U of Ideas of General Interest -- May 2000
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Andrea Lynn, Humanities/Social Sciences Editor (217) 333-2177; [email protected]
THE POLITICS OF RACE
Commentators' word games cast social issues in racial terms
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- How is a social problem "racialized?"
With figurative language, among other things. So says David Wilson, the author of a new study that analyzes the technique one political extreme uses to racialize one social problem.
After looking at thousands of political and media commentaries on urban violence, Wilson concludes that neoconservative commentators used "an array of tropes," or word games, to package their discourse on urban violence. They also deftly connected their discourse to already established understandings of black children, black families and black inner cities as a world apart from the mainstream world. In so doing, they were able to persuade readers, listeners and viewers that what they were reading, hearing and seeing was a racial problem, not a social or economic problem.
Put another way, by using similes, metaphors, metonymies and other figures of speech, and then rooting these images in stereotyped ideas about the African-American local culture or "world," commentators such as Rush Limbaugh have managed to construct urban violence in the United States not as a poverty or equity issue, but as a racial issue, which they labeled "black-on-black violence."
In the neoconservative narratives, Wilson argues, a "host of villains or core culprits are illuminated": the black family, black inner-city youth, liberal black politicians. "This villainizing followed the neoconservative tradition of reducing African Americans and their social spaces to color-coded stereotyped images. A tight-knit cluster of meaning and images -- black youth as predatory, inner-city black life as culturally and morally deformed, society as non-racist and enabling -- staked this violence to a 'pathological black culture' spreading through 'black families' and 'black youth.' "
"I'm not denying that urban violence exists," Wilson said. "What I'm saying is that a social act like urban violence can be seen many different ways. It could have been interpreted as impoverished-youth-on-impoverished-youth violence or oppressed-youth-on-oppressed-youth violence, but it wasn't."
Wilson, a professor of geography at the University of Illinois, offers his findings in a forthcoming issue of Antipode. For his study, he ran content analyses of mainstream magazines, urban newspapers, interviews with political leaders and the Rush Limbaugh radio show (1991 to 1995). He believes his is the first study of the neoconservative "rendition" of "black-on-black violence."
Wilson's article is part of a larger study and a book he is finishing on the social construction of "black-on-black violence." In his research, he has found that some liberals -- cultural reformist liberals -- use techniques similar to those of neoconservatives to present their version of urban violence.
"If you look deeply enough into both discourses, you see a common image that crystallized in the public consciousness. Both groups ultimately explain the violence by racializing it and pointing to the power of culture. Both groups tended to present the inner city as a very different world, with very different values. Instead of presenting a struggling sameness, they presented rich differences."
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