Asao B. Inoue's Infrequent Words

Entry 19 It is not hard to argue that the early racial discourses from men like Birnier, Lineaus, Buffon, and Blumenbach were also racist (see entry 6 ). From their origins, these discourses were hierarchical and placed people in uneven racial categories. That is, from the beginning race was inherently a hierarchical set of categories that came out of European discourses of science and philosophy by folks like Hobbes, Locke, and Bacon. And these thinkers were influenced by Aristotle’s scientific rhetorics of categorization (see entry 5 ). So the very idea of race as a set of categories which was easily placed into hierarchies of value could be argued is racist.  Today, this leads some to claim that just mentioning, using, or identifying race in any way is racist. We should therefore stop using race altogether as a way to reference people, either as a group or individuals. The idea is that you can stop racism by avoiding the idea of race in language, which doesn’t allow such ideas t...

Entry 18 Let me summarize what I’ve been discussing in the last four entries of this blogbook (entries 14 , 15 , 16 , and 17 ). I’ve been asking us to think of racism in our classrooms, texts, language practices, and world as a discourse. But the idea of what “racist discourse” means is bigger than just words. Racist discourse is both material and linguistic. It’s actions and decisions, and it’s language and stories that we use to explain and talk about those actions and decisions. Marxian dialectic and hegemony, as well as verum-factum and verum-certum that explain Vicovian common sense, help describe how we often consent to our own oppressions, that is, consent to racist discourse as the dominant set of conditions we all live and participate in, regardless of our better intentions or ethical stances on things.  Our consent to hegemony usually comes as “preferable systemically-constructed consciousness” -- that is, consciousness that is created in the system as preferable -- defin...

Entry 15 Now, I’ve mentioned a few times that racist discourse is a dialectic that is mutually reinforcing. What I mean is that racist language justifies and explains a racist world of racist judgements, actions, practices, and outcomes. At the same time, racist judgements, actions, practices, and outcomes justify the racist language. All the while, most of these judgements, actions, practices, and outcomes are not labeled as racist. This dialectic generates power. Think of it like a mobius strip, or a tacit racist tautology that ultimately produces racialized flows of power in particular directions, mostly toward middle and upper-middle class White people in Europe and America. Even the founders of the U.S. as a nation understood how power is produced through such categorizing of race. In describing Jefferson’s drafting of the Declaration of Independence, and the debate around it in the Continental Congress, Ibram X. Kendi explains:  For these rich men, freedom was not the power t...

Entry 14 So if racism is really racist discourse, at least as we might study it in a literacy or language classroom, then that field is made up of things we might identify and define. Things we can look for in and around texts with students. This will help us understand the racial politics of the languages and literatures we teach, and how those politics afford meaning and significance to those texts and their ideas. It can help us keep thinking about the racist discourses that any text participate in.   What are the elements? You likely already know them, or could guess. Goldberg says that racist discourse has two aspects. The first aspect is a collection of “discursive representations.” He means “styles of reference,” “figures of speech,” and “metaphors” ( note 88 ). Basically, one part of racism is the language we use to express it or enact it. It’s the tropes and styles of racism in language, like the raven as a symbol of Blacks and slavery, the “Yellow Peril” and Asians a...