Session 9(a): Language, Monsters and Difference

Session 9A: Language, Monsters and Difference
Chair: John Collins

The Language of Open and Deliberate Racism on the Internet
Heinz Lechleiter
Dublin City University, Ireland

Violence in word and in deed is often associated with immediate, unreflected behaviour. However, openly racist language on the internet has gone through a number of processing stages which means that some reflection and thought has gone into the production and publication of the racist material. At the same time, most racist writers are aware of their minority status and keen to give their writings an aura of respectability and authority. Therefore, while key terms as materialised in content words point towards web-sites as being racist, the strongest indicators for racist content come form linguistic features connected to the expression of attitudes.
The paper reports on results gained in the course of an EU-funded project aimed at the automated detection of racist material on the internet. It is based on a corpus, gleaned from the internet, of 1 million words each of racist, anti-racist and neutral speech in English. (Similar corpora exist for German and French). The comparison of key terms in the three English corpora confirms that the authors of racist texts choose certain topics to write about and they select certain victim groups, but in their majority they avoid offensive terms like nigger (which is used much more frequently by certain groups of black people to refer to themselves). Frequency counts show that racist authors strive to avoid responsibility for their linguistic violence and resort to mitigation strategies similar to those used by individual perpetrators of violent acts like sexual assault. But it is not only the keywords that make racist language identifiable. Patterns emerged in the course of our research, which are anchored in different levels of racist language. These patterns are hidden, for example, on the sub-verbal level: certain letter combinations like “wh” are quite reliable predictors of racist content. Attitudes towards groups perceived as other, as well as towards the in-group, are expressed through the use of adverbs and modal verbs. Analysis of abstract nouns also allows an insight into the intellectual world view of racist authors.

The Making of Monsters: Nationalist Subjectivation and the Production of Violent Desire
R. Sophie Statzel
Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Canada

This essay explores the relationship between subjectivation within nationalist and racial discourses and the production of violent desire. I begin with Foucault’s argument in Society Must be Defended that from the 18th century onward war became not only “a way of improving one’s own race by eliminating the enemy race… but also a way of regenerating one’s own race” (Foucault 1997). Whereas Foucault’s insights on the role of race in justifying war focused on the national level, I argue that concomitant disciplinary mechanisms produce raced subjects also committed to racial regeneration through violence as part of nationalist projects.
In the United States where a national ethos defines the nation and the American as ‘regenerated through violence,’ (Slotkin 1973) individual investment in committing racist violence is also based on white racial regeneration. Examining such different acts of racist violence in the United States as lynching, massacres of Native Americans, and recent anti-Arab violence, I explore various sites of white, American nationalist violence and trace the discursive underpinnings to them. Whereas psychoanalytic studies typically portray aggression as stemming from subject-formation in the socialization process within the family, I explore the development of aggression in individuals through interpolation by nationalist discourses. Current writings on nationalism portray the nation as an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) and as representing home, making it clear that modern subjects are also nationalist subjects with strong links between personal identification and nationalist identification (Hage 2000).
Through tracing connections between nationalist interpolation by discourse, the psychic investment in performing these identities, and the production of violent desire, a foundational logic of certain acts of violence can be uncovered based on racial self-expression and regeneration. Exposing the relationship between social narratives, individual psyches, and violent desire creates opportunities to understand and thus challenge the impetus towards racist violence.

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Cultural Difference, Violence and the Law: Towards an Understanding of the Law’s (Inadequate) Response to ‘Gypsies’ as Victims of Public and Private Violence
Jane Jameson-Till
University of Abertay Dundee, Scotland

Gypsy history in Europe is marked by genocide in the West and over five hundred years of slavery in the East. Protective human rights regimes and anti-discrimination laws now promise security, equality, freedom and dignity for all, yet the Gypsies continue to experience high levels of persecution and physical violence on the basis of their group membership. They continue to live in conditions of ‘caste like’ apartheid, effectively excluded from the cultural, social, political, economic and legal structures of the states in which they live. They are the paradigmatic ‘outsider’.
Verbal and physical attacks on Gypsy communities are growing across Europe . Recent incidents in the UK include: the burning of effigies of Gypsies at an East Sussex bonfire party, defended by the local MP as ‘understandable’; the violent clearances of Gypsy families from ‘illegal’ campsites in Essex, by a Council employed bailiff company, specialising in ‘gypsy services’; and the killing of fifteen year old Traveller, Johnny Delaney in the summer of 2003. One of his killers was heard to shout: ‘ … he deserves it – he’s only a f****** gippo’. Yet the court rejected the suggestion that there was a racial element in the attack.
This paper is an attempt to make sense of such violence as a part of ‘our’ (non-Gypsy and sedentary) culture and a product of ‘our’ laws, and to understand the nature of the relationship between cultural difference, violence and the law. The first step would seem to be an acknowledgement of the role of law in the creation of the culture that inflicts this violence – remembering also that ‘… it is this world which first creates the law’.
Adapting the approach outlined by Paul Berman, the paper will offer both a critical (suspicious) and a post-critical (sympathetic) reading of the law’s response to the cultural difference presented by Gypsies. On the one hand, understanding law as an expression of power and domination, controlling the conditions of knowledge and legitimating inequality and acts of public and private violence. And on the other, seeing law in a more hopeful light, as ‘…a useful site for discourse among multiple world-views… a potentially generative site for the play of discourse and the encounter with the Other’.