrete input messages and their meanings. As social members of the dominant group, people also reproduce the dominant ideologies of this group. Analysis and comparison of a large number of interviews allow us to assess not only the obviously shared beliefs and attitudes about ethnic groups but also how each individual social member—or various

24 Communicating Racism

subgroups—use such social cognitions in their own personal context and in the actual communicative situation. In this sense, reproduction is also an instance of the sociocultural reproduction of the in-group as a group.

Aside from shared beliefs and opinions about other ethnic groups, reproduction also involves the cognitive basis for consensual social action and interaction. Discursive reproduction in that case is both a contribution to the diffusion and confirmation of ethnic prejudice and a form of communicative preparation for discriminatory acts. People formulate "acceptable" shared norms and goals for in-group members in their dealings with out-group members. It is in this complex sense that we take prejudiced talk about ethnic minority groups both as an instance and as a form of reproduction of racism. Here, the structural, macro notion of racism meets with its individual and interpersonal enactment by dominant group members at the micro level of social organization. Chapter 6 focuses in particular on these various social functions of ethnic prejudice and examines, for instance, the special role of elite groups and the media in the (re)production processes of ethnic prejudice.

Interpersonal Communication and

Persuasion

Whereas the notion of reproduction, so to speak, conceptualizes how people discursively and cognitively face "backward" toward their personal or public information sources, the interpersonal communication of ethnic prejudice, of course, also has a "forward" dimension. People are not just passive recipients, but actively and persuasively convey their interpretations and representations to others in new communicative events. They not only express previously acquired and transformed ethnic beliefs and opinions, but also interactively engage in communications that are intended to "influence" other members of their own group. They have recourse to persuasive discourse strategies, such as those of positive self-presentation and of social group competence and affiliation display, and thus tell stories or formulate arguments that are moves in an effective realization of communication goals.

The interviews yield interesting data that illustrate such strategies. Also, in informal interview talk, interviewers are unknown others who are perceived as in-group members who need to be persuaded of the relevance and the truth of personal experiences, as well as of the defensibility of both personal and shared social opinions about ethnic minority groups. Discourse analysis and comparisons of interviews thus allow us to assess such persuasive strategies and, at the same time, may suggest at which point these are not just individual tactics but rather socially shared—or even stereotypical—maneuvers of the communicative repro-

Introduction 25

duction of ethnic prejudice. Indeed, people may not only tell very similar stories or use the same arguments and thus convey stereotypical prejudices, but also may do this in very similar, persuasive ways. Besides prejudiced in-group attitudes, there may be a shared rhetoric of racism. In Chapter 5, we deal with the various topics of the communicative and persuasive dimension of ethnic attitude reproduction.

Cognitive Structures and Strategies of

Prejudice

Discursive expression and persuasive communication of ethnic prejudice are programmed and controlled at the cognitive level. Few discourse characteristics or interpersonal communication properties can be fully understood without an explanation of their cognitive dimension. Therefore, in Chapters 4 and 5, extensive attention is paid to the mental nature of ethnic prejudice and to the processes that guide its expression in talk and communicative interaction.

This means, first, that cognitive contents and structures, that is, the representation of ethnic beliefs and opinions in memory, must be made explicit. Against the background of earlier work in psychology and AI on the cognitive representation of knowledge and beliefs, we analyze prejudice as a complex interaction of (a) negative (ethnic) group attitudes organized by schematic categories, (b) negative (biased) models of personal experiences, also involving previous communicative events, and (c) a set of cognitive strategies that connect these attitudes and models and also determine how ethnic encounters or talk about them are attended to, interpreted, represented, retrieved, and expressed. It is argued that such structures and strategies are not simply cognitive in the individual or personal sense but are rather forms of social cognition. This sociocognitive perspective also allows us to connect explicitly ethnic prejudice with social interaction (and hence with conversation) and with social structures of discrimination and racism.

Second, cognitive analysis allows us to show how people use ethnic beliefs and opinions in concrete discourse production. Speakers try to control what they say, and what they prefer to be silent about, especially when a delicate topic such as foreigners is concerned. We want to know which strategies are involved in these controlled processes of "expression" and "production" in conversational interaction. We also want to know exactly how people cognitively manage ongoing conversational interaction, how self-presentation is monitored, and how persuasive tactics are programmed and executed. In other words, the strategies of talk and persuasion must correspond to cognitive strategies for the manipulation of ethnic information in memory.

26 Communicating Racism

Third, for both the actual recipient of ongoing talk, as well as the actual speaker participating as a recipient in previous communications, we must know exactly how media or personal communications are being interpreted and represented in memory. That is, the process of persuasion cannot be fully understood if we ignore its detailed cognitive nature. Because transformations of social beliefs and attitudes are involved, we should know exactly how discourse information is processed, stored, and used in the formation or change of such ethnic beliefs.

Social Context and Social Structure

Because we focus attention on the micro-level reproduction of racism, notions such as discourse, interpersonal communication and persuasion, and (social) cognition play an important role in our theory and analysis. We also stress, however, that prejudice and racism are not characteristics of individual persons but involve people as group members. Discourse and communication about ethnic minority groups can be understood only in this double social perspective: They are social events at the interpersonal (micro) level but, at the same time, they are instances of a particular form of intragroup and intergroup relationships, that is, of higher-level social, cultural, and historical processes. This means that prejudiced talk is multiply integrated into and indicative of both its immediate social context and its embedding within broader societal structures.

Against this background, Chapter 6 shows which other social goals and functions may be distinguished for such prejudiced talk. Speakers actively reproduce, and thus diffuse, group-based cognitions. They express, confirm, and show allegiance to group goals, values, and norms, and may thus evaluate group actions toward ethnic out-groups. They express group attitudes that are assumed to be held by other group members and thus may or may not display conformity with their own group. At the same time, they may show acceptance of group-based beliefs about the perceived competition from or threats posed by ethnic out-groups. In other words, we also must analyze the proper social embedding of the social cognitions analyzed in mental frameworks.

Aside from this account of talk about ethnic minorities as an instance of intergroup relationships, social analysis also involves the more "structural" dimensions of reproducing racism. It was suggested earlier, for instance, that institutions, such as the media, education, the government, and other authorities, play a decisive role in the control of racist discourse. People show how the media are used as a permanent source of information and opinions about minorities and may point to the role of authorities when valídating their own opinions. Although it is not a

Introduction 27

major aim of this book, there is a brief analysis of the way interpersonal talk and communication about minorities mesh with these various components of the immediate and global social contexts.

Further Clarifcation of Key Notions:

Prejudice and Racism

We now have briefly defined the key notions to be dealt with in the following chapters. However, a few further terminological remarks are in order, especially as we use some tercos with a different meaning than in other work. First, the notion of ethnic prejudice itself. It was suggested aboye that ethnic prejudice will be theoretically analyzed as a specific type of negative ethnic attitude shared by the members of a (dominant) in-group. This fragment of a definition, which, of course, is to be fully spelled out in a theory, already suggests (a) that the analysis of prejudice is framed primarily in cognitive tercos, but also (b) that it is a social concept in the sense that it is a forro of social cognition about other groups and is shared by in-group members. In other words, for us there is no inherent distinction between the cognitive and the social, as the very notion of social cognition suggests. Of course, this does not mean that groups have minds or mental structures of their own (as is suggested by traditional notions such as "group consciousness"), but that the members of such groups share cognitions they acquire, use, convey, and change as group members in group-based interactions and communicative events.

To allow for some stylistic variation and simplicity, we usually abbreviate ethnic prejudice to prejudice. Because this book does not deal with prejudices about other social groups, this will not lead to confusion. Sometimes we also use the more general term ethnic attitude, which, of course, need not imply a negative orientation but, from the context, it will be clear when this generic term denotes ethnic prejudice. In Chapter 4, we show why a distinction should be made between (ethnic or other) opinions on the one hand and actitudes on the other. We do not use these terms as synonyms. The term attitude always denotes a complex, schematic structure of general opinions stored in long-terco memory, whereas opinions are single evaluative beliefs, whether particular (context bound) or general.

We generally use the general term ethnic relative to social groups that are identified in ethnic or racial terms. This means that their members are perceived to be different in physical appearance and/or sociocultural properties (origin, language, norms, and so on) with respect to dominant majority groups. Although we follow everyday usage here, there is also a theoretical reason. Prejudice and racism, both in Western

28 Communicating Racism

Europe and in the United States, are not limited to what are traditionally called different racialgroups. Especially in Western Europe, in particular in the countries that have immigrant workers from several Mediterranean countries, the discourse of race and racism has gradually taken a more sophisticated form by focusing primarily on "ethnic" properties of minority groups, and by emphasizing "cultural" differences. Hence, racism needs a more general, sociocultural correlate, namely, ethnicism (Mullard, 1985), to account for prejudice and discrimination against ethnic minority groups in general. Our usage of the term racism follows the traditional terminology, but it is intended to cover also the notion of ethnicism. In this perspective, we sometimes use the term as an adjective, for instance, in combinations such as racist attitude, which in that case is synonymous with ethnic prejudice (because of the negative implications of the term racist). The term minority is used here only as an abbreviation for ethnic minority group and implies that such a group is economically, socially, and culturally dominated by a majority group, in our case White "Northwestern" caucasians (such as Dutch and Anglos) .

Finally, racism or ethnicism are taken as notions that denote complex social phenomena both at the abstract, macro levels of societal structures, and at the micro levels of social cognition, discourse, communication, and interaction. In fact, the distinction between macro and micro analysis becomes blurred as soon as we talk about group ideologies (which we describe as social cognitions, but that are traditionally studied as typical macro phenomena), or when we study institutional actions (see Knorr-Cetina & Cícourel, 1981, for a more general and detailed study of the relations between macro and micro analysis). Hence, we do not simply take ethnic prejudice as a micro notion, and racism as a macro notion. Racism is an abstract property of social structures at all levels of society that manifests itself in ethnic prejudices as shared group cognitions, in discriminatory actions of persons as dominant group members, as well as in the actions, discourses, organization, or relationships within and among groups, institutions, classes, or other social formations.

Schema for This Book

We have briefly discussed some major notions and analytical frameworks that need to be worked out in a sound theory of the interpersonal reproduction of racism through everyday discourse. Each of them is, of course, associated with many other notions, as well as with much theoretical and empirical work, to be detailed and discussed in the succeeding chapters of this book. It has become obvious

Introduction 29

that our problem is as complex as it is fascinating, both academically and sociopolitically. Its vast interdisciplinary ramifications cannot be explored in one book and by one author. I can only provide a first sketch, work out some partial problems, and suggest the interdisciplinary framework for a study of the discourse dimension of racism.

The beginning is an analysis of the discourse structures of prejudiced talk. Theoretically, this is, of course, arbitrary because the beginning could just as well have been an analysis of the cognitive structures of prejudice or the social functions and contexts of such talk. However, for practical reasons, attention is paid to prejudiced talk first because it will provide the crucial empirical data on which further theorizing about prejudiced cognitive, interpersonal, and social structures and processes will be based. Prejudiced discourse is not only the central phenomenon in the communication of ethnic prejudices and the reproduction of racism; it also provides a rich data base that shows or signals the cognitive and interactive work of speakers and hearers, as well as the relevant properties of the social context. Once we have assessed the contents and organization of such discourse, we can move to their underlying cognitive representations and strategies, both as origins in the production of discourse, and as targets in persuasive communication. Similarly, we need this cognitive analysis first in order to be able to account for the processes of interpersonal communication.

Again, this ordering of the chapters is inspired mainly by practical reason of presentation. In reality, the processes of discursive reproduction of social cognitions are, of course, integrated and none of its major elements have either priority or a fully autonomous status. Indeed, social members strategically do it all at the same time: They think, speak, and (inter)act. Therefore, the following chapters will contain multiple crossreferences to other chapters. We may need to refer to cognitive structures or interactional strategies in order to analyze and explain certain discourse structures. And, conversely, we need discourse structures both as empirical evidence for and as concrete manifestation or enactment of these other processes.