The Everyday Language of White Racism by Hill Jane H

Author:Hill, Jane H. [Hill, Jane H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, linguistics, Historical & Comparative, Sociolinguistics, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781405184533
Google: VDIqAQAAIAAJ
Amazon: 1405184531
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2008-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

b. “Mr. Lott made matters only worse by embarking on a last-ditch campaign full of abject apologies that rang hollow to most witnesses”

(Mr. Lott Steps Down 2002 [editorial]).

c. “All the evidence indicates that what Lott truly meant to say was nothing – nothing at all . . . Critics and alarmists have taken Lott’s empty and meaningless words at a public event and injected them with substance they never had” (Rogers 2002).

Light talk, public and private: What light talk reveals about speaker beliefs

A second line of evidence used to explore the link between Lott’s words and his beliefs and intentions was the context for his remark. In the review of joking and parody above, we have seen that personalist ideology includes the possibility that some contexts permit disengagement between belief and the plain meaning of words. Journalism about Lott’s remark consistently contrasted private “light talk” with public “serious talk.” Public talk is thought to require a certain level of “seriousness,” while private talk can be “light,” of no relevance in the formation of opinion.

Light talk among intimates provides an opportunity for White Americans to indulge in explicit “race talk” (Eliasoph 1999; Myers 2005; Picca and Feagin 2007), including epithets and stereotypes. To the degree that a particular stretch of talk is keyed as “light,” it is relatively opaque to criticism and censure as racist. This opacity derives from cultural models that associate style, person, and space in simplistic default confi gurations. Light talk and joking are prototypically private, associated with the spaces of intimacy, where interpersonal solidarity is more important than strict adher-ence to truth. Indeed, the assumption of a key of “lightness” actually constitutes intimacy, so to reject the content of such talk is to reject the intimacy itself, and thus to threaten important social ties (Eliasoph 1999).

Light talk and joking are prototypically vernacular, so they are associated with private persons. While, as we saw in Chapter 3, evidence of “bias”

Gaffes: Racist Talk without Racists 109

is grounds for dismissing the views of a public speaker, bias and interest in private space are unproblematic. “In private,” among intimates, a speaker need not claim neutrality or innocence, but may express her strongest and most authentic opinions. Thus to censure offensive talk in the light style/

private space/intimate relationship context is to attack, not interest, but character or judgment, a dangerous threat against the speaker (Hill 2001:92).

This kind of intimate talk can, in fact, be used “in public.” But such a usage constitutes a metaphorical code switch (Blom and Gumperz 1972) that layers a frame of privacy and intimacy into the interstices of a larger public context. This frame insulates the speaker from many kinds of challenges that might be made of public, serious talk.

This contrast between “public” and “private” appeared frequently in the discourse of the Lott debate. Many commentators argued that his remarks were prototypical “light talk” – in Lott’s own words, “fl attery to an old man on his birthday” – and that it was absurd to take them seriously or to seek in them some deeper meaning.

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