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Covert Linguistic Racisms and the (Re‐)Production of White Supremacy
Author(s) -
Kroskrity Paul V.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1111/jola.12307
Subject(s) - white supremacy , racism , covert , sociology , ideology , colonialism , capitalism , indigenous , gender studies , politics , linguistics , political science , law , philosophy , ecology , biology
This article explores the potent role of covert linguistic racisms as practices critical for maintenance and transmission of white supremacy (Spears 1999, 2020). Though most Whites benefit from the structural violence of white supremacy, many disclaim their belief in racial hierarchies or participation in racist projects. Though they reject overt racism, they are more open to the effects of covert racism in reproducing racialized categories and naturalizing the patterns of political‐economic stratification associated with white supremacy. Covert racism is a product of a language ideological assemblage (Kroskrity 2018) involving raciolinguistic ideologies (Alim 2016; Rosa and Flores 2017) of the “white listening subject” (Rosa and Flores 2020), his/her “folk theory of racism” (Hill 2008), and the deployment of such features as indexicality and anonymity. Two instances of covert racism directed at Native Americans‐‐the academic pejoration of traditional narratives of the Indigenous Mono and Yokuts language communities of Central Cailfornia (Kroskrity 2015) and anonymous internet‐circulating jokes about Indians (Meek 2013). The indexical consistency of these racializing practices over time and scales of circulation are linked to settler‐colonialism and settler‐capitalism (Speed 2018b) as part of the larger project of white supremacy.