13th: A Community Action Project

The purpose of this blog is to tie linguistic anthropology and Ava DuVernay's "13th" (2016) together in order to address social injustice. Please visit our "About Us" page to learn more about our reasons and goals behind constructing this site. -Christa & Max

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Deconstructing Contemporary Racist Discourse in U.S. Media Coverage of Violent Crime In the current social and political climate of the United States, there has been a resurgence of overt racist di…

This links leads to the abstract I wrote for an honors independent study project titled “Deconstructing Contemporary Racist Discourse in U.S. Media Coverage of Violent Crime”, which I presented during the 2017 Five College Anthropology Conference at Mount Holyoke. I pursued this research in my first semester as a senior undergraduate student, supplementing my non-honors coursework in the linguistic anthropology class “Language & Racism.” My interest in this topic stemmed from a passion to pursue anti-racist activist work while still needing to better understand the nature of contemporary racism in order for those endeavors to be successful.

-Christa

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Hi! I think this blog is a great idea, and look forward to hearing more about it. I'd like to know if you're white? I ask this not to be rude, but to ask about your positionality in this struggle and how you are remaining aware of privilege(s) you may or may not have. Is just two of you involved, or is it the entirety of your class? I apologize if this has already been asked. Thank you for taking the time to read and respond.

Hello there, and thank you for your kind words! Your question is definitely not rude at all – Both Max and myself are white, which is something we addressed in the actual write-up of our project for our class but not on this blog. I greatly appreciate you candidly asking us this question because it is definitely something that we need to explicitly state here in order to be completely transparent about our own privilege as white people, particularly given that we are discussing issues connected to race and racism. I am going to revise our About Us over the next few days in order to reflect this.

While I cannot speak for Max (but invite him to edit this post to include his own perspective once he sees this!), I can say that my own interest in this topic stems from a passion to pursue anti-racist activist work while still needing to better understand the nature of racism in our society in order to be successful in those endeavors. I grew up in a small, predominantly white hometown, and it was not until I began college that I started to see my privilege as a white woman. Over the last four years, I have geared my coursework as a psychology and anthropology student around issues of social inequality, with a particular lens on racism as well as the psychology of discrimination and prejudice. In the last year I have gotten involved with a student-led reproductive justice activist group in my area, which has been an especially transformative experience for me in terms of developing my own knowledge-base on how to be an anti-racist activist, hashing out the various layers of privilege I possess, coming to better understand how my differing social identities intersect, and learning how to call-out and educate my white family and friends in productive ways. I am actively working to consistently center the voices of transwomen of color, gender nonconforming folks, and folks who do not identify according to the gender binary through this work. I have recently been reading up on some of Angela Davis and Loretta Ross’ books on RJ, SJ and feminism, but definitely have a lot left to learn in terms of these movements. I understand that because I am white I will never be not racist, but I consider it necessary to always be working towards getting closer to that point regardless. I am really sorry that this response is super long, but I hope that it answers your question about my positionality! (Also I apologize for any typos, I am typing this up quickly because I want to give you a response to these questions as soon as possible and may have missed a few mistakes.)

As far as who is involved with this blog, it is only Max and I. The rest of the students in our class are also pursuing projects associated with the topic of our course, although each group’s projects vary quite a bit!

Please let me know if you have any additional questions or if my responses here were not sufficient and you would like clarification! Both Max and I are available at the email listed on our main blog page if you are comfortable reaching out in that way, but I am also open to providing you with my individual email address if you would like to discuss things further with me specifically. Or we can easily continue to discuss things through our ask box, too! Thank you again for asking such important and necessary questions of us and I hope this response answers all of your questions.

- Christa

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Racial Language use in the 1988 Presidential Election

The 1988 presidential election between George H.W Bush and Michael Dukakis was initially a  close race, with polls putting Dukakis up slightly. This changed, however, in mid-september of 1988, coinciding with an attack ad against Dukakis supporting a law granting weekend passes to prison inmates in Massachusetts. The ad - shown below - prominently features a picture of William Horton, an African American convicted of murder.

This ad ran independently of Bush’s campaign, who ran an ad on the same topic, focusing on the imagery of a ‘revolving door’ of inmates granted these weekend passes. While this ad is the only one featured and discussed in 13th, the Bush campaigns ad is relevant to the discussion. Note that the only inmate that looks at the camera as they go through the door is African American.

Hortons actions are inexcusable, that much is very true. But it is important to consider the implications of his extensive use in the ad, playing to the basest fears of the American public at the time. This, alongside the Bush campaigns ad, worked against Dukakis, with Bush surging in the polls shortly after their release. 

I believe the attention given to the African American men in these adverts, and the labels given to them, were intended by the Republicans to capitalise on what 13th calls a ‘primitive fear’ against African Americans held by Whites.

The language used in these ads never explicitly target African Americans, but were subtly intended to craft associations with the images to certain groups of people. Using aggressive language on top of just calling them ‘criminals’, such as ‘rapists’ and ‘murderers’, while displaying African Americans on screen, resulted in the race as a whole being further marked in the minds of White American voters. This continued markedness against African Americans as ‘criminals’ would encourage White voters to vote against Dukakis out of fear.

Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, was interviewed in 1981 about the Southern Strategy, a republican tactic to secure white voters in the South by appealing to the racism held against African Americans at the time. This interview, made public in 2012, showcased the intention of hurting black voters indirectly by changing economic policies.

 “By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires……... Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.…”

Find the full interview here.

While the interview took place years before the Bush campaign, it shows the intentional targeting of African American voters by Republicans. It isn’t much of a reach to assume the group were aware of what they were perpetuating when they made the attack ad. Atwater seemed to acknowledge the changing attitude to racial slurs in America, and evolved his campaign tactics to keep African Americans marked by White voters in the South, even if the voters themselves were not directly aware of it.

- Max

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What are some other resources we can use to learn more?

What exactly would you like to learn more about? If you are referring to our most recent post here (about the term “super-predators” being a social indexical of young African American men), I would suggest checking out the following links for additional information:

Cognitive Warfare and Young Black Males in America - B. The Super Predator War by Perry L. Moriearty & William Carson

Why Hillary’s Super-Predator Comment Mattersby Ronda Lee (opinion piece)

The Context of the Term “Superpredator” by martinV (opinion piece)

I hope that helps!

-Christa

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“Super-predator” as a Racial Index

The term “super-predator” is discussed in Ava DuVernay’s 13th (2016), particularly how it linguistically indexes young African American men. Here, to index something essentially means to point to it. Indexicality more specifically is a process by which linguistic features (like the term “super-predator”) covertly connect to social meaning (like pointing to a specific social group, such as young African American men). This process is contextual, meaning that it often depends upon who a speaker is, where they are, and even who a speaker’s audience is.

But why does this matter? Well, when terms like “super-predator” are used to index an entire group of people, that particular group is thus associated with the characteristics linked to it, however positive or negative they may be. For instance: if we contextually look at the short clip above (shown in 13th but originally from this 1996 C-SPAN broadcast), we see Hilary Clinton using the term “super-predator” to characterize young African American men as inherently animalistic, criminalistic, and gang-involved without ever explicitly mentioning race in her speech. Not only does this paint young African American men as subhuman and innately threatening, but by promoting these ideologies Hilary is justifying initiatives that target people of color and members of low-income communities (of whom are overwhelming people of color) such as with the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.

This method of social indexing, coupled with a long history of race-based oppression and discrimination against people of color in our country, has lead to the criminalization of African American men and others who are perceived as members of this group. Going one step further, we can see that this process of criminalization has had severe consequences in terms of mass incarceration, “stop and frisk” policies, and other forms of state-sanctioned violence that disproportionately affect young African American men and communities of color more broadly.

To read more about what 13th (2016) calls the “mythology of black criminality”, check out the following pages:

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Criminal Justice

Police Reform Is Impossible in America by Donovan X. Ramsey

The Trayvon Martin Killing and the Myth of Black-on-Black Crime by Jamelle Bouie

The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Ta-Nehisi Coates

If you have any questions, suggestions and/or corrections relating to this post or another aspect of our blog, please feel free to stop by our ask box or email us at [email protected].

- Christa

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Frequently Asked Questions

Below are some of the common questions folks ask when first thinking about the intersections between language, racism, and contemporary social issues, or when surfing through the specific posts on our blog. Feel free to visit our ask box if you have any questions that we have failed to address here, if you would like clarification on something we have posted, or if you have anything to add to these topics!

- Christa & Max

Q: But language is just words, how can it perpetuate racism?

A: Great question! This addresses a common misconception that language is “just” how people express their thoughts or beliefs, without actually influencing how people think or perceive things. But in actuality, it totally does! It shapes how we identify and understand both ourselves and others in a unique myriad of ways. Furthermore, language perpetuates racism by delineating between marked (atypical) and unmarked (typical) groups according to racialized and ethnicized linguistic stereotypes, often relying on fictional norms of white, english speaking, middle class Americans to do so. Perceptions of which groups are marked versus unmarked constructs racial and ethnic differences between groups, reinforcing existing racial hierarchies as well as racism in which whiteness is valued above other ethnoracial identities. It helps to think about language as a form of action rather than only a means of communication when trying to understand this.

But this is a super complex topic and we don’t want you to take our word for it--check out Jane H. Hill’s book The Everyday Language of White Racism, in which she does a fantastic job of laying this out in much more detail (reviewed and briefly summarized here).

Q: I use racial slurs but I don’t mean them in a racist way, is that still racist?

A: In short, yes. This is because racial slurs and epithets are still charged with discriminatory and derogatory meaning regardless of one’s intentions behind using them. But the belief that personal intentions are capable of shaping the meaning of words, such as racial slurs, is actually a really common one! This is called the personalist linguistic ideology (Hill also discusses this at length in The Everyday Language of White Racism), which holds that a speaker’s intentions and beliefs are integral to understanding the meaning of their words. This lets speakers deny claims that their speech is racist so long as it was not their explicit intention to be, although that is certainly not the case. So yes, racial slurs and epithets are racist regardless of one’s intentions, contrary to the personalist linguistic ideology.

Q: Okay sure, but not all the words people say are racist actually are racist. Look in the dictionary!

A: This is a common response people have when faced with accusations of saying something racist. Although it might make sense at face value, this belief is actually part of the referentialist linguistic ideology, or referentialism. According to Hodges’ 2015 research on Ideologies of language and race in US media discourse about the Trayvon Martin shooting, this ideology holds that words carry meaning in stable, unchanging ways and that ideas are conveyed through language according to exact definitions laid out by authoritative sources. This ideology does not take into account who has the power or voice to write these authoritative sources (and who does not), nor does it consider the fact that definitions and meanings of terms evolve and change over time. Thus authoritative sources, often fixed in nature, cannot adequately define the meaning of all words and it is instead necessary to look towards the respective social contexts and historical eras in which words are used in order to best determine their meaning.

Q: But what is a “linguistic ideology” in the first place?

A: Linguistic ideologies (sometimes referred to as language ideologies) are widely held, “commonsense” beliefs about language that categorize languages and the folks who speak them. They are generally untrue, manifest from and perpetuate social inequity, and hard to dispute. Personalism and referentialism, described above, are two illustrations of linguistic ideologies.

Q: What is mass incarceration?

A: Mass incarceration is the term used to describe the exponential increase of incarcerated folk in the Unites States over the last four decades, which has disproportionately affected people of color. To learn more about this, check out this fact sheet on criminal justice by the NAACP for general information about trends, racial disparities, and consequences of incarceration in the United States. This infographic on the facts of combating mass incarceration by the ACLU is also a great resource if you are interested in learning more about mass incarceration.

Q: How can I contact the creators of this blog? Why did you make it?

A: You can get in touch with us through our ask box or by email ([email protected]) to voice any questions, suggestions, or concerns that you might have related to this blog or the topics we cover in it. Please visit our about us page to learn more about our specific reasons and goals behind constructing this site.

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A serious reformation of our carceral policy—one seeking a smaller prison population, and a prison population that looks more like America—cannot concern itself merely with sentencing reform, cannot pretend as though the past 50 years of criminal-justice policy did not do real damage. And so it is not possible to truly reform our justice system without reforming the institutional structures, the communities, and the politics that surround it. Robert Sampson argues for “affirmative action for neighborhoods”—reform that would target investment in both persistently poor neighborhoods and the poor individuals living in those neighborhoods. One class of people suffers deprivation at levels above and beyond the rest of the country—the same group that so disproportionately fills our jails and prisons. To pull too energetically on one thread is to tug at the entire tapestry.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, excerpt from “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration”

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About Us

We are two white undergraduate students who, as part of a linguistic anthropology course titled “Language and Racism” that we are taking throughout the Spring of 2017, are pursuing a community action project that addresses language’s role in perpetuating racism in U.S. society. In turn, we are investigating how language contributes to social injustices such as mass incarceration and the criminalization of people of color. After all, language has an incredible capacity to shape how people think about and perceive both others and themselves, and we must spread awareness about this fact if any resolution is to be made!

Thus, our blogs highlights the issues of mass incarceration and criminalization of African Americans by tying linguistic anthropological concepts to many of the ideas raised in Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th. We have chosen this film as part of our community action project because of its easy accessibility to the everyday layperson (check it out on Netflix!) and for the close attention it pays to contemporary social justice issues while centering the voices of marginalized groups.

In this film, DuVernay highlights how the U.S. prison industrial- and growing detention industrial-complexes have contributed to the mass incarceration of people of color--particularly African American men--while simultaneously profiting from the low-wage or unpaid labor of those who are incarcerated. It calls particular attention to the Thirteenth Amendment, included below, and how it allows for the continued exploitation of folks who are incarcerated by legalizing slavery:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

It is our hope that this blog will successfully tie 13th and linguistic anthropology together in order to address and potentially pose solutions to the aforesaid social injustices. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us through our ask box, by email ([email protected]) and/or to visit our FAQ.

Please fill out our brief feedback survey if you have a spare moment! It consists of a few multiple choice questions and one optional short answer question. We greatly value and appreciate your feedback!

Best,

Christa & Max