Description
One of the impediments to achieving racial justice in US society is the way much of our public discourse fails to recognize the systemic and institutional dimensions of racism. After events of racial significance, public discourse often gravitates toward responses that work to individualize racism. The process of individualizing racism relies on a narrow and incomplete understanding of racism, reducing the concept to individual acts of bigotry or racial animus that should, according to the logic of what Jane Hill (2008) has termed the “folk theory of racism,” be easily recognizable in overt and visible acts (e.g., racist slurs, epithets). The discursive routines that are premised on this narrow understanding of racism focus attention on individual “racists,” positioning such individuals as societal outcasts in a society otherwise supposedly unhindered by racism. This minimizes or erases the patterns and policies that perpetuate racial inequities. In this talk, I illustrate how the individualization of racism is achieved in US public discourse, drawing examples from prior work I have done on this topic in addition to considering how the revival of the “law and order” trope last summer after the killing of George Floyd helped Trump minimize concerns over the widespread pattern of state-sanctioned violence against African Americans.
Keywords
- race,
- racism,
- language and racism,
- meanings of racism,
- law and order,
- racial justice,
- Donald Trump,
- Tucker Carlson,
- Laura Ingraham,
- Jane Hill,
- racial justice protests
Disciplines
Publication Date
May 14, 2021
Citation Information
Hodges, Adam. 2021, May 14. "The Individualization of Racism." Language and Social Interaction Working Group Virtual Lecture Series, Columbia University.