linguistic prejudice essay

• Subject List
• Take a Tour
• For Authors
• Subscriber Services
• Publications
• African American Studies
• African Studies
• American Literature
• Anthropology
• Architecture Planning and Preservation
• Art History
• Atlantic History
• Biblical Studies
• British and Irish Literature
• Childhood Studies
• Chinese Studies
• Cinema and Media Studies
• Communication
• Criminology
• Environmental Science
• Evolutionary Biology
• International Law
• International Relations
• Islamic Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Latino Studies

Linguistics

• Literary and Critical Theory
• Medieval Studies
• Military History
• Political Science
• Public Health
• Renaissance and Reformation
• Social Work
• Urban Studies
• Victorian Literature
• Browse All Subjects

How to Subscribe

• Free Trials

In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Linguistic Profiling and Language-Based Discrimination

Introduction, general overviews.

• Foundations and Extensions
• Phonetic and Acoustical Analyses
• Linguistic Discrimination in the Workplace
• Evidence of Linguistic Bias in Housing Markets
• Educational Studies: Bilingual and Bidialectal Considerations
• Language and Gender: Evidence of Bias in Linguistic Style and Conversation
• Language Usage among Racial and Ethnic Minorities
• Linguistic Prejudice and the Law
• Linguistic Human Rights
• Alternative Perspectives

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

About related articles close popup.

Lorem Ipsum Sit Dolor Amet

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Aliquam ligula odio, euismod ut aliquam et, vestibulum nec risus. Nulla viverra, arcu et iaculis consequat, justo diam ornare tellus, semper ultrices tellus nunc eu tellus.

• Bilingualism and Multilingualism
• Contrastive Analysis in Linguistics
• Conversation Analysis
• Critical Applied Linguistics
• Cross-Cultural Pragmatics
• Cross-Language Speech Perception and Production
• Dialectology
• Educational Linguistics
• English as a Lingua Franca
• Euphemisms and Dysphemisms
• Heritage Languages
• Institutional Pragmatics
• Language and Law
• Language Contact
• Language, Gender, and Sexuality
• Language Ideologies and Language Attitudes
• Language Maintenance
• Language Revitalization
• Linguistic Complexity
• Linguistic Prescriptivism
• Minority Languages
• Positive Discourse Analysis
• Sociolinguistic Fieldwork
• Sociopragmatics

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

• Edward Sapir
• Sentence Comprehension
• Text Comprehension
• Find more forthcoming articles...
• Export Citations
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Linguistic Profiling and Language-Based Discrimination by John Baugh LAST REVIEWED: 12 January 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 12 January 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0267

Linguistic profiling and other forms of linguistic discrimination were first attested in the Old Testament. The coinage of the word shibboleth traces its origin to the Book of Judges 12:6, where the inability to pronounce that word correctly would result in death; “They told him, ‘Please say shibboleth.’ If he said, ‘sibboleth,’ because he could not pronounce it correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan.” Since then, other manifestations of human conflict and discrimination frequently exhibit linguistic demarcation in one form or another, and these shibboleths evolve over time. Warring factions may eventually make peace, as old rivalries come to be displaced or resolved. Advances in technology exacerbated these trends, as more-rapid modes of transportation increased contact and conflict among speakers of mutually unintelligible languages, accompanied by the development of increasingly efficient deadly weaponry that coincided with global expansionism along with sporadic conquests and the ensuing oppression of human enclaves throughout the world. The advent of global markets and multinational immigration has further accelerated circumstances where diverse human factions may use linguistic (dis)similarities as one of several means through which individuals formulate perceptual boundaries between groups that are familiar or unfamiliar. When compared to the historical longevity of discrimination based on language, linguistic evaluations of this phenomenon are relatively recent.

Haugen 1972 is among the first works by many professional linguists to call attention to the stigmatization of bilingualism as experienced by various immigrant groups in the United States. Lambert 1972 and Tucker and Lambert 1969 are experimental studies that expose further evidence of linguistic bias in bilingual (e.g., French and English in Canada) and bidialectal circumstances (e.g., mainstream Standard American English and African American vernacular English in the United States). Preston 1989 is a formulation of perceptual dialectology that provides orthogonal confirmation of such biases, through elicitations of opinions about superior-to-inferior varieties of American English. Explicit accounts of linguistic profiling are described in Purnell, et al. 1999 regarding housing discrimination and in Baugh 2000 in relation to testimony about different speakers’ dialects and racial identities during murder trials. Squires and Chadwick 2006 produces complementary analyses by uncovering differential dialect discrimination against minorities seeking to purchase homeowners’ insurance. In Zentella 2014 , evaluations of linguistic profiling share echoes of Einar Haugen’s early observations about prejudice against bilinguals, albeit with specific relevance to native speakers of Spanish who were obliged to speak English exclusively at their places of employment. Jones, et al. 2019 discovers unintended bias against black Americans by professional court reporters who regularly mischaracterized their statements during trials. When viewed collectively, matters of linguistic profiling and language discrimination persist in many social domains, thereby confirming the existence of one demographic dimension of human inequality.

Baugh, John. 2000. Racial identification by speech. American Speech 75.4: 362–364.

DOI: 10.1215/00031283-75-4-362

A survey of legal cases devoted to murder trials where the dialect of suspects or defendants was central to witness testimony. The phrase “linguistic profiling” first appeared in this article, and that concept has since expanded to include prejudicial, and often illegal, reactions to the speech or writing of individuals whose language usage was used as the basis of discrimination against them.

Haugen, Einar. 1972. The ecology of language . Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

A collection of interdisciplinary chapters that describe the intersection between linguistic diversity and America’s expanding global immigrant population. “The Stigmata of Bilingualism” is most relevant to linguistic discrimination, and it stands out among an array of other chapters dealing with a wide range of bilingual considerations that address linguistic prejudice against those who are not native speakers of English, with special relevance to the United States.

Jones, Taylor, Jessica Rose Kalbfeld, Ryan Hancock, and Robin Clark. 2019. Testifying while black: An experimental study of court reporter accuracy in transcription of African American English. Language 95.2: 216–252.

DOI: 10.1353/lan.2019.0042

Court stenographers in Philadelphia repeatedly produced inaccurate transcriptions of African American English (AAE), including different morphosyntactic and phonological features of AAE. These errors were consequential, changing official court records that would have significant legal repercussions for typical speakers of AAE.

Lambert, Wallace. 1972. Language, psychology and culture: Essays . Selected and introduced by Anwar S. Dil. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

Foundational research on societal and personal dimensions of bilingualism and biculturalism, including results from carefully controlled matched-guise experiments that revealed differential attitudes toward French and English in Canada. These attitudinal differences were measured with Likert scales that considered friendliness, trustworthiness, and educational status, among other traits.

Preston, Dennis. 1989. Perceptual dialectology: Nonlinguists’ views of areal linguistics . Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris.

Opinions about language usage were solicited in Indiana and Hawaii regarding perceptions about dialect differences, with primary emphasis on preferred manners of speaking in contrast to speech that was deemed less desirable, or incorrect. The field of perceptual dialectology is introduced and formulated in this volume.

Purnell, Thomas, William Idsardi, and John Baugh. 1999. Perceptual and phonetic experiments on American English dialect identification. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18.1: 10–30.

DOI: 10.1177/0261927X99018001002

Controlled experiments were conducted that showed bias against vernacular African American and vernacular Mexican American varieties of English in contrast to the dominant Standard American English dialect, which was preferred by landlords. Accurate identification of the race of speakers was determined with high rates of accuracy upon hearing the single word “hello.”

Squires, Greg, and Jan Chadwick. 2006. Linguistic profiling: A continuing tradition of discrimination in the home insurance industry? Urban Affairs Review 41.3: 400–415.

DOI: 10.1177/1078087405281064

An audit-pair study that exposed linguistic and racial bias against minority speakers who were seeking to purchase homeowners’ insurance. These findings confirm that some insurance agents would deduce the race of prospective clients during telephone calls. In many instances, these agents then denied minority prospects from purchasing homeowners’ insurance that would otherwise be available.

Tucker, Richard, and Wallace Lambert. 1969. White and Negro listeners’ reactions to various American-English dialects. Social Forces 47.4: 463–468.

DOI: 10.2307/2574535

An experimental study of diverse AAE speech styles that includes well-educated and less well-educated black speakers who were evaluated by diverse white and black (i.e., Negro) listeners. Each listener evaluated individual speech samples with a Likert scale that included various demographic categories such as education, wealth, and friendliness.

Zentella, Ana Celia. 2014. TWB (talking while bilingual): Linguistic profiling of Latina/os and other linguistic torquemadas . Latino Studies 12.4: 620–635.

DOI: 10.1057/lst.2014.63

Bilingual New Yorkers who were native speakers of Spanish were forced to speak English at their workplace under all circumstances, including personal conversations that were unrelated to their job. A survey was conducted, revealing differences of opinion about the importance and appropriateness of demanding exclusive usage of English.

back to top

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

• About Linguistics »
• Meet the Editorial Board »
• Acceptability Judgments
• Accessibility Theory in Linguistics
• Acquisition, Second Language, and Bilingualism, Psycholin...
• Adpositions
• African Linguistics
• Afroasiatic Languages
• Algonquian Linguistics
• Altaic Languages
• Ambiguity, Lexical
• Analogy in Language and Linguistics
• Animal Communication
• Applicatives
• Applied Linguistics, Critical
• Arawak Languages
• Argument Structure
• Artificial Languages
• Australian Languages
• Austronesian Linguistics
• Auxiliaries
• Balkans, The Languages of the
• Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan
• Berber Languages and Linguistics
• Biology of Language
• Borrowing, Structural
• Caddoan Languages
• Caucasian Languages
• Celtic Languages
• Celtic Mutations
• Chomsky, Noam
• Chumashan Languages
• Classifiers
• Clauses, Relative
• Clinical Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Colonial Place Names
• Comparative Reconstruction in Linguistics
• Comparative-Historical Linguistics
• Complementation
• Complexity, Linguistic
• Compositionality
• Compounding
• Computational Linguistics
• Conditionals
• Conjunctions
• Connectionism
• Consonant Epenthesis
• Constructions, Verb-Particle
• Conversation, Maxims of
• Conversational Implicature
• Cooperative Principle
• Coordination
• Creoles, Grammatical Categories in
• Critical Periods
• Cyberpragmatics
• Default Semantics
• Definiteness
• Dementia and Language
• Dene (Athabaskan) Languages
• Dené-Yeniseian Hypothesis, The
• Dependencies
• Dependencies, Long Distance
• Derivational Morphology
• Determiners
• Distinctive Features
• Dravidian Languages
• Endangered Languages
• English, Early Modern
• English, Old
• Eskimo-Aleut
• Evidentials
• Exemplar-Based Models in Linguistics
• Existential
• Existential Wh-Constructions
• Experimental Linguistics
• Fieldwork, Sociolinguistic
• Finite State Languages
• First Language Attrition
• Formulaic Language
• Francoprovençal
• French Grammars
• Gabelentz, Georg von der
• Genealogical Classification
• Generative Syntax
• Genetics and Language
• Grammar, Categorial
• Grammar, Cognitive
• Grammar, Construction
• Grammar, Descriptive
• Grammar, Functional Discourse
• Grammars, Phrase Structure
• Grammaticalization
• Harris, Zellig
• History of Linguistics
• History of the English Language
• Hmong-Mien Languages
• Hokan Languages
• Humor in Language
• Hungarian Vowel Harmony
• Idiom and Phraseology
• Imperatives
• Indefiniteness
• Indo-European Etymology
• Inflected Infinitives
• Information Structure
• Interface Between Phonology and Phonetics
• Interjections
• Iroquoian Languages
• Isolates, Language
• Jakobson, Roman
• Japanese Word Accent
• Jones, Daniel
• Juncture and Boundary
• Khoisan Languages
• Kiowa-Tanoan Languages
• Kra-Dai Languages
• Labov, William
• Language Acquisition
• Language Documentation
• Language, Embodiment and
• Language for Specific Purposes/Specialized Communication
• Language Geography
• Language in Autism Spectrum Disorders
• Language Nests
• Language Shift
• Language Standardization
• Language, Synesthesia and
• Languages of Africa
• Languages of the Americas, Indigenous
• Languages of the World
• Learnability
• Lexical Access, Cognitive Mechanisms for
• Lexical Semantics
• Lexical-Functional Grammar
• Lexicography
• Lexicography, Bilingual
• Linguistic Accommodation
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Areas
• Linguistic Landscapes
• Linguistic Profiling and Language-Based Discrimination
• Linguistic Relativity
• Linguistics, Educational
• Listening, Second Language
• Literature and Linguistics
• Machine Translation
• Maintenance, Language
• Mande Languages
• Mass-Count Distinction
• Mathematical Linguistics
• Mayan Languages
• Mental Health Disorders, Language in
• Mental Lexicon, The
• Mesoamerican Languages
• Mixed Languages
• Mixe-Zoquean Languages
• Modification
• Mon-Khmer Languages
• Morphological Change
• Morphology, Blending in
• Morphology, Subtractive
• Munda Languages
• Muskogean Languages
• Nasals and Nasalization
• Niger-Congo Languages
• Non-Pama-Nyungan Languages
• Northeast Caucasian Languages
• Oceanic Languages
• Papuan Languages
• Penutian Languages
• Philosophy of Language
• Phonetics, Acoustic
• Phonetics, Articulatory
• Phonological Research, Psycholinguistic Methodology in
• Phonology, Computational
• Phonology, Early Child
• Policy and Planning, Language
• Politeness in Language
• Possessives, Acquisition of
• Pragmatics, Acquisition of
• Pragmatics, Cognitive
• Pragmatics, Computational
• Pragmatics, Cross-Cultural
• Pragmatics, Developmental
• Pragmatics, Experimental
• Pragmatics, Game Theory in
• Pragmatics, Historical
• Pragmatics, Institutional
• Pragmatics, Second Language
• Pragmatics, Teaching
• Prague Linguistic Circle, The
• Presupposition
• Psycholinguistics
• Quechuan and Aymaran Languages
• Reading, Second-Language
• Reciprocals
• Reduplication
• Reflexives and Reflexivity
• Register and Register Variation
• Relevance Theory
• Representation and Processing of Multi-Word Expressions in...
• Salish Languages
• Sapir, Edward
• Saussure, Ferdinand de
• Second Language Acquisition, Anaphora Resolution in
• Semantic Maps
• Semantic Roles
• Semantic-Pragmatic Change
• Semantics, Cognitive
• Sentence Processing in Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers
• Sign Language Linguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Sociolinguistics, Variationist
• Sound Change
• South American Indian Languages
• Specific Language Impairment
• Speech, Deceptive
• Speech Perception
• Speech Production
• Speech Synthesis
• Switch-Reference
• Syntactic Change
• Syntactic Knowledge, Children’s Acquisition of
• Tense, Aspect, and Mood
• Text Mining
• Tone Sandhi
• Transcription
• Transitivity and Voice
• Translanguaging
• Translation
• Trubetzkoy, Nikolai
• Tucanoan Languages
• Tupian Languages
• Usage-Based Linguistics
• Uto-Aztecan Languages
• Valency Theory
• Verbs, Serial
• Vocabulary, Second Language
• Voice and Voice Quality
• Vowel Harmony
• Whitney, William Dwight
• Word Classes
• Word Formation in Japanese
• Word Recognition, Spoken
• Word Recognition, Visual
• Word Stress
• Writing, Second Language
• Writing Systems
• Zapotecan Languages
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility

Powered by:

• [66.249.64.20|185.126.86.119]
• 185.126.86.119

Chapter 7: English and the global perspective

7.2.4 English and linguistic discrimination (research essay)

Anonymous English 102 Writer

November 2020

After the Norman conquest of France in 1066, French rose to the seat of the world’s  lingua franca , or a language used to communicate across all other countries (Marques para. 2). French was the language of power – anybody who was anyone boasted of speaking it (Marques para. 3). All the nobility spoke it, great philosophers wrote books in it, diplomacy was conducted in it – the reach of the French language and the French influence stretched across the globe (Marques para. 4). But from what we can observe today, it does not seem to be that way anymore. Instead, there is a new language that has replaced the once dominate French – and that language is English. But how did this happen? It was not an overnight thing, where suddenly everyone woke up speaking English and living under its influence. So how, exactly, did English come to reside in this position at the top of the language hierarchy? And after it did happen, how did it come to a point where any other languages were considered inferior?

As mentioned before, English did not used to hold the seat of power against all other languages. For much of history, it was French that controlled the globe. But entering 18th   century, it started to look like French would not reign supreme for much longer (Marques para. 6). The Industrial Revolution in England pushed the country, through technological and scientific advancements, to the fore front of the scene (Marques para. 7). In addition, the British Empire began to stretch its sphere of influence across the globe, bringing English culture, and the English language, along with it (Marques para. 8). By the 19th century, the British impact spanned to all reaches of the Earth, and the barely formed, economically skyrocketing United States contributed its influence as well (Marques para. 9). According to the article “How and Why Did English Supplant French As the World’s Lingua Franca?” by Nuno Marques, “French may have been spoken in the courts of Europe all the way to Russia…. but English was the language of money, and money talks louder than philosophy.” And this certainly held true when the United States stole the spotlight from bankrupt England after WWII. In its competition against Russia during the Cold War, all eyes were on the U.S as it put forth unprecedented technologies and continued on its steady rise in power. And things only escalated from there. Today, roughly 1.5 billion people speak English – that is about 20% of the entire population on Earth (Stevens para. 2). Of those 1.5 billion, 75% of them are nonnative speakers, indicating the globality and rise the in influence of English (Stevens para. 2). It is the language of almost everything of importance – business, diplomacy, medicine, and so much more. And with English being the forefront of everything, it can be assumed that native speakers of English are given the upper hand. Any individuals speaking other languages as their primary are forced to learn English in order to spread their ideas or hold any sort of power in the gobal fields.

And there is certainly much evidence to attest to this. In the academic article “Language Bias in Randomized Controlled Trials Published in English and German,” the authors, Matthias Egger and Tanja Zellweger-Zähner, relayed their study on academic articles published English medical journals versus journals of other languages. They found that it was more likely for authors to publish statistically significant findings in English medical journals that it was for them to publish their articles in journals of their first language. According to the article “The Hidden Bias of Science’s Universal Language,” “in some non-English speaking countries… English-language academic papers outnumber publications in the country’s own language several times over (para. 1)”. This reveals that researchers are ultimately forced to publish their findings in English in order to reach a wider audience and global recognition. It also suggests the possibility of significant scientific findings being overlooked because they were not published in English and thus reached a more limited audience. In another academic article, “The Inferior Science and the Dominant Use of English in Knowledge Production: A Case Study of Korean Science and Technology,” author Kumju Hwang interviewed Korean scientists and engineers living in the U.K on perceptions of English usage. She noted that many of the Korean interviewees felt that they had a significant disadvantage because they had to devote more time and effort to learning English that could have been used elsewhere in their scientific activities (p. 407). In one interview, a scientist said “In order to learn English, we lose 20 percent of the time that could normally be spent concentrating on science. We cannot fully concentrate con science. This means that our scientific results will be reduced by 20 percent (p. 407)”. The interviewee also expressed difficulty in communication at conferences and national meetings, which she felt could lead to a disadvantage for everyone (p. 407). And yet still, if researchers want their findings to be recognized, they have to learn English and publish in an English journal. As one interviewee said, “It is…much easier to be accepted into Korean journals, due to the fact that papers of poorer quality are submitted [there]. If I discovered something important, I would not submit it to a Korean journal (p. 412).” Yet another interviewee said that there are prejudices against non-native speakers of English in the sciences that affected their ability to be successful in publishing their papers and gaining recognition for their work (p. 413).

But it’s not only countries’ academic journals that have been affected by English’s rise to power, but also their languages and cultures themselves. This first came to my attention in my German class, when my teacher was talking about something in German about the internet and she used the word  googlen  – to google. I thought that honestly quite amusing and it led me to think about what other words from the English language have been incorporated into the vernacular of other languages. In fact, the answer to that is – a lot. The article “The Influence of English” by R.L.G, details many examples of this, such as  downloaden (download) (para. 5), and also ways in which English sentence structure has rubbed off on other languages. For example, in German you would traditionally say  Es hat mir Sinn  (It has sense to me), but recently people have begun to say  Es macht Sinn  (It makes sense) (para. 3). I find this particularly interesting seeing how the tables have turned. Before the German language borrowed words from English, they were borrowing words from French. One that when I hear for the first time had me a little bewildered is the word  Chance ( same meaning in English too). The pronunciation of the word,  shaunz,  sounded so much more fluid that the normally harsher tone of the language that I was used to. But English isn’t innocent in this endeavor either. In fact, the language had a large habit of stealing words from other languages that has contributed to many of the common words we use today. These so called “loanwords” (I’d call them stolenwords) make up so much of our speech that we don’t even realize how much of our language we have absorbed from other languages. For example, the word ketchup comes from the Hokkien Chinese word  ketsiap  – which is a sauce made from fermented fish (Coleman para. 15) . Another one is cookie, which comes from  koekjes , or “little cakes”, in Dutch (Coleman para.17). But not only language has changed because of English, culture has as well. What I have noticed with specifically the influence of the United States is the seemingly “Americanization”, so to speak, of other countries. The article “America’s Cultural Role in the World Today” goes into detail about this, attributing the first huge rise of American cultural influence on other countries to the United States’s consumer economy after the Second World War (Damm para. 2).  One of the factors that the article attributes the influence of American culture to is the media. The technological advances, such as tv broadcasting, put American media at the head of the scene, and gave them a wider audience (Damm para. 6). Other factors include the arts – film, music, literature, art – all of which put international eyes on the United States. For example, the popularity of Hollywood and American films have sold the ‘American dream’ to people around the world (Daam para. 8). Unfortunately, the power the English language has acquired hasn’t only resulted in loanwords and domination of the film industry. It has also brought about biased beliefs that English is superior and prejudice against non-native speakers of English and speakers of other languages.

The occurrence of prejudice against non-native speakers of English and speakers of other languages is nothing new. Linguistic discrimination, or when someone is treated unfairly based on the language that they speak (or do not speak) and the way in which they speak (ex. accent, span of vocabulary) (Loehrke 2), has occurred all throughout history. This goes hand in hand with linguistic imperialism, which Rober Phillipson defines in his book  Linguistic Imperialism  as “the notion that certain languages dominate internationally on others. It is the way nation states privileged one language, and often sought to eradicate others, forcing their speakers to shift to the dominant language (p. 780).” Phillipson also discusses the idea of a “linguistical hierarchy” where languages are ranked as superior or inferior to one another, with the dominating language being at the top of the hierarchy (p. 2). He describes a similar pattern that has occurred in instances of linguistical hierarchy throughout history, which includes stigmatization, glorification, and rationalization (p. 2). Beginning with stigmatization, any other languages, accents, or vernaculars other than the current dominate language are deemed inferior (p.2). For instance, ancient Greeks called non-speakers of Greek  barbarians,  or outsiders (p. 2). Through glorification, speakers of the dominate language raise their language up on a pedestal above other languages, and with rationalization, establish a justification for why their language remains at the top of the hierarchy (p. 2).  A good example of this is the belief of German as the dominate language in Nazi ideology. The Nazis glorified the German language as a language of Aryan race, a people “physically and genetically superior to others” (Smith p. 151). Stigmatization, discrimination, and biased thoughts like this are present throughout the history books, but that doesn’t mean that modern people have not been affected by it.

Linguistic discrimination is still a very real occurrence and is very harmful for everyone involved. But how and why does it occur? TEDx writer Olena Levitina, in her article “Is Language Discrimination Still a Thing?”, writes that prejudice against non-native speakers stems from a lack of understanding (para. 6). When native-speakers talk with non-native speakers and cannot understand what they are saying because of their accent, they might associate their misunderstanding with the non-native speaker not being intelligent (para 6). This thought process is extremely harmful and can lead to future beliefs that anyone with that accent is not as intelligent as someone without. For example, in the academic article title “Why Don’t We Believe Non-native Speakers?”, authors Shiri Lev-Ari and Keysar Boaz recounted experiments in which they found that people were more likely to report statements spoked by native speakers as believable than those spoken by non-native speakers (p. 1093). They noted that when listeners hear accented speech, their “processing ability”, or how well they are able to take in information and understand it, decreases, but instead of just deeming what the speaker says as harder to understand, they perceive what they are saying to be less trustworthy (p. 1095). Always being thought of as less believable than native speakers is extremely detrimental, and even in some case they can become prepared for it. This phenomenon, described by Agata Gluszek and John Dovidio in their academic article “Speaking with a Non-native Accent: Perceptions of Bias, Communication Difficulties, and Belonging in the United States”, is called “anticipated stigmatization” in which the non-native speaker already expects the native speaker to have biases against them before they even open their mouth. The authors found that accented speakers of English in the United States who previously experienced conversational problems and difficulties in communication were more likely to feel anticipated stigmatization (p. 227). They suggested that if native speakers expect non-native speakers to have a harder to communicating than they actually do, they might be more likely to avoid instances with accented speakers or similar situations where they might have communication difficulty (p. 227). Thus, Gluszek and Dovidio also reported from their experiments that non-natively accent speakers expressed more feelings of not belonging in the United States, which they attributed to anticipated stigmatization and difficulty communicating (p. 288).

Linguistic discrimination directed in any situation is harmful, but it has been especially destructive in the education system. In going back to Phillipson’s book, he says about teaching English as a second language: “the spread of English shows clearly that the ‘development’ of this language has been structurally related to and contingent upon the underdevelopment of others (p. 348).” In addition, in her article “Education Equality: Mitigating Linguistic Discrimination in Second Language Teaching”, Laura Matson says that the “ideology of English language teaching is rooted in a power structure of linguistic imperialism brought about by a history colonialism in which English speaking countries have kept non-English speaking countries in a position of subordination (p. 14)”. For example, Matson details an explanation on how anxiety affects language learners’ performance and how the ideologies of teaching ESL (English as a Second Language) have contributed to this. Generally, learners at lower proficiency levels are more reserved when learning and less willing to participate because they are afraid of making mistakes and sounding “non-native” (p. 16). This is something that I can relate to as well with my journey learning languages. Especially when I was just starting out, I was afraid to answer question or speak out loud because I didn’t want to seem “stupid”. Whenever I read something out loud, I would internally cringe because even  I  could hear how bad my pronunciation was. Matson believes that the reason for anxiety in learning ESL is a direct result of the way in which the language is taught. By stressing that the “native speaker” accent is the correct, and essentially the ‘perfect’, way of speaking, pressure is put on the learner emulate this speech, and when they have difficulty with this, their willingness to participate at the risk of making mistakes decreases (p. 16). This ultimately enforces the idea of standard language ideology, which is defined by Rosina Lippi-Green in her book  Language in the USA  as “a bias towards an abstracted, idealized, non-varying spoken language (p. 289)”. This can be an extremely damaging belief, as, in referring to English, it promotes one way to speak it as the ‘right’ way, when in fact this ideology is a fallacy (p. 289). For example, Lippi-Green says that accents can be hard to change when they do not do anything to make communication difficult (p. 289) this makes it hard for there to be one language and only one way to speak it that is ‘correct’. In the article “The Silencing of ESL Speakers”, Barbara Seidlhofer, professor at the University of Vienna, says “it is easy to dismiss [various accented forms of English] as the use of incorrect English by people who have not learned it very well, but it is an entirely natural linguistic development, an example of how any language varies and changes as it is appropriated by different communities of users (para. 11).”

Another situation in which linguistic discrimination has been detrimental is in the workplace. In the academic article “Political Skill: Explaining the Effects of Nonnative Accent on Managerial Hiring and Entreprenurial Investment Decisions”, Laura Huang et. al investigate whether there is persistent bias associated with non-native speakers having weak political skills, and thus being less likely to advance in their careers (p. 1). The bias being tested in this article, called glass-ceiling bias, occurs when an individual is barred from attaining a higher position because of implicit bias against them (p. 1). Thus the ‘glass-ceiling’ refers to the idea that the individual is so close to reaching the position that they can see it through the glass, but bias has created a ceiling between them, preventing the individual from being able to climb higher up the corporate ladder (p. 1). In the experiments, Huang et. al found that native speakers of English received higher recommendations for promotions and more entrepreneurial funding than did non-natively accent individuals, therefore signaling that non-native speakers were considered to have lower political skill (p. 10). This is particularly alarming, because it shows that although non-natively accented individuals may have the same qualifications and experience (maybe even better) as native speakers, native English speakers are more frequently chosen for promotions and advancements in their careers.

But it is also important to note that not only non-native speakers of a language are discriminated against, but even native speakers as well. The most prominent example of this is discrimination against people who speak African American English, or AAE. African American English, which also has been referred to as Ebonics, African American Vernacular English, or Black English, is a dialect spoken by many African Americans in the United States (Mufwene para. 1). The linguistic features of AAE have often been criticized and denounced as grammatically incorrect compared to ‘standard’ English. For example, the usage of “double negatives” such as in “You  ain’t  getting  no  thanks from it.”(Poplack para. 3) would garner much denunciation according to standard English grammatical rules. But the fact of the matter is, that AAE is a part of the cultural identity of many African Americans just as any other accent is a part of anyone else’s. Unfortunately, due to lack of understanding and racist based biases, speakers of AAE have been, and continue to be, discriminated against. In the book  Why Are So Many Minority Students in Special Education? Understanding Race and Disability in Schools , authors Beth Harry and Janet Klinger offer a powerful example. As we discussed before, discrimination against non-native speakers of English in the education system is extremely detrimental, and the same is true for speakers of AAE in schools. Harry and Klinger found that speakers of AAE were found more often to be diagnosed with a language disorder and thus be placed in special education. The reasoned that it was often the assessors’ lack of knowledge regarding AAE and its linguistical traits that led to this diagnosis (p. 30). Assessors unfamiliar with the way that AAE functions might hear a student say something such as “he walk to school” instead of the standard English “he walks to school” and conclude that they have a language disorder, when in fact they were just speaking their native dialect. This disproportionately affects African American students, and students with other accents and dialects, giving them a disadvantage in their education. Discrimination also occurs with regional accents, most notably the Southern accent. Long held stereotypes of Southern ‘hillbillies’ and ‘rednecks’ have twisted many people’s minds, leading them to have biased views of Southerners being less educated or competent that other Americans. In the article titled “Perceptions of Competency as a Function of Accent”, Cheryl Boucher et. al found in their experiments that participants were more likely to view individuals with Southern accents as less competent that those with ‘neutral accents’ (p. 27). Participants rated the neutral speakers as being more grammatically correct and professional than speakers with Southern accents. This is similar to the common bias that African American English is grammatically incorrect compared to standard English. And it is harmful because it put speakers of AAE, those with Southern accents, and any other speakers of other stigmatized accents or dialects at an unfair disadvantage and puts untrue labels on them.

So how, then, can we stop linguistic discrimination, whether in the education system, workplace, or anywhere else? Going back to the academic article by Laura Matson, the author suggests promoting anti-racist education (p. 18). Matson argues that anti-racist education encourages a deeper look into the imbalances created between linguistically dominant and linguistically marginalized groups (p. 19). She writes that “‘merely celebrating differences (Kubota 36)’ … creates an illusion of equality that still maintains ‘existing power relations that the people on the margins are expected to assimilate to (Kubota 37)’ (p. 18)”. Matson proposes teaching English in a way that leads learners to look critically at the standard language, which allows them to question its role as a dominate language (p. 20). In the workplace and in the hiring process, writer Bridget Miller suggests in her article “Avoiding Discrimination in the Workplace” for employers to avoid “English-only” policies and train anyone related to the hiring process in unbiased interviewing (para. 3). She also wrote that it was important to note that 100% English fluency does not necessarily correlate to high job performance (para. 3). Dr. Pragya Agarwal, in her article “Accent Bias: How Can We Minimize Discrimination in the Workplace?”, says that making a conscious effort to look past bias and prejudice can create a more inclusive and amicable environment (para. 6). Through these ways, we can become more aware of our own, possibly unconscious, biases towards other non-natively accent speakers and work on ending them.

Works Cited

Lev-Ari, Shiri, and Boaz Keysar. “Why Don’t We Believe Non-Native Speakers? The Influence of Accent on Credibility.”  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , vol. 46, no. 6, 2010, pp. 1093–1096., doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.025.

Gluszek, Agata, and John F. Dovidio. “Speaking With a Nonnative Accent: Perceptions of Bias, Communication Difficulties, and Belonging in the United States.”  Journal of Language and Social Psychology , vol. 29, no. 2, 2010, pp. 224–234., doi:10.1177/0261927×09359590.

Egger, Matthias, et al. “Language Bias in Randomized Controlled Trials Published in English and German.”  The Lancet , vol. 350, no. 9074, 1997, pp. 326–329., doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(97)02419-7.

Hwang, Kumju. “The Inferior Science and the Dominant Use of English in Knowledge Production.”  Science Communication , vol. 26, no. 4, 2005, pp. 390–427., doi:10.1177/1075547005275428.

Agyekum, Kofi. “Linguistic imperialism and language decolonisation in Africa through documentation and preservation.” In Jason Kandybowicz, Travis Major, Harold Torrence & Philip T. Duncan (eds.), African linguistics on the prairie: Selected papers from the 45th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, 87–104. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Phillipson, Robert. 2009. Linguistic imperialism. In Jacob L. Mey (ed.), Concise encyclopedia of            pragmatics, 2nd edn., 780–782. Amsterdam: Elsevier Ltd.

Smith, Woodruff D.  The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism . Oxford University Press, 1986.

Matson, Laura. “Educational Equality: Mitigating Linguistic Discrimination in Second Language Teaching.”  Leviathan: Interdisciplinary Journal in English , 2019.

Huang, Laura, et al. “Political Skill: Explaining the Effects of Nonnative Accent on Managerial Hiring and Entrepreneurial Investment Decisions.”  Journal of Applied Psychology , vol. 98, no. 6, 2013, pp. 1005–1017., doi:10.1037/a0034125.

Harry, and Klinger. “Why Are so Many Minority Students in Special Education?: Understanding Race and Disability in Schools.”  Choice Reviews Online , vol. 52, no. 05, 2014, doi:10.5860/choice.185613.

Boucher, Cheryl J., et al. “Perceptions of Competency as a Function of Accent.”  Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research , vol. 18, no. 1, 2013, pp. 27–32., doi:10.24839/2164-8204.jn18.1.27.

Mufwene, Salikoko S. “African American English.”  Encyclopædia Britannica , Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/topic/African-American-English.

“America’s Cultural Role in the World Today.”  Access International , 2008, access-internationalvg2.cappelendamm.no/c951212/artikkel/vis.html?tid=385685.

Huttner-Koros, Adam. “Why Science’s Universal Language Is a Problem for Research.”  The Atlantic , Atlantic Media Company, 14 Sept. 2015,  www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/08/english-universal-language-science-research/400919/ .

“Did You Know Many English Words Come from Other Languages? Here Are 45!”  FluentU English , www.fluentu.com/blog/english/english-words-from-other-languages/.

Levitina, Olena. “Is Language Discrimination Still a Thing?  • TEDxVienna.”  TEDxVienna , 21 Feb. 2020, www.tedxvienna.at/blog/is-language-discrimination-still-thing/.

Miller, Bridget. “Avoiding Language Discrimination in the Workplace.”  HR Daily Advisor , 7 Jan. 2018, hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2016/03/14/avoiding-language-discrimination-in-the-workplace/.

Agarwal, Dr. Pragya. “Accent Bias: How Can We Minimize Discrimination In The Workplace?”  Forbes , Forbes Magazine, 30 Dec. 2018,  www.forbes.com/sites/pragyaagarwaleurope/2018/12/30/bias-is-your-accent-holding-you-back/?sh=1a2b81181b5a .

R.L.G. “Deep Impact.”  The Economist , The Economist Newspaper, www.economist.com/prospero/2015/07/16/deep-impact.

Stevens, Paul. “Viewpoint: The Silencing of ESL Speakers.”  SHRM , SHRM, 28 Feb. 2020, www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-competencies/global-and-cultural-effectiveness/pages/viewpoint-the-silencing-of-esl-speakers.aspx.

Marques, Nuno. “How And Why Did English Supplant French As The World’s Lingua Franca?”  Babbel Magazine , 2017, www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-and-why-did-english-supplant-french-as-the-world-s-lingua-franca.

Loehrke, Katie. “Language Discrimination Is a Real Issue: Here’s How to Avoid It.”  Bizjournals.com , 2017,  www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/how-to/human-resources/2017/11/language-discrimination-is-a-real-issue-here-s-how.html .

Poplack, Shana. “’It Don’t Be like That Now’ – the English History of African American English.”  The Conversation , 20 Nov. 2020, theconversation.com/it-dont-be-like-that-now-the-english-history-of-african-american-english-129611.

Understanding Literacy in Our Lives by Anonymous English 102 Writer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Understanding Linguistic Prejudice

Critical Approaches to Language Diversity in Brazil

• © 2023
• Gladis Massini-Cagliari   ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4050-7645 0 ,
• Rosane Andrade Berlinck   ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3420-5541 1 ,
• Angelica Rodrigues   ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1470-4634 2

Department of Linguistics, Literature and Classical Languages, São Paulo State University, Araraquara, Brazil

You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

• Discusses linguistic diversity, linguistic prejudice, and language variation and change from a Global South perspective
• Analyses Brazilian Portuguese, Brazilian native languages and Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS)
• Identifies dialectal forms in spoken and sign languages, to establish social evaluation and awareness regarding variants

1499 Accesses

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (11 chapters)

Front matter, linguistic prejudice and discrimination, introduction.

• Gladis Massini-Cagliari, Rosane Andrade Berlinck, Angélica Rodrigues

Theorising Linguistic Prejudice in Brazil: Pierre Bourdieu – The Symbolic Power of Language and the Principle of Error Correction

• Paul O’Neill, Gladis Massini-Cagliari

Literacy and the Problem of Linguistic Prejudice

• Luiz Carlos Cagliari

“What Deeply Irritates You”: Subjective Evaluation and Societal Evidence of (Socio)Linguistic Phenomena

• Marcus Garcia Sene, Caroline Carnielli Biazolli, Silvia Maria Brandão

Rhotacism and Lambdacism in Portuguese: The Process of Orthographic Standardization and Liquid Consonants

• Débora Aparecida dos Reis Justo Barreto, Gladis Massini-Cagliari

Neology and Group Identification in Brazilian Funk Lyrics

• Daniel Soares da Costa, Geisibel Cristina Andrade Nascimento

Diversity, Variation and Modalities

Confronting grammatical ideology with usage: toward a socially realistic account of spoken portuguese.

• Milena Aparecida Almeida, Rosane Andrade Berlinck, Stephen Levey

Pronominal Variation in Spoken Portuguese in “Rurban” Communities: Reflections on Evaluation, Prestige, and Stigma

• Letícia Gaspar Pinto, Rosane Andrade Berlinck

Approaching Gender and Sexuality Issues from a Sociolinguist Corpus-Based Analysis: A Methodologic Challenge

• Angélica Rodrigues, Camila Bordonal Clempi, Rafael de Almeida Arruda Felix

Language Prejudice and Language Structure: On Missing and Emerging Conjunctions in Libras and Other Sign Languages

• Angélica Rodrigues, Roland Pfau

Indigenous Languages in Brazil: Unveiling Linguistic Prejudice

• Cristina Martins Fargetti, Mateus Cruz Maciel de Carvalho

Back Matter

• Linguistic Prejudice
• Linguistic Discrimination
• Language Diversity
• Variation Linguistics
• Language Change
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Brazilian native languages
• Brazilian Sign Language LIBRAS

About this book

This book discusses linguistic diversity, linguistic prejudice, and language variation and change from a Global South perspective by analyzing Brazilian Portuguese, Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS) and indigenous languages spoken in Brazil. It brings together studies and reflections on linguistic prejudice and social discrimination based on data and examples from Brazil and aims to bridge the gap between academic findings and popular notions related to linguistic diversity to promote language diversity and fight linguistic intolerance. Chapters in this volume present contributions to understand the origins and motivations of linguistic prejudice and foster awareness of entrenched opinions regarding linguistic diversity.

The first part of the book brings together chapters analyzing basic sociolinguistic questions concerning linguistic prejudice based on theoretical discussions and qualitative research. The second part is composed of chapters that analyze linguistic prejudicein Brazil in major communities that speak Brazilian Portuguese varieties and minor communities that speak native and sign languages.

Understanding Linguistic Prejudice: Critical Approaches to Language Diversity in Brazil will be a valuable resource for researchers in sociolinguistics interested in language diversity, language justice and language policy. It will also be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists and other social scientist interested in the relationship between language, diversity, equity and inclusion.

Editors and Affiliations

Gladis Massini-Cagliari, Rosane Andrade Berlinck, Angelica Rodrigues

About the editors

Rosane de Andrade Berlinck is Professor in Historical Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at Sao Paulo State University, UNESP, at Araraquara, Brazil, since 1997. She obtained her Ph.D in Linguistics from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, KUL, Belgium, in 1995. From 2014 to 2015, she did a post doctorate, as a visiting professor, at the Sociolinguistics Laboratory of the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests and publications are in the fields of Historical Linguistics and Sociolinguistics of Brazilian Portuguese, with emphasis on linguistic variation and change in morphosyntactic processes, and correlations between textual-discursive genre, style, norm(s) and linguistic variation/change. She was editor-in-chief of Alfa : Revista de Linguística, from 2016 to 2020.

Angelica Rodrigues currently holds the position of Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Sciences and Letters at Unesp-Campus de Araraquara, where she works at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and holds the positions of Head of the Department of Linguistics, Literature and Classical Letters. She has a degree in Arts from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (1998), a Master's in Linguistics from the State University of Campinas (2001) and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the State University of Campinas (2006) with an internship (PhD Sandwich) at the Australian National University (2003-2004). She held an internship abroad (post-doctoral) at the University of Amsterdam between 2017 and 2018. Between March and July 2018, she performed an internship (post-doctoral) at the Federal University of Santa Catarina.  She has experience in the field of Portuguese and Brazilian Sign Language-Libras, with an emphasis on Linguistics, working mainly on the following subjects: sign language linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic variation and change, grammaticalization, syntax and descriptive studies of sign languages ​​(Brazilian Sign Language - Libras).

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Understanding Linguistic Prejudice

Book Subtitle : Critical Approaches to Language Diversity in Brazil

Editors : Gladis Massini-Cagliari, Rosane Andrade Berlinck, Angelica Rodrigues

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25806-0

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Social Sciences , Social Sciences (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-031-25805-3 Published: 31 March 2023

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-031-25808-4 Published: 01 April 2024

eBook ISBN : 978-3-031-25806-0 Published: 30 March 2023

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XX, 202

Number of Illustrations : 4 b/w illustrations, 31 illustrations in colour

Topics : Sociolinguistics , Language Policy and Planning , Romance Languages

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Communication and Culture
• Communication and Social Change
• Communication and Technology
• Communication Theory
• Critical/Cultural Studies
• Gender (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies)
• Health and Risk Communication
• Intergroup Communication
• International/Global Communication
• Interpersonal Communication
• Journalism Studies
• Language and Social Interaction
• Mass Communication
• Media and Communication Policy
• Organizational Communication
• Political Communication
• Rhetorical Theory
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Culture, prejudice, racism, and discrimination.

• John Baldwin John Baldwin School of Communication, Illinois State University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.164
• Published online: 25 January 2017

Prejudice is a broad social phenomenon and area of research, complicated by the fact that intolerance exists in internal cognitions but is manifest in symbol usage (verbal, nonverbal, mediated), law and policy, and social and organizational practice. It is based on group identification (i.e., perceiving and treating a person or people in terms of outgroup membership); but that outgroup can range from the more commonly known outgroups based on race, sex/gender, nationality, or sexual orientation to more specific intolerances of others based on political party, fan status, or membership in some perceived group such as “blonde” or “athlete.” This article begins with the link of culture to prejudice, noting specific culture-based prejudices of ethnocentrism and xenophobia. It then explores the levels at which prejudice might be manifest, finally arriving at a specific focus of prejudice—racism; however, what applies to racism may also apply to other intolerances such as sexism, heterosexism, classism, or ageism.

The discussion and analysis of prejudice becomes complicated when we approach a specific topic like racism, though the tensions surrounding this phenomenon extend to other intolerances such as sexism or heterosexism. Complications include determining the influences that might lead to individual racism or an atmosphere of racism, but also include the very definition of what racism is: Is it an individual phenomenon, or does it refer to an intolerance that is supported by a dominant social structure? Because overt intolerance has become unpopular in many societies, researchers have explored how racism and sexism might be expressed in subtle terms; others investigate how racism intersects with other forms of oppression, including those based on sex/gender, sexual orientation, or colonialism; and still others consider how one might express intolerance “benevolently,” with good intentions though still based on problematic racist or sexist ideologies.

• discrimination
• intolerance
• heterosexism
• stereotypes
• ethnocentrism

Introduction

One of the causes that gave rise to the postmodern revolution in France in 1968 was the failure of modern science and philosophy—liberalism, social science, reason, and so on—to remedy problems of war, poverty, and intolerance (Rosenau, 1992 ). As we look around today at the world in general, or even within specific nations, we continue to see a wide range of prejudice, from the 1994 genocide of Tutsis (and many Hutus) by Hutus in Rwanda to the mass killing of 70 people, mostly youths, at a Utøyan youth camp in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik. At this writing, a major refugee problem exists from people fleeing Middle Eastern countries where a strong ISIS influence is leading to the killing of gays, Christians, and Muslims from rival belief systems. In many European countries, hate groups and right-wing politicians are gaining ground. The Southern Poverty Law center tracks 1,600 hate groups within the United States (“Hate and Extremism,” n.d. ), classifying 784 that were active in 2014 (“Hate Map,” n.d. ), and the FBI reports nearly 6,000 hate crimes in the United States, with the greatest numbers due to race (48.5%), religion (17.4%), and sexual orientation (20.8%; FBI, 2014 ). These statistics reveal some interesting things about intolerance. For example, the “race”-based hate crimes include crimes based on anti-white sentiment as well as against people of color; and about 61% of hate crimes based on sexual orientation target gay males.

Both the international events and the statistics relevant to any specific nation prompt difficult questions about intolerance. In a white-dominant society, can or should we call anti-white crimes by people of color “racist”? If someone commits a hate crime based on sexual orientation, why are gay men more often the target than lesbians? Would hate crimes in other countries reflect the same axes of difference, or might hate crimes be based differently? German hate crimes might be based more on ethnicity (e.g., against Turkish immigrants, who by most racial classifications would be Caucasian). Why do people commit such acts at all?

One mistake we often make is thinking of prejudice and discrimination only in extreme terms such as genocide and hate crimes. In many countries and cultures, where overt expression of racism (and other intolerances) has become socially unacceptable, intolerances have gone “underground,” hidden in subtle forms. Further, intolerance can rely upon a wide variety of identity groups, including some that are (supposedly) biologically based, like racism, or based on other aspects, such as political party, fan status, or membership in some perceived group such as “blonde” or “athlete.” In sum, we must consider the relationship between different forms of intolerance, including but not limited to prejudice, racism, and discrimination; but these must always be understood within specific cultural contexts.

Culture and Intolerance

(re)defining culture.

As we look to the cultural influence on intolerance, we must first consider the definition of culture. The study of culture has deep roots in anthropological and linguistic research, especially as seen in the work of Franz Boaz and his students Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Edward Sapir, as well as in the early work of Edward Tyler, itself based on earlier traditions of ethology (Darwin) and social evolution (Marx). This work influenced the work of anthropologist E. T. Hall (Rogers & Hart, 2002 ) and others who laid the groundwork for the study of intercultural communication (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1990 ). Scholars have debated whether culture is a shared mental framework of beliefs, norms for behavior (i.e., the expectations for behavior rather than the behaviors themselves), values, and worldview, or whether culture should also include actual behaviors, texts, and artifacts of a group. In 1952 , A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn synthesized over 150 definitions of culture into a single definition that focuses on “patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior,” along with “ideas and especially their attached values” (p. 181). These are influenced and created through symbolic behavior, action, and other aspects of the environment (history, geography). The definitional dimensions of culture described by Kroeber and Kluckhohn explained well many of the definitions of culture up until the 1980s. After that time, some scholars (especially in communication) began to treat culture more as a set of symbols and meanings. Others framed culture as a process of constructing social meanings and systems through communication. As people sing, speak, play, tell jokes, and conduct business, they are constantly (re)creating their culture—both relying upon it and changing it.

More pertinent to the study of intolerance is a new approach to culture that sees culture neither as “suitcase” of things (be those beliefs and values or texts and artifacts) passed down from one generation to the next nor as a neutral process of mutual symbolic creation through time, but as having vested power interests that seek to influence what is seen as accepted or normal within a culture. For example, Moon ( 2002 ) defines culture as a “contested zone”:

Thinking about culture as a contested zone helps us understand the struggles of cultural groups and the complexities of cultural life … If we define culture as a contested zone in which different groups struggle to define issues in their own interests, we must also recognize that not all groups have equal access to public forums to voice their concerns, perspectives, and the everyday realities of their lives” (pp. 15–16).

That is, every cultural manifestation, such as the framing of Australian culture as “individualistic” or saying that “Australian men have such-and-such characteristics,” highlights what one should not be within that culture and establishes bounds for group-based intolerance.

With this diversity of definitions in mind, one is not sure what to think culture is or should be. Baldwin, Faulkner, Hecht, and Lindsley ( 2006 ) present a series of essays on the definition of culture by authors from six different disciplines (e.g., multicultural education, anthropology, political science), as well as 313 definitions of culture from an even greater number of disciplines, which they analyze. While they are reluctant to settle on a single definition of culture, this definition embraces most trends:

The way of life of a group of people, including symbols, values, behaviors, artifacts, and other shared aspects, that continually evolves as people share messages and is often the result of a struggle between groups who share different perspectives, interests, and power relationships (Baldwin, Coleman, González, & Shenoy-Packer, 2014 , p. 55).

This definition of culture, like most definitions that take a symbolic, process, or critical approach, does not treat cultures as “nations,” but as people groups who share symbolic or speech codes, with multiple cultural groups—defined not by demographic constitutions such as race, sex, or age, but by shared communicative realities—sharing single geographic areas. It is in the creation and defending of cultures—from countries to local and virtual communities—that intolerance often becomes apparent.

The Role of Culture in Prejudice

Of various schools of thought about the nature and origins of intolerance, only one approach suggests that intolerance is biological or in some way inherited, and that is sociobiology, or evolutionary theory. This approach suggests that intolerance is based on such things as preservation of the purity of the gene pool of one’s group, an inherent fear of strangers, or an inherited need for group identity. But even evolutionary theorists cannot explain all intolerance based on a theory of inherited impulse. Meyer ( 1987 ) argues:

Xenophobia and ethnocentrism as extreme forms of this search for identity cannot be attributed to [human] biology … Their very existence is a result of [human’s] attempts towards understanding the world, and [their] strong affective need to delimit a cosmos of conspecifics with whom [they] can share interpretations of [their] socially construed world (p. 93).

Research on intolerance in 90 preindustrial societies suggests that, when there are clearly psychological causes for intergroup conflict, groups ultimately use communication to create who the enemy is and how one should demonstrate or show intolerance (Ross, 1991 ). In sum, there is a strong cultural component determining which intolerances are felt or expressed in a given place or time.

Culture, however one defines it, can affect tolerance. Culture might be a set of values and beliefs, such as the value of loyalty to one’s group, combined with a belief that people who belong to a particular group have particular characteristics, are unlikeable for some reason, or merit mistreatment and the application of a different set of standards than we apply to ourselves (Opotow, 1990 ). If culture is a process, then we might look at how a culture creates both identity and intolerance through the ongoing structures of language, including word choices (“babe,” “hunk,” “faggot”), conversational structure (interruptions, etc.), joke- and storytelling, and so on. For example, West and Zimmerman’s ( 1987 ) notion of “doing gender” (i.e., gender as an everyday accomplishment of language) has led to countless studies of gender construction in several nations, as well as a focus by others on how we also “do race” and other identities. The way that we construct our identities through communication is inherently linked to how we construct the identities of those in outgroups, as we shall see; but they are also linked to behavior within our group. Social constructionist approaches to culture thus often become critical in their focus on power relations. Critical approaches look at how cultures, through communication, architecture, law, literature, education, and so on create a sense of the “other”—and of the self—that constrains us and pits us against one another in group conflict.

“Culture”-Based Prejudices: Ethnocentrism, Xenophobia

The purpose of this article is primarily to look at racism and discrimination as forms of prejudice; however, these cannot be understood without a larger understanding of prejudice in general and other forms or types of prejudice. Allport ( 1979 ) defines prejudice as an antipathy one has or a tendency to avoid the other, based on the other person’s group. For Allport, prejudice is a cognitive or psychological phenomenon:

Prejudice is ultimately a problem of personality formation and development; no two cases of prejudice are precisely the same. No individual would mirror his [or her] group’s attitude unless he [or she] had a personal need, or personal habit, that leads him [or her] to do so (p. 41).

Based on the Greek word that means “fear of strangers,” xenophobia refers to “the fear or hatred of anything that is foreign or outside of one’s own group, nation, or culture” (Herbst, 1997 , p. 235). The idea is frequently applied to a mistrust or dislike (rather than merely fear) of outgroups or those perceived to be different, especially in national terms. While the Greek translation suggests the psychological component of fear, recent researchers have treated the concept in behavioral or message terms. Historical research on xenophobia links it to anti-Semitism and, more recently, to Islamophobia, though it does not have as clear a historical trajectory as ethnocentrism; many more recent studies look at South Africa as a model nation in attempting to strategically reduce xenophobia. Researchers use a variety of methods to look at xenophobia, depending on their research assumptions and background disciplines. Rhetorical media research, for example, analyzes how Czech newspapers code anti-Roma sentiment through subtle terms such as “inadaptable citizens” ( nepřízpůsobivý občan , Slavíčková & Zvagulis, 2014 , p. 159); and psychological survey research investigates how, among Southern California students, ethnocentrism is positively associated with both language prejudice and feelings of being threatened by immigrants (Ura, Preston, & Mearns, 2015 ).

Van Dijk ( 1993 ) notes how groups can use language such as hyperbole of differences to marginalize immigrants, often through appeals to so-called democratic values. He notes that in some countries, such as in Central Europe, where claims of racism are often forcefully resisted due to conceptual ties of the term to Hitler’s Holocaust, Ausländerfeindlicheit (fear of foreigners) takes its place, though this fear of foreigners is frequently aimed at Turks and other (often darker-skinned and religiously different) people who resist adoption of traditional Germanic culture.

Ethnocentrism

Some types of prejudice relate specifically to the larger and more traditional notion of culture (i.e., cultures as nations). Ethnocentrism gained prominence as an area of research following sociologist Robert Sumner’s 1906 definition of the term as gauging others in reference to one’s own culture ( 1975 ), though other sociologists soon began to distinguish between this notion of “centrality” and the idea of “superiority”—that one’s culture or group is superior to those of others. If one sees ethnocentrism strictly as a feeling of superiority, nationalism (or school spirit, or religious loyalty, etc.) might not in and of itself be ethnocentric if it focuses only on being loyal to or highlighting the benefits of one’s own group, without denigrating others, though some might argue that it is impossible to feel pride in one’s own group without, at some level, disdaining or thinking less of other groups. The possibility of an ethnocentric bias in research led many early anthropologists to suggest ethnography—spending extended time within a culture to see things from cultural members’ point of view—as a way to reduce ethnocentrism in research.

A consideration of ethnocentrism has implications for other forms of bias as well, as the factors that predict national cultural ethnocentrism—and solutions that address it—could apply equally to one’s perception of life within one’s own community. The Hmong-descended people of the Pacific Northwest in the United States will likely feel that their ways are superior to those of Moroccan- or Guatemalan-descended peoples, as well as to those of the dominant culture. Auestad ( 2013 ) presented a series of essays on the rise of political discourses across the world that highlighted elements of national security and identity (tradition), as well as the building of cultures of fear by focusing on the negative aspects of foreigners or those of different religious groups within single countries. Some elements of the U.S. presidential race rhetoric of 2015–2016 exemplified this xenophobic and ethnocentric trend.

Within the field of intercultural communication, at least two lines of research have focused on ethnocentrism. The first is by Jim Neuliep, who, with colleagues, has revisited the measurement of ethnocentrism in the classic 1950 work by the Frankfurt School, The Authoritarian Personality , with a new measure of ethnocentrism. After applying the measure to white Americans, Neuliep ( 2012 ) continues to test the relationship of ethnocentrism to other important intercultural variables, such as intercultural anxiety and communication satisfaction. The second is Milton Bennett’s ( 1993 ) consideration of ethnorelativism. In this approach, a range of attitudes reflects either ethnocentrism or ethnorelativism. Ethnocentric stances include denial (e.g., indifference toward or ignorance of any difference at all), defense (traditional ethnocentrism of denigrating the culture of the other or feeling one’s own culture is superior, but also in “going native”), and minimization (focusing on similarities and ignoring differences, by claiming “color blindness,” or focusing on how we are all the same, be that as “God’s children” or in the Marxist struggle against oppression; 43). As one grows more “ethnorelative,” or accepting of difference, one exhibits one of three stages: acceptance (being respectful of and even appreciating the value and behavioral differences of others), adaptation (actually adopting behaviors or views of other groups), or integration (adopting a worldview that transcends any single culture). This approach has gained ground around the world and in different disciplines, from Finland to Iran, with applications from cultural sensitivity to interreligious tensions.

One of the difficulties of discussing prejudice is the conceptual overlap between terms (e.g., xenophobia conflates with racial or ethnic prejudice; ethnocentrism might refer to any people group, such as ethnic groups, and not just nations). At the root of our understanding of prejudice is the very goal of “tolerance.” In fact, the notion of tolerance for diversity may be limited: It is often treated merely as “the application of the same moral principles and rules, caring and empathy, and feelings of connections to human beings of other perceived groups” (Baldwin & Hecht, 1995 , p. 65). That is, it is similar to Bennett’s ( 1993 ) notion of acceptance, of respect for difference, though that respect sometimes (a) occurs at a difference and (b) sometimes exists in behavioral form only, but is not internalized. Communication of tolerance is a worthwhile pursuit in our behavior and research; however, we argue that we can go beyond tolerance to appreciation—even to the behavioral and attitudinal integration of elements of the other culture (Hecht & Baldwin, 1998 ). There is a danger of such appreciation, as borrowing (e.g., “cultural hybridity”) occurs within power relations. We are not talking about a dominant group borrowing from subordinate or subaltern groups in a colonizing or folklorizing way, but about cultural learning and dialogue.

Limited Perspectives of Prejudice

That consideration of tolerance/prejudice should be treated as a dichotomy or a range is only one of the difficulties that has haunted the study and conceptualization of prejudice. Debates have swirled around the nature of prejudice, the causes of prejudice, and the “locus” of certain prejudices (such as racism or sexism), among other things. Allport ( 1979 ) suggests that prejudice is a “generalized” attitude—that if one is prejudiced, say, toward Jewish people, she or he will also be prejudiced toward communists, people of color, and so on. It is possible, however, that one might be prejudiced toward some groups, even in some contexts, but not toward other groups (Baldwin & Hecht, 1995 ).

The nature of prejudice

Allport ( 1979 ) defines prejudice as “an avertive [i.e., avoiding] or hostile attitude toward a person who belongs to a group, simply because he [or she] belongs to that group, and is therefore presumed to have the objectionable qualities ascribed to the group” (p. 7). By this definition, prejudice is an aspect of affect , or feeling toward a group, though it is closely related to cognitions , or thoughts about the group, referring to stereotypes. Also, prejudice is inherently negative, following the primary definition common in modern dictionaries, though a secondary definition includes any sort of prejudgment based on group belonging, such as prejudice toward one’s own group. Most dictionary definitions follow the attitudinal approach, though in common usage, people often use the term to refer to things like racism, which carry behavioral and even policy implications that are not strictly attitudes. By strictest definition, prejudice is an attitude that favors one group over another, based on or related to cognitions, and both leading to and influenced by behaviors (including communication), texts (e.g., media, rhetoric), and policies (following the notion of structuration, in which social structures guide social behavior, but social behavior in turn creates and changes social structures).

Causes of prejudice

Allport ( 1979 ) recognized a series of influences that impact a particular incident of prejudice, such as police brutality based on racial group/social class divisions or anti-Islamic bullying in secondary schools around the Western world. These include historical, sociological, situational, psychodynamic, and phenomenological (i.e., perceptual) influences. But ultimately, for Allport, a social psychologist, prejudice is “a problem of personality formation and development” (p. 41). For Althusser ( 1971 ), a Marxist philosopher, prejudice would likely, in the last instance, be an issue of economic and social class considerations. Ultimately, a cross-disciplinary perspective is more useful for understanding a complex phenomenon like prejudice (Hecht & Baldwin, 1998 ). A broader consideration should consider multiple causes (Baldwin, 1998 ), including evolutionary causes, psychological causes (both psychodynamic and perceptual), sociological causes, and rhetorical causes. Communication and behavior become central in each of these causes, highlighting the need for a communicative understanding of prejudice.

Evolutionary causes, often referred to under the rubric of sociobiology, focus on the way in which prejudice might be an inherited trait, possibly even genetic (see, e.g., essays in Reynolds, Falger, & Vine, 1987 ). This approach includes the idea that groups seek to preserve themselves (e.g., by preservation of a supposedly pure gene pool or because of fear of the stranger), the ethnocentrism already noted. Behaviors that exclude have a sense of “naturalness” in that they help a group to survive, and such exclusion of strangers may help to preserve a group’s existence. Some scholars have criticized this approach as a rationale for conservative politics that create a notion of “us” and “them” as natural and that exclude the other, often in racial or religious terms, in order to preserve the way of life of a dominant group within a culture or nation.

Psychological explanations of prejudice fall into at least two major divisions. The first, psychodynamic, suggests that prejudice serves as a mechanism for individuals to meet psychological needs. Thus researchers have long linked it to things such as ambivalence toward parents, rigid personality structure, and a need for authority (Allport, 1979 ; Adorno et al., 1950 ). We see this indirectly through Kenneth Burke’s ( 1967 ) approach to rhetoric in his analysis of Hitler’s campaign against Jewish people as a means to divert negative emotions related to economic and political difficulties from the mainstream German people to Jews, and in Edward Said’s ( 2003 ) Orientalism , which notes how Medieval Europe cast negative images of lust and vice on Middle Easterners that the Europeans did not see in themselves.

A second aspect of the psychological approach concerns perception or cognition. This contains a range of possible influences on prejudice, including such things as selective attention, perception, and recall of the negative behavior of outgroup members, or the notion of attributional biases that impact how we give meanings to the behavior of those of our ingroup and those of outgroups. At the center of many of these explanations is the notion of categorization of people (i.e., dividing them into cognitive groups such as ingroups and outgroups). Social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986 ) suggests that we cannot think of ourselves apart from the groups to which we belong; we engage in intergroup comparison as a means to make us feel better about our group; and, if our group does not compare well to a group we admire or must rely on in some way—often the dominant group—we engage in strategies to reclaim a sense of pride for our group or distance ourselves from it.

Categorization, in social identity theory, is not a form of prejudice—it is simply the mental placing of people (or things, actions, characteristics, etc.) into mental boxes. However, those boxes are closely related to the stereotypes that cling to groups. Stereotypes are overgeneralizations we make about groups that we apply to individuals in those groups (Herbst, 1997 ). Although these stereotypes provide a mental shortcut for processing information about others, they interfere with our encoding, storage, and recall of information about members of our own group and other groups (Stephan, 1985 ). Countless studies of stereotypes suggest that stereotypes, like ethnocentrism, can serve positive ingroup functions, that they sometimes have at least some basis in an actual behavior or custom (a “kernel of truth”), and that we stereotype both our own group and other groups. Devine (e.g., Devine & Sharp, 2009 ) has found that even people who report lower prejudice, if mentally occupied, still rely on stereotypes, suggesting that everyone is aware of societal stereotypes toward certain groups (e.g., the elderly, athletes, the deaf). It is likely that if we are on auto-pilot or in a state of mindlessness, we will resort to stereotypes. But individuating people (i.e., taking them out of the group we perceive them to be in and treating them as individuals; Dovidio, Gaertner, & Kawakami, 2003 ) may require deliberate cognitive effort.

Group-based, or sociological, approaches, like psychological approaches, are varied. These include Marxist approaches, which are themselves varied in form (see various essays in Rex & Mason, 1986 ). Some hold tightly to a “vulgar” vision of Marxism, framing intolerance like racism as a creation of the elite to divide the working classes and distract them from revolution through “false consciousness.” Few Marxists take such a severe approach, choosing to see looser relations between capital and the construction of intolerance, but in the “last instance,” seeing intolerance as linked to social class and economic systems. “Capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchal social systems are frequently identified as producing inherent race and gender inequalities which, in various ways, serve the needs of the systems they perpetuate” (Knowles & Mercer, 1992 , p. 110). Weberian approaches see a wider variety of classes than workers and elite, with prejudice linked not just to labor forces but to the struggle over goods, services, and prestige (Gerth & Mills, 1946 ). Other group-based factors also impact prejudice, such as perceived group competition for jobs and resources in times of economic upheaval (e.g., the 1970s oil crisis in the United States), known as realistic group conflict (Bobo, 1983 ); immigration reasons (refugees versus those seeking economic opportunity, patterns of settlement; Omi & Winant, 1986 ); and historically developed class statuses between groups that link immigrants or members of a minority group to a certain class (Wilson, 1978 ), such as the Gastarbeiter (guest-worker) Turks in Germany or the Algerian-descended French.

In a classic “chicken-egg” argument about which came first, it is fruitless to debate whether psychology leads to sociological causes or vice versa, and, in turn, whether these lead to the communicative expression of intolerance, or whether it is the communicative construction of group identities and intolerance that creates the attitudes (Ruscher, 2001 ). It is more likely that mental structures and communicative practices co-create each other, through forms we shall examine in more detail. One possible metaphor for understanding these influences, the impact of historical situations (such as the longstanding antipathy between Turkish and Greek Cypriots, Broome, 2005 ), and specific incidents (such as the attack on the World Trade Towers in New York City in 2001 ), is as layers building upon one other, or even as a hologram, in which we can imperfectly see some semblance of a complex prejudice through a single image—an experimental study on racial perceptions and media use, an analysis of an anti-Irish speech or a pro-nationalist song, or interviews with women who are victims of catcalling (Hecht & Baldwin, 1998 ). But, as a complete hologram provides the most faithful image, the most complete view of an intolerance will come through multiple views (e.g., disciplines), using multiple methods.

Racism: A Case Study in Prejudice

Racism as a specific type of prejudice is one of the most hotly discussed and debated sites of intolerance in contemporary times in the United States and beyond. Even countries that once imagined themselves as “racial democracies” in which racially different people lived side by side (like Brazil) are now admitting the harsh reality of entrenched and historic racism. Even though many there argue that class, not race, is the primary social distinction, as racism has become officially illegal, forms of overt racism, from social media to abuse and killing of unarmed blacks by police continue to receive recent focus in U.S. news.

Racism is a form of intolerance that is based on the supposedly biological distinction of race, but many authors today argue that race is a social construct, sometimes defined differently from country to country and even over time within a single country. Different authors have outlined the history of the notion of race in the English language, noting that at different times, it has referred to an ancestral clan (the race of Abraham), to supposed biological differences, and, more recently, to culture (Banton, 1987 ; Omi & Winant, 1986 ). Those who see a biological component cannot agree on how many races there are and, historically, politics and rhetoric have done as much to construct who belongs in a particular race as biology (e.g., in the early U.S., the Irish were considered “colored”). In the United States, race was based on racist assumptions, on one having even a small degree of colored blood in one’s ancestral lineage; in other cultures, race is based strictly on physiological features, regardless of lineage. Ethnicity , in contrast, is related more to the cultural origins of one’s background or ancestry, sometimes linked to a specific time and place. To emphasize its social constructedness, many authors bracket “race” with quotation marks.

Who Can Be Racist? The Locus of Racism (and Other Intolerances)

Can minority members be “racist”.

Beyond the nature of race itself, researchers and educators debate the very nature of racism. Some contend that racism is an intolerance based on the construction of race that is perpetrated and held by the support of the dominant system. For example, Malott and Schaefle ( 2015 ) define racism as “a system of oppression, whereby persons of a dominant racial group (whites in the United States) exercise power or privilege over those in nondominant groups” (p. 361). According to this argument, only whites can be racist in a white-dominated system (whether that dominance is by numbers or in political and social power). Others contend that racism is any system of beliefs—“held consciously or otherwise”—that treats members of a group that is different on supposedly biological grounds as “biologically different than one’s own” (Herbst, 1997 , p. 193). By this definition, anyone who sees another race group as inferior would be racist.

The locus of racism: Individual or structural?

This distinction in racism also applies to definitions of sexism or to the delineation between homophobia as a personal dislike or fear of LGBT individuals and heterosexism as a social structure that reinforces prejudice against them (Nakayama, 1998 ). The debate is similar to the definitional debate of prejudice in general—is it something that is strictly an individual trait, or is it something that is socially built into the structures of society—the laws, the media, the educational system, the church, and so on? Associated with this question is the nature of what racism is: The “individual-level” definition treats racism as a system of beliefs (i.e., a psychological construct), and the other treats it as a system of oppression that goes beyond individual psyche and personality to consider racism embedded within social structures. The question of where we see racism (and other intolerances) is vitally important. Those who see racism and other intolerances as primarily individual-level (stereotypes, personal dislikes, etc.) tend to address intolerance through training and educational programs in organizations and schools; those who see it as systemic believe that such approaches ignore larger issues of policy, law, segregation, discrimination, and media/rhetoric that produce and reproduce racist beliefs or create an environment that makes them grow. We see this tension, for example, in Rattansi’s ( 1992 ) discussion of the debate between multicultural education—an educational solution to tolerance focused on educating about differences—and antiracism, which addresses political and social structures that propagate and support racism.

Racism: Defined by intent or result?

A related definitional distinction regarding racism concerns whether an intent of harm or exclusion is necessary to define thoughts or actions as racist. Miles ( 1989 ) criticizes earlier notions of racism, largely in that they re-inscribe the notion of race as if it were a concrete reality rather than a social construction. He weaves together a new approach to racism that begins with discourses that serve to exclude the “other” (based on supposed biological differences); for Miles, “the concept of racism should refer to the function, rather than the content of the discourses” (p. 49), allowing racism to include things that may not sound racist but still seek to exclude the other. Miles differentiates racism from racialization , the categorization of people based on supposed biological differences. He argues against the use of racism and disagrees with a stance that would have only whites being racist, such that “all ‘white’ people are universally and inevitably sick with racism” (p. 53), as this concept may ignore the specifics of racism in particular countries, cultures, or circumstances; however, he notes the need to consider institutional racism—racism built into organizational, legal, and social structures—that does favor whites in many countries. By this, one could speak of racism as something any person could hold or express, but institutional racism would be reserved for a group that has power in a particular context. Finally, he bases racism not on the intent of an action, but on the result. He argues that racism is an ideology, based on differentiation, that leads to “exclusionary practices” (pp. 77–78), such as differential treatment or allocation of resources and opportunities, regardless of one’s intent or even awareness of the ideological underpinnings of one’s actions. Goldberg ( 1993 ) argues that we should allow racism to include either intent or result.

Including resulting exclusionary practice in our definition of racism has implications for redressing or addressing racism. First, it suggests a limitation in addressing overt racist thoughts and stereotypes only through education, as policies, laws, and social structures foster an environment for the presence of such thoughts and their communication. Miles ( 1989 ) advocates that “strategies for eliminating racism should concentrate less on trying exclusively to persuade those who articulate racism that they are ‘wrong’ and more on changing those particular economic and political relations” (p. 82). A second implication is that, even as we seek to address racism through everyday interactions and social media, because racism is such a charged topic, we will advance our cause little by calling an action, a joke, or a Facebook or Twitter posting “racist.” The poster, holding a more traditional view of racism as intentionally harmful in some way, will deny racist intent, and a charge of racism will move the discussion into the original communicator’s attempts to avoid the charge of racism (or sexism, etc.), rather than addressing the specific policy, image, or statement. Instead, we might discuss and demonstrate through evidence the way that the policy or image excludes others based on race. Without invoking the “r-word,” we may have a better chance at engaging in dialogues about policies, laws, and communicative behaviors that exclude others.

Intersectionalities of Racism

As we have begun to notice, one thing that complicates the concept of racism is its overlap with other terms, such as prejudice (with racism being a subset of prejudice). So, although xenophobia and ethnocentrism are distinct and separate from racism, the “other” within these concepts is often articulated or perceived in terms of race. A focus on racism and antiracism, unfortunately, often excludes other bases of intolerance that may be even more prominent within a given area, such as religious intolerance, sexism, or heterosexism. At the same time, it is useful to see how racism intersects with and sometimes leads to other intolerances, all of which have received much thought in recent years.

In some cases, feminists and antiracists have been at odds, proponents of each claiming that their sphere of oppression is the one that merits the most attention. Feminism is defined as “the belief that men and women are equal and should have equal respect and opportunities in all spheres of life—personal, social, work, and public” (Wood, 2008 , p. 324). Feminist communication research seeks to make the voices of women heard, to highlight their experiences within the social construction of gender, and “their experiences of oppression and of coping with and resisting that oppression” (Foss & Foss, 1994 , p. 39). Recent feminists consider how patriarchy, or male power or hegemony over the realities and voices of women, is not something maintained only by men nor is it deliberate. Rather, it is held in place by systems often beyond the awareness of men and women, and consented to and participated in by women themselves (Zompetti, 2012 ). Each of these ideas could also apply to racism, revealing a similarity between sexism and racism. But racism and sexism are also joined in the experiences of women of color, whose specific life situations are not fully addressed by either antiracist efforts or feminism. Collins ( 1990 ), for example, argues that African American women in the United States live in a site of triple oppression—by race, sex, and class, with these oppressions articulated by both the dominant white community and within the black community.

Queer theory

Queer theory seeks to challenge the way in which society passes on heterosexuality as the norm. Warner ( 1991 ) sees oppression of gays and lesbians in every aspect of society and in “a wide range of institutions and ideology” (p. 5). But even more so, he feels that the academy’s silence regarding oppression of sexual identity participates in that oppression. Chávez ( 2013 ) supports this claim, noting that at the writing of her article, no major journal in the National Communication Association had devoted a full issue to queer studies. Again, recent scholars have been looking at the intersection of race and sexual orientation (Yep, 2013 ), such as the representations and experiences of older gay male adults, Latina lesbians, and transgender blacks.

Whiteness studies

Based on the early writings of Richard Dyer ( 1997 ) and Ruth Frankenberg ( 1993 ), researchers have highlighted the notion of whiteness —a hidden system of ideology and social structure that maintains whites in a position of advantage—but one that is often invisible to, and yet defended by, whites (Wander, Nakayama, & Martin, 1999 ). Whiteness studies call attention to areas of white privilege. “By exposing the ‘invisibility’ of whiteness, the study of whiteness helps us understand the way that white domination continues” (p. 22). A current search for “whiteness” in a communication library search engine reveals over 800 articles on the topic. Many of these are media studies on how whiteness is promoted and/or challenged in a wide variety of texts, including South Park , the Rush Hour movies, The Hunger Games , and Glee . But whiteness is also analyzed in areas of education, everyday language, and health and organizational communication, as well as in many different countries.

Orientalism/postcolonialism

whiteness studies owe part of their heritage to postcolonialism, which has its own roots in the conceptualization of Orientalism by Edward Said ( 2003 ). Said analyzes European art and literature to reveal the construction of the Arab or Middle Easterner as “other.” He notes how the Western ideology of the East (referring to the Middle East) folklorizes and sexualizes Middle Easterners, treating them as backward, in a way that justifies European colonization and paternalism. Thousands of books now deal in some way with Orientalism, and Said’s notion of the “other” has become a stock theme in how we consider the racial other. For example, though not framed explicitly in Orientalism, James Baldwin’s famous 1955 essay “Stranger in the Village” talks about the rage of the black man as he confronts white America and the naiveté of whites—a naiveté that they work hard to preserve (thus relating Baldwin’s ideas to whiteness). When whites arrive in Africa, blacks are astonished:

The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence … The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable: the rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history.

Postcolonialism, building upon Orientalism, considers all locations where one nation or people group has colonized another group, considering the cultural, political, and social ramifications of that colonization and seeking to remedy social ills that it has brought about. Shome and Hegde ( 2002 ) call the approach “interventionist and highly political” (p. 250). Postcolonialism notes how much of the world is forced to work within thought systems created by the Western world (an effect only magnified through the rise of the internet and globalization). Postcolonial writers are often interested in issues such as migration of people groups (including diasporic groups); the hybrid (but power-laden) mixture of ideas, artifacts, and behaviors between cultures; the liminal spaces between cultures; and the imperialism of ideas (Bhabha, 1994 ). Thus, postcolonialism is inherently about prejudice and oppression beyond racism, though it also has links to racism specifically, as authors consider the ways that some have used racial categories to colonize others (e.g., see essays in Nakayama & Halualani, 2010 ).

Discrimination: Considering the Form(s) of Intolerance

As we have seen, it is difficult to discuss prejudice in general or racism specifically without moving into issues of institutionalized prejudice, media representations, school and government policies, and so on. In this sense, both prejudice and racism are intricately intertwined with discrimination. Discrimination specifically refers to “behavior that denies equal treatment to people because of their membership in some group” (Herbst, 1997 , p. 185). It is based on the “beliefs, feelings, fantasies, and motivations of prejudice” (p. 185), but these mental or social concepts are not in themselves discrimination. Discrimination involves behavior.

Institutional Discrimination

When we think of institutional-level discrimination, many examples come to mind. These include things like not allowing certain groups housing or refusing other privileges, resources, or opportunities to them. At the writing of this chapter, a popular U.S. media topic is the county clerk, Kim Davis, who refused to give marriage licenses to gays or lesbians based on her faith, despite a state law that allowed her to do so. The Jim Crowe laws of the United States, which gave unequal educational and public access rights to blacks and whites is a classic example, with many facilities being for “whites only.” The website Global Issues (Shah, 2010 ) details instances of racism and racial discrimination around the world, such as racism against white farmers in Zimbabwe and discrimination against the Dalits—the “untouchables” in India.

Genocide and ethnic cleansing

At the extreme end of discrimination, we have genocide and ethnic cleansing . For example, around 1915 , the Ottomon (Turkish) empire slaughtered 1.5 million Armenians (75% of the Turkish Armenian population). The Turkish government took Armenian (largely Christian) children and converted them, giving them to Islamic families. Even today, Turkey defends this “Turkification” of Turkey as a necessary act of war and has resisted the U.S. and other nations defining it as genocide (Armenian genocide, n.d. ). Other genocides have occurred in Central Europe (the Holocaust) in the 1930s–1940s, Rwanda in 2003 , Cambodia in the 1970s, and the Greek/Pontic genocide of World War I. Extreme discrimination includes hate crimes and overt hate groups. The introduction of this chapter noted the prevalence of hate crimes and hate groups within the United States and other nations.

Redlining and racial profiling

In many countries, overt forms of discrimination for many (but seldom all) groups have been outlawed. Institutional discrimination itself may take forms that are harder to name and prove, such as redlining , the process by which banks give fewer mortgages to people of color, based on the belief that they are less able to repay loans. Some real estate agents may steer people of color away from rentals in upscale neighborhoods; school advisers may tell people of color that their children are more suited for trade school rather than college or graduate school. In the United States in 2014–2015 , there was a spate of cases surrounding potential police brutality against unarmed black men, leading to the “Black Lives Matter” movement. There is also racial profiling , such as when police pay more attention to people of color, stopping and/or searching them more frequently than they do whites (what some people of color call “DWB” or “driving while black”). A growing and complex array of academic studies examine whether or not profiling exists and, if so, what its nature is (e.g., is it pro-white, or does it depend on the race of the officer?). A similar phenomenon experienced by many people of color is being followed through stores by security guards, regardless of their attire or appearance. Notably, some aspects of discrimination, such as redlining, might be done, at least in the minds of the banker, real estate agent, or high school counselor, without a notion of racial discrimination; but here, Miles’s ( 1989 ) notion of racism defined by exclusionary outcome would classify the behaviors as racist, as they exclude based on supposed biological differences.

Intolerant Communication

Redneck racism/prejudice.

Central to our discussion is the way that discrimination and racism can occur through communicative behavior. Brislin ( 1991 ) outlined several forms of discriminatory communication. In addition to hate crimes and ethnic cleansing, he mentions redneck racism —the expression of blatant intolerance toward someone of another race. He applies these categories to racism, but we can apply them to any group. These might include jokes, statements (e.g., about the inferiority or backwardness of a group), or slurs or names for people of another group (also called ethnophaulisms ). Conventional wisdom, for example, suggests that there are many more slurs for women then there are for men, and most of these have some sexual connotation.

Sometimes, the intolerance is slightly veiled though still present, as when we resort to “us/them” language or talk to someone from another group about “your people.” Brislin’s ( 1991 ) notion of arm’s-length prejudice occurs when someone voices tolerance for a group, typically of being accepting of them in the neighborhood or workplace, but wants to restrict them from closer relationships, such as marrying a family member (related to Bogardus’s notion of social distance ; Allport, 1979 ). Prejudice might manifest in statements like “She’s very smart for an ‘X’” or “I have a friend who is a ‘Y,’ and he is very articulate,” since such statements assume that most Xs are not smart and most Ys are not articulate.

Prejudiced colloquialisms

Prejudice also manifests in our use of colloquialisms that play upon a particular aspect of identity or ability, such as calling something “lame” or “retarded.” Both the harm and use of such phrases has been established. For example, one study found that hearing the phrase “That’s so gay” made gays and lesbians feel less accepted in the university setting and, to a lesser degree, increased reported health problems. Over 45% of the participants had heard the word “gay” linked to something “stupid or undesirable” (Hall & LaFrance, 2012 , p. 430) ten or more times within the last year. Hall and LaFrance ( 2012 ) find a complex interplay between identity—males’ endorsement of gender identity norms andthe desire to distance themselves from homosexuality, as well as the social norms around them, and their likelihood to use the expression.

Prejudice built into language

We might well say that intolerance can be embedded in every level of language. In one classic study, men interrupted women much more than women interrupted men. If women overlapped men, men continued their turn speaking, but if men interrupted women, women yielded their turn speaking (Zimmerman & West, 1975 ). Coates’s ( 2003 ) analysis of narratives told by men in mixed company (such as around the family dinner table) notes that men are both the target and subject of most stories, with dinner table discussion typically centering on patriarchal authority. Research has explored prejudice through verbal and nonverbal behaviors toward people of different ages, people with disabilities, people with different languages or dialects, and other groups, including much theory and research on how we adjust or do not adjust our behavior toward those we perceive to be of different groups (communication accommodation theory; Gallois, Ogay, & Giles, 2005 ) or how minority members must negotiate their communication with dominant group members because of contexts of power and prejudice (co-cultural theory; Orbe & Spellers, 2005 ).

Bar-Tal ( 1990 ) and Zur ( 1991 ) note the way that we use rhetoric to create a sense of others (i.e., to create the identity of the enemy in a way that then justifies discrimination) resonates with Burke’s ( 1967 ) analysis of Hitler’s rhetorical construction of the Jewish people. Collins and Clément ( 2012 ), summarizing research from a special 2007 issue of Journal of Language and Social Psychology on language and discrimination up to the present, summarize the role of language as it pertains to prejudice:

Language is the primary means through which prejudice can be explicitly and implicitly communicated and is, therefore, a major contributor to its transmission and maintenance. But language can also play a more rooted and integral role in prejudice: changing perceptions by distorting the information it carries, focusing attention on social identities, and being a factor in the definition of group boundaries (p. 389).

Intolerance gone underground: Subtle forms of prejudice

As early as the mid-1980s, authors began to argue that in Western societies, racism and other forms of intolerance were going underground (i.e., aware that the redneck varieties of intolerance were socially unacceptable, people expressed less overt intolerance but continued to show intolerance through racism in ways that were “subtle” and “everyday”—a new and modern racism). People might express such forms of racism (and by extension other intolerances) through nonverbal behaviors, such as placing change on the counter instead of in an outgroup member’s hand, or through subtle sayings and word usages that exclude or put down the other person in some way that is not clearly distinguishable as prejudice. In the new racism, minority groups are not spoken of as inferior but as “different,” “although in many respects there are ‘deficiencies,’ such as single-parent families, drug abuse, lacking achievement values, and dependence on welfare and affirmative action—‘pathologies’ that need to be corrected” (van Dijk, 2000 , p. 34). Today, researchers and social activists refer to these subtle manifestations of prejudice as microagressions .

Symbolic racism is similar to subtle racism (Sears & Henry, 2005 ), though it relates more to political attitudes. Researchers have framed symbolic racism to include elements of anti-black sentiment hidden by political attitudes (e.g., that affirmative action has gone too far, that blacks are demanding too much; McConahay, 1986 ). Political research has a corollary in communication in that often, as whites talk about economic or political issues, there is at least a mental if not an explicit verbal coding of race or ethnic “othering.” International ownership of business becomes an issue when Japanese or Chinese companies start buying U.S. businesses, regardless of the large and long-term Dutch and English business holdings in America; discussions about welfare, gangs, and urban decay are often subtly about race. Similar verbal coding may also hold true with other identity groups.

Finally, in terms of face-to-face communication, researchers have explored the notion of “benevolent” intolerance. Discussions of things such as benevolent racism or sexism are often based on a larger notion of benevolent domination, whereby one nation or group seeks to dominate another, supposedly in its best interests (based on Rudyard Kipling’s notion of the “white man’s burden”). For example, Esposito and Romano ( 2014 ) contrast benevolent racism to other forms of post-U.S.-civil-rights forms of racism, such as laissez-faire racism, symbolic racism, and color-blind racism. Each might oppose affirmative action, for example, but for different reasons. Laissez-faire would oppose it based on ideas of meritocracy and free enterprise, blaming blacks themselves for lack of economic progress. Symbolic racism would hold that “the United States is a fair and equitable society where everyone has ample opportunity to succeed through hard work and talent” (p. 74), and that blacks who use the “race card” are hypersensitive—they are “too pushy, too demanding, too angry” (McConahay & Hough, 1976 , p. 38). Color-blind racism starts with what seems to be a reasonable assumption, that all people are the same, but then moves to assume that lack of progress of minority members is due to their personal choices, low work ethic, or lack of ability, and ignores structural support for inequalities.

Benevolent racism has a long history, even into slavery, a time in which some whites felt they were doing blacks a favor by controlling them and “providing” for them. More recently, it involves a seemingly positive attitude toward blacks that then opposes any social reforms like affirmative action as belittling blacks and working against their natural progress as citizens (Esposito & Romano, 2014 ). Benevolent sexism holds the same basic idea: Rather than sexism being based on anti-woman attitudes, it can also be supported by putting women “on a pedestal,” characterizing them as “pure creatures who ought to be protected, supported, and adored, and whose love is necessary to make a man complete” (Glick & Fiske, 2001 , p. 109). Extensive research has linked such benevolent ideas about women to negative outcomes for them.

Intolerance in the media and on the internet

Finally, many volumes have been written on the issues of stereotypes and intolerance in the media. This includes both social scientific work, such as the cultivation theory research that analyzes both representation of minorities in the media in different countries and the research that considers the effects of such representation. It also includes a wide array of critical and cultural analyses from the cultural studies school. Many of these analyses use the principles discussed—feminism, postcolonialism, critical race theory, whiteness, and so on. They work to demonstrate how the media systematically ignore, oversimplify, or negatively represent particular groups. One line of research in this field is the focus on the symbolic annihilation of race (Coleman & Chivers Yochim, 2008 ), which notes how, unlike stereotypes in the media that focus on the presence of some characteristic associated with a group, symbolic annihilation also considers “the meanings associated with absence, omission, or even inclusion that is not so obviously problematic (negative)” (p. 2), in terms of what such absences and seemingly benign images mean.

With the growth of the internet and video gaming, a final area of importance in understanding, researching, and working against prejudice includes all new media. The internet gives impetus for new research to understand hate groups on the media, flaming (e.g., in comments on video-hosting websites such as YouTube), and social media. We see examples of the use of social media for racist purposes in the flurry of racist twitters that followed the crowning of Nina Davuluri, an American of East Indian descent. Research considers both the presence of stereotypes in such media, as well as their effects.

The potential of communication

Unlike some early critical writers, who felt that media imagery (including new media) only produce and reproduce prevailing (prejudiced) ideologies, we must also consider the potential of face-to-face, mediated, and new media as places to challenge oppression. In terms of face-to-face communication, we can work through education to dispel stereotypes. That education can be simply on cultural differences and accomplishments, though changing cognitions alone may not change deeply felt affective prejudice, and only time (as more tolerant individuals assume positions of leadership) will lead to changes in discriminatory social structures. This is why some advocate for political education that addresses both personal and structural prejudice more directly, as well as political action and intervention in media systems.

Many scholars represent interpersonal contact as one of the best ways to address prejudice. Contact theory holds great potential for the planning of interventions to reduce intergroup tensions, as it describes how interpersonal contact with people from outgroups under the right conditions can work by changing both attitudes and affect, especially if people can see the other person as both a member of a new group while still recognizing their original group identity (Dovidio et al., 2003 ). Thomas Pettigrew ( 2016 ) outlines the history of research on authoritarianism (the desire and support for strong authority structures) and relative deprivation (the feeling that one’s group is disadvantaged in comparison to another group) as two of the main predictors of intergroup prejudice. He notes how, while personality factors like authoritarianism and cognitive rigidity are related to greater intolerance and make the likelihood of meaningful intergroup contact more unlikely, even in the presence of these variables, contact programs can have a positive effect for people with prejudice A meta-analysis of 515 contact studies suggests that contact works specifically by increasing knowledge of the other group, decreasing anxiety when one is with the other group, and increasing empathy for the other group (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008 ).

In terms of media, we see both a growth in the production of media that challenges and resists stereotypes, rigid gender constructions, and so on, as well as a growth of grassroots efforts to highlight such oppression. One such effort is the website Fat, Ugly, or Slutty , a site composed of posts contributed by women who are stereotyped or verbally assaulted by men in video gaming websites, usually when the women have beaten them. The women are able to post comments made by other players, their own avatars, and even videos that the men sometimes send them. Efforts like these highlight forms of oppression that occur throughout the internet, but they also highlight the potential of the internet for addressing these forms of oppression in creative ways.

Conclusions

We have seen throughout this article that culture, prejudice, racism, and discrimination are related in complicated ways. Some people even see the characteristics of a particular culture (e.g., mainstream America’s conception of male and female beauty, the definition of a “good” education, or the focus on individualism) as negotiated between people with economic and power interests. Cultures (using the term much more widely than “nation”) are always ethnocentric, with individuals sometimes being xenophobic. But these forms of intolerance are frequently linked to other forms of intolerance—religious, racial, ethnic, and otherwise. Prejudice, most technically, is an affect—a desire to avoid someone because of her or his group, as opposed to stereotypes, which are more cognitive associations with a group—and efforts to reduce prejudice should focus on both affect and cognition. But intolerance is also clearly linked to higher-order manifestations of prejudice, such as discrimination through legal and organizational policies, symbolic annihilation of groups in the media, and everyday forms of discrimination, be they overt or subtle. More likely, communicative and policy forms of prejudice (and their manifest effects in terms of housing, education, job opportunities, and so on) “create” prejudicial perceptions, which in turn create the conditions of discrimination. Racism serves as an example—but only one of many—of the links among attitude, communicative action, policy, and social structure. With this complex view in mind, we can see that any attempts to redress or ameliorate racism or any other intolerance must include not only education, or even merely a wide array of communicative responses (media and face-to-face), but also efforts at addressing social inequalities at the structural and policy levels.

Further Reading

• Chin, J. L. (Ed.). (2010). The psychology of prejudice and discrimination . Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
• Crenshaw, K. W. , Gotanda, N. , Pellar, G. , & Thomas, K. (Eds.). (1995). Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement . New York: New Press.
• Delgado, R. , & Stefanic, J. (Eds.). (1997). Critical White studies: A look behind the mirror . Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Dovidio, J. F. (Ed.). (2010). The SAGE handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination . London: SAGE.
• Fishbein, H. D. (2002). Peer prejudice and discrimination: The origins of prejudice . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Giles, H. , & Watson, B. (Eds.). (2013). The social meanings of language, dialect, and accent: International perspectives on speech styles . New York: Peter Lang.
• Gioseffi, D. (Ed.). (1993). On prejudice: A global perspective . New York: Anchor.
• Goldberg, D. T. (1993). Racist culture: Philosophy and the politics of meaning . Oxford: Blackwell.
• Harwood, J. , & Giles, H. (Eds.). (2005). Intergroup communication: Multiple perspectives . New York: Peter Lang.
• Hecht, M. L. (Ed.). (1998). Communicating prejudice . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Nakayama, T. K. , & Martin, J. N. (Eds.). (1999). Whiteness: The communication of social identity . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Nelson, T. (Ed.). (2009). Handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination . New York: Psychology Press.
• van Dijk, T. A. (1987). Communicating racism: Ethnic prejudice in thought and talk . Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
• Whillock, R. K. , & Slayden, D. (Eds.). (1995). Hate speech . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Yūki, M. , & Brewer, M. (Eds.). (2013). Culture and group processes . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Adorno, T. W. Frenkel-Brunswik, E. , Levinson, D. J. , & Sanford R. N. , with B. Aron , M. H. Levinson , & W. Morrow (Eds.). (1950). The authoritarian personality . New York: Harper.
• Allport, G. (1979). The nature of prejudice . Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
• Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin philosophy and other essays B. Brewster (Trans.). London: NLB.
• Armenian genocide (n.d.). History .
• Auestad, L. (Ed.). (2013). Nationalism and the body politic : Psychoanalysis and the rise of ethnocentrism and xenophobia . London: Karnac Books.
• Baldwin, J. (1955). Stranger in the village . From Notes of a Native Son (pp. 159–75). (1984 [1955]). Boston: Beacon Press.
• Baldwin, J. R. (1998). Tolerance/intolerance: A historical and multi-disciplinary view of prejudice. In M. L. Hecht (Ed.), Communicating prejudice (pp. 24–56). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Baldwin, J. R. , Coleman, R. R. M. , González, A. , & Shenoy-Packer, S. (2014). Intercultural communication for everyday life . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Baldwin, J. R. , Faulkner, S. L. , & Hecht, M. L. (2006). A moving target: The illusive definition of culture. In J. R. Baldwin , S. L. Faulkner , M. L. Hecht , & S. L. Lindsley (Eds.), Redefining culture: Perspectives across the disciplines (pp. 3–26). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Baldwin, J. R. , Faulkner, S. L. , Hecht, M. L. , & Lindsley, S. L. (Eds.). (2006). Redefining culture: Perspectives across the disciplines . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Baldwin, J. R. , & Hecht, M. L. (1995). The layered perspective of cultural (in)tolerance(s): The roots of a multidisciplinary approach. In R. Wiseman (Ed.), Intercultural communication theory (pp. 59–91). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Banton, M. (1987). Racial theories . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Bar-Tal, D. (1990). Causes and consequences of deligimitization: Models of conflict and ethnocentrism. Journal of Social Issues , 46, 65–81.
• Bennett, M. J. (1993). Towards ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity. In R. M. Paige (Ed.), Education for the intercultural experience (pp. 21–71). Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press.
• Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture . London: Routledge.
• Bobo, L. (1983). Whites’ opposition to busing: Symbolic racism or realistic group conflict. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 45, 1196–1210.
• Brislin, R. W. (1991). Prejudice in intercultural communication. In L. A. Samovar & R. E. Porter (Eds.), Intercultural communication: A reader (6th ed., pp. 366–370). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
• Broome, B. J. (2005). Building bridges across the Green Line: A guide to intercultural communication in Cyprus . Nicosia, CY: United Nations Bicommunal Development Program.
• Burke, K. (1967). The philosophy of literary form: Studies in symbolic action (2d ed.). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
• Chávez, K. R. (2013). Pushing boundaries: Queer intercultural communication . Journal of International and Intercultural Communication , 6, 83–95.
• Coates, J. (2003). Men talk . Malden, MA: Oxford University Press.
• Coleman, R. M. , & Chivers Yochim, E. (2008). The symbolic annihilation of race: A review of the “Blackness” literature. African American Research Perspectives , 12, 1–10.
• Collins, K. A. , & Clément, R. (2012). Language and prejudice: Direct and moderated effects . Journal of Language and Social Psychology , 31 , 376–396.
• Collins, P. H. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment . Boston: Unwin Hyman.
• Devine, P., G. , & Sharp, L. B. , (2009). Automaticity and control in stereotyping and prejudice. In T. Nelson (Ed.), Handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination (pp. 61–87). New York: Psychology Press.
• Donald, J. , & Rattansi, A. (1992). Introduction. In J. Donald & A. Rattansi (Eds.), “ Race,” culture and difference (pp. 1–8). London: SAGE.
• Dovidio, J. F. , Gaertner, S. L. , & Kawakami, K. (2003). Intergroup contact: The past, present, and future. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations , 6 (1), 5–21.
• Dyer, R. (1997). White . New York: Routledge.
• Esposito, L. , & Romano, B. (2014). Benevolent racism: Upholding racial inequality in the name of Black empowerment. Western Journal of Black Studies , 38 (2), 69–83.
• FBI . (2014). Latest hate crime statistics report released . FBI.
• Foss, K. A. , & Foss, S. K. (1994). Personal experience as evidence in feminist scholarship. Western Journal of Communication , 58 , 39–43.
• Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of Whiteness . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Gallois, C. , Ogay, T. , & Giles, H. (2005). Communication accommodation theory. In W. B. Gudykunst (Ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication (pp. 121–148). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Gerth, H. H. , & Mills, C. W. (Eds.). (1946). From Max Weber: Essays in sociology . New York: Oxford University Press.
• Glick, P. , & Fiske, S. (2001). An ambivalent alliance: Hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary justifications for gender inequality. American Psychologist , 56 , 109–118.
• Hall, J. , & LaFrance, B. (2012). “That’s gay”: Sexual prejudice, gender identity, norms, and homophobic communication . Communication Quarterly , 60 , 35–58.
• Hate and extremism . (n.d.). Southern Poverty Law Center.
• Hate map . (n.d.). Southern Poverty Law Center.
• Hecht, M. L. , & Baldwin, J. R. (1998). Layers and holograms: A new look at prejudice. M. L. Hecht (Ed.), Communicating prejudice (pp. 57–84). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Herbst, P. H. (1997). The color of words: An encyclopaedic dictionary of ethnic bias in the United States . Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press.
• Knowles, C. , & Mercer, S. (1992). Feminism and anti-racism: An exploration of the possibilities. In J. Donald & A. Rattansi (Eds.), “Race,” culture, and difference (pp. 104–125). London: SAGE.
• Kroeber, A. L. , & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical view of concepts and definitions . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Leeds-Hurwitz, W. (1990). Notes in the history of intercultural communication: The Foreign Service Institute and the mandate for intercultural training. Quarterly Journal of Speech , 76 , 262–281.
• Malott, K. M. , & Schaefle, S. (2015). Addressing clients’ experiences of racism: A model for clinical practice . Journal of Counseling and Development , 93 , 361–369.
• McConahay, J. B. (1986). Modern racism, ambivalence, and the modern racism scale. In J. S. Dovidio & S. I. Gaertner (Eds.), Prejudice, discrimination, and racism (pp. 99–125). Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
• McConahay, J. B. , & Hough, J. C. (1976). Symbolic racism. Journal of Social Issues , 32 (2), 23–45.
• Meyer, P. (1987). Ethnocentrism in human social behavior: Some biosociological considerations. In V. Reynolds , V. Falger , & I. Vine (Eds.), The sociobiology of ethnocentrism: Evolutionary dimensions of xenophobia, discrimination, racism, and nationalism (pp. 81–93). London: Croom Helms.
• Miles, R. (1989). Racism . London: Routledge.
• Moon, D. G. (2002). Thinking about “culture” in intercultural communication. In J. N. Martin , T. K. Nakayama , & L. A. Flores (Eds.), Readings in intercultural communication: Experiences and contexts (2d ed., pp. 13–21). Boston: McGraw Hill.
• Nakayama, T. K. (1998). Communication of heterosexism. In M. L. Hecht (Ed.), Communicating prejudice (pp. 112–121). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Nakayama, T. K. , & Halualani, R. T. (Eds.). (2010). The handbook of critical intercultural communication . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Neuliep, J. (2012). The relationship among intercultural communication apprehension, ethnocentrism, uncertainty reduction, and communication satisfaction during initial intercultural interaction: An extension of anxiety and uncertainty management (AUM) theory . Journal of Intercultural Communication Research , 41 , 1–16.
• Omi, M. , & Winant, H. (1986). Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s . New York: Routledge.
• Opotow, S. (1990). Moral exclusion and injustice: An introduction. Journal of Social Issues , 46 , 1–20.
• Orbe, M. P. , & Spellers, R. E. (2005). From the margins to the center: Utilizing co-cultural theory in diverse contexts. In W. B. Gudykunst (Ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication (pp. 173–191). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Pettigrew, T. F. (2016). In pursuit of three theories: Authoritarianism, relative deprivation, and intergroup contact . Annual Review of Psychology , 67 , 1–21.
• Pettigrew, T. F. , & Tropp, L. R. (2008). How does intergroup contact reduce prejudice? Meta-analytic tests of three mediators . European Journal of Social Psychology , 38 , 922–934.
• Rattansi, A. (1992). Changing the subject? Racism, culture, and education. In J. Donald & A. Rattansi (Eds.). “Race,” culture, and difference (pp. 11–48). London: SAGE.
• Rex, J. , & Mason, D. (Eds.). (1986). Theories of race and ethnic relations . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Reynolds, V. , Falger, V. , & Vine, I. (Eds.). (1987). The sociobiology of ethnocentrism: Evolutionary dimensions of xenophobia, discrimination, and nationalism . London: Croom Helm.
• Rogers, E. M. , & Hart, W. B. (2002). The histories of intercultural, international, and development communication. In W. B. Gudykunst & B. Mody (Eds.), Handbook of international and intercultural communication (3d ed., pp. 1–18). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Rosenau, P. M. (1992). Post-modernism and the social sciences: Insights, inroads, and intrusions . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Ross, M. H. (1991). The role of evolution in ethnocentric conflict and its management. Journal of Social Issues , 47 , 167–185.
• Ruscher, J. B. (2001). Prejudiced communication: A social psychological perspective . New York: Guilford.
• Said, E. W. (2003). Orientalism . New York: Vintage Books.
• Sears, D. O. , & Henry, P. J. (2005). Over thirty years later: A contemporary look at symbolic racism. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology , 37 , 95–150.
• Shah, Anup . (Oct 1, 2010). Human rights in various regions . Global issues: Social, political, economic and environmental issues that affect us all.
• Shome, R. , & Hegde, R. (2002). Postcolonial approaches to communication: Charting the terrain, engaging the intersections. Communication Theory , 12 , 249–270.
• Slavíčková, T. , & Zvagulis, P. (2014). Monitoring anti-minority rhetoric in the Czech print media: A critical discourse analysis . Journal of Language and Politics , 13 (1), 152–170.
• Stephan, W. (1985). Intergroup relations. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (rev. ed.) (pp. 599–658). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
• Sumner, G. A. (1975). Folkways and mores . E. Sagarin (Ed.). New York: Shocken.
• Tajfel, H. , & Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory of intergroup behavior. In S. Worchel & W. G. Austin (Eds.), Psychology of intergroup relationships (2d ed.) (pp. 7–24). Chicago: Nelson-Hall.
• Ura, M. , Preston, K. S. J. , & Mearns, J. (2015). A measure of prejudice against accented English (MPAAE) . Journal of Language & Social Psychology , 34 , 539–563.
• van Dijk, T. 2000. New(s) racism: A discourse analytical approach. In S. Cottle (Ed.), Ethnic minorities and the media (pp. 33–49). Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press.
• van Dijk, T. A. (1993). Elite discourse and racism . Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
• Wander, P. C. , Martin, J. N. , & Nakayama, T. K. (1999). Whiteness and beyond: Sociohistorical foundations of Whiteness and contemporary challenges. In T. K. Nakayama & J. N. Martin (Eds.), Whiteness: The communication of social identity (pp. 13–26). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Warner, M. (1991). Introduction: Fear of a queer plant. Social Text , 29 , 3–17.
• West, C. , & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing gender. Gender & Society , 1 (2), 125–151.
• Wilson, W. J. (1978). The declining significance of race: Blacks and changing American institutions . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Wood, J. (2008). Critical feminist theories: Giving voice and visibility to women’s experiences in interpersonal communication. In L. A. Baxter & D. O. Braithwaite (Eds.), Engaging theories in interpersonal communication: Multiple perspectives (pp. 323–334).Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Yep, G. A. (2013). Queering/quaring/kauering/crippin’/transing “other bodies” in intercultural communication . Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6 , 118–126.
• Zimmerman, D. H. , & West, C. (1975). Sex Roles, interruptions, and silences in conversation. In B. Thorne & N. Henley (Eds.), Language and sex: Difference and dominance (pp. 105–129). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
• Zompetti, J. P. (2012). The cultural and communicative dynamics of capital: Gramsci and the impetus for social action. Culture, Theory and Critique , 53 , 365–382.
• Zur, O. (1991). The love of hating: The psychology of enmity. History of European Ideas , 13 , 345–369.

Related Articles

• Race, Nationalism, and Transnationalism
• Cultural Identities
• Prejudiced Communication
• Behavioral Indicators of Discrimination in Social Interactions
• Critical Whiteness Studies
• Culture, Ethics, and Communication
• Diffusion of Concepts of Masculinity and Femininity
• Performance of Race, Culture, and Whiteness
• Anxiety, Uncertainty, and Intercultural Communication

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Communication. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 02 June 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [66.249.64.20|185.126.86.119]
• 185.126.86.119

Character limit 500 /500

• Current Issue
• Past Issues
• Get New Issue Alerts
• American Academy of Arts 
and Sciences

Language on Trial

This essay draws on the case study we conducted of Rachel Jeantel’s testimony in the 2013 trial of George Zimmerman v. The State of Florida . 1  Although Jeantel, a close friend of Trayvon Martin, was an ear-witness (by cell phone) to all but the final minutes of Zimmerman’s interaction with Trayvon, and testified for nearly six hours about it, her testimony was disregarded in jury deliberations. Through a linguistic analysis of Jeantel’s speech, comments from a juror, and a broader contextualization of stigmatized speech forms and linguistic styles, we argue that the lack of acknowledgment of dialectal variation has harmful social and legal consequences for speakers of stigmatized dialects. Such consequences include limits on criminal justice, employment, and fair access to housing, as well as accessible and culturally sensitive education. We propose new calls to action, which include the ongoing work the coauthors are doing to address such harms, while also moving to inspire concerned citizens to act.

1  John R. Rickford and Sharese King, “Language and Linguistics on Trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel (and Other Vernacular Speakers) in the Courtroom and Beyond,” Language 92 (4) (2016): 948–988.

Sharese King is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Her research explores how African Americans use language to construct multidimensional identities and how these constructions are perceived and evaluated across different listener populations. She has published in journals such as Annual Review of Linguistics and Journal of Sociolinguistics .

John R. Rickford , a Fellow of the American Academy since 2017, is the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities, Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and, by courtesy, Professor in Education Emeritus at Stanford University. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the British Academy. He is the author of Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (with Russell John Rickford, 2000), African American, Creole and Other Vernacular Englishes: A Bibliographic Resource (with Julie Sweetland, Angela E. Rickford, and Thomas Grano, 2012), Variation, Versatility, and Change in Sociolinguistics and Creole Studies (2019), and Speaking My Soul: Race, Life and Language (2022).

On February 26, 2012, while returning from a casual walk to the corner store, a Black teenager named Trayvon Martin was murdered by a neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, in Sanford, Florida. While Zimmerman was the admitted suspect, he was not formally charged for the crime, second-degree murder, until April 11, 2012. Like the fatal police shooting of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, after which protestors and activists demanded that the offending officer, Darren Wilson, be held accountable, this incident sparked a wave of resistance. 2 Zimmerman, tried in 2013, was ultimately found not guilty. The acquittal was a key moment in the formation of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a response to the history of excessive force and extrajudicial killings by the state and vigilantes. 3

There were many injustices leading up to the ultimate “not guilty” verdict for Zimmerman, with the first and foremost being the pursuit and killing of Trayvon Martin. It is difficult to point to any single factor that influenced the jury’s decision. Perhaps the official charge should have been manslaughter rather than second-degree murder. It might have been that the jury, composed of six women, represented Zimmerman’s peers but not Martin’s, and as a result, the jurors were unable to sympathize with Martin. Some have also emphasized that Martin, the victim, was on trial, rather than Zimmerman, and that his character assassination contributed to the verdict. 4 Acknowledging all of these and other possible contributions to Zimmerman’s acquittal, we, as linguists, examine the prosecution’s training of their star witness, Rachel Jeantel, and the criticism of her linguistic performance in the courtroom. 5

Rachel Jeantel, then ninteen years old, was a friend of Martin. Her testimony lasted almost six hours across two days of questioning. As the last person to speak with Martin before he passed away, she heard much of the encounter between him and Zimmerman up until their tussle on the ground. Despite her knowledge of the encounter, her testimony was dismissed as difficult to understand and not credible, and played no part in jury deliberations. 6 Through a linguistic analysis of Jeantel’s speech, comments from a juror, and a broader contextualization of stigmatized speech forms and linguistic styles, we have argued elsewhere that Jeantel’s dialect was found guilty before a verdict had even been reached in the case. 7 In this essay, we use our case study of Jeantel to launch a broader discussion of linguistic prejudice, contending that the lack of acknowledgment of dialectal variation has harmful social and legal consequences for speakers of stigmatized dialects. 8 We begin with an examination of the critiques leveled against Jeantel’s speech and examine how the unintelligibility of such vernaculars extends to more legal contexts. We expand this discussion to account for how such stigma also has legal consequences in employment, housing, and schooling. Finally, we end with an updated call to action, which includes the ongoing work the coauthors are doing to address such harms, while also moving to inspire concerned citizens to act.

Jeantel, a trilingual speaker born and raised in Miami, received much backlash for the way she spoke during the trial. Specifically, her use of African American Vernacular English ( AAVE ) contrasted with the socially unmarked varieties of English demonstrated by the lawyers, the judges, and other witnesses, and attracted the attention of many who subscribe to standard language ideologies. 9 Such ideologies are what linguists describe as prescriptivist , emphasizing the “incorrectness” or “ungrammaticality” of her speech, which departed from the rules we learned as early as grade school. 10 Contrary to popular belief, linguists have shown that AAVE is a systematic, rule-governed dialect with regular phonological (system of sounds), morphological (system of structure of words and relationship among words), syntactic (system of sentence structure), semantic (system of meaning), and lexical (structural organization of vocabulary items and other information of English) patterns. 11 Negative language attitudes about AAVE are based on ideology, or ingrained beliefs about how one should speak and how language should be used, rather than linguistic science, which has substantiated the structure of the dialect across decades of research. 12

We can observe Jeantel’s use of AAVE in an excerpt of her testimony, recounting Martin’s realization that he was being followed by Zimmerman:

Excerpt from Courtroom Testimony of Rachel Jeantel (RJ), Day 1, Prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda (BR) questioning, as recorded by the court reporter (CR) and annotated by the authors [ ∅ = zero is/are copula, or zero plural, possessive, or third singular present tense -s]

RJ : He said he ∅ from—he—I asked him where he ∅ at. An he told me he ∅ at the back of his daddy ∅ fiancée ∅ house, like in the area where his daddy fiancée—BY his daddy ∅ fiancée ∅ house. Like—I said, ‘Oh, you better keep running.’ He said, naw, he lost him.

BR : Okay. Let me stop you a second. This—this lady [the Court Reporter] has got to take everything down, so you make sure you’re—Okay. So after he said he lost him, what happened then?

RJ : And he say he—he ∅ by—um—the area that his daddy ∅ house is, his daddy ∅ fiancée ∅ house is, and I told him ‘Keep running.’ He—and he said, ‘Naw,’ he’ll just walk faster. I’m like, ‘Oh oh.’And I—I ain’t complain, ’cause he was breathing hard, so I understand why. Soo

BR : What—what happened after that?

RJ : And then, second ∅ later—ah—Trayvon come and say, ‘Oh, shit!’

CR : [Unintelligible—requesting clarification] ‘Second later?’

RJ : A couple second ∅ later, Trayvon come and say, ‘Oh, shit!’

BR : Okay. Let me interrupt you a second. When you say, the words, ‘Oh, shit,’ pardon my language, who said that?

RJ : Trayvon.

BR : He said it to YOU?

BR : Okay. And after he used, pardon my language, he said, ‘Oh, shit,’ what happened then?

RJ : The nigga ∅ behind me.

CR : I’m sorry, what? (22:7–23:7)

RJ : [Slowly, deliberately] The nigga’s behind—the nigga ∅ behind me.

BR : Okay. He used the N word again and said the nigger is behind me? 13

This excerpt demonstrates several documented AAVE features including the absence of - s in possessive and plural tense contexts, copula absence , and the use of the controversial lexical item, the n-word . 14 With respect to -s absence in possessive contexts, we observe such a feature in a phrase like “daddy fiancée house” where there is no - s after daddy or fiancée to mark possession. Absence of - s in plural contexts can be seen in phrases like “and then second later” or “couple second later” where the noun second does not have an overt - s to mark plurality. Alongside these examples, there is a “hallmark” feature of AAVE known as copula absence where inflected “be” forms like is and are are absent. The AAVE copula follows important constraints such as rarely being deleted in the context of first person am or in clauses where the copula occurs finally (for example, “the area that his daddy ∅ house is ”). Jeantel deletes where expected in this dialect, as we can observe in sentences such as, “I asked him where he ∅ at,” in which is is absent. We discuss these examples to emphasize how these rule-governed AAVE patterns are employed in naturally occurring speech and to display their regularity in Jeantel’s speech. 15

Without the awareness of AAVE ’s systematicity or its legitimate status as a rule-governed dialect, one might assume that the occurrence of such patterns in someone’s speech marks both a lack of grammaticality and intelligence. However, as shown above, Jeantel displays a deep understanding of the dialect’s grammar and its associated patterns. Unfair judgment of Jeantel’s language skills is demonstrated in public comments on news articles published covering the trial:

She is a dullard, an idiot, an individual who can barely speak in coherent sentences. —Jim Heron, Appalachian State 16

This lady is a perfect example of uneducated urban ignorance. . . . When she spoke everyone hear, “mumble mumble duhhhh im a miami girl, duhhhhh.”—Sheena Scott 17

Everyone, regardless of race, should learn to speak correct English, or at least understandable English. . . . I couldn’t understand 75% of what she was saying . . . that is just ridicolous [ sic ]!’—Emma, comment on MEDIA ite 18

These comments expose the overwhelmingly negative response from the public to Jeantel’s speech. The first exhibits the lack of understanding of such dialectal variation, implying her speech was incoherent. The second demonstrates the same, but also reveals the tropes that co-occur with discussions of racialized vernacular speakers as being from the inner city, working class, and uneducated. This coarticulation of discourses about the speaker and their assumed position in society reinforces how stigma against vernacular speech is as much about how things are said as it is about the speaker who says them.

Alongside the vitriol from the general public, evidence from jury members suggested that not only was Jeantel’s speech misunderstood, but it was ultimately disregarded in the more than sixteen hours of deliberation. With no access to the court transcript, unless when requesting a specific playback, jurors did not have the materials to reread speech that might have been unfamiliar to most if they were not exposed to or did not speak the dialect. Specifically, juror B 37 stated in an interview with Anderson Cooper that “A lot of times [Jeantel] was using phrases I had never heard before,” indicating some degree of miscomprehension of Jeantel’s speech. Further, when asked by Cooper if she found Jeantel credible, juror B 37 hastily responded, “No.” 19 Further support for miscomprehension across jurors came from the court transcript itself. Specifically, the court transcriber notes moments where jurors speak out of turn, such as:

RJ : Yeah, now following him.

BR : Now following him. Okay. What I want you to do, Rachel Jeantel—

THE COURT [to a juror]: Just one second, please. Yes, ma’am?

A JUROR : He is now following me or—I’m sorry. I just didn’t hear.

THE COURT : Okay. Can we one more time, please, give that answer again.

RJ : He said, he told me now that a man is starting following him, is following him.

A JUROR : Again or is still?

THE COURT : Okay. You can’t ask questions.

A JUROR : Okay.

THE COURT : If you can’t understand, just raise your hand.

Here we observe further evidence that jurors needed moments of clarification for Jeantel’s speech. Such confusion from the jurors, alongside the public commentary on Jeantel’s use of AAVE , highlight the common lack of understanding in public discourses of and about AAVE . They also raise questions about the potential consequences of producing stigmatized speech in legal settings and the role that dialect plays in attributions of credibility or trustworthiness. Specifically, this case opened up the following inquiries, which have taken a concerted effort from linguists and members of contiguous fields to answer:

1) Are accented speakers like Rachel Jeantel more likely to be misheard and viewed as less credible?

2) How intelligible is AAVE , or “accented” speech, in general?

3) What can we do to reduce these inequities among speakers of stigmatized varieties?

While we do not provide complete answers to these questions, this essay surveys the research that addresses them, examining the perception of accented speech more broadly construed, while also expanding our consideration of the sociopolitical consequences in legal contexts beyond criminal cases. Ultimately, this specific case study showed us how the treatment of Jeantel as the defendant on trial operates in a history of linguistic prejudice, discrimination, and misperception of vernacular speech in legal contexts.

Listening to accented speech that is not your own can have processing costs or the potential to be judged as less comprehensible. 20 However, the extent to which the lack of comprehensibility is the result of genuine misunderstandings of accented speech, implicit biases about speakers with certain accents, or some combination of the two is unclear. Research in linguistics has established that listeners have negative or positive ideologies about certain accents or dialects, which can reinforce stereotypes about certain groups of speakers. 21 The question of how much these ideologies can influence perception has been explored in work by linguist Donald Rubin in his investigation of race and the perception of accentedness. 22 Specifically, his work suggests that the same voice can be evaluated differently in terms of comprehension, whether presented with a picture of a white or Asian face. Different perceptions of accentedness and comprehension for the same speech signal, but different races, calls into question the objectivity of listening and its role in interpreting racialized speakers’ voices as nonnormative, and therefore deficient. 23

How might such biases interact with perceptions of credibility or presumptions of guilt? In low-stake situations, such as reading random trivia facts, research has indicated that listeners were less likely to believe statements when produced by a nonnative speaker. 24 However, when the stakes are higher and in the context of legal settings, biases against specific dialects can affect presumptions of guilt for suspects and witnesses. In particular, linguists John A. Dixon, Berenice Mahoney, and Roger Cocks found that those who spoke in the less-prestigious and more stigmatized regional accent tended to be negatively evaluated and rated as guilty. 25 Linguists Courtney Kurinec and Charles Weaver make similar observations in their 2019 article showing that jurors found AAVE -speaking defense witnesses and defendants less credible and less educated than their General American English-speaking peers, ultimately yielding more guilty verdicts. 26 Finally, evidence from linguists Lara Frumkin and Anna Stone shows that even eyewitness testimonies are evaluated differently with respect to credibility, accuracy, and trustworthiness based on factors like the prestige of an accent, race, and age. 27

T he unintelligibility or lack of understanding between dialects can also lead to mistranscriptions, which not only result in the misrepresentation of speech in legal documents, but also the misinterpretation of the facts in a case. To demonstrate such injustices, we introduce three examples from English contexts. The first example comes from vernacular Aboriginal English ( AE ) and displays how unawareness of a particular word in this dialect affected the meaning of the sentence. In a Central Australian case, the phrase “Charcoal Jack, properly his father,” uttered by an AE -speaking witness, was transcribed by a court reporter unaware of the dialectal differences as “Charcoal Jack, probably his father.” 28 On the surface, such a mistake looks benign, but an understanding of the phrase reveals that the speaker’s intended usage reflects the specific meaning in AE where properly means real . Thus, the mistranscription introduces doubt via the use of the word probably where the actual usage of the term properly is meant to distinguish the biological father.

Building on this example, we turn to a mistranscription of a Jamaican Creole speaker testifying in a police interview in the United Kingdom:

wen mi ier di bap bap,                                  mi drap a groun an den mi staat ron.

a. When I heard the shots (bap, bap),           I drop the gun , and then I run.

b. when I heard the bap bap [the shots],      I fell to the ground and then I started to run. 29

In this example, the verb drop is initially transcribed such that it has the direct object gun . The introduction of the word gun for ground potentially attributes responsibility to the speaker of having a weapon. Fortunately, the transcript was checked against the recording by a Jamaican Creole interpreter who corrected the potentially dangerous error.

A final example of such transcription errors comes from a 2015 police transcript of a recorded jail call from a speaker in East Palo Alto. The speaker, recorded as saying “I’m fitna be admitted” was mistranscribed as “I’m fit to be admitted.” The word fitna is a variation of finna , “fixing to,” and marks the immediate future in AAVE . While this statement originally referred to the timing of admittance, the transcription now changes meaning to consent to being admitted. Such examples illustrate that across these three dialects (Aboriginal English, Jamaican Creole, and African American Vernacular English), lack of awareness of the structure of the variety, be it in vocabulary or sentence structure, affects one’s ability to accurately transcribe the speech. Taylor Jones and colleagues recently showed that court transcribers from Philadelphia, who were certified at accuracy rates of 95 percent and above, often mistranscribed and misparaphrased AAVE . 30 Although they self-reported at least some degree of comprehension with the dialect, their transcription and paraphrase accuracy was 59.5 percent and 33 percent, respectively, at the level of the full utterance, far below the threshold for acceptable accuracy. Such work suggests that even for these experts, understanding and representing the variety can be difficult; thus, we must recognize the potential legal repercussions when we do not account for vernacular intelligibility.

Prejudice against and stigma for such speech extends beyond the legal consequences of speaking and hearing speech in criminal cases. Speakers of these stigmatized dialects also suffer consequences that can infringe on their civil liberties and access to services and resources.

Accent discrimination in the workplace can affect current and future employment opportunities. 31 James Kahakua, a “university-trained meteorologist with 20 years of experience” and a speaker of Hawaiian Creole and English, was denied a promotion to read weather reports on air in Hawaiʻi because his employer believed that his colleague, a thirty-year-old Caucasian man, had the better broadcasting voice. 32 And in Mandhare v. W.S. LaFargue Elementary School , Sulochana Mandhare, an Indian immigrant who had been studying English for almost twenty years, sued the school board for not renewing her contract as a school librarian because of her “heavy accent.” 33 These are just two examples of many that show what is on the line for speakers when they encounter the stigma of having accented speech.

Title VII of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission disallows employers from taking action on the basis of one’s accent, but protects their ability to do so if the employee’s accent affects job performance. 34 The perception of which accents interfere with job performance is often influenced by bias. That is, what one might interpret as a linguistic impediment to the job might interact with their beliefs, not facts, about what is considered unprofessional language and who is considered “professional.” Thus, in deciding what is or is not an interference, “even the most open-minded of courts may be subject to the unwritten laws of the standard language ideology.” 35 Further, the ambiguity around “accent” and “language” does not make clear where the law stands in relation to dialects of one language (such as English), rather than the differences between multiple languages.

In addition to employment discrimination, discrimination with respect to housing rental has often involved linguistic prejudice. Through “linguistic profiling,” the auditory equivalent to racial profiling, whereby listeners use auditory cues to identify the race of a speaker, speakers have been denied opportunities to see homes on the basis of their voices. 36 In extensive work on housing discrimination, linguists Thomas Purnell, William Idsardi, and John Baugh have demonstrated that not only do listeners try to identify a speaker’s dialect based on the word “Hello,” but landlords also discriminated against prospective tenants on the basis of their voice. 37 That is, landlords were less likely to make appointments with Black and Latinx callers in neighborhoods with higher populations of white residents. 38 The Fair Housing Act “prohibits housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual harassment), familial status, and disability.” 39 However, people are not always aware that cues in a voice can be used to map a person to such demographic categories.

Finally, having shown how linguistic injustices can generate both employment and housing discrimination, we turn to examine a pivotal case in the history of Black language in education. In King v. Ann Arbor , the plaintiffs were Black preschool and elementary students asserting that they spoke a Black vernacular or dialect and were denied equal participation in their instructional programs as the school had not taken appropriate measures to account for such a language barrier. 40 This case was the first to argue successfully on behalf of speakers of Black English, and resulted in the judge ordering the district to identify Black English speakers in the schools, teach them how to read Standard English, and improve teachers’ negative attitudes toward their speech. 41 Intuitively, we can imagine that the lack of recognition of Black English in schooling impedes the learning experience, but without explicit instruction on these vernaculars and the reach of their stigma, the broader society remains unaware of the vulnerability speaking such a dialect can pose in a range of areas including education, housing, and employment.

We have considered how often speakers of stigmatized dialects are misheard and perceived as less credible, that accented speech can affect processing, and that such effects can be tied to negative language ideologies or negative attitudes about certain groups of speakers. Let us now address the question of what can be done to reduce these inequities among speakers of stigmatized varieties. In our previous work, we have suggested how linguists and citizens could play a more active role in combating linguistic prejudice in legal systems. 42 While our work has focused on the dialect AAVE , our suggestions can be extended to other vernaculars. We revisit this list through a new lens of the practical challenges to reducing these inequities, as well as examples of how we have tried to implement such solutions since the publication of our study:

• Oppose efforts to preemptively keep African Americans and members of other marginalized groups that are overrepresented in the carceral system from serving on juries, especially when their knowledge of linguistic differences could be beneficial to the task. After all, a jury should be reflective of one’s peers. But as we have made clear, discrimination through jury selection is not uncommon: “In Foster v. Chatman (2016), the U.S. Supreme Court held that prosecutors purposefully discriminated against a Georgia man facing the death penalty when they dismissed two Black jurors during jury selection.” On the other hand, “The Court’s narrow decision was largely based on the egregious nature of the Batson violations and, therefore, may do little to deter the discriminatory use of race in jury selection.” 43 We can also consider the criminal case of Box v. Superior Court where a potential Black juror was dismissed on the basis of pronouncing police as PO -lice, rather than po- LICE , with stress on the first syllable rather than the last. 44 This pronunciation is a feature of AAVE . However, due to bias against AAVE , the prosecutor claimed the pronunciation was evidence the juror had an “unfriendly feeling” toward law enforcement.
• Advocate for and produce more research on the perception and processing of stigmatized voices in institutions like schools, courtrooms, and hospitals. Research in this vein is burgeoning, with researchers assessing court reporters’ understanding and transcription of vernacular speech, as well as researchers evaluating bidialectal Black speakers’ use of MAE (Mainstream American English) or AAVE when providing a narrative as one would in an alibi. 45 Expanding research on the study of stigmatized dialects allows us to investigate which aspects of the dialect are difficult for nonfluent listeners to interpret, while also uncovering more about the relationship between perception and linguistic biases.
• Agree to help with cases or projects in the legal system that involve speakers of stigmatized varieties. Native speakers of AAVE and linguists familiar with AAVE should offer to serve as an expert witness or participate in building cases for speakers whose speech in question is AAVE . For instance, Sharese King has accepted invitations to speak with law firms or specific courts, such as the Fourth District in the Minnesota Judicial Branch and the Habeas Corpus Resource Center in California, about linguistic prejudice in legal contexts. This direct engagement has allowed us to educate lawyers, judges, and court reporters on the legitimacy of the variety, while also informing them of the social and legal consequences of producing such speech in legal contexts and beyond.
• Similarly, advocate for speakers of stigmatized varieties like AAVE to be heard in the courts and beyond, while acknowledging how raciolinguistic ideologies affect one’s ability to listen and accept information from accented speakers. 46
• Offer help to acquire “standardized” varieties of English for speakers interested in commanding both their vernacular and MAE . Such multilingualism can help them be more upwardly mobile. We acknowledge the controversy of such an offer, since one should be wary of solutions that put the burden on the victims to conform to the linguistic norms of those in power. We also recognize that speaking the standardized dialect will not fix all the injustices such speakers face, nor shield them from the injustice of racial prejudice. But it may alleviate such injustices to some extent, and we should prioritize individual speakers’ agency to decide what is the best option for themselves.
• Advocate for more vernacular speakers to have the option to use interpreting services in court settings to reduce the risk of misunderstandings. We emphasize the word option as we understand that some speakers may reject the notion given that they may not be aware of how their language varieties are subject to misunderstandings in comparison to other English speakers in the courtroom. Further, we acknowledge that the position of the translator would need to be filled by someone who is informed about the structure of the language, including regional variation. As above, we prioritize speaker autonomy to choose which solution they feel most comfortable with.
• We have advocated for jurors receiving transcripts, while also having linguists check these transcripts for accuracy. King’s ongoing work teaching Minnesota court reporters about AAVE and the social political consequences for speaking such a variety has raised a new awareness of this need and the challenges to implementation. Specifically, court transcribers noted the difficulty of converting their work into legible transcripts for jury members in a short period of time. Such work could prolong the time between lawyers’ closing statements and jury deliberation. Moreover, court transcribers not only expressed their lack of knowledge about the grammar, but a lack of understanding of how to represent the variety. These conversations made us aware that court transcribers may need linguists’ help in developing a universal coding system for transcribing AAVE in these contexts.
• “Stay woke” or informed about the racial disparities experienced by the most marginalized in society, be it from linguistic prejudice to health inequities to unfair policing of such communities. Consider when and how such injustices interact. In addition to increasing awareness, we must be vigilant in spreading such knowledge and not keeping these conversations in the halls of the ivory towers. Such work includes engaging in different forms of communication with family and friends, or with the public via social media platforms, linguistic podcasts such as The Vocal Fries and Spectacular Vernacular , or newspaper editorials. 47
• Lastly, we must evaluate our own linguistic prejudice and how it materializes in both personal and professional settings. Further, we must assess how specific norms in the workplace might devalue some voices versus others and work to address them.

While the broader public is just becoming aware of the notion, linguistic prejudice and its impacts are being felt widely by communities of speakers whose linguistic practices have been stigmatized. Recognizing the consequences of prejudice in criminal justice, employment, housing, and education can help us to address the unnecessary harms speakers of AAVE and other vernacular speakers face in society. We believe that the multifaceted solution to reducing such inequities will require acceptance and compassion for an increasingly multilingual society, but also the courage to enact such empathy through research, policy, and sustained education on the issue.

• 2 Protestors and activists, as well as formal groups such as the National Bar Association, called for the Ferguson Police Department and the Missouri Department of Public Safety to hold Darren Wilson accountable for Michael Brown’s death. See Paul Hampel, “African-American Lawyers Association Seeks Revocation of Darren Wilson’s Police Officer License,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch , December 8, 2014. For an overview of the protests and the Justice Department’s response, see Jaime Chandler and Skylar Young, “Justice Delayed,” U.S. News: A World Report , October 15, 2014.
• 3 What began as a hashtag in response to the acquittal of Zimmerman grew into a movement and nonprofit organization. More information can be found on https://blacklivesmatter.com .
• 4 Karen Grisby Bates, “A Look Back at Trayvon Martin’s Death, and the Movement It Inspired,” Code Switch , NPR, July 31, 2018.
• 5 Mark S. Brodin, “The Murder of Black Males in a World of Non-Accountability: The  Surreal Trial of George Zimmerman for the Killing of Trayvon Martin,” Howard Law Journal 59 (3) (2016): 765–785.
• 6 Lisa Bloom, Suspicion Nation: The Inside Story of the Trayvon Martin Injustice and Why We Continue to Repeat It (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2014).
• 7 Rickford and King, “Language and Linguistics on Trial.” We draw on Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling’s definition of dialect as “a neutral label to refer to any variety of a language that is shared by a group of speakers. Languages are invariably manifested through their dialects, and to speak a language is to speak some dialect of that language.” Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling, American English: Dialects and Variation (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2016), 2.
• 8 In sociolinguistics, variation , language variety , or simply variety refers to differences in speech patterns, such as dialect, register, and general style. Standardized English is one of many variations or varieties of English. For more on varieties in sociolinguistics, see Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, and Cecil L. Nelson, eds., The Handbook of World Englishes (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
• 9 We recognize that there are other variations on the term African American Vernacular English, including African American Language ( AAL ) (Lanehart) and African American English ( AAE ) (Green). However, in referencing AAVE , vernacular refers to the variety that is most different from standard or standardized English (Lippi-Green). See Sonja Lanehart, The Oxford Handbook of African American Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Lisa J. Green, African American English: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Rosina Lippi-Green, English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States , 2nd ed. (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge, 2012).
• 10 Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk, and Rachel Elizabeth Weissler, “Language Standardization & Linguistic Subordination,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023): 18–35; and Wolfram and Schilling, American English .
• 11 Green, African American English .
• 12 Walt Wolfram, A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech (Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1969); Ralph W. Fasold, Tense Marking in Black English: A Linguistic and Social Analysis (Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1972); William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972); and John Baugh, Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973).
• 13 Rickford and King, “Language and Linguistics on Trial.”
• 14 While we follow a long tradition within linguistics of referring to these features as “absence” by contrast with their required presence in written Standard English and other varieties, we propose instead that we refer to them as “intrinsic” features of AAVE , which does not frame the standardized options as the norm. See William Labov, Paul Cohen, Clarence Robins, and John Lewis, A Study of the Nonstandard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City: Final Report , Cooperative Research Project No. 3288 (Washington, D.C.: United States Office of Education, 1968); and Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, Talking College: Making Space for Black Language Practices in Higher Education (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 2022).
• 15 While this brief analysis focuses on Jeantel’s speech, some have criticized the discourse strategies used by Bernie De LaRionda, referring to his repetition as a kind of “ventriloquy” that further othered her speech as peculiar or deviant. See Alyvia Walters, “Race, Language, and Performance in American Legal Space: Rachel Jeantel, Testimonial Truth, and the George Zimmerman Trial” (master’s thesis, Georgetown University, 2018).
• 16 Evan S. Benn and Audra D. S. Burch, “Trayvon Martin’s Childhood Friend Back on the Witness Stand in Zimmerman Trial,” Miami Herald , June 26, 2013.
• 17 Marc Caputo, “Zimmerman Trial Witness to CNN: ‘Nigga,’ ‘Cracka’ Not Racist Terms,” Miami Herald, July 16, 2013.
• 18 Evan McMurry, “Democrat Rips ‘Black English’: Black Leaders ‘Have To Stop Making Excuses’ for Rachel Jeantel’s Speech,” MEDIA ite, July 2, 2013.
• 19 “Juror B37 Speaks Exclusively with Anderson Cooper: ‘I Felt Sorry for Rachel Jeantel,’” AC360, CNN , July 15, 2013.
• 20 Ann R. Bradlow and Tessa Bent, “Perceptual Adaptation to Non-Native Speech,” Cognition 106 (2) (2008): 707–729; and Charlotte R. Vaughn, “Expectations about the Source of a Speaker’s Accent Affect Accent Adaptation,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 145 (5) (2019): 3218–3232.
• 21 Dennis Richard Preston, ed., Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology , Vol. 1 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1999).
• 22 Donald L. Rubin, “Nonlanguage Factors Affecting Undergraduates’ Judgments of Non-Native English-Speaking Teaching Assistants,” Research in Higher Education 33 (1992): 511–531.
• 23 Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa, “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education,” Harvard Educational Review 85 (2) (2015): 149–171.
• 24 Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar, “Why Don’t We Believe Non-Native Speakers? The Influence of Accent on Credibility,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (6) (2010): 1093–1096.
• 25 John A. Dixon, Berenice Mahoney, and Roger Cocks, “Accents of Guilt? Effects of Regional Accent, Race, and Crime Type on Attributions of Guilt,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 21 (2) (2002): 162–168.
• 26 Courtney A. Kurinec and Charles A. Weaver III , “Dialect on Trial: Use of African American Vernacular English Influences Juror Appraisals,” Psychology, Crime & Law 25 (8) (2019): 803–828.
• 27 Lara Frumkin, “Influences of Accent and Ethnic Background on Perceptions of Eyewitness Testimony,” Psychology, Crime & Law 13 (3) (2007): 317–331; and Lara A. Frumkin and Anna Stone, “Not All Eyewitnesses Are Equal: Accent Status, Race and Age Interact to Influence Evaluations of Testimony,” Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice 18 (2) (2020): 123–145.
• 28 Herold Koch, “Nonstandard English in an Aboriginal Land Claim,” in Cross-Cultural Encounters: Communication and Miscommunication ,” ed. John Pride (Melbourne: River Seine, 1985), 176–95; and Diana Eades, Sociolinguistics and the Legal Process (Bristol, England: Multilingual Matters, 2010).
• 29 Celia Brown-Blake and Paul Chambers, “The Jamaican Creole Speaker in the UK Criminal Justice System,” International Journal of Speech, Language & the Law 14 (2) (2007): 269–294.
• 30 Taylor Jones, Jessica Rose Kalbfeld, Ryan Hancock, and Robin Clark, “Testifying While Black: An Experimental Study of Court Reporter Accuracy in Transcription of African American English,” Language 95 (2) (2019): e216–e252.
• 31 Lippi-Green, English with an Accent .
• 35 Rosina Lippi-Green, “Accent, Standard Language Ideology, and Discriminatory Pretext in the Courts,” Language in Society 23 (2) (1994): 178.
• 36 John Baugh, “Linguistic Profiling,” Black Linguistics: Language, Society and Politics in Africa and the Americas , ed. Sinfree Makoni, Geneva Smitherman, Arnetha F. Ball, and Arthur K. Spears (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge, 2003), 155–168. Also see John Baugh, “Linguistic Profiling across International Geopolitical Landscapes,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023): 167–177.
• 37 Thomas Purnell, William Idsardi, and John Baugh, “Perceptual and Phonetic Experiments on American English Dialect Identification,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18 (1) (1999): 10–30.
• 39 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Fair Housing Rights and Obligations” (accessed July 6, 2023); and Civil Rights Act of 1968, Pub. L. No. 90-284, 82 Stat. 73 (1968).
• 40 John Chambers Jr., ed., Black English: Educational Equity and the Law (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Karoma Publishers, Inc., 1983); Geneva Smitherman, ed., Black English and the Education of Black Children and Youth: Proceedings of the National Invitational Symposium on the King Decision (Detroit: Center for Black Studies, Wayne State University, 1981); and Marcia Farr Whiteman, ed., Reactions to Ann Arbor: Vernacular Black English and Education (Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1980).
• 41 Walt Wolfram notes that the judge ordered the teachers to be trained in the dialect of the children. In fact, Wolfram and Donna Christian prepared materials for that training so that they could identify the speakers. See Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Dialogue on Dialects, Dialect and Educational Equity Series (Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1979); and Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Exploring Dialects, Dialect and Educational Equity Series (Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1979).
• 42 Rickford and King, “Language and Linguistics on Trial.”
• 43 “Foster v. Chapman [sic]: Excluding Jurors Based on Race,” Constitutional Law Reporter (accessed July 6, 2023).
• 44 Christopher Box v. The Superior Court of San Diego County (2022).
• 45 Jones, Kalbfeld, Hancock, and Clark, “Testifying While Black”; Sharese King, Charlotte Vaughn, and Adam Dunbar, “Dialect on Trial: Raciolinguistic Ideologies in Perceptions of AAVE and MAE Codeswitching” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2022); and Kurinec and Weaver, “Dialect on Trial.”
• 46 Flores and Rosa, “Undoing Appropriateness”; and H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball, eds., Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
• 47 For instance, see John Rickford’s appearance on The Vocal Fries in 2022, which includes a discussion of Rachel Jeantel and Trayvon Martin. The Vocal Fries Pod: The Podcast about Linguistic Discrimination , “The Rickford Files,” July 22, 2022; Spectacular Vernacular at Slate (accessed July 6, 2023); Sharese King and Katherine D. Kinzler, “Bias against African American English as a Pillar of American Racism,” The Los Angeles Times , July 14, 2020; and Anne H. Charity Hudley and Jamaal Muwwakkil’s letter to the editor, cited in Sewell Chan, “Opinion: About That Page of Pro-Trump Letters,” The Los Angeles Times , November 21, 2020.

• Dissertations & Theses
• Collections

Home > YURJ > Vol. 1 > Iss. 1 (2020)

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

Article title.

What Two Canonical Novels Tell Us About Linguistic Prejudice in United States Courts

Charlotte Van Voorhis , Yale University

In this senior essay, I reflect on how African American English (AAE) is represented and perceived in our society. I establish that it is a regular and systematic variety of English. I investigate two novels, To Kill A Mockingbird and Their Eyes Were Watching God and whether their depictions of AAE accurately reflect its systematicity. I equate inaccurate representation in the novels with the disrespectful treatment of AAE and its speakers in the United States currently. I compare the treatment of AAE in the novels’ trials to its treatment in State of Florida vs. George Zimmerman (2013), in which Rachel Jeantel’s testimony was severely criticized and unfairly dismissed. By exploring this thematic link between canonical American fiction and contemporary events, the wounds caused by linguistic prejudice can begin to heal.

Recommended Citation

Van Voorhis, Charlotte (2020) "What Two Canonical Novels Tell Us About Linguistic Prejudice in United States Courts," The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal : Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 2. Available at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yurj/vol1/iss1/2

Since August 21, 2021

Included in

English Language and Literature Commons , Linguistics Commons , Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons , Sociology Commons

• Journal Home
• About This Journal
• Aims & Scope
• Editorial Board
• Publication Ethics Statement
• Submit Article
• Most Popular Papers
• Receive Email Notices or RSS

Advanced Search

Home | About | FAQ | My Account | Accessibility Statement

Privacy Copyright

147 Prejudice Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best prejudice topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 good essay topics on prejudice, ⭐ interesting topics to write about prejudice, ✅ simple & easy prejudice essay titles, ❓ research questions about prejudice.

• Stereotyping and Prejudice Prejudice on the other hand refers to the attitude formed in regard to a certain group of people based on the fact that they are affiliated to a certain group.
• Appropriations, Prejudices and Cultural Cruise Control: Overview The notion of cultural cruise control is widely present in the corporate culture of the multinational corporation, and especially, it is highly prevalent in the entertainment and social media industry.
• Prejudice and Discrimination What I can say about myself is that being in a group while studying the nature of bias and discrimination was a useful experience.
• Sociology: Prejudice and Discrimination in India The Dalits and the Adivasis and other classes of Indian Society are pursuing the erasure of the age old caste system with the new Indian socialist revolution.
• Inevitable Prejudice in Social Psychology Adorno supposes that the authoritarian personality is hostile to those of an inferior rank and servile to those of a higher rank.
• Cross-Cultural Interaction: Prejudices and Stereotypes In this regard, the concept of stereotype also influences social categorization and information sharing in the course of cross-cultural communication. One of the most effective ways to exterminate stereotypic and linear thinking is to change […]
• Prejudice and Discrimination in Policing For instance, racial profiling often results in misjudging the level of danger of encounter based on the race of the perpetrator.
• Prejudice and Discrimination in Diverse Organizations Prejudice, discrimination and stereotyping are common in an organization and each one of them has its effects which directly or indirectly influence an organization.
• Primary Sources Relevant to Prejudice in Modern Society Thus, the podcast and the book explore Banaji’s perspective on the problem of prejudice in the form of favoritism in people who indirectly infringe on the interests of vulnerable segments of the population by practicing […]
• Applying Psychodynamic Theory to Combat Racial Prejudices The psychodynamic theory and, more specifically, Otto Rank’s existential ideas can help to explain many of the postulates of the How to be an anti-racist book from the social work perspective, shedding new light on […]
• Individuals With Disabilities: Prejudice and Discrimination I researched that people with persistent medical or physical disorders, such as cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis, who have speech, articulation, or communication impairments, for example, are sometimes seen as having an intellectual deficiency. Corey […]
• Racial Prejudice in the US Society As they leave, the government begins ignoring these places in favor of others, leading to dilapidation and ultimately stagnant growth or even a reversal of the safety and other features that led people of color […]
• Social Problems Surrounding Racism, Prejudice and Discrimination This kind of discrimination makes the students lose their self-esteem and the traumas experienced affects the mental health of these students in the long term.
• Substantial Prejudice Against Immigrants This study focuses on examining news sources and the rhetoric of politicians to find out the reasons for the formation of substantial prejudice against immigrants.
• Biases and Prejudices at the Workplace Later, I knew the new employee better, and I understood that they were capable and effective enough to receive the offer.
• Bias and Discrimination: Prejudice, Discrimination, and Stereotyping The bias may be automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent depending on its characteristics and how it manifests in terms of people’s opinions on certain groups of individuals.
• Business Through Cognitive Perception: Linking Planning and Prejudice In “Do you see”.the authors draw attention to radical innovations in business and the need to adapt to them. In the end, false assumptions can go to a new level and affect all structures.
• Culture Play in Prejudices, Stereotyping, and Racism However, cognitive and social aspects are significant dimensions that determine in-group members and the constituents of a threat in a global religious view hence the relationship between religion and prejudices.
• Conspiracy Theories and Prejudices in Social Media Although Cohen’s fears could be seen as farfetched, the overall tone of the essay allows keeping the focus on an important social issue, namely, that one of the misuse of social media as the tool […]
• Discrimination and Prejudice Comparison Discrimination is the negative behavior or action toward a person on the accounts of their sexual orientation, race, or social class; it is the expression of prejudice and may lead to harming an individual.
• Aging and Beauty Standards: Overcoming Social Prejudice The ethical issue is that in an attempt to change one’s body and make it similar to those that are presented in the media and by stars, people lose their identities and opinions.
• Criminal Justice: Racial Prejudice and Racial Discrimination Souryal takes the reader through the racial prejudice and racial discrimination issues ranging from the temperament of racism, the fundamental premise of unfairness, the racial biasness and the causes of racial unfairness to ethical practices […]
• Designing Intuitionalism: New Concepts & Old Prejudice To evaluate the significance of the change in the architecture style which same to reign after the world fairs in XIX-XX centuries, one has to take account of the social events which took place in […]
• Cultural and Racial Prejudices in the Criminal Justice System Simultaneously, whiteness continues to play one of the key roles in the development of cultural and racial prejudices in the criminal justice system.
• Ethnic Stratification, Prejudice & Discrimination Stratification can also arise due to the existence of prejudice and biases towards people of different backgrounds that did not allow them to develop their careers and families at the same level as others could.
• Sexual Prejudice in the Society The topic of the research study is to analyze the way people view sexuality and how any differences in sexual preferences are reflected on the individuals and the views about those individuals by people around.
• Prejudice in the Work Place There is also the element of favoritism derived from the social need of a group of workers to a state of belonging and companionship.
• Institutional Discrimination, Prejudice and Racism Racism that is in the society today is not evident like that of the early 19th and 20th century which was characterized by among other things separation based on color of the skin, religious differences […]
• Cultures and Prejudice: Poverty Factors For instance, if the two cultures had in the past interacted in a negative way, the poor culture directs all the blame to the well up culture.
• Holocaust: Ethnic and Cultural Diversity and the Real Face of Prejudice The holocaust refers to the murder of six million European Jews in the course of the Second World War. The holocaust was the highest level of prejudice in society during the time.
• Weight-Based Prejudice in Modern Society For example, the opening quote of the essay is used by the author to place her argument in the context of the social stereotypes against the fat, or heavy, people in America: “Loyalty to petrified […]
• Forms of Prejudice Underlying Cultural Representations of Disabled People These services that isolate them from the rest of the people include failure to utilize the resources available in the surroundings, failure to utilize technology to assist in communication, and failure of the society to […]
• Racial Prejudices in the United State Every citizen of the great country America has to be protected with the Articles and Amendments of the Constitution of the United States of America.
• Racism in Movies: Stereotypes and Prejudices I believe that, despite the legal manifestation of validity and equality of the law, there are still some restrictions that hinge the normal way of living of national minorities and Afro-Americans in particular.
• Equality vs. Prejudice in American Society To say more, people do not mind in today’s American society the values of humane attitude toward each other without mentioning the differences in ethnical or cultural diversity.’Melting pot’ of today leaves much to be […]
• Prejudice and Discrimination in Canada According to Harry and Tater, Canada really is a racist society; essentially the culture is divided by racism while people choose to ignore it and simply live under the colorful illusion that it does not […]
• Prejudice as the Root Cause of the Discrimination The first involves actual crimes, like murder, assault and rape that are motivated by the fact that the victim belongs to one of the social divisions mentioned above.
• Unconscious Prejudice: How (Un) Ethical Are You? The final form of unconscious prejudice is a conflict of interest or the bias in favor of those that can provide one with benefits.
• People From Brazil: Dismantling of the Prejudice The major one of them is that Brazilians are criminals, and communication with them is dangerous for people as far as rates of crime in Brazil are higher than in the majority of the countries […]
• Racial Prejudice in Urban Elections The controversy of Cory Booker and Sharpe James mayoral race of 2002 illustrates the actual position of political life of the African-American population.
• Ageism: Stereotyping and Prejudice Ageism is the negative stereotyping of old people who are regarded as useless and a burden to society since they do not contribute anything but consume resources.
• AIDS in a Different Culture Review: Cultural Differences, Prejudice, and Racism Now, gay youth and men face the possibility of HIV infection in the course of sexual relationships. The pejorative view of gay men prevalent in some black and Hispanic communities can inhibit they are coming […]
• Youth Crime. Prejudice: Is It Justified? The reason behind the criminal prejudice is of course the variations of cultures in context with the ‘Multicultural environment’. And while the image of the young offender has certainly changed in appearance over the second […]
• Stop and Frisk: American Prejudice Many authors and researchers contribute to the discussion of this issue, and the work by Claudia Rankine Citizen: An American Lyric is on the list of the most powerful and rather educative books.
• Social Psychology: Prejudice Reduction Practices When speaking about the deficiencies of the prejudice reduction model, the researchers pay attention to the real sources of prejudice, the distribution of power, and the reduced collective consciousness.
• Stereotyping, Prejudice and Discrimination: Social Influence After the events of the 9/11 and other terror attacks, many people in Europe and the United States developed a stereotype that all Muslim people are terrorists, which led to prejudice and discrimination.
• “Causes of Prejudice” by Vincent Parrillo Prejudice is the main theme in the article “Causes of Prejudice” by Vincent Parrillo. The first one is prejudice in the psychology perspective, and the other one is the sociology perspective.
• What Can I Do About Prejudice? Now that I have realized with the help of my younger sister that being young or old does not make a person any less intelligent, professional or responsible, I suppose that I am ready to […]
• Prejudices and Biases: Example Problems What if there are people who are obese who could be helpful to me in school or career, and I have ignored them?
• Leadership and Gender Prejudice The world needs more examples of successful and inspiring women, and one of them is Jeanette Clough, the Chief Executive Officer and President of Mount Auburn Hospital, who managed to overcome the crisis in this […]
• Racial Prejudice in Weapon Perception The focus of the present paper is to analyze the study titled “Prejudice and Perception: The Role of Automatic and Controlled Processes in Perceiving a Weapon” Although Payne used two experiments to undertake this study, […]
• Weight Discrimination and Beauty Prejudice in the HRM It should be noted, though, that the identified change in the corporate policy will also require a change in the social standards, as well as the perception of people with weight issue in the society.
• Native American Imagery Causing Prejudice The concept of the Native people as savages and their implementation in business and commerce creates barriers to the development of the basis for moral respect.
• Racial Prejudice in China Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has been considered as the world’s superpower nation. Just like other Confucian states, China is viewed as a societal institution; this brings in the […]
• Advocacy Theories: Bias and Prejudice I will be obliged to respect the values, concepts, and practices of my clients. This knowledge will guide me to develop personalized and culturally competent therapies depending on the attributes of the clients.
• Muslims in the US: Prejudice and Discrimination In the United States, for instance, the whites discriminate the black people to shield them from political positions, access to employment and health services, and other opportunities that are freely and easily accessible to the […]
• Minorities, Immigrants, and Crime Prejudice While these assertions are often mythical and baseless due to deficiencies in documented facts, they have nevertheless continued to be used by the larger public not only to profile minorities and immigrants but also to […]
• Prejudice and Discrimination Reduction Prospects Famed as the conflict theory, this situation to a large extent results in the springing up of these social ills since one group of individuals tends to believe that they are better than the others […]
• Cultural Diversity in Media and Gender Prejudices Considered that posters have the capability to influence and shape peoples’ perceptions, the portrayal of women as sexual commodities will affect the manner in which the society perceives and treats them.
• Prejudice, Aggression and Social Conflict In the above case, stereotype seems to dominate the entire proceedings since the Muslim leaders are generally annexed on the basis of their race.
• Racism as a Case of Ignorance and Prejudice Racism refers to the act of ascribing certain traits and stereotypes to individuals based on their race. According to a report titled Race for Equality, the National Union of Students revealed that 1 in 6 […]
• Ethnic Stratification, Prejudice, Discrimination: Hispanics The author of this paper discusses the effects of ethnic stratification on the Hispanics/Latinos, and how prejudice and discrimination are relevant to this ethnic group.
• The Social Perspective of Prejudice Prejudice is a state of the mind of individuals towards others in society meaning what they think about others is what they believe them to be.
• Psychological Impact: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Racism Considering stereotyping, prejudice, and racism as the part of a psychological development, distress, and behavior on a culturally diverse individual, the changes in human being are going to be discussed under the influence of these […]
• The Impact of Prejudice and Discrimination The African slave trade is the most famous; the trade culminated in the Atlantic slave trade that took place between the 16th and the 19th centuries.
• Homosexuality Criticism Rates Society and religion Many people from different society levels have different views on homosexuality with religious leaders and followers arguing that the practice is disrespect to God and immoral assault to the society.
• Discrimination, Prejudice and Racism in the United States Members of the society should be allowed access to equal opportunities, for example, education, medical care, sports and in many other spheres.
• African Americans-Prejudice and Discrimination This began during the civil war in which African Americans stood to fight against prejudice and discrimination. It is undeniable that African Americans have faced many challenges in the U.S.ranging from prejudice to racial discrimination.
• Motivational and Cognitive Sources of Prejudice In spite of the cultural values that connect people, the Asian men feel discarded when the Asian women prefer the Caucasian men to them.
• Is Race Prejudice a Product of Group Position? This leads to the rise of a group that feels it is more superior, also known as the in-group, and every other group that is deemed less superior becomes known as the out-group.
• Murder and Prejudice: “The Butcher’s Tale” by Helmut Smith Events that followed this murder have been debated by different people and this formed the bedrock of Nazi propaganda in a broad way.
• Philadelphia: Prejudice About Homosexuality Philadelphia is the movie that touches upon numerous themes, and one of them is the development of the relations between two men with absolutely different interests and principles: one of them is Andrew Beckett, who […]
• The Issue of Racial Prejudice The significance of Othello’s race and pigmentation work hard to expose racial prejudice in the Elizabethan era. Shakespeare is using the Moor to challenge the ideologies of race, sex and miscegenation in the Elizabethan period.
• Role of Prejudice in Wars in Iraq The main causes of prejudice are explained and how they can be used to resolve and be used for the benefit of fighting discrimination and stereotyping.
• Health Care Delivery and Gender Prejudice Against Women
• Branding Beyond Prejudice: Navigating Multicultural Marketplaces for Consumer Well-Being
• Language and the Development of Children’s Ethnic Prejudice
• Changing the World Through the Bars of Prejudice
• Reducing Prejudice Through Intergroup Contact Situations: Why Does This Approach Fail
• Social Contact to Reduce Prejudice and Discrimination
• Prejudice Against Muslims and Islamic Fundamentalism
• American’s Discrimination, Racism, and Prejudice Towards the Immigrants
• Discrimination, Prejudice, and Stereotyping From a Sociological Perspective
• Activities and Strategies for Reducing Racism and Racial Prejudice
• Racial Prejudice and Racial Residential Segregation in an Urban Model
• Music Addressing Racial Prejudice and Its Political Implications
• Ethnicity, Modern Prejudice, Social Dominance and the Quality of Life
• Difference Between Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination and Its Impact on Society
• Mental Health Stigma, Discrimination, and Prejudice
• Psychological Impact: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Racism Research Paper
• Anti Semitism: The Prejudice Actions Against Other
• Democracy and the Discrimination and Prejudice in America
• Gender Discrimination and Prejudice in Promotional Content
• Traditional Values, Prejudice, and Discrimination
• Checkpoint: Stereotype and Prejudice Behaviors
• Culture, Health, and Bigotry: How Exposure to Cultural Accounts of Fatness Shape Attitudes About Health Risk, Health Policies, and Weight-Based Prejudice
• Difference Between Racism Stereotype and Prejudice
• How News Reporting on Obesity Shapes Attitudes About Health Risk, Policy, and Prejudice
• Psychology: Relationship Between Religiosity and Prejudice
• Hate Crimes, Racism, and Prejudice in Modern Society
• Hate Hurts, How Children Learn and Unlearn Prejudice
• Racial Prejudice and Labor Market Penalties During Economic Downturns
• Sexual Orientation Discrimination Prejudice in the Workplace
• Gender and Gender Equality: Prejudice and Lack of Understanding
• Two Theories That Explain Prejudice Discrimination and Stereotyping
• Miscegenation: Morality Versus Prejudice
• Social and Moral Development Aspects and Childhood Prejudice
• Modern Day Stereotypes and Prejudice and Its Impact on Society
• Historical and Contemporary Prejudice Against Native Americans
• Holocaust: Prejudice, Hatred, and Discrimination
• Addressing Client Racism and Racial Prejudice in Individual Psychotherapy
• Racial Prejudice and Discrimination Is Just a Form of Corruption
• Price and Prejudice: The Statics and Dynamics of Money-Wage Flexibility
• Everyday Encounters With Prejudice: Ethnocentrism and Stereotyping
• How Do the Prejudice and Discrimination Base on the Language?
• How Do Education and Other Minor Factors Affect Prejudice in Contemporary European Society?
• How Perceived Crisis Leads to Anti-corporate Prejudice?
• How Did Prejudice and Discrimination Affect the Development?
• How Prejudice Falsely Condemned Italian Anarchists?
• Why Police Prejudice Against Minorities?
• How Does Prejudice Affect Justice?
• Does Interaction Between Racial or Ethnic Groups Reduce Prejudice?
• How Do Prejudice and Stereotyping Affect the World?
• What Is the Difference of Bias and Prejudice?
• How Mildred Taylor Uses the Characters and Events to Show Prejudice?
• How Prejudice Exposes the Fear and Ignorance?
• How Does Racial Prejudice Affect Our Diversity?
• Why Are Women Often Met With Prejudice When It Comes to Their Clothing?
• How Does Social Prejudice Affect Our Society?
• Does Prejudice and Discrimination Exist Towards Ethnic Groups?
• What Are the Causes of Prejudice?
• What’s the Opposite of Prejudice?
• How Prejudice and Discrimination Can Help in Understanding Racial and Cultural Groups?
• How Can We End Prejudice?
• How Might Prejudice Develop and How Might It Be Reduced?
• How Does Our Society Foster Institutional Prejudice?
• Does Prejudice Exist Today?
• How Does Ethnic, Racial, and Cultural Prejudice Affect Western Society?
• How Can You Eliminate Prejudice in Our World Today, Starting With Yourself?
• What Does Being Prejudiced Against Someone Mean?
• What Does Prejudice May Construct an Environment?
• What Was the Expression of Anti-immigrant Prejudice and Racism?
• What Are the Types of Prejudice?
• What Makes Archie Bunker a Child of Ignorance and Prejudice?
• Pride and Prejudice Essay Ideas
• Hispanics Questions
• Islamophobia Paper Topics
• Homophobia Topics
• Racial Profiling Essay Topics
• Segregation Research Topics
• Honesty Essay Ideas
• Sexism Essay Ideas
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, March 2). 147 Prejudice Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/prejudice-essay-topics/

"147 Prejudice Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." IvyPanda , 2 Mar. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/prejudice-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '147 Prejudice Essay Topic Ideas & Examples'. 2 March.

IvyPanda . 2024. "147 Prejudice Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/prejudice-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "147 Prejudice Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/prejudice-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "147 Prejudice Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/prejudice-essay-topics/.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

Jamie Raskin: How to Force Justices Alito and Thomas to Recuse Themselves in the Jan. 6 Cases

By Jamie Raskin

Mr. Raskin represents Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District in the House of Representatives. He taught constitutional law for more than 25 years and was the lead prosecutor in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

Many people have gloomily accepted the conventional wisdom that because there is no binding Supreme Court ethics code, there is no way to force Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to recuse themselves from the Jan. 6 cases that are before the court.

Justices Alito and Thomas are probably making the same assumption.

But all of them are wrong.

It seems unfathomable that the two justices could get away with deciding for themselves whether they can be impartial in ruling on cases affecting Donald Trump’s liability for crimes he is accused of committing on Jan. 6. Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, was deeply involved in the Jan. 6 “stop the steal” movement. Above the Virginia home of Justice Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, flew an upside-down American flag — a strong political statement among the people who stormed the Capitol. Above the Alitos’ beach home in New Jersey flew another flag that has been adopted by groups opposed to President Biden.

Justices Alito and Thomas face a groundswell of appeals beseeching them not to participate in Trump v. United States , the case that will decide whether Mr. Trump enjoys absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, and Fischer v. United States , which will decide whether Jan. 6 insurrectionists — and Mr. Trump — can be charged under a statute that criminalizes “corruptly” obstructing an official proceeding. (Justice Alito said on Wednesday that he would not recuse himself from Jan. 6-related cases.)

Everyone assumes that nothing can be done about the recusal situation because the highest court in the land has the lowest ethical standards — no binding ethics code or process outside of personal reflection. Each justice decides for him- or herself whether he or she can be impartial.

Of course, Justices Alito and Thomas could choose to recuse themselves — wouldn’t that be nice? But begging them to do the right thing misses a far more effective course of action.

The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.

The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can invoke two powerful textual authorities for this motion: the Constitution of the United States, specifically the due process clause, and the federal statute mandating judicial disqualification for questionable impartiality, 28 U.S.C. Section 455. The Constitution has come into play in several recent Supreme Court decisions striking down rulings by stubborn judges in lower courts whose political impartiality has been reasonably questioned but who threw caution to the wind to hear a case anyway. This statute requires potentially biased judges throughout the federal system to recuse themselves at the start of the process to avoid judicial unfairness and embarrassing controversies and reversals.

The constitutional and statutory standards apply to Supreme Court justices. The Constitution, and the federal laws under it, is the “ supreme law of the land ,” and the recusal statute explicitly treats Supreme Court justices as it does other judges: “Any justice, judge or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” The only justices in the federal judiciary are the ones on the Supreme Court.

This recusal statute, if triggered, is not a friendly suggestion. It is Congress’s command, binding on the justices, just as the due process clause is. The Supreme Court cannot disregard this law just because it directly affects one or two of its justices. Ignoring it would trespass on the constitutional separation of powers because the justices would essentially be saying that they have the power to override a congressional command.

When the arguments are properly before the court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Sonia Sotomayor will have both a constitutional obligation and a statutory obligation to enforce recusal standards.

Indeed, there is even a compelling argument based on case law that Chief Justice Roberts and the other unaffected justices should raise the matter of recusal on their own, or sua sponte. Numerous circuit courts have agreed with the Eighth Circuit that this is the right course of action when members of an appellate court are aware of “ overt acts ” of a judge reflecting personal bias. Cases like this stand for the idea that appellate jurists who see something should say something instead of placing all the burden on parties in a case who would have to risk angering a judge by bringing up the awkward matter of potential bias and favoritism on the bench.

But even if no member of the court raises the issue of recusal, the urgent need to deal with it persists. Once it is raised, the court would almost surely have to find that the due process clause and Section 455 compel Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves. To arrive at that substantive conclusion, the justices need only read their court’s own recusal decisions.

In one key 5-to-3 Supreme Court case from 2016, Williams v. Pennsylvania, Justice Anthony Kennedy explained why judicial bias is a defect of constitutional magnitude and offered specific objective standards for identifying it. Significantly, Justices Alito and Thomas dissented from the majority’s ruling.

The case concerned the bias of the chief justice of Pennsylvania, who had been involved as a prosecutor on the state’s side in an appellate death penalty case that was before him. Justice Kennedy found that the judge’s refusal to recuse himself when asked to do so violated due process. Justice Kennedy’s authoritative opinion on recusal illuminates three critical aspects of the current controversy.

First, Justice Kennedy found that the standard for recusal must be objective because it is impossible to rely on the affected judge’s introspection and subjective interpretations. The court’s objective standard requires recusal when the likelihood of bias on the part of the judge “is too high to be constitutionally tolerable,” citing an earlier case. “This objective risk of bias,” according to Justice Kennedy, “is reflected in the due process maxim that ‘no man can be a judge in his own case.’” A judge or justice can be convinced of his or her own impartiality but also completely missing what other people are seeing.

Second, the Williams majority endorsed the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct as an appropriate articulation of the Madisonian standard that “no man can be a judge in his own cause.” Model Code Rule 2.11 on judicial disqualification says that a judge “shall disqualify himself or herself in any proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” This includes, illustratively, cases in which the judge “has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party,” a married judge knows that “the judge’s spouse” is “a person who has more than a de minimis interest that could be substantially affected by the proceeding” or the judge “has made a public statement, other than in a court proceeding, judicial decision or opinion, that commits or appears to commit the judge to reach a particular result.” These model code illustrations ring a lot of bells at this moment.

Third and most important, Justice Kennedy found for the court that the failure of an objectively biased judge to recuse him- or herself is not “harmless error” just because the biased judge’s vote is not apparently determinative in the vote of a panel of judges. A biased judge contaminates the proceeding not just by the casting and tabulation of his or her own vote but by participating in the body’s collective deliberations and affecting, even subtly, other judges’ perceptions of the case.

Justice Kennedy was emphatic on this point : “It does not matter whether the disqualified judge’s vote was necessary to the disposition of the case. The fact that the interested judge’s vote was not dispositive may mean only that the judge was successful in persuading most members of the court to accept his or her position — an outcome that does not lessen the unfairness to the affected party.”

Courts generally have found that any reasonable doubts about a judge’s partiality must be resolved in favor of recusal. A judge “shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” While recognizing that the “challenged judge enjoys a margin of discretion,” the courts have repeatedly held that “doubts ordinarily ought to be resolved in favor of recusal.” After all, the reputation of the whole tribunal and public confidence in the judiciary are both on the line.

Judge David Tatel of the D.C. Circuit emphasized this fundamental principle in 2019 when his court issued a writ of mandamus to force recusal of a military judge who blithely ignored at least the appearance of a glaring conflict of interest. He stated : “Impartial adjudicators are the cornerstone of any system of justice worthy of the label. And because ‘deference to the judgments and rulings of courts depends upon public confidence in the integrity and independence of judges,’ jurists must avoid even the appearance of partiality.” He reminded us that to perform its high function in the best way, as Justice Felix Frankfurter stated, “justice must satisfy the appearance of justice.”

The Supreme Court has been especially disposed to favor recusal when partisan politics appear to be a prejudicial factor even when the judge’s impartiality has not been questioned. In Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. , from 2009, the court held that a state supreme court justice was constitutionally disqualified from a case in which the president of a corporation appearing before him had helped to get him elected by spending $3 million promoting his campaign. The court, through Justice Kennedy, asked whether, quoting a 1975 decision, “under a realistic appraisal of psychological tendencies and human weakness,” the judge’s obvious political alignment with a party in a case “poses such a risk of actual bias or prejudgment that the practice must be forbidden if the guarantee of due process is to be adequately implemented.”

The federal statute on disqualification, Section 455(b) , also makes recusal analysis directly applicable to bias imputed to a spouse’s interest in the case. Ms. Thomas and Mrs. Alito (who, according to Justice Alito, is the one who put up the inverted flag outside their home) meet this standard. A judge must recuse him- or herself when a spouse “is known by the judge to have an interest in a case that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Chief Justice Roberts assured America that “judges are like umpires.”

But professional baseball would never allow an umpire to continue to officiate the World Series after learning that the pennant of one of the two teams competing was flying in the front yard of the umpire’s home. Nor would an umpire be allowed to call balls and strikes in a World Series game after the umpire’s wife tried to get the official score of a prior game in the series overthrown and canceled out to benefit the losing team. If judges are like umpires, then they should be treated like umpires, not team owners, fans or players.

Justice Barrett has said she wants to convince people “that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.” Justice Alito himself declared the importance of judicial objectivity in his opinion for the majority in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overruling Roe v. Wade — a bit of self-praise that now rings especially hollow.

But the Constitution and Congress’s recusal statute provide the objective framework of analysis and remedy for cases of judicial bias that are apparent to the world, even if they may be invisible to the judges involved. This is not really optional for the justices.

I look forward to seeing seven members of the court act to defend the reputation and integrity of the institution.

Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, represents Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District in the House of Representatives. He taught constitutional law for more than 25 years and was the lead prosecutor in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Glimpses into the Enigmatic World of Gypsy Lore

This essay about the intricate tapestry of Gypsy culture, exploring its traditions, family ties, linguistic richness, and artistic expressions. It sheds light on the central role of tradition and family bonds, the significance of the Romani language as a carrier of cultural heritage, and the vibrant essence of Gypsy music and dance. Despite enduring prejudice and stereotypes, efforts to challenge misconceptions and elevate Gypsy voices are underway. By unraveling the veil of misunderstanding, we can celebrate the resilience and diversity of Gypsy culture, fostering empathy, understanding, and solidarity across cultural divides.

How it works

The enchanting world of Gypsy culture is a kaleidoscope of traditions, mystique, and resilience, drawing from a mosaic of influences spanning continents and centuries. Delve into the heart of Gypsy lore, and you’ll discover a captivating tapestry woven with threads of tradition, family ties, linguistic prowess, and artistic expression. However, this vibrant culture has often been obscured by layers of misunderstanding and prejudice, obscuring its true essence from mainstream perception. Let us embark on a journey to unravel the enigmatic veil surrounding Gypsy culture and illuminate its multifaceted brilliance.

Central to Gypsy culture is an unwavering reverence for tradition and the sanctity of familial bonds. Within tightly knit communities, generations intertwine in a harmonious dance of respect, where elders are esteemed for their wisdom, and familial roles are clearly delineated. It is within this sacred web of kinship that the essence of Gypsy identity is nurtured and preserved, providing a sanctuary of strength and resilience against the tides of adversity.

Language serves as a sacred vessel, carrying the stories, songs, and collective memory of the Gypsy people across generations and continents. Romani, the linguistic cornerstone of Gypsy culture, resonates with the echoes of ancient migrations and cultural exchanges, embodying a rich tapestry of dialects and nuances. Beyond mere communication, Romani encapsulates the soul of Gypsy heritage, weaving a linguistic landscape imbued with the vibrant hues of tradition and identity.

Music and dance, infused with passion and vitality, form the heartbeat of Gypsy expression, transcending boundaries and captivating audiences worldwide. From the haunting melodies of traditional Romani music to the fiery rhythms of flamenco, Gypsy artistic traditions embody a spirit of exuberance and defiance, echoing the resilience of a people who have endured centuries of persecution and marginalization. Through music and dance, Gypsies reclaim their narrative, celebrating their heritage with a fervor that resonates with the pulsating rhythms of life itself.

Yet, despite its richness and vibrancy, Gypsy culture has often been shrouded in a veil of misconception and prejudice, perpetuated by centuries of misrepresentation and exoticization. From the pages of literature to the silver screen, Gypsies have been relegated to the role of enigmatic outsiders, perpetuating harmful stereotypes that undermine their dignity and humanity. These distortions not only obscure the true essence of Gypsy culture but also perpetuate discrimination and social exclusion, denying Gypsies the right to be seen and heard on their own terms.

In recent years, there has been a growing movement to challenge these stereotypes and elevate the voices of Gypsy communities in the public sphere. Scholars, activists, and cultural advocates have embarked on a journey to reclaim Gypsy narratives, shedding light on the richness and diversity of Gypsy culture while challenging ingrained prejudices and discriminatory practices. Through grassroots initiatives and advocacy efforts, Gypsies are reclaiming their rightful place in the tapestry of human diversity, forging alliances and building bridges of understanding across cultural divides.

In conclusion, Gypsy culture is a mesmerizing mosaic of tradition, resilience, and artistic expression, weaving a rich tapestry that transcends borders and defies stereotypes. By peeling back the layers of misconception and prejudice, we can uncover the true essence of Gypsy culture and celebrate its vibrant legacy with the reverence and respect it deserves. Through dialogue, education, and collective action, we can dismantle the barriers that separate us and embrace the beauty of diversity in all its myriad forms. Let us embark on this journey together, guided by the guiding light of empathy, understanding, and solidarity.

Cite this page

Glimpses into the Enigmatic World of Gypsy Lore. (2024, Jun 01). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/glimpses-into-the-enigmatic-world-of-gypsy-lore/

"Glimpses into the Enigmatic World of Gypsy Lore." PapersOwl.com , 1 Jun 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/glimpses-into-the-enigmatic-world-of-gypsy-lore/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Glimpses into the Enigmatic World of Gypsy Lore . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/glimpses-into-the-enigmatic-world-of-gypsy-lore/ [Accessed: 2 Jun. 2024]

"Glimpses into the Enigmatic World of Gypsy Lore." PapersOwl.com, Jun 01, 2024. Accessed June 2, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/glimpses-into-the-enigmatic-world-of-gypsy-lore/

"Glimpses into the Enigmatic World of Gypsy Lore," PapersOwl.com , 01-Jun-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/glimpses-into-the-enigmatic-world-of-gypsy-lore/. [Accessed: 2-Jun-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Glimpses into the Enigmatic World of Gypsy Lore . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/glimpses-into-the-enigmatic-world-of-gypsy-lore/ [Accessed: 2-Jun-2024]

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Hire a writer to get a unique paper crafted to your needs.

Our writers will help you fix any mistakes and get an A+!

Please check your inbox.

You can order an original essay written according to your instructions.

Trusted by over 1 million students worldwide

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

The Federal Register

The daily journal of the united states government, request access.

Due to aggressive automated scraping of FederalRegister.gov and eCFR.gov, programmatic access to these sites is limited to access to our extensive developer APIs.

If you are human user receiving this message, we can add your IP address to a set of IPs that can access FederalRegister.gov & eCFR.gov; complete the CAPTCHA (bot test) below and click "Request Access". This process will be necessary for each IP address you wish to access the site from, requests are valid for approximately one quarter (three months) after which the process may need to be repeated.

An official website of the United States government.

If you want to request a wider IP range, first request access for your current IP, and then use the "Site Feedback" button found in the lower left-hand side to make the request.