Day 9: Intent and impact

A lot of ink has been spilled in recent days over whether or not Trump is a racist.  I want to contend, perhaps controversially, that it doesn't matter.  And, in fact, that arguing over whether or not he (or anyone else) is racist doesn't serve those of us who are deeply concerned about this kind of discourse.  It doesn't serve us, not because what he's saying isn't racist, but precisely because it is.  And this is where the distinction between intent and impact really matters.

I'm a linguist (I may have mentioned this before).  And, in fact, I'm a linguistic anthropologist.  So you might say that my stock in trade is based in the understanding that speech* is action.  To say something is to do something in the world.  (Maybe reread that, because it's the foundation of the whole rest of this post.)

What this means is that we are not responsible only for what we mean by our words, but also for what they do.  I understand that this is the point where all of us, including me, to one degree or another, feel resistance.  But surely I can't be responsible for all of the possible impacts of my words - what about people who are hypersensitive?  What about stuff I didn't know could be hurtful?  Why can't people give me the benefit of the doubt?  And I get it.  I truly do.

That doesn't change the fact that our words have an impact. And the more that those words ring with broader discourses and social structures that create and reinforce inequalities, the more we are responsible for their impacts.  A useful term here is "intertextuality", the idea that every text (spoken texts count) is understood in no small part through its links to other texts, past and present.  No speech event stands in isolation. 

I think it also helps to unpack what it means to say that a particular speech event is racist (or sexist, or misogynist, and so on).  (I should say before I go on that there's really no way to cover this well in a space this short - this is a massive national conversation we need to be having - and I was tempted to say nothing at all, but I think that way lies complicity, so here I go.)  A racist speech event is one that upholds and justifies the structures which legitimate one group of people's ways of being and doing as right and natural for our society as a whole.**   

As a relevant aside, I have been struck by the many people who are upset by those who criticize what they call "our" way of life.  Who is the "we" there?  It is white, Christian, and patriarchal.  The use of "our" is another racist speech event that upholds those identities as normative, right, legitimate.  And it simultaneously denigrates anyone who would hold alternative perspectives.***

A racist speech event is about power.  It upholds the power, in this country, of white folks to say what they want; it upholds and justifies the structures that allow that to happen.  It upholds and legitimizes the violences that keep people of color from speaking (physical, emotional, psychological, political, and so on).  A single speech event, through the process of intertextuality, draws upon and feeds the many other speech events that create a system of racism in this country.  In other words, speech doesn't just reflect what is, it creates it in an ongoing way.  It reifies structures - makes them real.  As fiber artists (which I know many of you are), we know that a single strand of yarn may be weak, but a knitted or woven structure is strong.  In the same way, a single speech event, all by itself, may not seem strong - but we must acknowledge and understand that each speech event is interwoven with many many others.  And that interweaving makes them strong.  It creates impact.

I started this off by saying that it doesn't really matter if Trump is a racist (and boy, am I having trouble not also writing this about misogyny).  And here's why.  When someone says that he (or anyone else who says something that justifies and reinforces structures of racism) is a racist, it's all too easy to duck that charge, as we are seeing here.  And then we get into arguments about whether a person really is racist.  (Check out this video, which I show my students each semester - Jay Smooth gets at this point in a fun and useful way.)  But it doesn't really matter whether someone is racist in their heart of hearts.  Instead, it's critical to focus on what their words are actually doing out there in the world.  As many have argued in their analyses of the implications of telling four women of color, all US citizens (and three of whom were born here in the US), to go home if they are going to criticize anything about the US, these words do a number of things out there in the world, all of them racist.  They say that some people are allowed to criticize the US, and others aren't. I'd like to point out that no-one has told Bernie Sanders to go home.  Or Elizabeth Warren.  That is a text (silence is also a text) which links to this one, and tells us that white folks (and especially white men) can engage in criticism of the US, but that women of color cannot.  These words tell us which folks can become US citizens, and whose membership in our national community, no matter how long they've been here, is contingent.  Barring Native Americans, we all came here from somewhere - some of us willingly, others as enslaved human beings.  No-one ever, not ever, tells white men to go home.  Their immigrant status is gone in a generation.  People of color do not get that consideration.  (This chimes with the birther lies about President Obama, which only make sense if the citizenship of people of color is always contingent.)

Even Lindsay Graham's statement reinforces this message: "I don't think [Trump's statement] is racist to say.  I don't think a Somali refugee embracing Trump would be asked to go back.  If you're racist, you want everybody to go back because they are black or Muslim."  It is not true to say that if you're racist, you'd want everybody to back.  Racism is about maintaining systems of inequality.  Insisting that people of color are OK as long as they agree with you is, you guessed it, part of a system of inequality.  It relies on and replicates racism. 

I know from teaching about this in my classes that it's really hard to step into the idea that our words are implicated in immense and intractable structures of racism and misogyny.  It feels too big.  I think we end up feeling frightened by the weight of responsibility that this implies, and when we're frightened, we often get angry (so much easier to feel righteous indignation than fear and shame).  As I try to help my students see (and as I try to remember myself), the fact that our words have so much power should give us not only pause and an incentive to be careful, but also hope.  If my words can reinforce structures of power inequity, institutionalized forms of violence, surely they can also help to undo them?  At the very least, I have the power to choose not to make real the things that I don't want to see in the world.

When someone calls us out on the impact of our words, and we respond by saying things like, "but I didn't mean it that way", or "why are you so sensitive?", we are speaking from and defending our smaller selves.  When we say, "but I didn't know" that it would have that impact, or that it does that thing out there in the world, that is true sometimes.  It seems, though, that once we know better, we can do better.  Not out of a sense of self-flagellation or martyrdom, but rather because there's something important about being actively engaged in creating the world we want to live in.  Something that speaks to our larger Selves, the selves that understand that we live in community, that interconnection makes us better.  Bringing about Martin Luther King Jr's Beloved Community, a world where we can look at one another and see ourselves in all other beings - it doesn't happen in isolation.  It doesn't happen if we indulge in guilt or shame, or if we hide from the consequences of our actions.  And it certainly doesn't happen without care for our words, precisely because they are action. 



*"Speech" is (not unproblematic) shorthand for language in both its primary - oral and manual (signed) - and secondary (written) forms.
**Please note: this is why reverse racism really isn't a thing.  Even if individual people are biased against white folks, they don't have the structures of power behind them, and their bias doesn't create structures of power which disadvantage white folks. I know that it's tempting to think that they do, but the data show otherwise.
*** Please also note: to believe that this was, at any point in its past, a white nation is to disregard the facts of history.  Our history books have been written to give that impression. Which, of course, implicates those books in this project of upholding racial inequities.  This is also why it's problematic to say that people of color (and women, and LGBTQ folks, etc) are playing "identity politics".   We're all playing identity politics - it's just that white, Christian, male identities are allowed to remain unspoken, so when policies are put in place that benefit that particular group, we call that business as usual.