EDITORIAL 147

Discourse and racism

Discourse & Society

Copyright © 1999
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
Vol 10(2): 147–148
[0957-9265
T E U N A . VA N D I J K (199904) 10:2;
U N I V E R S I T Y O F A M S T E R DA M 147–148; 008045]

Until recently, racism (including antisemitism, xenophobia, eurocentrism, etc.)

was not a problem with which many scholars of language, discourse and com-
munication were actively engaged. Even in more critical studies of text and talk,
gender inequalities received much more attention (especially from women) than
those based on ‘race’ or ethnicity. This is not surprising perhaps when we realize
that the vast majority of discourse analysts are white. A serious study of racism
would involve their own group, if not themselves, as an object of critical analysis.
Racism is often found to be a controversial topic,and also – if not especially – among
the elites more often denied than recognized as a major problem. Many of our col-
leagues and therefore also the funding agencies they advise about research grants,
may often find it a ‘political’ issue, or a domain of activist anti-racism, rather than
an object of ‘serious’ and systematic scholarly inquiry. Thus, scholars who accuse
‘us, whites’ of racism, often tend to be ridiculed or even marginalized not only by
the media or politics, but even in academia. Since most of these symbolic elites see
themselves as more or less liberal and tolerant, an analysis of their own text and
talk in terms of ‘racism’ is not only preposterous, but is also seen as a form of trea-
son. At most, we may be allowed to examine prejudice or forms of discrimination
(especially when those outside the elites are actively involved), but dealing with dis-
cursive practices in terms of racism is at least found to be exaggerated or ridiculous.
This dismissive attitude among scholars is especially significant when we
examine the history of racism. The history of biology, as well as of the humani-
ties and social sciences, is riddled with blatantly racist ‘science’ at least until the
Second World War, when the Nazis and the Holocaust made racist ideas less rep-
utable. And although today sociobiological and other studies that claim to prove
black intellectual inferiority may at least be found controversial, they are still
carried out by tenured professors; they are printed, sold and debated just like any
other scholarly topic. And many of the older and newer racist ideas, perhaps for-
mulated in less blatant biological terms, that is in the guise of sociocultural dif-
ferences and hierarchies, not only appear in the self-legitimating discourse of
extremist racist parties, but increasingly also in mainstream discourse in politics,
the media, education and scholarship. In other words, scholars remain part of the
problem, and have as yet done too little for its solution, even in the study of lan-
guage, discourse and communication.
148 Discourse & Society 10(2)

It need hardly be emphasized that this situation calls for urgent and extensive
critical engagement in the framework of multidisciplinary discourse studies. The
good news is that the prominence of the issues of immigration, ethnic relations
and racial inequality has led to an increasing interest during the last years in the
study of racism and related problems, also in discourse analysis. Thus, reading
the papers submitted for the issues of the present volume of Discourse & Society, I
was pleasantly surprised to find that racism, nationalism and ethnic relations
have become prominent topics of critical discourse studies in this journal. And I
am satisfied to announce therefore that this and subsequent issues will each fea-
ture one or two papers on this topic. I sincerely hope that these papers, and the
earlier ones we published, will stimulate further research in this area.
Such research is not easy. Especially in elite discourse, derogation today may
be more subtle than the explicit use of racist labels for outgroups. Thus we
encounter the systematic foregrounding and emphasizing of our good actions
and their bad ones (or the backgrounding of our bad actions and their good ones)
by headlines and other conventional schematic categories, by syntactic structures
(actives vs passives) and nominalizations, by pronouns and global (de)topicaliz-
ation, as well as by conditions of local coherence, presuppositions, indirectness,
forms of quotation, detail or level of action description, and many other struc-
tures and strategies of text and talk about the Others.
And this is only the beginning of a multidisciplinary analysis of the role of dis-
course in racism as a system of social inequality. Apart from such systematic and
multilevel descriptions of subtle discursive derogation, we need to examine the
conditions and consequences, and the precise functions of such text and talk in
social interaction and society. We need to know how (white) recipients understand
and flexibly process and memorize elements of such discourse, and how it shapes
their mental models of specific ethnic events, and more generally the social repre-
sentations of the Others shared with other members of their own group. Or con-
versely, how such contextualized and hence variable mental representations and
strategies operate in the very production of text or talk in specific social situations.
Crucially, though, racism is not only about biased mental models or prejudiced
attitudes or ideologies and their construction or expression in discourse. Racism
is about power and dominance, about ethnic or racial inequality, and hence about
groups and institutions and more complex social arrangements of contemporary
societies. Hence, we finally need to examine how such thought and talk are repro-
duced throughout the group, or between groups, to understand the role of
leaders and elites in making such discourse credible, and study the everyday rou-
tines of discourse making in the media, politics, education, scholarship or cor-
porate business. Just like any form of dominance or power abuse, racism is being
challenged by minority groups themselves as well as by white dissidents, whose
oppositional discourse, social interaction and organizations also require discur-
sive analysis. In this broader, multidisciplinary perspective, the study of racism
and discourse has only just begun.

Readers are invited to critically react to this editorial. Their comments will be published in
the Discussion section of one of the next issues of Discourse & Society. See the inside back
cover for the required format of these contributions.