racist rhetoric

[Ronald Kephart]

Celso Alvarez Cáccamo writes:

>(1) The utterance triggers the existential pressuposition that
>"blacks" exist in the real world as predefined objects.
>(2) These "blacks" are defined genetically.

I just wanted to weigh in as agreeing with Celso, and also Gary
Palmer and John Clark.  I hesitated a bit in doing so out of fatigue,
because I've been struggling with some of these issues over on the
Anthro-List recently.  And in any case, Celso has beaten me to to the
punch with the above, which for me defines the root of the problem I
have with much of evolutionary psychology, and indeed much of
psychology in general.

The hypotheses that these folks construct about "race" and
"intelligence," or "race" and whatever, seem to always accept folk
categories ("race," "intelligence") as analytic categories. For
example, they take "black" and "white" to be real biological
entities, they look at some "IQ" test scores, and conclude that they
have found genetically determined differences between genetically
determined groups on a genetically determined trait.  This is
fundamentally flawed science.

This is, as Gary suggests, an illustration of the power of linguistic
categories to shape our world view, and to that extent it is an
interesting lesson for us as linguists to exploit in our classes.
But it's more than that: what these people say about people of
different "racial" groups can have real effects on the real lives of
people who happen to belong to the stigmatized group (for example, I
still hear about African American kids being put in special ed
classes because they speak Ebonics; a position that gets aid and
comfort from some of this "research").

I think that we, as linguistic anthropologists, are uniquely
positioned to contribute to this discussion, because we understand
both the biology involved and also the linguistics, especially the
danger of thinking something is real just because we give it a name
(anyone ever meet a real Klingon?).

PS: Speaking of other disciplines, and our own contribution, I've
noticed over the last few months that sociologists have discovered
that people acquire languages more successfully when they are young,
and psychologists have discovered that language and culture
influences thought.  Gee, who would have guessed?


Ronald Kephart
English & "Foreign" Languages
University of North Florida