Analyzing racism through political debates : a socio-cognitive approach

Abstract

Racism remains a serious problem in contemporary society. Discriminatory acts and racial prejudices against ethnic minorities are never stopped and uncommon in social interactions. In order to understand or even to combat such a complex social issue, it is important to realize that discourse plays a vital role in the production and reproduction of this phenomenon. According to van Dijk (1984), it is through socialization and exposure to various forms of racist discourse that people acquire the mental models, and hence the socially shared representations may in turn control their actions and interactions with or about the ethnic group. It is also worth noticing that the politicians play a prominent part in this process. Therefore, the study focused on discourse of symbolic politicians and chose one influential type of political discourse, that is, political debate as the data for analysis. Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach was employed to explore how racism is expressed and enacted through discourse and what various discourse structures and strategies being adopted tell us how the speaker’s underlying attitudes and ideologies act against the “others”. The analysis showed that for all the discourse categories being examined, they not only featured the overall strategy of positive self-representation and negative other-representation, but also signaled the politicians’ biased and prejudiced beliefs and ideologies against the minority group. In fact, the main goal of their discourse is to maintain and legitimate the power and dominance of the white majority.