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On where Stereotypes come from so that Kids can Recruit them
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Hill, J. Higham |
| Copyright Year | 2004 |
| Abstract | In reading the papers by Bucholtz, Reyes, and Talmy, I was struck by the attention that all of these authors give to what has come to be called "agency": The capacity, even among young people who are members of disadvantaged racialized populations, to recruit what might be thought of as unpromising semiotic materials for the construction of vivid and dynamic identities. However, in a sort of contradictory reaction, the papers made me think about agency's opposite, "structure," the huge historical system of White racism that produces these stereotypes and endows them with voicings and metapragmatic tendencies against which these young people must struggle (since that's what I've been working on, it's the first thing that comes to mind). Thus I'll begin with a question that these papers, with their emphasis on the production of identity in microinteraction, did not emphasize: Into what kind of racializing system do Asians fit in the United States? This question is hardly new. The inclusion of papers about young people with Pacific Island, Laotian, and a complex mix of Cambodian-ChineseVietnamese-South Asian in the group of essays I was asked to discuss must be drawing on something like the 1990 U.S. Census category "Asian-Pacific Islander." But the 2000 U.S. Census responded to both scholarly and popular pressures for the recognition of diversity by an involuted taxonomy of "races" that recognizes six different kinds of Asians and three different kinds of Pacific Islanders, plus, of course, a "write-in" category and the notorious "mixed-race" option. Is this insistence on diversity the best way to get a purchase on what is going on with Asian American populations, on what they confront as they make their lives in the United States? Do we in fact see a huge diversity of experiences and outcomes, or does the system of White racism impose certain constraints that are felt right across the full spectrum of this diversity and not only "Asian" diversity, but all the different ways of being Black, or Latino, or Native American, or Arab American, or any kind of person of color? My own view is that the elaborate taxonomies of the 2000 U.S. Census mystify a much simpler system: A single social division between Whiteness and Color that accounts for most of the ways that White racism plays out in the United States. This is a controversial position, not only because it deemphasizes obvious diversity, but also because it downplays what is sometimes called "Black exceptionalism" (Espinoza and Harris 2000): The assertion that African Americans were uniquely damaged by the economic loss and social psychological degradations under slavery and Jim Crow and that they are uniquely centered in White racist imagination as prototypical Others. |
| Starting Page | 193 |
| Ending Page | 197 |
| Page Count | 5 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1075/prag.14.2-3.05hil |
| Volume Number | 14 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.jbe-platform.com/docserver/fulltext/prag.14.2-3.05hil.pdf?accname=guest&checksum=64FF9B72912194FEA3F1339F94EF28D1&expires=1544968415&id=id |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.14.2-3.05hil |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
