Everyday Language of White Racism

"Resonating far beyond its focus on the US, this is a lucid, compelling, committed, and highly original account of the fundamental aspects of routine language that help racism thrive amidst its everyday denial. " Professor Ben Rampton, King's College London

"The Everyday Language of White Racism is an extremely important book. Jane Hill raises readers' awareness for the potential danger which confronts all of us; i.e., that ' race' and racially based practices which are frequently expressed in indirect and covert ways would become part of common sense and thus essentialized. This is also a very timely book because it points us to the many instances in everyday life where discrimination still occurs and proposes ways to challenge social exclusion. " Ruth Wodak, Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies, Lancaster University

"Hill's academic credentials give her the authority to write this disquieting book. The care she uses to make her case will compel even skeptics to reconsider the way they speak about other people. " Otto Santa Ana, University of California, Los Angeles

"For the many Americans who believe that racism is on the decline in the contemporary United States, The Everyday Language of White Racism will be both eye-opening and thought-provoking. Challenging the commonsense belief that racism is rooted in individual, intentional feelings of hatred or prejudice, Jane Hill shows that racism is produced through language in which racist stereotypes circulate, whether deliberately, unwittingly, or somewhere in between. Hill's magisterial command of a wide range of scholarship provides rich theoretical and political context for her acute analyses of racist language in the media, public discourse, and private talk. The result is an engaging and important discussion of the enduring yet often invisible presence of racism in American daily life. " Mary Bucholtz, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara

In The Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane H. Hill explores the myth that White racism is fading in the western world. Instead she reveals it to be a pervasive and highly adaptive cultural system, one that has endured in various forms for hundreds of years. Hill's incisive analysis of everyday talk and text shows how language that purports to be anti-racist is framed almost entirely by a folk theory of racism, one that continues to contain overt and covert racist discourses, slurs, and epithets. " This prominent linguist offers a penetrating summary of critical theories of racism and introduces the concept of "linguistic appropriation", as a new theoretical dimension to the study of language contact and linguistic borrowing. Hill draws on her internationally-acclaimed work on "Mock Spanish", and delves into two important new case studies of public debates around racist slurs, providing a fresh and incisive analysis of the relationship between language, race, and culture.