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

384 Communicating Racism

minority groups or new immigrants in country, city, and community through myriad discourse types that define the communication lines of our society: parent-child and family talk, conversations with peers, friends, or neighbors, through children's books and comics, movies and TV programs, noveis or news reports, political propaganda or academic research reports. Whereas (still too few) previous studies focused on the important role of the mass media, primarily the press, TV, and movies, this book focused on more direct, interpersonal communication among majority group members, namely, on everyday conversation.

The main question we thus try to answer can be simply formulated, as follows: "How do majority people talk about the minority groups in their city or country?" Such a question implies several dimensions. First, what do people actually say: What are the contents of such talk? That aspect can be accounted for in terms of a semantic or topical analysis. Second, how do people talk about "them"? This question requires further discourse analysis of narrative and argumentative structures, local semantic "moves," style, rhetoric, and other conversational features of spontaneous talk. Third, what and how does such talk express or signal underlying structures and strategies of prejudice in social cognition? Fourth, what are the communicative sources of such conversations: To which persons or media do people refer when they account for their information orjustify their opinions? Fifth, what are the real or possible effects of prejudiced talk, and what strategies do people follow in the persuasive communication of their beliefs, opinions, and feelings about minority groups? And, finally, what are the social contexts of such talk: What type of interaction is involved, who are the participants, what are the social functions of prejudiced conversations, and which relations of power are at stake, or what role is played by the elite and the media in this kind of informal reproduction of racism? These are the questions that the respective chapters have sought to answer, sometimes in theoretical and empirical detall, sometimes only in terms of first hypotheses and initial evidence.

Unfortunately, we were unable to record and analyze "real;' spontaneous conversations about ethnic minorities. Therefore, in five years of intermittent fieldwork, my students and I have collected some 180 interviews, both in Amsterdam and in San Diego. These interviews were as informal and spontaneous as possible, and proved to yield excellent data for an empirical study of prejudiced talk. The analysis of contents, style, and strategies of the communication of ethnic attitudes was based on these interviews. Similarly, we also used them as evidence for the study of underlying ethnic prejudices in cognition, and as data about communication sources, persuasive strategies, the role of the media, and the social self-presentation and self-definition of speakers. Results of stud-

Conclusions 385

ies of other discourse types, especially the news media, provided additional information about the everyday reproduction of racism in society.

2. Discourse analysis

Because the conversations in the form of interviews play such a central role in this research project, it is, of course, of primary importance that we analyze them adequately. The first concern of the project, of which results have been published earlier as well (see, e.g., van Dijk, 1984), was, therefore, a systematic discourse analysis of the interviews. Both at the global and at the local levels of description, we tried to account for some specific properties of prejudiced talk. Thus, at the global level we analyzed the topics and overall opinions people express, the stories about minorities they tell, and the arguments they give to defend their opinions or to justify their actions. At the local, micro level, we paid attention primarily to strategic features of talk, such as semantic moves of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, as well as stylistic, rhetorical, and conversational properties of this kind of "delicate" discourse.

Topics

Topics, defined as semantic macrostructures, are essential for the conversational as well as the cognitive organization of information. They tell us what myriad lower-level meanings are "all about," they summarize, provide higher-level abstraction, and define what is most important or relevant in a text or in memory. Hence, a topical or thematic analysis of the interviews is a central concern of the study of prejudiced talk. We found thatjust as conversation in general, the—often spontaneous, and hence not interviewer-induced- selection of topics is highly stereotypical. A simple experiment told us that we indeed all "know" what people say, even if we don't always agree. What people tell us about the "foreigners" in the Netherlands or the "illegal aliens" or "immigrants" in California is essentially the same, with variations depending on context: Too many of them are (coming) here, immigration should become stricter, they make us feel unsafe on the streets, the neighborhood is being run down by them, they are aggressive and involved in crime, some of them work hard but many of them are lazy and on welfare (for which we pay taxes), they take our houses and jobs and are unfairly favored by the government, they do not adapt to our ways, do not speak our language or do have strange religion

Conclusions 387

riences, especially if these are somehow weird, strange, funny, dangerous, or otherwise "interesting." The vast majority of the stories about minorities, then, feature negative Complication categories. The different, if not deviant, foreigner, immigrant, or Black is, of course, a prime subject to play the role of villain in the most classical stories of threat, crime, vice, or cheating. Psychological work also shows that we remember negative things better, especíally about minorities. The negative portrayal also shows in the Evaluation category of the stories, which may be the most salient dimension through which storytellers can show their prejudiced opinions about minorities.

Yet, the story about "them" is seldom heroic. The protagonist hardly provides the valiant solution to the threat posed by the resented "other." Indeed, these stories often lack the canonical Resolution category, signaling that there is no obvious way out of the "ethnic problems." They are tales of complaint and accusation, of self-pity and resentment, not of self-aggrandizement or pride. They are the narrative of a group who portrays themselves as the "real" victim of immigration or desegregation. Told especially by those that do have experiences, hence by people living in ethnically mixed neighborhoods, and, therefore, often in the poor inner-city areas, that victim role is easy to assume also for other reasons. Poor Whites, victimized through the socioeconomic oppression of their class, will tend to look down, instead of up, for the most likely causes and agents of their misery. And the dominant consensus, preformulated by the elite, and distributed, further detailed, and dramatized by the media, will, of course, have little tendency to counterargue such racist dimensions of the ideology.

Argumentation

Stories about minorities usually do not occur alone. They often are functional elements in argumentative sequences, for which they provide the sometimes detailed and, of course, veridical, while actually experienced, "evidence" that supports a usually negative conclusion. Also, argumentations are being used by people who do not have everyday experiences with ethnic minorities, for instance, while not living in the same neighborhood or because they are working in an all-White job environment. In such cases, argumentation is typically based on general statements about properties of minorities. Argumentation is, of course, an important aspect of the pervasive positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation strategies. Especially negative statements about minorities cannot be made without any support, and when there is no evidence, people will usually at least muster some arguments that make their conclusions look plausible. One

388 Communicating Racism

effective strategic move in argumentation is, for example, the "empathy" argument: it is for their own good—when they vmuld go back, when they would learn the language, and so on.

Semantic Moves

At the local level of analysis, the management of delicate topics and opinions requires strategic moves to combine the sometimes conflicting goals of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. Thus, we get the many variants of the widely known move, "I am not prejudiced, but ...," which we called an apparent denial. Similarly, to lessen negative statements about minorities, people often mitigate them in a next clause or sentence, or they will choose—rhetorically—understatements and other ways to tone or play down negative inferences that might be made about themselves. People make apparent concessions, saying that "we" also sometimes do bad things, or that "you also have good ones among them," but the strategic nature of such moves becomes apparent when they regularly appear to be followed by a rather significant but. Similarly, the more tolerant speaker tends to emphasize, sometimes genuinely, sometimes merely as a ploy, that he or she "doesn't mind so much, but other people in the neighborhood (job, school) do" Among the many other moves that thus contribute to the overall goals of conversational interaction and impression management, we may expect several forms of contrast or opposition. "We" are, of course, hardworking, law-abiding citizens, whereas "they" don't want to work and are engaged in all sorts of crime. As for several other semantic moves, this kind of contrastive emphasis also has a rhetorical function, typically signaling the crucial cognitive and social opposition, if not conflict, perceived between us and them.

Style, Rhetoric, and Features of

Spontaneous Talk

These propertíes of strategic management of delicate talk are also exhibited in style, for example, in lexical selection. Only a few people used blatantly racist language, and more generally it seemed obvious that for relative strangers, people use moderate language. Negative expressions are, of course, necessary in so much negative talk, but either these tend to be mitigated by next moves, or people try to formulate their opinions in generally "acceptable" expressions. Another striking element of style appeared to be some kind of "narre taboo": Instead of ethnic group names, people overuse pronouns and demonstratives (they, these people). We interpreted these deictic

Conclusions 389

expressions in terms of a strategy of linguistic "distancing." Denying a name or an acceptable description, indeed, seems one of the forms whereby prejudiced people deny individuality or social membership to minority groups.

Of the traditional rhetorical figures, a few seem to have specific significance in prejudiced talk. Those of irony, understatement, and litotes ("life is not exactly nice in this neighborhood") typically emphasize the negative in a positive way, and thereby ideally realize the difficult combination of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. Such operations partly overlap with the semantic moves of mitigation. We already noticed that contrasting us and them is common in prejudiced talk, and this signaling of group identity, competition, and conflict can take place both semantically and rhetorically. This also holds for the frequent ploy of comparison, in which majority people typically assert that "they would also respect the law (learn the language, and so on) when they would go to another country." And it is not surprising that the operation of comparison usually comes out positive for us and negative for them.

Speakers appear to be doing many things at the same time. Both socially and cognitively, they have to attend to many different types of information. Especially when topics are delicate and careful self-presen- tation is required, spontaneous talk often runs into production "problems." People hesitate, make false starts, repair earlier words or word groups, make pauses, and use many filler uuhhmm. Indeed, we found that when speakers must mention an ethnic group by name (which, as we saw, they avoid by using pronouns), an ethnic name is often preceded by uhhmm's, hesitations, pauses, or repairs. The same phenomena can be witnessed when negative statements are made about some ethnic group.

At these various local levels of discourse analysis, thus, we have also found that people who speak about minorities are engaged in a highly delicate social task, requiring permanent monitoring of the execution of several major strategies, such as those of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. Yet, people not only speak as individuals who want to make a good impression even when saying bad things about others; they essentially talk as group members and speak about others as group members, and this opposition between us and them also underlies many semantic, stylistic, and rhetorical operations. In general, then, we find that systematic discourse analysis is both a subtle and very powerful tool in the assessment of the expression and communication of ethnic prejudice. At the same time, it allows us, as was obvious in the subsequent chapters as well, to make inferences about underlying cognitive and social properties or constraints of ethnic prejudice and their ingroup communication.

3. Sources

More than in most work in communication, we have focused on the "message" itself. For our kind of data, in fact, we have hardly more than what people tell us. We have no experimental ways or other methods to access or control properties of the communicative context, such as sources and their properties or effects of communication. Thus, the information about sources people use for their information and opinions about ethnic groups also had to be drawn from our interviews. This limitation also has an important advantage, though: Using people's own accounts of their sources shows us when, where, how, and why such source mentions are made, and especially how people have interpreted, stored, and retrieved information attributed to specific sources.

Obviously, these sources are multiple and may be any type of discourse or communication in a very diverse communicative environment, ranging from parent-child talk, children's books, comics, novels, movies, and TV programs, to news reports, academic studies, and informal everyday conversation. A systematie analysis of some 200 "source passages" in our interviews suggests, however, that in their own talk, people predominantly refer to conversations with other people and to the media, especially TV and the newspaper. In accordance with other work, we found that the media are typically used for information and as an opinion basis regarding the more public topics of immigration, social issues (welfare, unemployment), crime, and discrimination. Personal information is especially relevant for topics that deal with everyday conflicts in the community, such as noises, smells, decay, children, clothing, food, or typically "ethnic" habits. Such information and opinions are often derived from stories and their evaluative conclusions.

In the majority of cases, people use other sources to mention negative "facts" about minorities, even when they do not agree with such facts or opinions themselves. In other words, it is not only implicitly but even explicitly "known" that talk about minorities is negative. For instance, many people know and acknowledge that the press is sometimes biased, for instance, by mentioning the ethnic background of suspects in crime stories. Generally, at least in the Netherlands, TV is perceived as a sornewhat more positive source than the newspaper, which, especially in the hígh-contact (mixed) neighborhoods is often used as "independent evidence" for people's own stories and opinions.

What people say they hear (and remember) from others is in line with the general ethnic opinions we have derived from conversational topics in general: Minoritíes live on welfare, cause unemployment, take our houses, and are involved in crime, and they especially do not respect our

Conclusions 391

norms and ways of everyday living. At the same time, speakers sometimes assert both that "you hear that all the time" and "people don't dare to talk about this anymore." This shows that stereotypical talk is known and socially shared in the community, but on the other hand, that people realize that there is also a social norm—if not concrete fear for retaliation—against negative talk about minorities. Note, though, that for different topics and opinions, different personal sources may be cited: General negative talk is attributed to "others" or unspecified neighbors. Family members, friends, and colleagues are typical sources for everyday experiences of competition or nuisances (noise, dirt), especially in the high-contact areas. In the low-contact areas, people understandably refer to the media more often as a source (and generally the moreeducated and wealthy people seldom talk about themselves or their family members when experiences or opinions about minorities are involved).

From our analysis of the role of sources in prejudiced talk and the communication of racism, we may first conclude that the media play a decisive role, not only in agenda setting, but also in defining the (negative) dominant consensus and preferred interpretations for many public events. For most dominant group members, especially those from lowcontact neighborhoods, they are virtually the only source for ethnic information. Even for stories that usually are communicated in interpersonal talk, such as everyday "nuisance" events, the media provide the—often uncritical—public diffusion among the population at large.

4. The cognitive dimensions of prejudice and prejudiced talk

The next major task of this book has been a sketch of the cognitive structures and strategies of ethnic prejudices and their expression in talk. Prejudice was analyzed as a specific form of negative ethnic attitude, which was described as a hierarchically and categorically organized cluster of negative general opinions in semantic (social) memory. Such prejudice schemata organize socially shared ethnic opinions according to categories such as origin, appearance, socioeconomic status, sociocultural properties, or personal characteristics of ethnic groups and their members. It was stressed, therefore, that prejudice is not just an individual attitude of (bigoted) people, but a structurally founded form of social cognition. In addition to such general, social schemata, individual group members interpret ethnic events

392 Communicating Racism

in terms of concrete (situation) models, stored in episodic memory. It is at this point that we can explain why and how people have "biased" representations, and hence biased recall, of such events, for instance, in the stories we analyzed. Thus, at all levels of the (also schematically organized) model of an ethnic event, people may use their general prejudices to represent the setting, the circumstances, and especially the ethnic participants and their actions in a negative way. Even when ethnic agents are unknown, as in many crime or urban decay stories, they can be inserted into the model by default.

Similarly, people follow complex strategies to "reinterpret" ongoing events in ways that are negative for ethnic minorities. Of course, urban decay, housing shortage, and unemployment are routinely blamed on the foreigners, and indeed, such is the way dominant group members often "see" otherwise unclear events, or overgeneralize from single models. In other words, we found that ethnic prejudice not only involves schematically organized negative attitude structures, but also concrete, subjective, personally variable models, on one hand, and more general strategies of ethnic information processing on the other hand.

The systematic discourse analysis of the interviews allowed us to find many textual signals for these underlying structures and strategies. Thus, topical analysis shows what kind of general opinions are used and presupposed and how they may be ordered. Once identified as "foreigners" or as "immigrants" under the category of Origin, and as "looking different" or as "Black" in the Appearance category, the major opinions about minorities are organized by the socioeconomic category (they live off welfare—our money—and take our jobs and houses), the sociocultural category (they have a different mentality, do not respect our norms and values, do not speak our language, and so on), and the "Personal" category (they are deviant, aggressive, criminal). Depending on context, and hence allowing personal variation, these socially shared opinions may be further organized by concepts such as "threat" or "competition," as well as by the usually implicit notion of "inferiority."

Despite historical and socioeconomic differences between different countries, we finally found that prejudices, and their structures and strategic uses, are very similar in different countries of Western Europe and North America. People say sometimes identical things about Mexican immigrants in the United States or California, and about Turkish "guest workers" in the Netherlands or Western Germany. We have interpreted such ethnic prejudices as functional in the maintenance of power and privileges of the dominant White majorities in these countries.