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

Conclusions 393

5.Interpersonal communication

B ased on the results of the analysis of prejudiced discourse and cognitions, we devised a complex theoretical framework for the interpersonal communication of ethnic attitudes. Earlier work on communication and persuasion was critically examined in the light of these theoretical advances: With a better model of discursive and cognitive structures and strategies, we are able to analyze in more detail which processes are involved in the interpersonal communication of racism. For instance, we now know in more explicit detail how people interpret ethnic encounters as well as accounts, such as stories, about such encounters, and how they organize such information in memory. We have also shown exactly how prejudiced talk is being produced on the basis of biased models and prejudiced schemata, on one hand, and within the framework of cognitively represented modeis of the communicative situation, on the other hand. Such communicative situation models, for instance, represent the contextual constraints speakers use in the strategic management of self-presentation: They have a dynamic model of the possible modeis hearers may develop about themselves as speakers and as competent social members. That is, the cognitive and discursive moves of impression management are being analyzed in the wider framework of social interaction. Part of the social membership and competence thus displayed, for instance, depends on the enhancement of credibility, for which people have a wide choice of strategic moves, such as plausible argumentation and convincing storytelling.

The cognitive and interactional analysis also permitted us to design a framework for the acquisition and persuasive changes of ethnic opinions and attitudes. Thus, overgeneralization can be easily defined in terms of model abstraction based on single or isolated models of ethnic encounters, whereas even general attitude formation is possible by analogy with schemata for other ethnic groups. People show in their talk which perceíved facts or opinions expressed by others (or the media) are found convincing, and how they dealt with persuasive aspects of prejudiced talk or text. In agreement with much other work on persuasion, we found generally that people tend to focus on, and selectively store and retrieve, the model and schema information that is consistent with their own ethnic attitudes.

This is why they tend to mention other sources primarily as strategic confirmation or justification of their own ethnic opinions. It is in this way that a dominant ethnic consensus is being developed and communicated within the in-group. Both the media and most other people do not provide counterinformation that may be used to give up prevailing ethnic

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opinions. Indeed, one of the most notable properties of a racist society is that it is not antiracist. At most, the general norms or values may be inconsistent with racism, but actual discourse, such as everyday talk and the media, as well as commonsense interpretations and evaluations are not based on systematically developed knowledge and beliefs about the processes of prejudice and discrimination. People have not learned to contradict racist thought and talk, and our data suggest that they hardly ever do so. The prevailing practices, also in communication, are protective of the status quo, and hence of the dominance of the White majority.

6. The social context

Finally, we briefly embedded the analysis of prejudiced discourse, cognition, and communication in a wider social context. Indeed, a major thesis of this book has been that neither prejudiced opinions, nor the everyday talk based on them, are purely personal or individual, but essentially social and group oriented. The structure of ethnic attitudes in cognition is determined by important social dimensions of groups (origin, socioeconomic status, and so on). Talk about minorities appeared to be functional in social interaction processes of self-presentation. Similarly, prejudiced talk was shown to have multiple social functions, such as the signaling of group membership, the display of social competence, the sharing of socially relevant experiences and cognitions, or the illustration and prescription of effective social action against minorities.

We also examined the role of some traditional social categories in the types of ethnic attitudes, such as neighborhood, gender, age, and education. The results, drawn from a quantified qualitative analysis of the interviews in terms of prejudice levels, show agreement with earlier work on the role of such indicators. There are no significant differences between men and women, although women tend to adhere to the more moderate prejudice patterns. The elderly generally appear more prejudiced than younger people, probably also because of less education and less contact: Especially in the Netherlands, the younger generation is for the first time in history growing up with sometimes substantial numbers of ethnic minorities in the classroom. People in the mixed, high-contact neighborhoods usually score higher on the prejudice scale, but again part of this is probably due to differences in education and socioeconomic status. As such, more experiences and "ethnic contact" do not guarantee lower prejudice levels, but people who appear to mention regular personal contacts with minority group members are usually less prejudiced. Most consistent, also in other research, is the generally pos-

Conclusions 395

itive role of education, which also interacts with other factors, such as age, neighborhood, and occupation, of course.

We have interpreted these results with care, however. Thus, clearly, higher levels of education generally make people more aware of the subtleties of prevailing norms and morals. Even more than for other group members, the better educated resent being qualified as prejudiced or racist: After all, they see themselves as the moral guides of society. Also, they have more practice with specific forms of talk, such as interviews, argumentation, and communicative "meta-statements." Indeed, they hardly ever talk about themselves, but mainly about "others." Independent evidence about the actual prejudices of, and the discrimination by, the better educated, namely, obtained through the systematic analysis of the everyday experiences of minority group members, shows that in the appropriate contexts, the better educated hardly show less negative opinions and actions. And then, such elites have more influence and power, so that their prejudice and discrimination have vastly more negative consequences for minorities than the sometimes more blatant prejudices of the powerless.

Illustrated on the example of the media portrayal of a new group of ímmigrants, still unknown with the population at large, namely, of Tamil refugees in the Netherlands, we finally postulated that ethnic prejudices in society are preformulated by the elite. Politicians, academics, national or local leaders of government or other institutions, as well as the crucial journalists, are the elite groups that provide first descriptions and interpretations of new or salient ethnic groups. By their routine or easy access to the press, they are able to provide preferred interpretations of immigration, social conflicts, and intergroup relations in general. They are the first to signal the "problems" assumed to be caused by immigration, the strains on the job or housing market or on the welfare system, and they are among those who particularly focus on cultural differences and problems (language, education, religion, and so on). The interviews showed that large parts of the public adopt these interpretations and evaluations: A few people mitigate or even denounce such official reactions, but most will accept or even accentuate such dominant group opinions.

This assumption about the elitist preformulation of ethnic opinions also provides further perspective to the analysis of the everyday, conversational communication of racism. It confirms the importante of the media in the active diffusion of the ethnic consensus, but also provides insight into the sources and the credibility evaluations people assign to their own ethnic opinions: If the elite think so, we have even more reason to adopt that opinion.

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7. Open problems and future research

This study has examined many aspects of the discursive, cognitive, and communicative dimensions of ethnic prejudice and racism. We have analyzed a wealth of natural data, and developed new theoretical frameworks across several disciplinary boundaries. New insights into the social problems of prejudice and racism have been obtained, but at the same we have more generally learned about social information processing and the communication of beliefs and attitudes. Most of these aspects, however, have been examined here for the first time, and lack of data or theoretical details forced us to provide only an initial account. Let us, therefore, finally mention a few areas in which problems have remained unresolved, evidence unaccounted for, or theory not yet developed.

Although we now have a reasonably accurate first description of prejudiced talk, each level of analysis needs, of course, more detailed inquiry. We have examined topics, but have not yet analyzed in detall how topics are sequenced and changed or how topics are specified semantically at the micro level. We have found some general properties of stories about minorities, especially at the macro level, but the more local organization of such narratives has been studied only in part. At the global level, the structures of argumentation especially need more attention because these play such a vital role in the "defense" of ethnic opinions. Strategic semantic moves have received extensive analysis, but as for the other structures, we need to assess which of them are characteristic of prejudiced talk, and which appear in "delicate" talk more generally. Stylistic analysis has been reduced to a few observations about lexical choice and the use of "distancing" deictic expressions, whereas a rhetorical analysis did not go beyond the description of a few "figures of style." Together with a more extensive account of the proper conversational properties of spontaneous talk, these are the more "local" elements of prejudiced talk that need detaíled analysis in the future.

A more general as well as fundamental problem has been the status of informal interviews as data. We assumed that such interviews are sufficiently close to "real" talk. Yet, there are, of course, differences, and a major task for future research is to obtain such "real" conversations about ethnic minorities, and to study the proper interactional structures of such talk in "real" social contexts. We have found that in interviews, even highly prejudiced people tend to express themselves in a rather moderate way, for instance, because of the now well-established role of positive self-presentation. We need to know, however, how majority group members talk about minorities without such social constraints, such as among family members and close friends.

Conclusions 397

The sources of ethnic prejudices and their formulation have been analyzed in tercos of people's own spontaneous accounts of such interpersonal contacts or media influences. It goes without saying that a complete analysis requires independent evidence about the sources people actually have access to, use, and interpret. Detailed fieldwork, as well as experiments, are necessary to understand how people use the media in the acquisition of ethnic information, and with whom they talk themselves in the diffusion of such information.

The cognitive theory of prejudice presented in this book is a further step in the new developments of the study of the structures and strategies of social, intergroup cognition. Yet, the theory of the memory organization of ethnic attitudes has not yet gone beyond the simple structural analysis of hierarchical categorization. We need to know how organizing concepts such as "threat," "competition," or "inferiority" provide further organization to such attitude structures, and we need to know more about the strategies applied in the formation, retrieval, and uses of ethnic prejudices. Despite our attempt to explain the link between cognition and social structures of racism, we still know very little, also more generally, about the nature of the social constraints on memory organization, and hence about the relationships between prejudice and discrimination.

This lack of complete insight into the cognitive structures and strategies involved also implies that we could only provide partial explanations of the processes of interpersonal communication and persuasion. We have some fair amount of knowledge about the understanding and memory storage of prejudiced talk, and about how people build models of ethnic encounters. However, we do not yet fully understand when and how people "adopt" ethnic opinions or integrate these in more complex attitude structures. The roles of general norms, values, goals, and ideologies have been repeatedly emphasized, but we have no explicit theoretical framework of how such social or group cognitions are related to scripts, attitudes, or episodic models. Again, the deficiencies of a more general theory of social cognition made themselves felt also in the more specific theory of ethnic cognition and communication.

Our final attempt to contextualize the communication of ethnic prejudice within a wider social framework was—intentionally—limited to a few observations. If ethnic prejudice and its communication are essentially social and group based, as we have repeatedly stressed, then, of course, a proper intraand intergroup theory of prejudice and racism should be the basis for a further account of the functions and processes of prejudiced talk in society. And, of course, we need to know much more about the social mechanisms that underlie the apparent variations in prejudice types or the differences in talk about ethnic minorities. What exactly is the role of education, and, therefore, of the elite, in the

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formulation and distribution of ethnic opinions? How can such a role be integrated into a wider, macro-level account of the role of institutions in the reproduction of racism? Similarly, how do race and class interact in the acquisition and uses of ethnic prejudices and their communicative reproduction? In other words, many of the crucial, macro-level questions about the nature of racism have remained unanswered in our study.

And yet, our micro-level approach to racism, as well as the new insights obtained about the discursive, cognitive, and communicative dimensions of the reproduction of racism in society, at the same time suggest new ways of analyzing these wider, macro-level problems. For instance, instead of formulating very abstract and general hypotheses about the role of the elite, of the media, or of schooling, we now have a more subtle, more detailed and more powerful set of instruments to examine their contribution to the reproduction of racism, namely, through a detailed analysis of their communicative interactions in society. Similarly, we also have some more insight into the ways structural (macro) constraints operate at the level of the concrete (micro) enactment of racism. It is a major task for future research to spell out such relationships.

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tion that is not as high as some other big cities in the United States (though substantially higher than Amsterdam).

The reason these two classes of neighborhoods were chosen were twofold. First, ethnically mixed neighborhoods provide more everyday occasions for perception, interaction, and experiences with regard to ethnic minority group members. Second, the mixed neighborhoods are mostly the poorer inner-city areas where several important social features, such as unemployment, lower-level jobs, urban decay, and "street crime" are more common, and possibly linked to explanations people may have of their ethnic opinions. Conversely, the nonmixed, wealthier neighborhoods would allow us to study how people talk about minorities without actual everyday experiences.

Selection

Interviewees were selected by more or less arbitrarily asking people in a given neighborhood whether they would be willing to participate in an interview (see below, for modes of address). Interviewers went to public places such as cafes, laundromats, shops, and parks, or they went from door to door. Each interviewer, however, had to make sure to balance the choice of interviewees on "observable" characteristics, namely, age and gender, so that both men and women, as well as people from different ages, would be interviewed. Because not all interviews could be held during the evenings or weekends, there is some bias in some of the Amsterdam interview groups toward people who happened to be at home (unemployed, housewives, elderly) during the daytime.

Similar selection took place in San Diego, but there the "door to door" method was much harder for several reasons than in Amsterdam: Simply, especially, of course, in the evening, people are not inclined to let interviewers come in—even females—for well-known "reasons": fear of crime in the United States, especially in the cities, is much more pronounced than in Amsterdam. Second, in the predominantly White and wealthy neighborhoods, people are even less prepared to let in unknown interviewers. One student-interviewer had to try 200 addresses in this way to get 2 interviews! Third, in the mixed neighborhoods, the percentage of minorities is such that just going from door to door would enhance the probability that a member of one of the minority groups would open the door, which would require the application of somewhat difficult strategies (like asking directions, or purportedly looking for family X), to avoid interviewing such persons. After all, the project was dealing with White prejudice and racism, and we are convinced that interviewing minority members regarding their opinions and experi-

Appendix 401

ences about such a delicate topic, requires minority researchers (Essed,

1984).

Obviously, this informal method of selection does not yield representative groups of White citizens. Although we took care to interview in socially and economically different neighborhoods (which provides sufficient variation in education, occupation, income, and the like), and to select people from different ages as well as both men and women, we had no way to select people in a more systematic way. In fact, we were glad for every interview people were willing to grant us. Despite this kind of selection, the overall variation of interviewees is substantial and more than satisfactory for the kind of qualitative data we were trying to get.

Interviewers

Most interviewers were students participating in research-oriented classes that focused on different topics of our project. Each research class and hence all fieldwórk in a given neighborhood usually lasted three months, with an additional two months for further analysis. Participation was usually in partial fulfillment of a major or minor degree in discourse analysis (in Amsterdam), or as part of the requirements of a communications class (at UCSD). The majority of the students were majoring in one of the humanities or social sciences. Most students were between 20 and 25 years of age (the Californians mostly around 20). Few of the students had previous interview experience, but several instruction, discussion, and practice sessions preceded actual interviewing. For this type of interviewing, we did not find significant or otherwise interesting differences between interviewers who did and who did not have extensive interview experience. Linguistically, this, is of course, hardly surprising, as all students have, of course, more general conversational competence. Experiences we had in the earlier interview groups were very instructive in conducting the later interviews. Interviewers were both male and female, although the research classes mostly attracted more female than male students—a phenomenon which by itself would require interesting explanations (indeed, often female students appeared to be interested because of similarities between ethnic and gender prejudices). Each student conducted about 4 interviews on average, transcribed it, and at the end of a semester wrote a paper based on the interviews—also those by the other students—and against the background of theoretical literature about a specific dimension of the project. Some of the data reported in this book draw on some of these papers.

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The Interviews

As we have explained in several chapters of this book, the interviews should be as close as possible to natural conversations people have with strangers. This meant that, although there was a general interview-schema, few questions were previously established, nor was a fixed question-ordering respected. Once the interview was "running," and the topic of "ethnic minorities" had come up, the initiative was mostly left to the interviewees, with occasional follow-up questions by the interviewer. The interviewer, thus, acted like a "visitor" to the neighborhood, and mostly did not have to simulate ignorance when asking about the experiences of people and properties of their neighborhoods. The interviews in Amsterdam, often conducted at the interviewees' homes, lasted about 45 minutes on average. The California interviews, mostly conducted in public places, were usually shorter (30 minutes on average).

Most interviews were requested and started without specific mention of the "ethnic" topic. People were asked to participate in an (anonymous) interview about their opinions and experiences with respect to "this neighborhood" or "this city." After sometimes long introductory sections of the interview, the topic was then shifted to "people" in the neighborhood, which allowed a natural transition to other ethnic groups. In fact, especially in Amsterdam, where ethnic immigration is more recent and more salient, most people would themselves spontaneously introduce "foreigners." Most of the rest of the interview would then remain with that topic. Yet, we also conducted interviews that explicitly announced the topic "ethnic minorities," but we have not found differences in those interviews, nor more or less acceptance of being interviewed. The code numbers of the interviews, only in Amsterdam, of which the main topic was thus overtly announced, are followed by an "x" (for eXplicit). Code numbers for interviews with more than one person are followed by "a," "b," or "c."

The interviewers introduced themselves as what they were—students of the University of Amsterdam, or of the University of California at San Diego, respectively. One strategy of obtaining interviews was to formulate the request in terms of "help" the people could provide by giving an interview the student "had to make for a class." We assumed that such a request for help would have a stronger appeal than a less personal request for an interview (for an institution or company), and would also generate a less formal interview context. Only a few people did probe deeper into the reasons and goals of the interview. In fact, many, especially in the high-contact neighborhoods in Amsterdam, were actually very much willing to talk. In many respects, the interview provided