Linguistic Anthropology and social justice under late-stage liberalism
Preliminary thoughts on language and power in the Cannibal Nation.
In 1971, Sun Ra gave a lecture in Berkeley, California where he spoke about language and how words have power over our lived reality. He was a pioneer and master of what became known as “spiritual” free form “jazz.” Ra sought to change the frequencies of the minds of Black people, to free them from the poisonous confusion and subjugation of the white race, through the language of music.
In this stream of consciousness lecture, Ra pulled apart the intricate ways that words slip into our minds and affect us. He spoke of “dead languages” and how they’re “never really dead.” Old words and their meanings stay alive in our language today; it’s just that we “don’t know where they came from but these words from ancient days are affecting people today.” Time has a way of distancing us from the connection to the origin of words, the meanings placed on them, and how those meanings can — and have — materially shape our world and experiences. Ra was referencing the ghostly history of language and power, and how the origins of things from another time still haunt us in the present. Maybe then language, like many other aspects of our lived world, could benefit from an hauntological approach.
“All these things affect people. It doesn’t matter if you know about them or not.”
— Sun Ra
Language has both a clear and subtle relationship to power. There is power in the words we use to name and categorize people and objects. Today, some of the words we use, and the meanings and values that have been placed on them, actively maintain oppressive systems.
The cultural productions of whiteness are delivered through language; they shape minds and spark the production of physical racist structures and spaces in the world. Many words or phrases that we casually use today originate from slavery and colonialism. Understanding how language shapes and programs human behavior — while also reinforcing and reproducing inequality — is important for social and racial justice work. Being able to decipher language also helps us to navigate the performance politics of “diversity” and “inclusion” under late liberalism (Povinelli 2011).
Language is a technology and a vehicle of culture. Langauge is passed down from parent to child and, therefore, inherently carries the meaning and context imbedded into it by those peoples culture. Within American English the culture of whiteness is programmed and encoded into meaning and symbols, some of which escapes our conscious perception.
In Mary Bucholtz’s White affects and sociolinguistic activism (2018), she discusses how “race and language are inextricably tied together.” Bucholtz is self-critical about the efficacy of some her own efforts towards racial justice and explains how the limits of sociocultural linguistics are insufficient to dismantling white supremacy. She speaks about how the act of removing superficial manifestations of racism, such as creating new names for colonial spaces of genocide, do not solve the material problems of racism and its accompanying exclusion and removal. Bucholtz gives an example of a street sign in California: “[T]he Santa Barbara street name Indio Muerto ‘dead Indian’ not only reflects a history of violence against indigenous Californians but also represents a form of ongoing linguistic violence that continues to harm the local Native community”, specifically because “when Californians of Latinx heritage are being deported indiscriminately, does the name of the street where they used to live really matter, or whether diacritics were used in their names on the deportation orders?” Bucholtz summarizes her central argument when she said, “[R]edressing linguistic inequality on its own cannot redress racial inequality,” a simple yet very salient point that still lacks a critical and engaged approach across many disciplines.
White people (and those who are aligned psychologically and culturally with whiteness) use language to avoid facing reality everyday. Regardless of political affiliation, and when faced with the aspects of our world that they don’t want to deal with, many (liberals and otherwise) will refer to historical facts by saying “Well, that’s your opinion” and more overt racists will refer to facts as “revisionist history.” Olster (2011) explains that by their nature and as a means of communication, languages divide humanity into groups and “only through a common language can a group of people act in concert, and therefore have a common history.” The standardization of vernaculars across Europe facilitated the formation of nationhood by way of the invention of the printing press and the resulting “print-as-commodity” capitalism (Anderson 1983). But “[w]ith writing comes control, and with control, for Europeans, comes power” (Ani 1994:210). Today, white nationhood is reinforced through the shared practice of mislabeling facts in order to neutralize them — in mind and narrative; that which can be seen quite pronounced within today’s political events, as in the past.
At the same time, what also develops in this discourse is the oppositional language used to deconstruct political theatrics; analyze and name the identical behavior and ideologies of both Trump and Biden administrations and their supporters alike; such as labeling Biden’s liberal racist “blue no matter who” voter base as #BlueMAGA and the now conspicuous and psychologically dissonant conspiracy theories that they spread ad nauseam: #BlueAnon caused by “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS). The more critical language used towards the corporate-owned, anti-Black and pro-slavery Democratic Party and it’s narratives of symbolism stands counter to the dishonest notion that both wings of the white ruling class are somehow in complete contest with each other.
Today as lynchings by the police and other forms of white terrorism persist, many Democrat politician’s go-to solutions tend to be more symbolic and performative and less about actual action or policy or material change — not least in the lives of Black American Freedmen.
In the spring and summer of 2020, the pandemic made the world a captive audience to the lynching of George Floyd by police officer, Derek Chauvin. A lynching which resulted in uprisings across the country and world. However, as these uprisings unfolded, police across the United States continued to target, abuse, and murder African Americans. On top of this, reports emerged of five or more Black males found hanging from trees in different states, two of which were in New York City. Instead of acknowledging the timing and placement of these deaths (which should have been labeled — to say the least — as concerning, nor implementing political action that would produce immediate material results, Mayor De Blasio chose to rush to Trump Tower and paint “Black Lives Matter” on the street out front.
Performance politics were the extent of the Mayor’s action for Black Americans; to liberalize his conspicuous avoidance of the hanging deaths amidst large-scale social crisis and how quickly they were determined to be a “suicide.” In fact, all of the hangings were immediately labeled this way — by the police who arrived as each scene.
Given how present “Black Lives Matter” activism is in American culture, it’s no surprise that someone as problematic as De Blasio would think he could hide behind painted words on a street and not materially address the white terrorism that has long been the foundation of New York City and the United States writ large, resulting in the unrest happening at that moment. Not only does De Blasio use language — like all other politicians — to avoid his complicity in the racial violence in our city, but the embarassing and pathetic painting of words only adds a level of perceived permanence and actual impermanence to his performative political stunt. Meanwhile, blame continues to be put entirely on Trump as if the Democratic party and Joe Biden had not played more major roles in creating and maintaining the same system which facilitated the lynching of George Floyd and countless other Black American Freedmen at the hand of police since the 1970’s — and not least, the 19th century.
Democrat politicians in office will always say — or worse, tweet — “there is no room in our city for hate,” while at the same time turn a blind eye to all of the anti-Black violence at the hands of cops and citizens — of all races. They stay true to the founding fathers decree of “all Men” being created equal; but by “Men” they only meant “white.”
In White affects (2018), Bucholtz talks about how sociocultural linguists can use their discipline to analyze language and power, but she explains that they are not trained to “dismantle white supremacy” and this has lead to the inability of linguists to contribute substantially to social and racial justice. She also cites Mark Lewis’s critique of William Labov’s principle of error correction (1982), which Lewis says fell short by thinking that the “expertise” of “sociolinguists would eradicate racist educational policy.” As we know today, educated and informed people can still be racist, easily manipulated to vote for and support politics of white power by way of liberalism, perpetuating whiteness consciously or unconsciously. Even writing in the eighties, this idea of “error-correcting” racism through education was missing the mark, particularly given the scholarship from Derrick Bell and others of the time.
The belief that education and integration would lead to a post-racial society shows a lack of awareness that educational institutions are merely extensions of the state and designed to neutralize any threat to the status quo within their curriculums. Not to mention the deep-rooted connections American universities have to slavery and colonialism (Wilder 2013); a relationship that did not magically disappear after integration. As well as the relentless avoidance of the fact that one cannot integrate change into a chattel slave society without first dealing with whiteness first.
It is important that we — whether linguistic anthropologists, lay people, or activists — pay attention to how the language of slavery and mercantilism persist within American English and other white colonizer languages today. If we are going to talk about the reach and limits of language in regards to whiteness and power, then we need to start talking more commonly about the cannibalistic characteristics and behaviors of whiteness (Woodard 2014, Ko 2019); the ways that our white culture passes on “psychopathic personality” traits (Wright 1984); how our economic system was built from and fueled by Black American women’s “capitalized womb[s]” (Sublette 2016), and various other ways that our colonial past still operates today, haunting us through language.
Bucholtz (2018) quotes from Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” (2011) when she really should be quoting from Carol Anderson’s “White Rage” (2016). We should be talking less about white people’s feelings or frailties and more about the integral role that white violence has played in maintaining a white nation and securing all of the Black social death (Patterson 1998) that it requires to function. Historically, that violence has taken many forms: sexual, psychological, economic, political etc; and it should all be understood as terrorism. Police violence is white racial violence and indeed terrorism, but so were the policies that were created to deliberately exclude Black American Freedmen from fully participating in the economy. White rage has been a primary means of creating and ensuring a steady stream of Black social death for the cannibal nation.
The avoidance of facts by ordinary white behavior and culture is also violence. Avoidance, silence, and liberal acquiescence are equally violent. All white people are complicit. The system of white supremacy gives the power to define violence to those who willfully uphold and carry out its designs. Under current late-stage liberalism, new “diverse” and “inclusive” faces for whiteness have been gradually vetted and put into places of political power. Politicians who have aligned themselves with the status quo, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, “the squad” and Ritchie Torres, are the new face of that status quo.
There now exists a multi-racial group of elected officials who are self-titled “the squad” but do absolutely nothing specific for African Americans. An act of linguistic cannibalism that is characteristic of the white nation they serve. A “diverse” and “inclusive” group of Democrats under the guise of democratic socialism and progressivism, who use a colloquial term Black Americans created within east coast hip-hop culture, yet they have done very little, if anything at all, to fight for reparations or any Black American agenda at all. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes appropriated this title while at the same time feigns confusion over the question “what is Black? Who is Black?” When asked about US Reparations.
Whiteness — regardless of the race or ethnic group that participates in it — cannibalizes Black American language, mind, body, spirit, flesh, and culture. Then uses all of the above as energy and social/political capital to ascend the ranks of assimilation. Able to build their life on the backs of Black Americans who descend from US chattel slavery, while all the while claiming to be [insert so-called oppressed intersectional identity].
When countless Americans were criticizing Ocasio-Cortes over her conspicuous avoidance of the cries for “Medicaid For All” she called it “violence.” When questioned about Reparations for the descendants of US chattel slavery, Ocasio-Cortes questioned what is “Black” and who really falls under that category?; just one of many anti-Black actions she has taken since getting a seat in Congress.
After months of parroting the platitudes of President Biden, Ritchie Torres came out in support of the ongoing attacks on Syria at the hands of Israel; a white nation that Torres said has the right to “safety and sovereignty.” Torres uses language to further aligns himself with white people by also blaming the other side for that which they are allegedly guilty, by claiming the “attacks” on “Israel” are also attacks “on truth itself.” According to Torres, anyone who claims that Syrians are humans who have rights to life are participating in an “Orwellian universe where truth no longer matters”; something that he himself is guilty of in his article for the New York Post. A collection of statements with conspicuously omitted facts, easily discernible due to all of the honest content by actual journalists like Max Blumenthal, Glen Greenwald, and Abby Martin. Torres has clearly been trained well by his white handlers and donors, and it’s exemplified by how he names his critics a “mob.” Imagine he was as passionate about bringing real change to The Bronx as he is about US Imperialism.
‘Language’ is a tool of power and — when needed — erasure. In 2018, Carol Anderson gave a lecture about “White Rage” at Emory University, where she is the Charles Howard Chandler Professor and Chair of Africana Studies. She opened her lecture with the topic of police violence. At the beginning of the lecture, Anderson describes when former New York City Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, was interviewed after the NYPD lynched Amadou Diallo. Anderson added to this: “I know something is wrong, but I don’t know how to name it…and you know we have to name things in order to be able to face them, to deal with them.”
Anderson also invokes the power of language when she describes first seeing Ferguson, MO on fire after the lynching of Mike Brown by — of course — the police. To divert attention from white complicity in the lynching of Mike Brown, the media immediately initiated narratives of erasure. Anderson acted out the typical responses we hear all the time: “Look at Black folks buring up where they live…Did you know that Black folks were burning up where they live?…Black folks are burning up where they live!” Narratives of erasure change the direction of our focus and they also activate imbedded, dormant emotional triggers and (il)logics that are programmed in the collective white American psyche. White America is designed and trained to use language to alter narratives about reality and also the reality we chose to paint in our own heads.
During the Diallo interview, Giuliani celebrated New York City’s broken windows Black code program and how successful it had been. He said that his NYPD were “the most restrained and best behaved” in response to them firing 41 bullets at an unarmed man (common practice when those unarmed men are Black). Regardless of how many New Yorker’s who see with our own eyes the crimes against humanity that the NYPD has committed, a language of psychological dissoance is still employed. The white psyche is in constant conflict with and denial of reality; because reality threatens the validity of whiteness — the false identity we are raised to believe in. Let us also compare this to Mayor De Blasio’s 2020 ‘BLM’ street painting performance in lieu of policy to protect African Americans and other Black New Yorkers: When white America needs Black bodies for fuel, languge is used to immediately create and impliment policy; when that predatory economic logic is exposed, language is used to avoid making policy that could protect Black bodies.
When Giuliani presented data that revealed a “decrease in crime”, he also revealed how disposable Black people are in the process of convincing white America that they are safe. But “safety” is a code word; one that is directly associated with a level of control over African Americans and other Black people. We know this for many reasons; but in the case of Giuliani, we know “safety” is racialized because he if was actually interested in protecting the lives of citizens, he would not have made all of the moves that contributed to the fire fighter deaths at the World Trade Center on 9/11.
White narratives of erasure are used every day and in every way imagineable.
In order for language to assist us in overturning white supremacy we need to talk more about (1) how white people, culturally, are sociopaths (2) why and how that translates into white violence and (3) how it was/is used to hold onto power.
Whiteness is parasitic and destructive. The late Vincent Woodward’s work on human consumption in US slave culture was cited in the recent publication of Black feminist and activist Aph Ko (2019) who utilizes the framework and language of cannibalism when discussing white America; to be better activists and fighters for racial justice. One way she does this is by analyzing the themes of human consumption and the white desire for Black flesh in the movie “Get Out,” along with the themes of racism and resistance through the lense of “animality” in the film which, of course, is historically tied to white America’s willfully dishonest misrepresentations of Black people:
“In Get Out, the grammar system for colonialism is consumption — the act of reducing beings to mere flesh to be eaten and/or manipulated. This is how the racial system communicates its power. Animal is a part of the vocabulary of white supremacist violence; it signifies the rhetorical and social branding of certain bodies, which white supremacy wants to consume, exploit, and eliminate without question…If we can acknowledge the zoological dimensions of white supremacy, then we can ‘read’ the expressions of animal violence in Get Out as part of the racial landscape” (99). White America is a cannibal nation, and its victims are consumed to strengthen the project of whiteness; its nationhood. From members of “other” cultures — that would be conquered and enslaved — to digestible versions that are palatable to white taste and sensibility.
Whiteness is an identity of illogic, and therefore, the language, racism and methods it uses to constantly regenerate itself rejects and resists the scientific logics of “rationality, empiricism, [and] objectivity” (Bucholtz 2018). Today the language of whiteness continues its mission of aggressive consumption of that which would expose or invalidate its existence.
In 2020, President Trump signed the ‘1776 Commission’ to reinforce a ‘Patriotic Education’ which would mandate the removal of any teaching of history through an honest lense; meaning the truth telling about the centrality of slavery and racism to the United States and its culture. To instead uplift narratives that perpetuate the lie that our country has no systemic racism and that all people have a fair and equal chance to succeed. Narratives which are integral to the survival of whiteness. We should take notice of the linguistic association between the concept of patriotism and the protection of false, ‘lost cause’ type narratives. Trump’s ‘1776 commission’ was an actual attack on history, truth, and language. However, forcing anything new onto white America — without any strategic institutionalized protections, put in place and enforced, to block the psychotic and violent rage that typically follows — would only add to the cycle that has already been in motion. President Biden may have dissolved the ‘1776 commission’ but has done nothing about white violence, in or out of institutions of education or anywhere else in our country.
Bucholtz explains that Mark Lewis believes that “in order to foster social justice, sociocultural linguistics must shift from a liberal perpsective of benevolent scientific objectivity to a more politically engaged stance” through “the spirit of critical and collaborative reflexivity within sociolinguistics.” However, Bucholtz is also concerned that social change will require the collective work of linguistics “across fields” and “beyond academia” in order to have a more critical understanding of “other’s failure and limitations.” Bucholtz concludes by saying: “We need to learn from and make common sense cause with scholars, activists, and community members focused on the racist legacies of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and genocide, including educational inequality, economic disparities, and state-sponsored violence” (2018). Bucholtz is right, but clearly there is a lot of bad education and propaganda to work through, in and out of academia, politics, and our personal friend/family circles.
Understanding that “redressing linguistic inequality on its own cannot redress racial inequality” is important for navigating performance politics of multiculturalism in late-stage liberalism.
Applying what Bucholtz said about street signs like ‘Indio Muerto”, what difference does it make if a organization calls itself “Black Lives Matter” if it is just a front for the Democratic Party — the anti-Black, pro-slavery minstrel party since 1828. How much change will it bring to build a movement from the deaths of primarily heterosexual Black males if said movement ignores explicitly advocating for the rights and protections of heterosexual Black males? Is “diversity” and the “inclusion” perpetuating the erasure of the Black demographic that is the most represented in the data that reveals who is targeted by police, the prison industrial complex; the flesh-hunger of white America?
How successful can we be in dismantling the system of white supremacy if the “inclusion” of white women in politics is considered “diversity”? Are we supposed to think that the presence of “brown” women “of color” in the White House, congress, or local political office automatically means “change” if they are politically aligned with anti-Black racists who have been implementing Jim Crow policies for over fifty years?…or if nothing about Neocolonialism has changed? What progress will come if the system of white supremacy is responsible for picking its “diverse” representations?
A more critical and engaged application of linguistics should definitely help us understand how words and meaning reinforce and perpetuate anti-Blackness and other oppressions. However, it should also make clear that “Make America Great Again” and “Build Back Better” reinforce the same colonial systems of oppression, domestically and globally.
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References
- Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, London. 1983.
- Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Bloomsbury. 2016.
- Bucholtz, Mary. White affects and sociolinguistic activism. Language and Society 47(3). 2018.
- DiAngelo, Robin. “White fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism”, Beacon Press. 2018
- Ko, Aph. “Racism As Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out”, Lantern Books. 2019.
- Sublette, Ned & Constance. The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry. Lawrence Hill Books. 2016.
- Sun Ra lectures (linked in text)
- Ostler, Nicholas. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Harper Perennial, 2005.
- Patterson, Orlando. “Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries”, Basic Civitas Books. 1998.
- Povinelli, Elizabeth A. “Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism”, Duke University Press. 2011.
- Torrés, Ritchie. “Here’s why I’m supporting Israel — despite the Twitter mob”, nypost.com. 2021
- Wilder, Craig Steven. “Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities”, Bloomsbury Press. 2013.
- Woodard, Vincent. “The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture”, NYU Press. 2014.
- Wright, Bobby E. “The Psychopathic Racial Personality and other essays”, Third World Press, Chicago. 1984
