Racial Slurs Research Articles

Disentangling Perceptions of Subtle Racist Speech

This investigation assesses E. Hall's 1976 communication context as one explanatory mechanism governing interethnic perceptions of subtle racist speech. Six hundred thirteen participants evaluated the perceived harm of direct and indirect racist slurs made by a White (European American) speaker to a non-White (Asian, African, or Hispanic American) target. A series of 2×2×2 (Message Explicitness: Direct vs. Indirect × Group Membership: In-Group vs. Out-Group × Racial Slurs: Roommate vs. Class Discussion) mixed-effects ANOVAs revealed that lower and higher context communication styles mediated the perception of racist speech harm. Asian Americans were more sensitive to the communication context, evaluating indirect racist speech as the most problematic; whereas European, African, and Hispanic Americans relied more on the actual message, rating direct racist statements most disturbing. Both theoretical and applied implications of the findings are discussed.

WHAT'S IN A SLUR?

The relationship between social attitudes and lexicography is filled with individual controversies. Debates of varying passions involve prescrip- tive viewpoints on the correct usage of words like unique, geographic lexical variation as in soda versus pop, issues of political correctness, and the labeling and censorship of obscenities. Lexical choice is a matter of con- cern for all who claim to be linguistic consumers. In other words, every- body fights over language at some level. This is particularly true for words which are involved in ongoing cultural and social developments as in references to those in protected classes. 1 For example, under what cir- cumstances is bitch offensive or vulgar? Certainly a statement like getting fired is a bitch may not be construed as vulgar in the same sense that he fired that bitch might be. It is the unenviable job of lexicographers in the United States to record the nuances of meaning and social usages in dictionaries used by a diverse population which communicates in a world of perpetual social change. To examine a narrow point within this general question, I studied the area of ethnic epithets. Attention to ethnic slurs often focuses on single words. For example, a recent foray into this area is Nigger by Randall Kennedy (2002), a law professor who documents what he calls in his subtitle The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Extending beyond that individual controversy, this paper examines the work of dictionaries in the selection of entries, definitions, and usage notes with regard to ethnic slurs used for both black and white Americans. The slurs in this study exclude terms for minority groups other than African Americans as well as some ethnically distinct groups who are considered white (e.g., mick and polack for people who are Irish and Polish, respectively). Several areas about the explanations for ethnic slurs are explored here. Are there differences in definitions of ethnic slurs across dictionaries? Are there qualitative differences in the definitions between ethnic slurs which reference blacks and those that reference whites? Given that major dictio- naries of English are compiled by predominantly standard speakers who are white, to what extent are other viewpoints reflected? How has social change for African Americans—especially that which occurred in the post- Civil Rights era—been incorporated into dictionaries through changes in entries, definitions, and usage notes?

From Nansemond to Monacan: The Legacy of the Pochick-Nansemond among the Bear Mountain Monacan

In 1948, Library of Congress scholar William Gilbert wrote: "Indian blood still remains noticeable in our eastern States population in spite of the depletions arising from over 300 years of wars, invasions by disease and white men from Europe and black men from Africa."1 Noting that Virginia's surviving Indian groups tended to retain traditions of their Native origin, Gilbert identified several Indian groups along the Blue Ridge and Piedmont zones of the state. Stating these concentrations "beginning with Rappahannock County in the north and continuing southward along the Blue Ridge through Rockbridge and Amherst counties and striking directly southward to Halifax County on the North Carolina border," he gave definition to the geographical occupation of these interior Virginia tribal groups.2 Specifically he identified five hundred to six hundred mixed-bloods in central and the extreme western end of Amherst County near Bear Mountain and Tobacco Row Mountain of the Blue Ridge. Known locally as "issues," he describes these people as having "a very rich brunette with straight black hair and Caucasian features."3 Acknowledging a second group northwest of Amherst County, he further identified a population of over three hundred "Brown people" exhibiting "a mixture of white, Indian, and occasionally Negro blood." While self-identified as American Indians, these groups were locally considered to be "mulattos" but acknowledged as "a group apart from both whites and Negroes."4 Before proceeding with this history of a Pochick-Nansemond band among the Monacans, we would do well to acknowledge the derogatory nature of the racial epithets, such as "issues," "brown people," and "mulattoes" as they were inappropriately applied to these Native people. The [End Page 781] term mulatto, however, does have a legal history in the confines of Virginia law. As early as 1705, Virginia law held that "the child of an Indian and the child, grand child, or great grand child of a negro shall be deemed, accounted, held and taken to be a mulatto."5 The legislative intention was clearly to include Indians among the colony's colored population, thereby creating a biracial—white and colored—society. The mulatto definition inclusive of Indians was re-affirmed in the subsequent racial codes including the racial integrity acts of 1822 and 1924. Under the authority of Walter Ashby Plecker, M.D., registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics, "there were only two races in Virginia: white and 'colored,' which to him and to most people meant black."6 As a consequence of this legislation, all Indians became legally mulattos, an ambiguous racial category in colonial folklore reflecting admixtures of race, including black-white, Indian-white, Indian-black. American Indians were, nonetheless, classified mulatto regardless of racial admixture, so that Virginia's full-blood Indians could be deemed mulatto under the terms of the racial codes. Mestizo, the Spanish folklore for Indian-white admixtures was never in use in Virginia.7 Consequently when one finds reference to a mulatto in a known Virginia Indian community, one cannot immediately assume that the mulatto referenced is a racially mixed person and by no means should one conclude that the possible admixture is solely black. In fact, evidence suggests that mulatto admixtures among the Virginia Indians were largely white beginning presumably with Thomas Rolfe. While the preceding brief summary exhausts the information supplied by Gilbert, it does not begin to manifest the social history and cultural significance of these surviving Virginia Piedmont and Blue Ridge Indian groups. In recent years, the scholarly consideration of the central Blue Ridge Indian communities has advanced considerably thanks to the work of Peter Houck. Houck's Indian Island in Amherst County (1984) manifests significant scholarly efforts in exploring and explicating the mystery and history of the Rockbridge-Amherst Indian communities that Gilbert noted in 1948.8 Indeed, Houck's work served as the benchmark for the state's formal...

Contesting meaning: Newfie and the politics of ethnic labelling

The ethnic label Newfie is a site of ideological dispute: for some, it is simply an informal term for residents and expatriates of the Canadian province of Newfoundland, for others it may function as an in–group term of solidarity which takes on negative connotations when used by non–Newfoundlanders, and for still others it is the equivalent of a racial slur. In this study we first trace the history of the term, a fairly recent innovation. We then examine present–day attitudes as expressed in (provincial and national) media discourse and in self–report data. We argue that debate over Newfie is part of a larger ideological struggle concerning the commodification of an ‘invented’ Newfoundland culture, which itself must be understood in terms of Newfoundland’s socioeconomic position as Canada’s poorest province. Finally, we compare the Newfie case to other instances of contested group labelling.

Race-Related Stressors Can Trigger PTSD

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Clinical & Research NewsFull AccessRace-Related Stressors Can Trigger PTSDKen HausmanKen HausmanSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:20 Sep 2002https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.37.18.0021People who are victimized because of their race share an unfortunate legacy with victims of terrorism. Both suffer the effects of violence inflicted on them because of factors beyond their control—effects that are often both severe and chronic.This is the contention of Chalsa Loo, Ph.D., a clinical research psychologist at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’s Pacific Islands Division. The center is a project of the Department of Veterans Affairs.Loo, who maintains that race-based violence is a form of terrorism, discussed this issue at the annual convention and scientific assembly of the National Medical Association, the country’s largest organization of African-American physicians, in August in Honolulu. She presented findings of a study on race-related stressors and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).Loo has written extensively on mental health issues pertaining to Asian Americans. For her study she administered the Race-Related Stress Scale (RRSS) to 300 Asian-American veterans who served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. She hypothesized that these soldiers, who, being of Asian ethnicity, bore a substantial physical resemblance to the enemy the United States was fighting in Vietnam, would suffer from PTSD in numbers over those predicted by military rank and extent of combat exposure.Loo noted that when she began her study, there was no published research on the existence of a relationship between race-related stressors and PTSD symptoms or even on racism as a traumatic stressor. There had been studies, however, that uncovered higher PTSD prevalence rates and adjustment problems among African-American and Hispanic veterans than among their white counterparts. Loo wanted to see whether race-related discrimination while in the military could be a shown to be a “distinct contributing factor” to psychological problems after veterans left the service.The measurement instrument they used, the RRSS, of which Loo was one of the developers, contains a series of questions that respondents rank on a five-point scale. The scale’s questions assess three categories of race-related stressors.The first, having experienced racial prejudice and stigmatization, asked the Asian-American veterans about perceived racial slurs, racial hatred, or “being treated like outsiders or foreigners” while in the military.The second category, bicultural identification and conflicts, assessed the degree to which the veterans identified with the Vietnamese people or culture while stationed in their country. Loo expected this section would reveal conflicts between the extent to which veterans identified with the North Vietnamese and “military conditioning to dehumanize the enemy.”Experiencing a racist environment while in the military was the third category of question. She explained that this section dealt with the Asian-American veterans having heard remarks or seen behavior on the part of U.S. military personnel that denigrated or harassed Asians.Participants’ race/ethnicity was Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, Chamorro, mixed Asian, or mixed Asian and non-Asian. Seventy percent were in the Army, the rest in the other branches of the military.The data showed that 20 percent of the variance in PTSD incidence in this population of Vietnam veterans was due to race-related stressors, Loo said—that is, with military rank and combat exposure factored out.Both total RRSS score and having experienced racial prejudice and stigmatization were even stronger predictors of PTSD symptomatology than exposure to combat, Loo pointed out.She noted that her findings on the relationship of racism and PTSD are in line with those of studies done in the mid-1980s that showed that African-American Vietnam veterans showed more psychological problems and adjustment difficulties than Caucasian soldiers. She suggested that a major factor in the postwar problems experienced by African-American veterans may have arisen from guilt and rage related to emotionally identifying with the “devalued” and oppressed Vietnamese people they were fighting.“This finding tells us that the personal experience of racism is a potent risk factor for PTSD,” she stated, and one to which clinicians and researchers have rarely paid attention.The message for psychiatrists, Loo suggested, is that clinicians who fail to account for and discuss possible race-related stressors with their non-Caucasian patients are potentially missing a major cause of PTSD symptoms. ▪ ISSUES NewArchived

Appropriating a Slur

Appropriating a Slur

Nigger: the strange career of a troublesome word

In Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy grapples with a key term in the lexicon of race relations. He traces the history of the word nigger, showing that it has been primarily employed as an insult, probably the most notorious racial epithet in America, and perhaps, the world. Kennedy also demonstrates, however, that people have used the term nigger in other ways. Some have written or spoken the word in order merely to document its usage. Others have written or spoken the word in order to condemn it. Still others have used it in order to attempt to transform its meaning, to convert it from a negative slur into a positive gesture of solidarity. All of these uses are intensely controversial, and many observers believe that everyone should refrain from using nigger given its history, its continued use as a wounding slur, and the very real risk that it will hurt feelings regardless of the intentions of a given speaker or writer. Kennedy describes and assesses these arguments and counter-arguments. Along the way he introduces readers to intense debates over such issues as the propriety of assigning to students Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (in which the word appears 215 times), the wisdom of imposing special speech codes on college campuses, conflicting ways of defining nigger in dictionaries, and contending approaches to disciplining those who respond violently to racial insults.

Redskins: racial slur or symbol of success?

Redskins: racial slur or symbol of success?

"The Negro never knew": Emily Dickinson and Racial Typology in the Nineteenth Century

poem, but as a nineteenth-century text, one of many texts in which the denigration of people of color is treated so casually one barely regis ters it's there. Certainly, the racism of the lines I had just read?The Negro never knew /1 wooed it too?never jumped out at me the way it did then. I remember the pause so well because it went on so long. What appalled me was not the recognition of Dickinson's racial slur but, as I told my students, that it had escaped me heretofore. Why had I been so blind? Or, put another way, what had allowed me to see The Malay's racism now when I had not before?

Domestic Terrorism: The Ideology of Division and the Power of Naming

In Spring 2000 I received a package containing the film Who Killed Vincent Chin? Also enclosed was a note from Renee Tajima, who heard about a hate crime on our campus. An Asian American freshman was standing outside his dorm when fellow white students passed by. According to witnesses, they yelled racial epithets, beat him, and cracked his skull. Miraculously, after a stay in the hospital, the student survived.Assault and battery are crimes. Crimes have a name; in this case, it's hate crime. The term has been so hotly debated that we forget the meaning of hate crime. At its heart, hate crime is domestic terrorism, the kind of violence perpetrated against a community and a people. Some would say that the beating of one Asian American student in New York could hardly be called terrorism.

Explaining Perceptions of Racist Speech

This two-part investigation evaluated four different explanations potentially governing theory on deprecating speech: social identity, expectancy violation, complexity-extremity, and desensitization. To test the descriptive and predictive usefulness of the first three theories, 614 participants made attributions of the perceived harm of actual racist slurs targeted at African, Asian, or Hispanic Americans. The results pointed to social identity as the most powerful theoretical construct to explain perceptions of racist speech. Although social identity concerns predicted participants' responses better than the two competing explanations, a second study further examined the complexity-extremity and desensitization theories. A sample of 36 Asian Americans demonstrated that previous exposure (low vs. high) mediated participants' perceptions of harm and levels of desensitization. Intergroup perceptions of racist speech seemingly derive from both social identity processes and previous experience. The study concludes with a discussion of the legal implications for hate speech.

Theatricality and Cosmopolitanism in Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem

act 3 of Hannah Cowley's 1780 comedy The Belle's Stratagem, (1) the character Hardy contemplates the choice of a costume for an upcoming masquerade: Let me see.--What shall my dress be? A Great Mogul? No.--A Grenadier? No;--no, that I foresee, would make a laugh. Hang me, if I don't send to my little Quick, and borrow his Jew Isaac's dress:--I know the Dog likes a glass of good wine; so I'll give him a bottle of my Forty-eight, and he shall teach me. Aye, that's it--I'll be the Cunning Little Isaac! If they complain of my want of wit, I'll tell `em the cursed Duenna wears the breeches and has spoiled my part. (3.1, p. 40) The humor of this scene relies on a metatheatrical in-joke: Hardy was originally played by the versatile actor John Quick (1748-1831), who had played not only the role of Isaac Mendoza in Sheridan's The Duenna (1775) but also Tony Lumpkin in a 1773 production of She Stoops to Conquer. (2) Cowley counts on her audience to recognize the transparency of Hardy's announcement: Quick both calls attention to the idiosyncrasies of his previous role and reminds us that he only plays at being Hardy here. This metatheatrical moment is consistent with Cowley's attempt to foreground performance throughout her comedy as she encourages her audience to recognize a Shakespearean paradox: if human subjectivity is defined by constant role-playing, then only on the stage do people really appear as what they are. The actor is the only truly sincere being since her performance is the explicit demonstration of ever-shifting human potential. And so in act 4, Quick plays Hardy playing the Jew Isaac Mendoza, whom the audience (and presumably the characters also, for they seem to have seen The Duenna as well) recognize not as an actual Jew--nor even as a representation of an actual Jew--but as a specific dramatic rendering of Jewish identity. Hardy enters into an altercation with another masker, who taunts him with racial slurs: Why, thou little testy Israelite! Back to Duke's Place; and preach your tribe into a subscription for the good of the land on whose milk and honey ye fatten.--Where are your Joshuas and your Gideons, aye? What! all dwindled into Stockbrokers, Pedlars, and Rag Men? Putting his fingers to his head, Hardy replies: No, not all. Some of us turn Christians, and by degrees grow into all the privileges of Englishmen! the second generation we are Patriots, Rebels, Courtiers, and Husbands (4.1, p. 50). This is certainly an interesting response, that could be played in a number of different ways. Is the playwright condemning or condoning the process by which Mendoza's ethnic origins are erased? Is a Jew who has turned Christian still a Jew who only masquerades as what he is not? Does he therefore only perform the role of Patriot, Rebel, Courtier, or Husband, thereby covering, hiding, or disguising what was originally stamped upon his character? Or, is Cowley here endorsing the idea that the Jew turned Christian leaves behind his origins and that he successfully adopts a new English identity? On the hand, as a play, The Belle's Stratagem evinces an awareness of the destabilizing effects of performance as well as the anxiety this destabilization can produce. As the character Sir George Touchwood complains, society has become one universal masquerade, all disguised in the same habits and manners (2.1, p. 27). He is unsettled because he can no longer recognize distinction of character or class of female. Indeed, the masquerade scene in act 4 introduces us to a variety of poseurs--shady characters who exploit appearances to get what they want. Miss Flutter claims she can tell the histories of half the people at the event: In the next apartment, she alleges, there's a whole family, who, to my knowledge, have lived on Water-Cresses this month, to make a figure here to-night--; but to make up for that, they'll cram their pockets with cold Ducks and Chickens, for a Carnival to-morrow (4. …

Living Through the Looking-Glass, or, Memories of the Big Lie

I have always told people that there was little of the confederate legacy of race in the western part of Texas I come from, that the main racial slurs and divisions I heard as a child were those between whites and hispanics--anglos, wetbacks, beaners, and the like. It's a fact that I grew up in the segregated South, and yet, throughout my remembered life, it just never seemed that way. I never thought much about the seeming absence of African Americans in the world I lived in. Later, of course, I came to know the intricacies of the "no sell" policy that kept my suburban school district lily white. Only in retrospect do I recognize the odd moment of disorientation, of otherness, when a city-wide basketball tournament pitted me against a black player for the first time.

"You Nothing But Trash": White Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina

"Americans love to hate the poor" and, in particular, to hate poor white trash, observe Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz in their analysis of the white trash phenomenon in America (1). A "classist slur" and a "racial epithet that marks out certain whites as a breed apart, a dysgenic race unto themselves," white trash is "the most visible and clearly marked form of whiteness" (2, 4). The fact that the term "trash" means "social waste and detritus" (4) points to the social degradation and shame implicit in this derogatory class designation. Referring to whites who live in poverty--classically in rural poverty--the term also invokes long-standing stereotypes of poor whites as "incestuous and sexually promiscuous, violent, alcoholic, lazy, and stupid" (2). That there is a "relationship between social formations and structures of feeling" (Fox 14) and that the feeling of shame and the experience of being socially shamed are crucial to the development of a white trash identity are revealed in Dorothy Allison's many public remarks on her white trash upbringing in Greenville, South Carolina, and in her semi-autobiographical novel, Bastard Out of Carolina. If American culture is often described as competitive and success-oriented, it is also a shame-phobic society in which those who are stigmatized as different or those who fail to meet social standards of success are made to feel inferior, deficient, or both. Living in a "shame-based" society in which there is "shame about shame and so it remains under strict taboo" (Kaufman, Shame 32), Allison takes decided risks in describing her shameful white trash origins and her experiences of physical and sexual abuse, including the risk of being re-shamed in a mass-media, [End Page 101] talk-show culture that often ruthlessly exposes and shamelessly sensationalizes the stories of victim-survivors.

Spinning the Web: Relationships, Talk, and Learning in a Diverse Classroom

Presents concerns of a middle school teacher regarding the possibility that programs designed to enhance teachers’ cultural sensitivity might inadvertently serve to emphasize the differences between white teachers and their students of color. Relates how her students dealt with the use of racial epithets by other students.

An examination of the nature and correlates of ethnic harassment experiences in multiple contexts.

The authors examined the nature and correlates of ethnic harassment experiences in 4 predominantly Hispanic samples of working men and women (N = 575) using a newly developed scale. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a 2-factor structure for the Ethnic Harassment Experiences scale (i.e., verbal ethnic harassment and exclusion due to ethnicity). Most experiences of ethnic harassment in the workplace during the previous 24 months included verbal ethnic harassment (i.e., ethnic slurs, derogatory ethnic comments, or ethnic jokes). It was also found that participants who experienced verbal ethnic harassment and exclusion reported negative correlates that could not be attributed to affective disposition. For some correlates, those who experienced low levels of verbal harassment and high levels of exclusion were more negatively affected than others, perhaps as a result of the attributional ambiguity of the situation.

The English Roots of Abbo of Fleury’s Political Thought

Cet article souligne l'influence de l'Angleterre sur la pensee politique d'Abbon de Fleury. En effet, ce dernier fut envoye pendant deux ans comme professeur a l'abbaye de Ramsey et vit le benefice possible pour le monachisme francais de beaucoup de pratiques anglaises, et peut-etre que ses affirmations les plus importantes ont ete celles sur les relations entre rois, eveques et abbes. Ces ecrits refletent a la fois ses impressions favorables sur le systeme anglais et son evaluation realiste du systeme francais.

DANGEROUS LIAISONS: QUEER SUBJECTIVITY, LIBERALISM AND RACE

The emergence of queer theory has posed an incipient and significant challenge to the essentialism which has typically characterized theories of sexuality. In an attempt to eschew the totalizing effects of the categories ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’, queer theorists advocate a subjectivity which celebrates sexual difference without concern for achieved or ascribed characteristics. It is this remarkable capacity for inclusivity, attributed most immediately to the gender and race neutrality of ‘queer’, which is of particular interest here. More specifically, this article examines queer subjectivity's relation to a liberal humanist discourse whose purported universality requires the production of abstract, sovereign subjects without concern for their social location. The article in turn examines how the liberal premises which underlie queer subjectivity actually facilitate the reappropriation of ‘queer’ while undermining similar attempts to resignify racial epithets. Far from being a neutral subject position which ensures the liberty and autonomy of its inhabitants, the racial epithet here reinscribes the difference which the ‘queer’ subject and its liberal humanist prototype are perpetually trying to mask. I contend that it is this discrepancy in the capacity to mask difference – via a proximity to or distance from the liberal subject – which permits the reappropriation of ‘queer’ while racial epithets continue to remain taboo in the cultural mainstream.

The Differential of Appearance: Asian American Cultural Studies

Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, $16.95). Pp. 252. ISBN 0 8223 1864 4.Paul R. Spickard, Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformation of an Ethnic Group (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996, $28.95). Pp. 225. ISBN 0 8057 7841 1.Gordon Chang, Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato Ichihashi and his Internment Writings, 1942–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, £35.00). Pp. 552. ISBN 0 8047 2733 3.Appearances can be deceiving, sometimes they are fatal. In 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American, entered a Detroit bar with some friends. Ronald Ebens, a foreman at a Chrysler automobile plant, and his stepson Michael Nitz, a laid-off Chrysler assembly-line worker, also came into the same bar. It is uncertain what exactly prompted Ebens to derisively call Chin a “Jap” and scoff: “It's because of you motherfuckers that we're out of work!” What is indisputable, however, is the sequence of events which took place after the insult. In the wake of the abusive remark, a fist-fight erupted between Ebens and Chin. The brawlers were evicted from the bar. Ebens and Nitz went to their car and grabbed a baseball bat. Observing that Ebens was in possession of a bat, Chin and his companions fled from the bar's parking lot. Unwilling to be thwarted by this escape, Ebens and Nitz stalked Chin. After a twenty minute pursuit, Ebens and Nitz cornered Chin. Nitz held Chin while Ebens beat him on the head with the baseball bat. Four days after this attack, Chin died from his head wounds.What makes the murder of Vincent Chin particularly hideous is the perverse element of mistaken identity that led to his death. Ronald Ebens took Chin for a “Jap.” At one level of interpretation, this visual blunder comments on the blind spots of racist thinking, where categorical forms of reasoning isolate us between our prejudices and our self-serving interests. Ebens saw an Asian face and automatically made it the target of his frustration. At another level of interpretation, Eben's racial slur, although inaccurate in ethnically identifying Chin, strangely articulates the conceptual incongruities and cultural displacements that occur in representations of ethnicity and race. Chin's physical appearance made him vulnerable to ethnic mistranslation and an eventual victim of racist misrepresentation. In short, there is (much like pronouncing two people husband and wife) a performative aspect to Ebens's misrecognition of Chin's identity. To put it grimly, Chin's figurative transformation literally concluded in his execution.

Rassenpolitik in National Socialist Cinema

"Rassenpolitik in National Socialist Cinema" emphasizes the alacrity of the German film industry's compliance with Adolf Hitler's genocidal policies and its position as Nazi Germany's most effective propaganda device in the state's effort to win popular approval of its destruction of "life undeserving of life." In so doing, the article refutes notions of the "marginal" nature of racial slurs routinely inserted in Nazi feature films compared to the corrosive effect of the infamous Nazi cinema subgenre of antisemitic film. Far from innocuous, these snippets were an important part of the industry's design to vilify people slated for eventual destruction. The article explores the industry's ploy of justifying its activities as its timely response to popular mandates when in fact no such mandates had been granted. Far from exculpating the movie-going public from having supported the industry's relentless propagandistic assault, however, the article closes with a brief discussion of the continued success of directors, actors, and actresses most prominently engaged in this shameful enterprise.