by Jean-Jacques Weber
Since the 2008 election of
President Obama in the United States of America, we are increasingly
told that we are witnessing the end of racism. I would argue, on the
contrary, that racism is still all-pervasive but that it has been
normalized.
Racism has become such a
part of everyday common sense that we often do not even notice it any
longer. We do notice it at certain times, as when in Europe and
elsewhere, Far Right parties score electoral victories, with
increasing numbers of people voting for them and their elected
representatives sitting in the European Parliament, or in national
parliaments and local communes, whether in Austria, France, Greece,
Hungary, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Finland, or many other
countries.
It is easy, at times like
this, to construct those who vote for such parties as the racists and
us, by implication, as non-racist. In fact, however, these seemingly
opposed views actually exist on a continuum, on which it is easy to
slide from softer to harder forms of racism. None of us is immune
from racist views and in particular the language racist views that
our Western societies are steeped in. Language racism refers to the
manifold ways in which language is increasingly used nowadays as a
proxy for race in order to exclude people.
Before I discuss some
examples, there are two important points that we need to keep in mind
about racism. First, racism is not only cognitive but also structural
and institutional. Racism is not just a matter of individual beliefs,
which can be abolished by changing these beliefs. There are also
structures and institutions that are bolstered by the racial ideology
and that help to maintain and reproduce racial privilege and
inequality. Secondly, the biological racism built around a
distinction between superior and inferior races has nowadays
metamorphosed into a cultural racism focused on cultural differences,
which can be linguistic, religious, etc. In this way, many racial
discriminations are also about religion, language, social class or
gender. The point is precisely that different types of discrimination
overlap, and that race, class, gender, religion and language issues
intersect in all sorts of ways.
However, mainstream
contemporary discourses are marked by what is usually referred to as
‘colour-blind racism’, which consists in the denial (or erasure)
of race and racism. An illustration of this would be the August 2014
events in Ferguson, Missouri, a small town located within the
metropolitan area of St Louis. Long-standing spatial, economic and
cultural segregation in Ferguson has involved a high level of
distrust between the largely black community and the mostly white
police force, which culminated in the shooting of unarmed black
teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on 9
August 2014, which in turn sparked off massive protests on the
streets of Ferguson and all over the USA.
One widely reported
comment after this tragic event was that of the white Republican
mayor of Ferguson, who insisted that we need to ‘blame poverty, not
race’ (Guardian, 23-08-2014).
In this way, he attempted to shift the blame away from white
supremacy and the structural racism of the social system, and upon
poor people, who could then be looked upon as responsible for their
own poverty. Thus the erasure of race and racism involves a number of
factors:
- an emphatic assertion that we, or a particular individual (Darren Wilson), are not racist;
- an inability – or unwillingness – to see the wider picture of structural racism in the social system;
- a mistaken belief in the one factor that explains it all: ‘it’s about poverty, not race’.
Language racism works in a
similar way. A recent example of it occurred in Luxembourg, the
country where I live and work. Luxembourg is a highly multilingual
country, with three officially recognized languages (Luxembourgish,
French and German). It has a high number of foreign residents
(45.3%), with the largest immigrant community being the Portuguese.
Many foreign residents speak French (as well as other Romance
languages such as Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Cape
Verdean Creole). As a result, French, which used to be the
language of prestige and of the educated elite, has now become
associated with migrants and is being viewed in an increasingly
negative light
by many locals. They fear that the rapid spread of French may
endanger the small Luxembourgish language and, concomitantly, the
Luxembourgish ‘nation’
itself.
On 7 June 2015, the Luxembourgish citizens were asked in a referendum to
decide for or against extending the right of vote in legislative
elections to foreign residents. The government campaigned in favour
of a ‘yes’ vote, as a way of reducing the ‘democratic deficit’
in Luxembourg, where only about half of the population are allowed to
vote in legislative elections. However, the motion was rejected by
78% of the voters. In the aftermath of the referendum, many of these
‘no’ voters felt the need to defend themselves against possible
charges of xenophobia and racism, by arguing (in online comments,
letters to the editor, etc.) that theirs was not a vote against
foreigners but against the French language. In the following letter
to the editor, for example, it is claimed that the sole aim of the
‘no’ voters was to defend the Luxembourgish language against an
encroachment by French:
The 80% against voting rights for foreigners is not a vote against foreigners. It was a vote against the further ‘Frenchification’ of the country … That proves: we are not hostile to foreigners. (Luxemburger Wort, 17-06-2015)
Here we have another
instantiation of the ‘denial of racism’ strategy (‘it’s about
language, not race’), and we are reminded that multilingualism does
not automatically tally with tolerance and open-mindedness. Even more
worryingly, this form of language racism underlies widespread
societal discourses which are ostensibly about language but are often
tied up in more complicated anxieties about race, for example the
politics of integration in Europe and the English Only movement in
the United States. Anybody interested in this topic will find further
examples and analyses in my new book Language Racism.
Jean-Jacques Weber is Professor of English and Education at the University of
Luxembourg. He has published widely in the areas of discourse
analysis, multilingualism and education, including Language Racism
(Palgrave, 2015), Flexible Multilingual Education: Putting Children’s Needs First
(Multilingual Matters, 2014) and Introducing Multilingualism: A Social Approach (Routledge,
2012).
© Jean-Jacques Weber 2015
