On Language and Reinforcing Bigotry
[Note: statistics will vary considerably depending where you are in the world. I’m using statistics and studies which are mostly relevant to the United States, and so this post will focus accordingly. This is my comfort zone, but I encourage others to take a look at these same concerns as they relate to their cultural contexts.] Language is our responsibility. How we use it determines everything from our ability to communicate with one another to how we talk about other people to how we describe the world we all share. Language is also one of the most effective ways by which we can share, distribute, and reinforce cultural values. Among the most pervasive values is bigotry in its many forms. If it were not already obvious, language and bigotry go hand in hand. What we call other people, how we refer to them in the media or “polite” conversation, and how we deal with the narratives presented to us by others not only defines the character of our bigotries and the language we use to talk about and reinforce those bigotries in the future (or the opposite, as the case may be). Language can do good, too, but when we are careless with it, it can do an almost immeasurable amount of damage to our cultural and individual identities, to our bodies, and so on. One of the most obvious examples of this involves the rhetoric surrounding Muslims in the United States and abroad. I can’t speak to the European context, but as an American, I know all too well how easy it is to fall into the trap of using language which, perhaps unintentionally, denigrates an entire people. Given that the majority of us get our information about Muslims from what we read, it is unsurprising that the majority of Americans have unfavorable views of Muslims or that a sizable portion of the population agrees with profiling Muslims/Arabs. There are numerous studies which confirm this view. For example, Christopher Bail’s upcoming book, Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream (2014; Princeton University Press), argues that representations of Muslims after 9/11 have tended to privilege narratives of fear by treating fringe (read: “radical, violent Islam”) Muslim groups with the same value as non-fringe (read: “everyday Muslims”) Muslim groups. In essence, this practice “created a gravitational pull or ‘fringe effect’ that realigned inter-organizational networks and altered the contours of mainstream discourse itself.” Additionally, Evelyn Alsultany suggests in “Arabs and Muslims in the Media after 9/11: Representations Strategies for a ‘Postrace’ Era” (2013; American Quarterly, Vol 65, No 1) that narrative television and news networks have engaged in a mode of discourse in which [positive] representations of Arabs and Muslims have helped form a new kind of racism, one that projects antiracism and multiculturalism on the surface but simultaneously produces the logics and affects necessary to legitimize racist policies and practices. It is no longer the case that the other is explicitly demonized to justify war or injustice. Now the other is portrayed sympathetically in order to project the United States as an enlightened country that has entered a postrace era. (5) These studies are not contradictory. Rather, they suggest that the complicated portrayal of Muslims in the media (broadly speaking) has created a discourse surrounding Muslims that either confirms a fear-based narrative about “radical Islam” or a form of Orientalism which places U.S. culture in opposition to a “savage Islamic state.” Thus, what we have are two mainstream portrayals: one which conforms to U.S. cultural desires and the other which conforms to U.S. cultural fears. This fear narrative has been recently bolstered by the graphic and gruesome violence of ISIS, which has, in one account, provided fuel for the anti-Islamic fire which holds “Islam” as a threat (distinctions generally absent). I can’t say for certain if these images are deliberately curated to produce this effect, though it is unlikely that it is all accidental or subconscious. Regardless, I hope it illustrates the point I’m trying to make here: namely, that language (and, by extension, the images attached to it) has such a profound affect on our culture that to ignore it, especially when it produces an ill effect, reinforces a bigoted position. Ignorance and “doing nothing,” in other words, makes us unintentionally complicit in these discourses. The same could be said of the term “feminism.” Polls suggest that most Americans do not identify as feminists, with some variation between the genders. But when given a textbook definition of feminism (that it stands for the political, social, and economic equality of the sexes), as respondents were provided in this YouGov poll, the results swing drastically in the other direction. Sadly, those numbers are still disgustingly low when you consider the clear moral question implied in that textbook definition, but the poll also suggests that Americans are horribly ill-informed about feminism at its most basic. A lot of study has been done to determine why “feminism” has become less appreciated (and even actively disliked) in our contemporary culture. In “The Framing of Feminists and Feminism in News and Public Affairs Programs in U.S. Electronic Media” (2002; Journal of Communication, Vol 52, Issue 1), Rebecca Ann Lind and Colleen Salo conclude from an analysis of 35,000 hours of network broadcasts that “feminists are demonized more often in the media than [women],” but also that feminists are less likely than women to be trivialized by for physical characteristics than general women (219)(this came as a surprise to Lind and Salo). What becomes apparent in the study is not that feminists are necessarily treated worse than everyday women, but rather that they are discussed far less frequently than their non-identitarian counterparts (or, rather, those who are not identified as feminists in a given broadcast). As they note in the conclusion, feminists “are indeed absent from the news and public affairs programs analyzed for this study” (224). In effect, demonization and absence become cultural mechanisms in a narrative which, as Lind and Salo demonstrate in their linguistic