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

342 Communicating Racism

among your acquaintances, for instance, or are these things you read in the paper as you just said.

M:Well, you know that those things happen, and those people are being interviewed on television ... You have both let's say

"impon Dutch," an unelejant word, but I don't mean anything ugly with "impon Dutch' as well as let's say autochthonous Dutch who tell their stories uh on television or in the bar, here or, for instance, in the streetcar, when you get an eloquent person sitting in front of you, and uhh that is how I get to know those stories, and then I think yes, God, then I can understand all that, but we can't we shouldn't reason like that, because that is of, course not, the way to do it.

The other interviewees, both university people, do not tell about concrete communicative experiences, but give general impressions and analyses of these situations. Although neither of them is specialized in the field of prejudice and racism, they show that the kind of prejudiced talk we analyze is fairly well known, as well as the principies of how people get to know ethnic prejudices. The sociologist in example 34 sug- gests that in the high-contact neighborhood where he lived, talk about foreigners also had the function of "testing" other people, thus, to obtain information about their "ethnic stance" as a member of the community. As with political beliefs, the topic may be delicate, and speakers must know with whom they can talk "openly" (i.e., negatively) about ethnic groups in the community.

(34) III-CB-lx (Man, 34, sociologist, low-con, P2)

(S) Sometimes you hear from people who live there about rags hanging before the windows, and toilet bowls being removed. And when I lived in one of those neighborhoods "you could often hear from people that they resented that, and that was discussed, I mean people all the time were busy forming their opinions about that, say, and testing what you thought about that yourself, and what your own experiences were with others" so that you knew whether people were for or against foreigners, and for what reasons. In that sense people knew more about each other than in this neighborhood.

(35)III-ET-1 (Man, 37, university teacher, low-con, P1)

(Story in newspaper) (S) M: Yes, those stories you read all the time like slaughtering sheep and blood streaming from the walls, type of stories you hear on each point where people have unfounded opinions. You are sitting in *_he train and somebody starts to talk to you about all those people on unemployment allowances, and then they start telling a story "I KNOW SOMEBODY, a family of 5 persons of which 4 Nave an allowance, they together make twice as much as we make." Such stories are told a hundred times, until they legitimitize the conclusion that the allowances may well go down, because people live nicely on them and couldn't care less about a job ... Apparently it is allowed and interesting for people to tell and hear those stories, especially when

they are never contradicted. It is important to react to this, for instance, when in the papers or as I saw recently on TV, people do as if those stories are normal, and that the media just register them so that people are getting used to them and a normal way of storytelling.

In this last example, the interviewee gives a political analysis of the consequences of negative stories about foreigners. They may legitimate concrete social actions against minorities. And the fact that they are not contradicted, as we have indeed found, confirms their consensual nature, that is, their "correctness" as symptoms of a "bad" ethnic situation. The passively reproductive role of the media especially is critically commented on here, a point that is raised more often in the interviews in this neighborhood.

Conclusions

From these examples, we may at least infer some elementary features of communicative effects in "foreigner talk." Standard is the belief and support of negative stories as confirmations of negative stereotypes. Possible counterarguments of a moral nature are strategically rejected by pointing out the negative consequences for Dutch people of favorable treatment, and lack of respect for our norms and values by the foreigners. Hence, perceived deviance of in-group norms isjustified with higher-level norms and values that protect in-group identity, interests, or goals.

For other recipients of such talk, the situation is more problematic. They feel that such conversations are at least improper (as also speakers themselves are sometimes aware), and may at least have some skepticism about the truth of such stories. In many situations, however, hearers may remain silent, or may be ashamed. Others activate arguments that contradict opinions in talk, or understand that innocent questions or stories are in fact expressions of negative prejudices. Finally, at a metalevel of understanding, some interviewees show that negative storytelling has become part of a dominant consensus, and may have highly detrimental social consequences. They resent the uncritical reception of such stories, also by the media.

The general pattern, thus, is one of uncritical acceptance or at least passivity. Because only a few people think they should react critically, and still fewer actually do so, negative stories can be safely reproduced in talk, and magnified through the mass media. It appears that there is virtually no standard set of (counter)arguments against racist talk. The dominant consensus does not reproduce such arguments or positive information in talk and the media. People thus can only globally disbe-

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lieve and reject racist stories and opinions based on them, but have no alternatives.

Both socially and cognitively, there are no antiracist attitudes and models that are as developed as the prejudiced ones. For the rejection of wrong beliefs, people must sometimes have considerable knowledge, which, however, is hardly provided by the media. And for the oven disagreement with racist opinions, they must challenge commonsense norms, values, and arguments against which other arguments may be powerless while "uncommonsense. " Those who defend the rights, the points of views, or the interests of the minority groups may risk being treated as social traitors who don't care about their "own people." The development of antiracist models and schemata, as long as it is not supported by the authorities, educational materials, and practice, and especially the media, will have few chances against the massive daily reproduction and execution of a powerful consensus. In this and the previous chapters, we have examined much evidence that shows why such a consensus is so pervasive and persuasive, and how people cognitively respond to prejudiced talk. To examine the real consequences of such talk, we must however also analyze its social contexts, which we do in the next chapter.

346 Communicating Racism

for the structures, strategies, and cognitive processing of discourse as interaction. In other words, social situations are analyzed here as the integration of text and context. After the earlier analysis of the cognitive context of talk, we now must attend to the rest of the social situation in which ethnic prejudice is reproduced.

The theory of social situations, both in sociology and in social psychology, has had important informal predecessors during this century (for historical surveys, see Argyle, Furnham, & Graham, 1981; Forgas, 1979; Furnham & Argyle, 1981). However, only in the last decade have attempts been made to make this theory more systematic and explicit, although results in these two disciplines are still little integrated. Together with interaction, social situations may be considered as the building blocks of social organization and process, and the crucial meeting point of cognition and social action. For our own discussion, this mean that it is also the location for the analysis of the communicative reproduction of racism by speech participants as social members in general, and as dominant in-group members in particular.

One task of the analysis of social situations, then, is a further social characterization of participants. Traditionally, this involves specification of class and group membership, gender, age, socioeconomic status, institutional functions or other roles, among other things. This chapter provides only a few figures that give some description of the social groups to which our speakers belong. A more adequate approach, common to cognitive or interpretative sociology as well as cognitive social psychology, would be a "dynamic" analysis of such social dimensions in terms of, for example, strategic interaction, negotiation, shared interpretations, and commonsense categories (Schwarz & Jacobs, 1979). In the conversational communication of ethnic prejudice, the traditional descriptions of the social identities of speech participants are abstractions from ongoing processes, such as self-presentation, impression management, categorization, interpretation, and attribution. People monitor this social membership at several levels at the same time, and may talk simultaneously as a woman, as a professor, as a White in-group member, as a neighborhood member, as a Dutch person, and so on in varying hierarchies of relevance, and enact such selfand other-categorizations in strategically effective ways in their interaction (Taj fel, 1982; Taj fel & Forgas, 1981).

Through further analysis of our interview data, we thus hope to be able to study a few of these social categorizations and strategies of prejudiced group members. Part of this task has already been accomplished in our analysis of self-presentatíon and impression management strategies of prejudiced communication. Yet, the social dimension of this analysis was still lacking, as if people were only participating in such conversa-

tions as individual actors. We must probe deeper, for instance, into the permanent self-presentational moves that aim at the avoidance of social categorizations such as racist. Similarly, we must pay more attention to the social constraints of shared norms, values, and ideologies that impinge on conversational interaction among White in-group members.

Between Macro and Micro Leveis

Limited attention will be paid to an autonomous sociological account of the ethnic situation at the macro level, which is the main object of research in most studies of discrimination and racism. These studies, it must be noted, were carried out from vastly different theoretical or ideological points of view, which neither this book nor this chapter can discuss, however (among many other publications, see, e.g., Banton, 1983; Bowser & Hunt, 1981; Castles, 1984; CCCS, 1982; Cox, 1948; Husband, 1982; Miles & Phizacklea, 1979; Mullard, 1985; Ratcliffe, 1981; van den Berghe, 1967). It goes without saying, however, that such broader historical, socioeconomical, and sociocultural analyses of ethnic relations and racism form the necessary background for the study of ethnic attitudes at the micro level of talk, communication, and interaction. Of the macro approaches, we only retain the more "cognitive" dimension, namely, ideology. Thus, we are interested in the ways participants of prejudiced talk display their knowledge and beliefs of "ethnic situations" in discourse and interaction, and thus reproduce this situation at the micro level (Knorr-Cetina & Cicourel, 1981). Also, we pay special attention to the role of the elite in the communication of racism.

The Role of Elite Discourse and Racism

The macroanalysis of racism in society dovetails with our micro approach in many significant ways. Both from our own empirical results, as well as from much other recent research, we may conclude that the discursive reproduction of racism can be explained only partly in terms of everyday talk among "ordinary" social members. Within the dominant White group, for instance, there are again dominant subgroups that play a special role in the production phase of racist attitudes and practices, as they are communícated primarily through the mass media: politicians, civil servants, journalists, academics, professionals, members of the various state institutions (judiciary, police, social welfare agencies, and so forth), and all others in control of public and dominant discourse types. In a society in which everyday ethnic encounters of the population at large may still be rare or

ing some of the classical parameters that may play a role in the levels of prejudice inferred from our interviews, namely, area, gender, age, education, occupation, and so on. We first give some simple descriptive data, which, however, may put us on the trace of more interesting qualitative differences. However, we comment on the quantitative figures, as they are usually also provided by survey research, in tercos of what we know about the content of the interviews and hence against the background of the (interpreted) social context of the speakers. Some of the quantitative results have already been studied, especially for people mentioning media or personal sources, in Chapter 3. Here we are interested in these data for all interviewees in Amsterdam. The limited number of American interviews does not allow even such approximate generalizations.

Differences Between Groups

In Table 6.1, we have usted the average prejudice scores for interviewees from different social groups. The overall average is 3.4, which is somewhat lower than the midpoint of our 7-point scale.

The first obvious difference is the one between highand low-contact areas, the first being well aboye the average, the second below the average prejudice level. This difference is significant: F(2, 140) _ 8.31, p = .0004. Although this result corresponds with most survey results on the area dependence of ethnic attitudes, it should be interpreted with care. The low-contact areas in this case are mostly middleto upper-middle- class neíghborhoods of Amsterdam, where people generally have higher education and better jobs. This will also effect the score of the areas. Most important, though, the lower scores in the low-contact areas also relate to the way people in these areas talk about ethnic affairs. Often these conversations take place at a meta-level. That is, they do not so much topicalize their own experiences (which people obviously lack), but rather the attitudes or assumed experiences of other people, especially those in the "poor" neighborhoods. Also, the people in the lowcontact areas are often more explicitly aware of the social norms for attitudes and talk about ethnic minorities, and, therefore, their statements to (student) interviewers may in part also come out as less prejudiced. Below, we shall see in more detail that there is little reason to believe that generally people in (higher-)middle-class areas are less prejudiced if other topics and experiences are discussed (Wellman, 1977).

We find no confirmation for the well-known hypothesis that living with ethnic minority groups reduces prejudice (see, e.g., Amir, 1976; Stephan, 1977, for discussion). Indeed, such reduction depends, for

350 Communicating Racism

TABLE 6.1: Average Prejudice Scores for Different Social Groups

example, on close personal contacts in equal situations with common goals (Pettigrew, 1981, 1986).

The differences between men and women are generally slight, and we have little reason to doubt the results of our quantitative analysis of these differences.

The most robust differences in prejudice level have been found for age. Generally, the elderly show higher prejudice levels, and young people, lower levels, with intermediate age scoring around the overall mean. These differences are significant: F(2, 140) = 5.12, p = .0071.

Note that our figures for education and occupation are very incomplete: We do not have this information for all interviewees, although in most cases in which information about education and occupation is lacking, people have low education and low occupation scores, are jobless, or retired from low-level jobs. For the data we have, though, high occupation (> 4 on a 7-point scale) and especially high education (also > 4 on a 7-point scale) also seem to condition lower prejudice levels. One of the explanations, in addition to the ones formulated earlier, is that these groups usually have access to more and more varied information, also about ethnic groups, which includes beliefs about the kind of opinions that are normatively acceptable and which are not. For them, the presence of ethnic minority groups is generally a "theoretical" problem only, and many admit that they have no experiences and cannot judge. Note also that the averages for low-contact areas and higher occupation are close to 3.0, which is not dramatically lower than the mean of 3.4. Education and (young) age seem to be the most confident predictors of

lower prejudice levels as measured on the basis of what people say in talk: F(1, 141) = 31.28, p = .0000.

If we break down some of these figures for the two different areas (Table 6.2), we see that these tendencies are confirmed: Men and wornen remain more or less equally prejudiced in the two types of area, the elderly score higher and younger people lower than the average in the respective areas. Note, though, that younger people in the high-contact areas nevertheless reach the overall mean of 3.4.

The American Interviews

Although our American interviews hardly allow quantitative generalizations such as those made aboye, a few tendencies may be observed. Of 24 interviewees, 11 lived in highcontact neighborhoods in Southeast San Diego, and 13 in predominantly White, relatively wealthy suburbs (La Jolla, University City, Del Mar). Whereas the overall prejudice score is somewhat lower than in Amsterdam (3.3), the difference between the highand the low-contact neighborhoods is more pronounced: 4.2 in high-contact neighborhoods, and 2.1 in low-contact neighborhoods. The figure for the high-contact neighborhoods is, however, somewhat biased by three highly prejudiced, if not blatantly racist, men, scoring 6 or 7 on the prejudice scale. The people who express less explicit prejudices not only live in the wealthier suburbs but also tend to have better jobs and higher education levels (college or more), read quality newspapers, and watch quality TV programs. Most of them describe themselves politically as Democrats or liberals (although the man who scores highest on the prejudice scale also qualifies himself as a "liberal"). There are no obvious age or gender differences in this small group, although those who express most prejudice appeared to be male and younger than 40. There is no tendency, as in the Amsterdam data, for the elderly to express more prejudice. Most consistent is the tendency that links education with prejudice levels: All people scoring 4 or higher on the scale have no more than high school. Although these are merely tendencies in our data, they are in line with what we found in Amsterdam, and also correspond with results from quantitative survey research about racial attitudes in the United States and California (see Apostle, Glock, Piazza, & Suelze, 1983; Schuman, Steeh, & Bobo, 1985, and the discussion of this work in Chapter 4.4).

Obviously, there are not only differences between different social groups that have (or have less) prejudice, but also differences between ethnic groups. In the San Diego area, and in South California (or even the United States), generally ethnic attitudes toward Asians are often less