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Jane H. Hill is Regents' Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Arizona. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has served as President of the American Anthropological Association, and was awarded the Viking Fund Medal in Anthropology in 2005.

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In The Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane H. Hill explores the myth that White racism is fading in the western world. Instead she reveals it to be a pervasive and highly adaptive cultural system, one that has endured in various forms for hundreds of years. Hill’s incisive analysis of everyday talk and text shows how language that purports to be anti-racist is framed almost entirely by a folk theory of racism, one that continues to contain overt and covert racist discourses, slurs, and epithets.

This prominent linguist offers a penetrating summary of critical theories of racism and introduces the concept of "linguistic appropriation", as a new theoretical dimension to the study of language contact and linguistic borrowing. Hill draws on her internationally-acclaimed work on "Mock Spanish”, and delves into two important new case studies of public debates around racist slurs, providing a fresh and incisive analysis of the relationship between language, race, and culture.

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In The Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane H. Hill explores the myth that White racism is fading in the western world. Instead she reveals it to be a pervasive and highly adaptive cultural system, one that has endured in various forms for hundreds of years. Hill’s incisive analysis of everyday talk and text shows how language that purports to be anti-racist is framed almost entirely by a folk theory of racism, one that continues to contain overt and covert racist discourses, slurs, and epithets.

This prominent linguist offers a penetrating summary of critical theories of racism and introduces the concept of "linguistic appropriation", as a new theoretical dimension to the study of language contact and linguistic borrowing. Hill draws on her internationally-acclaimed work on "Mock Spanish”, and delves into two important new case studies of public debates around racist slurs, providing a fresh and incisive analysis of the relationship between language, race, and culture.

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The Everyday Language of White Racism

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Introduction: Racism, Race, and Racial Disparities

I began to write this chapter in the early months of 2004, 140 years after the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1864, 80 years out from the establishment of citizenship for Native Americans in 1924, and during the 50th anniversary of the US Supreme Court's great decision of 1954, Brown v. Board of Education, which ended official segregation in US public schools. The US Civil Rights Act of 1964, which proscribed racial discrimination in broad areas of American life, was 40 years old.

The people who made these landmarks live in daguerreotypes, in flickering black and white film, in reunions of graying veterans of the Civil Rights movement. Today most Whites see White racism as a part of the American past, and anti-racist struggle as largely completed. Yet people of color - African Americans, Native Americans, Americans of Latin American or Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry - consistently report that they experience racism (Alter 2004; Bobo 2001; Feagin and Sykes 1994). These reports are not the product of oversensitivity or paranoia. Instead, they may even understate the impact that White racism has on the everyday lives of people of color (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Feagin and Vera 1995).

While American workplaces and public institutions are increasingly integrated, very few Whites have social friends among people of color (Bonilla-Silva 2003:107-111). White isolation makes it easy for them to dismiss the complaints of people of color as "whining" and "playing the race card." Whites do not themselves experience harassment for "driving while Black," or the stony inattention encountered when "ordering a restaurant meal while Indian." Their conversations with family and friends are never interrupted by perfect strangers telling them to "Speak English! This is America!" Nobody has ever tried to seduce them by confessing that they've "always wanted to make it with a hot Asian chick." And they don't have the kinds of conversations with people of color where they would hear about such incidents, which are so frequent as to be stereotypical. Everyday moments of discrimination are only part of the picture, though. Statistics for a wide range of indicators stratified by three major racial groups in the United States, shown in Table 1, reveal a consistent picture of gross disparities.

The numbers in Table 1 capture quantitatively what is obvious to anyone who drives through an American city, attends a college graduation, visits a corporate headquarters, sits in a hospital emergency room, or accomplishes any other kind of everyday engagement with the world. What might explain these vivid inequalities? Brown et al. (2003) argue that they result from two opposing dynamics, "accumulation" that favors Whites, and "disaccumulation" that continues to disadvantage people of color. Yet we know that ordinary White people do not feel that they enjoy any benefit due to their race. Nor do they believe that people of color continue to face disadvantage. So, how do White people explain these numbers, and the visible evidence that they quantify, given that they think that racism has ended in the United States?

Most White Americans do admit that isolated pockets of White racism persist - perhaps in northern Idaho, or southern Georgia. However, the disparities charted in Table 1, which are consistent across every region of the United States, are unlikely to result from the actions of those very few members of the White community - openly declared White supremacists - that all Whites categorize as "racists." A few thousand Ku Kluxers can hardly claim responsibility for the fact that the average household net worth of African Americans is less than one-tenth that of White households.

Since common sense requires White Americans to reject the idea that these racial disparities are due to racism as they understand it - that is, as overt expression of White supremacy - they often conclude that they result from some fault of those who suffer. So they are credulous when the long-discredited idea that there might be a biologically based difference in intelligence among the races was revived in the last years of the twentieth century, in the bestseller The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1994). However, while differential intelligence might explain the disparities in educational accomplishment seen in Table 1, it hardly accounts for the twofold disparity in figures for unemployment. Surely the labor market offers enough grunt jobs that this difference should be no more than 11 percent or so, as predicted by The Bell Curve's figures for differential intelligence. Instead, the table shows a 100 percent disparity, with African American unemployment twice that of Whites. Nor can the alleged average difference in IQ explain an African American infant mortality rate two and a half times that of Whites. The Hispanic figures contradict such an association: Hispanics have rates of school completion similar to those of African Americans, and yet exhibit lower rates of infant mortality even than Whites. A White American trying to account for these statistics might turn to ideas about cultural differences among ethnic groups, believing, for instance, that Hispanics typically enjoy large, close-knit extended families that provide good support for expectant mothers, explaining their low figures for infant mortality. Or they might believe that African Americans do not value higher education, but seek success in fields like sports and popular music, thus explaining their low rate of completion of bachelor's degrees. But, as we shall see below, these ideas about "culture" do not survive critical attention from an anthropological point of view.

Of course we cannot ignore the weight of history. African Americans were never compensated for their exclusion as slaves from the wealth of the nation built with their labor, for being terrorized by Whites out of such small property as they might accumulate in the dark years of Jim Crow, for their formal exclusion from resources distributed by twentieth-century government programs such as the GI Bill, FHA mortgage assistance, aid to small businesses, and support for farmers, through the mid-1960s and even later (Lipsitz 1998). Disparities in household net worth, or life expectancy, might be a residue of this history. But "history" does not explain differences in short-range phenomena such as median per capita income, unemployment, college graduation, or incarceration. If discrimination has been largely vanquished for the last 40 years, two generations, the racial stratification of these factors should surely have disappeared.

Along with many other scholars who have investigated the question, I suggest that what does account for these numbers is the persistent culture of White racism in the United States. White racism is not just part of American history. Instead, White racist culture today organizes racist practices in White-dominated institutions such as schools and health-care facilities, and everyday choices and behaviors by the vast majority of Whites operating as individuals. White racist culture is shaped by a "White racial frame," "an organized set of racialized ideas, stereotypes, emotions, and inclinations to discriminate" (Feagin 2006:27), along with interpretations that rationalize the discrimination against people of color that is indeed old...