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

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TABLE 6.2: Prejudice Scores for Combined Variables

negative than, for instance, against Mexicans or Blacks. The fact that many Asians recently have been shown to perform "even" better at school or on jobs than (White) Americans, and proved to be able to live up to the American dream ideology of personal success better than any other invnigrant group, has made them the "model minority" of the late 1980s (Glazer, 1985). (Indeed, on the day this passage was written, December 19, 1985, a long article in the Los Angeles limes reported figures and anecdotes that seem to sustain that evaluation. It shows that prejudices start to develop against Asians for being "too good," as with prejudices against Jews: They "take [our] educational positions," when they occupy more than 30% of freshman classes in colleges, which is much more than their percentage in the population, and score highest or next highest on SAT tests.)

We have not paid much attention in this book to the specific differences between ethnic prejudices against various ethnic groups, neither in the United States nor in the Netherlands. These differences exist, of course, and Blacks and immigrant workers from Turkey or Morocco are associated with different prejudiced opinions. On the other hand, we were more generally interested in the prejudices, and the communications based on them, that seem so remarkably similar for different ethnic groups and even different countries.

Experiences and Contacts with

Ethnic Minority Groups

Theoretically, prejudice is an ethnic attitude that is developed on the basis of (negative) protoschemata for ethnic groups together with strategically processed information derived from the media, personal communication, and personal experiences.

On the basis of the number of experiences or contacts actually mentioned in the interviews, each interviewee was assigned an approximate experience or contact value. Of course, this value, for our data, can only reflect reported interaction, not actual interaction. Hence, the data provided here may represent considerable bias. Nevertheless, to obtain a first impression, we calculated prejudice scores for people with different degrees of experiences and contacts (as indicated by their own interviews; see Table 6.3).

Experience here means direct observation of or interaction with members of ethnic groups, whereas contact means that the interviewees have (close) personal contacts with minority group members. Level 0 means no experiences or no contacts of these types, and levels 1 through 3 indicate increasing experiences and contacts. We have tabulated these figures for the different areas, so that the overall notion of "high-" or "low-contact area" could also be compared to these experiences and contacts.

The general tendency in the low-contact areas, as may be expected, is that most people indeed have no personal experiences or contacts with minorities, although incidental contacts with a single minority member is not uncommon in the low-contact areas. Interestingly, even in the highcontact area, real personal contacts are not more frequent than in the low-contact areas (which suggests that our initial choice of the term high-contact area, is misleading). Because the chances for such contacts are, however, higher in the high-contact areas, we may conclude that people in that case avoid such contacts more often. This is in agreement with our qualitative analysis of thematic structure: It is a frequent topic of talk in such areas that people "have no contact with them."

Another tendency in Table 6.3 is that increasing personal contacts is an indicator of lower prejudice scores in both area types: F(3, 139) = 5.53, p = .0013. This confirms the well-known finding that real personal contact may reduce prejudice (under specific conditions), and also agrees with our qualitative analyses, which suggest that people with lower prejudice scores more often tell (neutral or positive) stories about good neighborly or friendly contacts with ethnic minority individuals and families (see N. Miller & Brewer, 1984, for discussion). In these situations, indeed, the level of contact, and the nature of the goals (being good neighbors, having good friends) is such that contact is indeed a reliable indicator of less negative attitudes. Instead of saying that contacts reduce prejudice, it is obvious that also the reverse may hold: Peopie with less prejudice will be inclined to establish more and more friendly contacts with ethnic minority group members. Again, this shows the "circular" and self-confirming nature of ethnic prejudice.

Indeed, another general tendency of the figures in Table 6.3 is that

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TABLE 6.3: The Role of Experiences and Contacts with Minorities in Different Areas

lack of experiences and contacts often correlates with higher prejudice scores. For experiences, this is less marked, however. Especially in the high-contact areas, having more experiences usually means that these might also be interpreted negatively, which, of course, does not result in lower levels of prejudice. We have seen earlier that recall of experiences with ethnic minority group members, typically told in stories, often has a negative bias. That (many) experiences are more frequent in the highcontact areas, is as may be expected, and the negative bias in their recall and reproduction also accounts for a large part of the higher prejudice scores in these areas. Only a handful of people in the low-contact areas have such (frequent) concrete experiences. Qualitatively, this confirms our earlier finding that talk by people from such areas has a more general, "theoretical" or "meta" nature. Conversation in such cases is about general norms and values, about the ethnic situation in general, which rather primes socially desirable (positive) norms regarding attitudes and behavior toward minorities. Concrete storytelling about the (more frequent) experiences in highcontact areas has a negative bias, both because of existing prejudice as well as because of narrative constraints (interesting stories are often about remarkable, and hence negative events) .

Generally, we should repeat that all our data are based on rather spontaneous self-reports, often prompted by specific questions. We do not know how often people "really" have experiences and contacts with ethnic minority group members, and there obviously are personal differences between how much individuals can remember during the interview, how "extrovert" they are in general when volunteering information about personal experiences, and so on. Despite these personal differences, we still witness, overall, rather clear tendencies that are rooted in social differences between groups, defined in terms of their

socioeconomic status or the nature and frequency of their intergroup perceptions and interactions.

Note finally that we did not distinguish here between degrees of "seriousness" of the negative events. Indeed, many of them are the usual petty "problems" of close neighborly relations, such as noise, (usually attributed to—too many—children), dirtiness, or smells, that characterize poor neighborhoods in general, mostly due to bad housing, lack of facilities, and general urban decay.

Men versus Women

Do men and women have different experiences and contacts with ethnic minority groups? Taking into account that we interviewed more women, we find the same contact scores, with women especially reporting more often frequent contacts (see Table 6.4). Indeed, women are more often personal friends or partners of ethnic minority group members.

The same pattern holds for experiences: Women more often tell about experiences (they tell more stories). The prejudice scores are not consistent in this case. As was concluded before, more (close, equal) contacts generally indicate lower prejudice scores, both for men and women. Yet, with experiences we see a pattern that suggests that a single experience (as told) signals a somewhat higher prejudice level for both men and women. On several scores, men seem to have somewhat higher prejudice levels (indeed their average is 3.5, whereas that of women is 3.3), except when frequent experiences are involved, then women score higher (than men, and than their own general mean). This seems to be the cases when women tell (many) stories about their experiences, which tend to be negative. When interviews are held with couples, it is generally the woman who speaks and tells the stories.

Prejudice Leveis

Concluding this section, we may briefly look at the prejudice levels themselves, instead of at the averages for each group. Which groups of people tend to score at specific prejudice levels? (See Table 6.5.)

When we look at the scores of all people together we first find that most people score at level P4, and then at P3, which both indicate neutral to slightly negative opinions about ethnic groups, a few stereotypes, no antiracist or positive opinions, understanding for negative opinions of others, emphasis of cultural differences, and the general consensus that foreigners must adapt themselves. The distribution over the various

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TABLE 6.4: The Role of Experiences and Contacts with Minorities for Men and Women

TABLE 6.5: Prejudice Levels for Different Groups

PI P2 P3 P4 P5 P6 P7

levels is slightly biased to the lower levels: There are more people who show no prejudice and who are antiracist (P1 and P2) than people who are systematically negative and racist (P6 and P7).

The differences at the extreme boundaries coincide largely with the areas: Very negative people live predominantly in high-contact neighborhoods, and antiracist people especially in the low-contact areas (in which case contacts with minority are an important criterion). At the higher prejudice levels, men and women are more or less in balance, but

men more often score at the P 1 level. As may be expected from the mean given earlier, younger people tend to score at the lower levels only, whereas the elderly tend to concentrate on the intermediate P4 level. People with better jobs and better education only score at the lower levels (P4 and lower). The mention of information sources is also distributed in the lower levels, although references to personal communication more often is an indicator of a somewhat higher (P4/P5) score than the use of the media. Indeed, many people with low prejudice scores referring to the media do so critically.

Experiences and contacts with minorities are more or less equally distributed, but as noted before, personal experiences more often signal higher prejudice levels. Those dominating at the lowest level, especially, are men from low-contact areas, both those with lower and those with higher education, and both old and young. Women and older people tend to converge to the middle scores, and we have attributed this to a somewhat greater tendency to conformity. Overall, higher (> P5) prejudice levels are accounted for mostly by older people with little education in high-contact neighborhoods, and people mentioning personal experiences or conversations with others as their source of information.

Provisional Conclusions

Conclusions from these elementary descriptive data can only be very tentative and provisional. Most consistent are the roles of area, age, education, and close personal contact. These factors are, of course, not independent. Older people, for example, generally have less contact with other people, and especially ethnic minority groups, than younger people, who frequently report having ethnic companions at school or as friends. Area is less linked with personal contact (indeed people in high-contact areas appear to have less contacts than expected), but does indicate the amount of experiences. Also, area, of course, is a factor that is not independent of those of education and occupation. Use and mention of (public) information, such as the media, typically for the better educated, signal lower prejudice scores, and the same holds for increased personal contacts (which also implies more information). There are only incidental differences between men and women, but women tend to score at the intermediate levels more often than men (as do the elderly).

Part of these differences are easily explained, others require more thorough theoretical analysis. Some explanations are stereotypical themselves, such as the young being more "flexible" in their attitudes, and hence less associated with the "inflexible" nature of prejudices. Similarly, more education seems to imply and induce the use of more information, also about different (ethnic) groups, such as through more and

mental questions about the role of specific social groups or institutions in the reproduction of ethnic prejudice in talk. We have discussed in this book how prejudice is organized and strategically expressed in discourse in communicative situations, but we have ignored the relevant problem of the "origins" of current stereotypes and prejudices in society. This problem is forbiddingly complex and intricately intertwined with a study of the causes and conditions of racism and discrimination in general, which we cannot discuss in this single chapter.

Yet, when the notion of "reproduction" is examined, it seems plausible to inquire into the processes of "production." People do not spontaneously "invent" negative opinions about ethnic minority groups, nor do they express and communicate them in everyday talk without sociocultural constraints. Prejudice and its reproduction in (verbal or other) interaction has specific social functions, which may simply be summarized as the maintenance of dominance or power for the in-group and its members (we analyze these functions in more detail in the next section). And although the reproduction of shared prejudices in a racist society is part of the dominant consensus, this consensus also has a "developmental" dimension. Social knowledge, beliefs, ideologies, and hence also prejudice, are also systematically "produced." In this section, we examine one of these production processes, namely, those in which various elite groups and the media are involved. One of the reasons for this focus is that we want to counterbalance the possible misconception that ethnic prejudice is merely or especially (re)produced by "ordinary" or "bigoted" people, or by lower-class groups, such as those in ethnically varied, poor inner-city neighborhoods, as our own figures in the previous section might suggest (see also Phizacklea & Miles, 1980, for discussion).

The Role of the Media

Against this background, then, it may be asked whether all in-group members or subgroups beneflt equally from the effects of the functions of prejudice. For "ordinary" people in everyday life, the prejudiced cognitive programming of interethnic perception, representation, and interaction will usually support minor everyday actions and lead to neighborly conflicts and everyday discrimination of individual ethnic minority members, only. Both their prejudices and the discriminatory practices they monitor are in many respects "local phenomena." In order for these to become shared and integrated into the consensual attitudes and practices of a racist society, other important factors must be at play. In our Northwestern societies this means, for instance, that such attitudes and practices are also repre-

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sented and reproduced by the mass media. Our interview data have shown that this is indeed the case: People not only defend or legitimate ethnic prejudice with references to the media, but also learn about negative opinions of others from the media, whether they accept them or not (see also Hartmann & Husband, 1974).

The media, however, do not routinely report what "ordinary" people think or do in everyday life (unless they are victims of crime or catastrophes). On the contrary, there is much media research that documents the fact that access to the media is predominantly controlled by various "elite" groups, such as the leading members of government and Parliament, leaders of political parties, various state institutions, large business corporations, academia, and (other) professional groups, and, of course, journalists themselves (Fishman, 1980; Gans, 1979; Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Tuchman, 1978). This also holds for reporting about ethnic affairs. Neither ordinary people nor ethnic minority groups themselves have dominant access to ethnic affairs news. And if, as several of our interviews show, ordinary people are allowed to express their "complaints" about ethnic minority groups publicly in their town or neighborhood, this is possible only if those who control the media, or a larger consensus, deem such complaints legitimate. One could even formulate this assumption in sharper terms: People expressing ethnic prejudice will be represented in the media predominantly if they formulate opinions that are at least partly shared by those who control the media.

This does not mean that every journalist shares the views of those he or she interviews, but only that such views are within a range of opinions that apparently merit attention from the media and the public. Opinions that are definitely outside the consensus either tend to be censored or are embedded in a critical framework. Some of our interviewees have noticed that this is not the case for negative opinions about minorities: Racist people are often quoted without further comments. Our own and other research into the portrayal of minorities in the media confirms this impression (Hartmann & Husband, 1974; van Dijk, 1983a; Wilson & Gutiérrez, 1985). In other words, the media play an important, active, role in the public (re)production of ethnic prejudice (see also our brief survey in Chapter 2).

Media and Elite Discourse

It was, however, assumed that this role is not merely reflective, nor limited to the (re)presentation of ethnic prejudices of people from the "poor inner-city neighborhoods. " On the contrary, in the social model constructed by the media, actors, and speakers on ethnic affairs are also the national and local authorities, the state insti-

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(2) Ethnic information is mostly derived from the (news) media. Whereas most social information processing about ethnic groups is discursive, only in specific areas may "direct" information about ethnic groups be based on personal communication, such as rumors and stories. Yet, ethnic prejudices are widely shared in society at large, so that even the forms of personal communication based on "experiences" often go back to media stories or to people interviewed by the media. It follows that for society at large, the major direct or indirect source for information about ethnic minority groups are the mass media.

(3) Other media provide background for ethnic prejudice. Although we here refer especially to the news media, such as TV, radio, the newspaper, and magazines, it goes without saying that an important segment of these media is formed by school textbooks or other educational materials, children books, novels, advertising, and movies (see Chapter 2). Research has shown that the portrayal of ethnic minority groups in these discourse genres is equally negative as that in the news media (see Wilson & Gutiérrez, 1985, for survey and references). This explains part of the ethnic prejudices formed during socialization and education, whereas stereotypes in fictional or advertising discourse are coherent with the negative opinions expressed or implied by the news media. These other media shape social knowledge and beliefs about relatively "unknown" others. This also holds for our beliefs about other, especially geographically or ideologically distant, countries and peoples. It has been shown, indeed, that both the news media and these other media, represent ethnic minority groups and, for instance, Third World countries and peoples in similar ways (Downing, 1980).

(4) Elite discourse is reproduced by the media. From these premises it follows, first, that much information on which ethnic prejudices are based is derived or inferred from media discourses of various types. From the premise that various elite groups especially have access to and control over media contents it follows, second, that the information is primarily derived from the contents of the source discourses (decisions, debates, reports, and so on) provided by these elite groups, and from the ways these are transformed by media workers. These transformations may involve changes that are specifically functional in the framework of news production, such as dramatization, personification, group attribution, and negativization (see, e.g., Cohen, 1980; Hall et al., 1978, for such media transformations of official discourse about social minority groups).

(5) The public tends to adopt dominant elite opinions. Generally, media users do not simply repeat beliefs or opin-