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

42 Communicating Racism

information. For most categories, it is highly unlikely that people have acquired information by personal experience only. It is probable that personal experiences often also include things they have heard "from other people." For instance, the fact that many people say they know about "resentment" or "prejudice" against minorities suggests that they heard about this from others, or from the media. We return to this role of the media, hearsay, and personal experiences in later chapters.

Hartmann and Husband (1974) not only surveyed the information sources and opinions of children and adults in various areas, but also conducted a (mostly thematic) content analysis of a number of newspapers (Times, Guardian, Daily Express, and Daily Mirror) over a period of seven years (1963-1970). The major themes the newspaper reports on are, for example, housing, education, health, employment, numbers (of immigrants), White hostility, Black hostility, discrimination, police, crime, disturbances, and cultural differences. A dominant topic during these years was the immigration of Commonwealth subjects from East Africa, the Caribbean, and India. In this as well as in the other topics, minority groups are primarily portrayed as a threat and as causing "problems." These may be the very "numbers" that were seen to "invade" the country, the perceíved competition for houses, work, education, and social welfare, as well as the frequent associations with crime, riots, or other "disturbances." In other words, immigration and social problems are redefined as a "race" problem. The press did pay attention to conflicts, tensions, and resentment against the new citizens, but hardly discussed the underlying causes and consequences of this resentment, such as ethnic prejudice and racism, or discrimination against Black people. On the whole, minority groups were not represented as being part of British society, but as outsiders who preferably should be "kept out." Racist statements of someone such as Powell received wide coverage in these years. The authors conclude that the media have not just expressed general opinions and feelings, but have themselves significantly contributed to such negative feelings.

Other British studies confirm these conclusions. Critcher, Parker, and Sondhi (1977), and Troyna (1981), in their analyses of the British regional press (Birmingham and Manchester), found that most items are about crime and human interest, followed by the national issues of immigration and the debate about legislation against such immigration. The actions of the neofascist National Front receive much attention, and although there is space devoted to the "White" side of the "problem," namely, discrimination, this is typically portrayed as incidental, as the act of extremist individuals, and notas a structural manifestation of British racism. Hall et al. (1978) in their extensive study of the political, legal, social, and media reactions to the "mugging crisis" also found

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that young Black West Indians tend to be associated with crimes in general and with mugging in particular. Downing (1980), who summarizes his findings from an analysis of TV programs, stresses that Blacks, both in Britain and in African countries, are seldom allowed to give their opinions. The media rather invite a (male) White "minority specialist" to give his views. Immigration is the main theme, and violence against Blacks is treated as regrettable incidents.

Most other studies on the portrayal of ethnic groups in the press that have been carried out in the United States and in various countries in Europe have come to similar conclusions. Yet, there are few in-depth content analyses of the news media. De Mott and Roberts (1979) in their bibliography list 138 items in English, including British studies, but most of the items are brief and anecdotal. There is not a single fullfledged study of the portrayal of minorities (or of any minority group) in the American press until the more general monograph by Wilson and Gutiérrez (1985). Fischer and Lowenstein (1967) feature a number of articles by journalists, but do not repon results of systematic research. The 1960 "riots" are widely covered, and it is concluded that here too the negative, sensational, violent dimensions of racial conflict are stressed. The Black perspective is seldom represented, and the same holds for police brutality (see also Schary, 1969). Knopf (1975), in her study on "rumors and riots" in earlier decades, also finds that, generally, Blacks are portrayed negatively, and that the White dominant perspective is always given in press accounts. Also, Greenberg and Atkin (1978) and Roberts (1975) conclude that Blacks are mostly present only in "nonspeaking" roles, even for events that directly involve them. This is true not only for their role in press stories, but also for their participation in the news media themselves: Especially in higher positions, there are virtually no Black journalists (Greenberg & Mazingo, 1976).

Gutiérrez (1978), in his study of the California media, concludes that Chicanos tend to be portrayed negatively when conflicts arise, and that police versions or other Anglo sources of such conflicts are usually preferred over those of Chicano representatives. Chicanos are routinely defined as "illegals" so that they can be treated as a "problem ofjustice" (see also Wilson and Gutiérrez, 1985).

Our own studies of the Dutch press (van Dijk, 1983a, 1987b, 1987d), which were both quantitative and qualitative, fbund that the picture is similar to the one found for the American and British media of the 1960s and 1970s: Ethnic minority groups (immigrant workers from different Mediterranean countries and the Surínamese) are sometimes subtly associated with social and economic problems. In the early 1980s, the immigration topic itself became somewhat less prominent, but socioeconomic and cultural themes are discussed and indirectly associated with threat, ten-

44 Communicating Racism

sion, conflict, problems, and other difficulties. Crime and deviance are the most frequent topics, "even" in the quality press. Much like the mugging problem studied by Hall et al. (1978), the Dutch press continues to be fascinated by the Amsterdam drug scene, which is also preferably redefined as at least in part a "Black" problem. Discrimination is reported, but more easily when it affects Jewish people and institutions than when individual Black or ethnically different immigrants are involved. Similarly, acts of discrimination are reported as incidents rather than as expressions of widespread racism. Racism is a taboo notion, and when Blacks have experienced racism, for instance, by the authorities (notably the police), such events will go unreported or are reported with the usual distance markers, such as quotes, modalities, and other doubt-implying particles. Research findings that show the systematic occurrence of ethnic prejudice and racism are either ignored or tend to be marginalized or discredited by much of the press. The traditional myth of Dutch tolerance is not challenged.

The emergence of right-wing racist parties also received substantial attention, especially when one of these parties obtained a seat in Parliament in 1982. Yet only the spectacular actions and conflicts created by this party are focused on, not the background, ideas, history, or the systematic links with people and ideologies within the established parties. Thus, racism in politics is treated just as incidental as racism in general. It is simply attributed to a small right-wing party, and—with more understanding—to poor people in urban neighborhoods where this party collected up to 10% of the votes. Prejudice and discrimination elsewhere, such as in national or local government, the police, the courts, education, or the media, is never extensively reported or analyzed. We discuss the _implications of this tendency in the mass media for the reproduction of ethnic prejudice in everyday talk in later chapters.

Summary

Despite the obvious differences between newspapers, countries, regions, and the periods examined in the (few) substantial studies about the representation of race in the press, there seem to be a number of prevailing and persisting commonalities:

(a) Ethnic minorities are also minorities in the press—they are less employed and less represented. (b) Many of the dominant topics are directly or more subtly associated with problems, difficulties, or threats to the dominant values, interests, goals, or culture. (c) Ethnic events are consistently described from a White, majority point of view, in which the authorities are given more space and credíbilíty than minority spokespersons. (d) Topics that are relevant for the ordinary daily life of ethnic

Structures 45

groups, such as work, housing, health, education, political life, and culture, as well as discrimination in these areas, are hardly discussed in the press, unless they lead to "problems" for society as a whole or when they are spectacular. (e) Racism is systematically underreported, reduced to incidents of individual discrimination, or attributed to small rightwing parties and located in poor city areas. Racism of the elite or the various institutions is seldom discussed.

Conclusions

It goes without saying that against this background, the media have been reluctant, to say the least, to discuss publicly their own role in the reproduction of racism in society. Critical analysis is censored, and my own experiences with the Dutch press suggest that critics are often personally discredited or prevented from collecting data in fieldwork.

For the discussion in this book, the role of the media is highly relevant. They provide the main "data" and the issues people may use for everyday conversation, especially for those topics of talk that cannot be inferred from personal experiences or contacts with other people: immigration and national immigration policies, the numbers of immigrants, unemployment statistics, the role of ethnic groups in housing and education, discrimination, and crime statistics.

This does not mean that most newspapers explicitly formulate racist opinions. Many editors and journalists will maintain that they are against racism, and generally loathe extremist racist parties. Their role, indeed, is more subtle and indirect. Partly, but only partly, is negative reporting a consequence of routine conditions of news production and news values: Negative, spectacular events tend to get more attention, and any group without power, influence, and organized spokespersons will have less access to the news media.

On the other hand, many properties of content or style can only be explained as expressions of the dominant ideologies of class and ethnic group to which the journalist belongs—hence, the White perspective, the special attention to the actions and opinions of the authorities, the location of racism in "poor" areas, and the reluctance to cover racism of elites or institutions. Similarly, the focus on "problems" associated with the presence of immigrants of color (because other immigrants are not so discussed), is not just the consequence of the general media bias that favors coverage of negative issues and problems.

The many "neutral" topics that are present for the White majority (such as political organization, culture, the arts) are not there when they are about minority groups. And the problems for the majority (economic

46 Communicating Racism

recession, unemployment, lack of housing, crime) are not paralleled by those problems that are relevant for the minority. On the contrary, the majority problems are often subtly attributed to the very presence of minority groups. Deeper social causes, contexts, and consequences, such as the role of discrimination in housing, everyday contacts, education, and employment, are seldom discussed.

Even when the media do not formulate negative opinions themselves, they provide a definition of the ethnic situation that makes such negative inferences not only possible but also plausible. In this way, they both preformulate prejudice and reinforce the partial models of the ethnic situation that are acquired by personal experiences, hearsay, and socialization.

3.2. TEXTBOOKS AND

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

Where the mass media are the primary information source about ethnic groups for adults, textbooks and children's books (including comics) play a similar role for children, probably surpassed only by television. Indeed, many of the initial prejudices we bring to bear on present minority groups may find their origin in this important textual dimension of socialization and education (Katz, 1976; Milner, 1983).

It comes as no surprise, then, that analyses of children's books and school textbooks yield results that are rather similar to those of the media. The studies that examine history, geography, or social science textbooks in various countries consistently find variable degrees of ethnocentrism, prejudice, and racism (Dixon, 1977; Ferro, 1981; Pearson, 1976; Redmond, 1979; Stinton, 1980; van den Berg & Reinsch, 1983; van Dijk, 1986a; World Council of Churches, 1979; Zimet, 1976).

Briefly summarizing the major results of these studies, we find, first, that the home country, and then other Western countries or Western civilization, are systematically portrayed more extensively, more favorably, and as superior to the colonized, Third World, or "Black" countries and civilizations of the southern hemisphere, notably in Asia and Africa. Second, immigrants from those countries in the home country are often treated in similar ways, if at all. As in the press, the White dominant perspective prevails. In U. S. textbooks, American Indians, Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, or other groups are systematically underrepresented.

In Dutch textbooks of the mid-1980s, we find the same systematic exclusion of minority groups from high school textbooks (van Dijk, 1986a). Descriptions are often stereotypical, ahistorical, and, as usual, neglect the problem of discrimination and racism. Colonial history, as is the case for most textbooks in most ex-colonial countries, is described in terms of adventures, explorations, heroic feats, or the diffusion of "civi-

Structures 47

lizatíon," rather than in terms of exploitation, slavery, or brutalities. Colonized people are still characterized as "primitive," and their histories of before and alter the colonial period neglected.

The dominant picture of different ethnic groups and of other peoples that arises from such textbooks is an important contribution to the ethnocentric socialization of knowledge and beliefs in adolescents. The biased definitions of such groups, even when very incomplete and sketchy, contribute to a negative overall framework in which such groups are associated with cruelty, crime, (self-inflicted) poverty, primitivism, stupidity, and "strange" or, at best, exotic behavior. As soon as immigrants from such countries, often former colonies, actually become prominent in our present-day societies, such early definitions may be used as the basis for the further extension of stereotypes and prejudices. The striking similarity between the contents of stereotypes or associations in everyday talk, the media, textbooks, and literature suggests that present-day attitudes about minority groups are notjust formed on the basis of everyday experiences, hearsay, or media inferences. There is a systematic, historical foundation to the current cultural definitions of foreigners.

3.3. CONCLUSIONS

Although we summarized systematic research findings mainly on the representation of ethnic groups in the news media and books for children, these are by no means the only forms of discourse that form the ideological environment for prejudiced talk. TV programs, movies, and advertising also play an important role in which the function of images is also relevant for the formation of ethnic stereotypes (see Bogle, 1973; Greenberg & Mazingo, 1976; Maynard, 1974; Pierce et al., 1978; Wilson & Gutiérrez, 1985; and many other studies).

The results of these studies suggest that prejudice in talk is not spontaneous, "invented" on the spot, or simply a consequence of ethnic encounters. Rather, through socialization, education, and the many forms of mass communication and the media, majority group members have been constantly confronted with repeated negative stereotypes and ethnocentrism. Even, or maybe because of, their most "innocent" or subtle forms, such stereotypes provide dominant models of the ethnic situation and its participants. The mass communication of these models explains why they can become a dominant consensus. And as we shall see in the next sections and chapters, the content of everyday talk is in many ways coherent with the models conveyed by the media as preformulated by journalists, teachers, advertisers, politicians, scholars, and other elite groups. Indeed, most prejudice may not be expressed on the street but behind the typewriter or word processor.

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4. Topics of conversation

4.1. TOPICS AS SEMANTIC MACROSTRUCTURES

We start our analysis of everyday talk about ethnic groups with a description of the topics or themes that are expressed in such discourse. Theoretically, topics are defined in what we have called semantic macrostructures (see, e.g., van Dijk, 1980a, for details). Thus, topics are properties of the global meaning of discourse. They represent what a fragment of text or talk is about, globally speaking. They also may be considered as the "gist" or most important information of such a fragment. When we summarize a discourse, we essentially express its underlying semantic macrostructure, or thematic structure. Topics organize the local meanings of a discourse and, therefore, also define its overall coherence. Speakers in conversation are expected to follow or keep to the topic once introduced, or must strategically change the topic. If not, incoherence is the result and such incoherence will often be negatively evaluated by the other speech partner. Topic elicitation, introduction, maintenance, or change are complex strategies of conversational interaction (Button & Casey, 1984; McLaughlin, 1984).

Semantic macrostructures are derived from local meanings of words and sentences by macro rules, such as deletion, generalization, and construction. Such rules leave out the irrelevant details, combine similar meanings to higher-level abstract meanings, or construct different meaning constituents in higher-level event or action concepts. Thus, the details of actions such as going to the airport, checking in, going to the gate, boarding, and so forth may be constructed as contributing to the overall discourse topic of "traveling by plane to ...." This means that macro rules reduce the complexity of lower-level meanings to simpler, more abstract, higher-level meanings. Because they are also meaning constructs, topics are represented as propositions and not, for instance, as isolated concepts, such as "travel." The concept of travel would in this case be a component part of the thematic proposition "A travels by plane to B," which could be the overall topic of a concrete story. Of course, several of such stories may be classified under the common conceptual denominator or theme (in the traditional sense) of travel.

Topics can be derived from sequences of local meanings (propositional sequences, or "episodes," see van Dijk, 1982a), only on the basís of world knowledge: The inference of "air travel" from information such as going to the airport and checking in can be made only by discourse

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participants who have world knowledge about air travel, such as scripts of such routine episodes of our culture (Schank & Abelson, 1977). And because all interpretation is subjective, based on personally and socially variable cognitive representations, the inference of topics may also be subjective. What one participant finds "important" or "topical" in a fragment of discourse may not be found important by other participants, for example, because there are different modeis of the situation, different opinions, or different attitudes. These differences in topic structure may also affect the course of conversation. Speakers, therefore, often need to negotiate about a cornmon topic, or may speak in related but different topic control sets, which may lead to misunderstanding and conflict.

Cognitive Macrostrategies

Actual topic production and understanding is strategic (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). Speakers do not form or infer a topic "after the (f)act" of propositional sequences. In production, they first need to have at least some vague topical plan within which the individual propositions are locally planned and expressed. In conversation, local information in turns of the next speaker may then lead to a revision of the ínitíally planned topic. Similarly, in comprehension, a recipient tries to find out as soon as possible what the discourse "is about," that is, forros a provisional topic. This may already be accomplished from knowledge inferred from the context of communication, obvious goals or characteristics of speakers, and/or from first sentences. Once a topic has been construed, it is a powerful, while top-down conceptual structure in the memory Control System of the recipient. It monitors and facilitates the local understanding of the individual words and sentences of ongoing discourse, shows where incoherence is produced, and allows the recipient to continue current topics coherently, or change them. Much like other strategies, these cognitive macrostrategies are flexible, multilevel, and effective ways of handling very complex information. Yet, they are also "hypothetical." Unlike rules, they are only a forro of guessing, and they, therefore, may lead to error. A wrong assumption about an actual topic may, therefore, have to be modified by subsequent information from later sentences or turns.

Semantic macrostructures dominate the textual representations in memory. That is, in processes of retrieval they are easily and effectively found, and experiments have shown that in general they are much better and can be recalled after a longer time than local meanings. This is in accordance with our intuitions: We remember best the main topics or most important information of a text or conversation (Kintsch & van

50 Communicating Racism

Dijk, 1978; Kieras, 1982; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1982). For other reasons, only striking details are remembered well in specific circumstances, such as details that are associated with strong emotions (Martins, 1982), very concrete imagery, personal experiences, or prominent attitudes.

Similarly, macropropositions also dominate so-called situation mod- els constructed from the interpreted text and from previous personal and general knowledge. These models are what a text is about in the referential (and not in the meaning, intentional) sense. But our representations of complex events or scenes also need to be organized and, therefore, are "headed" by an overall macroproposition. Thus, the event of taking a trip by airplane, whether actually participated in or read about, is píctured in a model of this event, and this model is also dominated by an overall "definition of the situation," that is, by a macroproposition such as "A flying to ...." This means that macropropositions in discourse may actívate both previous discourses and "previous" models.

4.2. TOPICS IN PREJUDICED DISCOURSE

Obviously, topics play a crucial role in the meaning and the actual production or comprehension of discourse. Indeed, without the overall control of a topic, we would be unable to accomplish a conversation of more than a few turns, because we would not have an idea what the conversation was about at a particular moment. Also, we would be unable to remember previous conversations. This role of themes or topics is, therefore, also crucial in talk about ethnic minorities. Whatever the length or complexity of such talk, speech participants not only must be able to talk about a mutually negotiable topic but also must draw general inferences from such talk for later use, for example, in action or in other conversations. And only if they have been able to assign topics to news reports in the media (often signaled by headlines), or to discourses from other sources referred to, are they able to use such information in actual conversations.

As we discuss in more detail in Chapters 4 and 5, the assignment of topics to text or talk fragments about ethnic minority groups is, however, a socially controlled subjective accomplishment. Speakers may have topical intentions that may be significantly different from the topical assumptions of recipients. A news report about unemployment among young minority group members may be assigned the topic "They cause unemployment" instead of the topic "They suffer from unemployment." The same is true in everyday conversations. Local meanings may be subjected to a number of specific strategic operations (such as negative associations, transfer and attribution, selective attention, and so on) that may form the basis of different macroproposition formation by the recipient.

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Similarly, the listener may also "upgrade" local meanings to higherlevel macropropositions, by taking a detail as the organizing conceptual framework of a discourse fragment. Making sense of talk, thus, essentially involves making sense of the overall intentions, meanings, or topics of talk, and for prejudiced participants, such overall meanings may be biased. This process will be described in more detail later. Here, we focus primarily on what conversational participants themselves say about ethnic minority groups. That is, they carry the major responsibility of "executing" a topic, even if that topic is vaguely or indirectly suggested by the participant/interviewer. Yet, even then their topics are formed and executed locally within the overall definition of the communicative context, including its goals and possibly its overall topic, for example, "contacts in the neighborhood" or "foreigners in town. "

A full-fledged analysis of all main topics and secondary topics of some 180 interviews is a very cumbersome enterprise, especially if we want to show explicitly how such topics can be derived from local propositions expressed in talk. Therefore, we use a more intuitive method of inferring main themes from a number of relevant fragments, namely, summarization. We have seen that summaries may be taken as expressions of underlying macropropositions, and although our summaries may also be subjective, we have no other practical method than this to establish the main themes as they organize talk about ethnic groups.

The first group of interviews (N = 49, with 53 interviewees because some interviews were held with more than one person), held in various neighborhoods in Amsterdam, express topics that can be further categorized in various fields of experiences, opinions, or attitude dimensions. These topics are not necessarily "prejudiced," but they stereotypically tend to "come up" as soon as "foreigners" are discussed, whether associated with negative or more neutral evaluations. In our simple listing of topics, we summarize for the group as a whole and do not study possible correlations between topics in general or within individual interviews in particular.

(a) Contacts and information sources.

The first set of topics is particularly important for our discussion because they concern contacts and acquisition of information about ethnic groups. We order the topies in this category by their frequency of occurrence (some topics occur several times in the same interview). We use the pronoun them to refer to ethnic minority groups, sometimes different ones, as is it done by the speakers. We comment upon this use of the pronoun later.