Racial Discourse in a Community: Language and the Social Construction of Race

Abstract

Language is an important factor in the development of the construct of race. According to Kramer, Thorne, and Henley (1978), the study of language can provide insight into social stratification and racial and ethnic inequalities. They further suggest that comparing patterns of communication among unequal groups may be useful in deciphering the power relations operating in everyday life. How people talk about race can be an indication of their attitudes, prejudices, and socialization toward racial issues. As Allport (1958) suggests, language plays an important role in building boundaries for mental categories and emotional responses such as repression, color-blindness, and color-consciousness, all of which can be used to construct either racism or racial harmony in a society. The present article examines the language of race in Centerville, an almost 80% African American town in the rural South. It is an analysis of repression and denial in the community's discussion of race-related issues, and of the implications of these factors on local residents' social construction of race. My investigations center around the following issues and the ways in which they have been framed for interpretation by town residents: the Civil War, social interactions within the community, pre-desegregation schools, the closing of Centerville's elementary school, and school dropouts. All these issues are racially charged; however, there was a clear absence of discussion about race in the Centerville community. Centerville residents seem to go out of their way to portray themselves as colorblind or to deny and repress the existence of a racial component to local issues and problems. This may be attributed to the fact that, although the majority of the town's population is African American, the minority White population controls the local media, which consists primarily of the town's newspaper. The dominance of the White perspective in Centerville may be setting the parameters within which residents frame local, national, and global events. It may also serve to disempower and delegitimize the Black Centerville community's perspectives on historical and contemporary events. Recent oral histories of town residents