2.17: Communication/Film/Speech
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- Susan Rahman, Prateek Sunder, and Dahmitra Jackson
- CC ECHO
The study of communication in academia examines the process of human communication cutting across socio-economic, political, and cultural contexts, dealing with how meaning is generated in different communication settings (“What is Communication Studies”,n.d.). Racial inequalities and the colonial legacies of white supremacy permeate scholarly and public discussions in the field of communications (Chakravartty et al., 2018). As part of an ongoing movement to decenter white masculinity as the normative core of media and communications, white women were once considered the only diverse component on American TV screens.
In analyzing the demographics of who graduated with communications degrees in 2019, about 56.1% of degrees were awarded to Whites, 15.7% to Hispanics, 11.6% to Blacks, 4.19% to Asians, 0.318% to Native Americans, and 4% reported mixed racial identity (“Communications”, n.d.). Given the central role of universities in social reproduction, and in the creation and legitimation of knowledge, equity and its place in higher education are a subject of significant interest in both social movements and scholarly critique across the United States. However, not only do the demographics of educational degrees not represent our country as a whole, the publication of authors and scholars of color is also vastly disproportionate. By coding and analyzing the racial composition of primary authors of both articles and citations in journals between 1990–2016, one study found that non-white scholars continue to be underrepresented in publication rates, citation rates, and editorial positions in communication studies (Chakravartty et al., 2018).
White supremacy has a habit of finding opportunity in new innovations in media, technology,and communications. In the shift from the print-only-era to the Internet era we see the distinct advantage wealthy whites had over students and faculty of color. White supremacists understood this period of innovation early on, and saw ways to exploit it to further their ideological goals (Daniels, 2019). The 1915 film Birth of a Nation,directed by D.W. Griffith,premiered, giving white supremacists an opportunity to parade outside the theatre in celebration of their group’s rise after their defeat in the Civil War (Daniels, 2019). Griffith also premiered his film at the White House for Woodrow Wilson, who is quoted in the film and stated that it is,“history writ with lightning” (Daniels, 2019). With these new avenues of publication for their ideologies, the KKK began to create film companies and produced more films to be screened at events, churches, and schools, obtaining an estimated five million members by the mid 1920’s (Daniels, 2019).
Almost a century later, another generation saw the same potential to spread white supremacy in digital technologies. As Derek Black, son of Don Black (founder of Stormfront, a white supremacist website), said in a recent interview with Michael Barbaro on The Daily podcast,reflecting on his childhood in the 1990s, they were a family of early tech adopters, always looking for innovations that they could exploit for the cause of racism:
Pioneering white nationalism on the web was my dad’s goal. That was what drove him from the early 90's, from the beginning of the web. We had the latest computers,we were the first people in the neighborhood to have broadband because we had to keep Storm front running,and so technology and connecting people on the website,long before social media. ...When I was a little kid, I would get on chat rooms in the evening ... and I had friends in Australia who I would talk to at a certain hour ... I had friends in Serbia I would talk to at a certain hour (Barbaro, 2017).
Stormfront’s successful global reach initiated more online white supremacist sites such as, The Daily Stormer, now the largest global neo-Nazi website with servers based in the U.S., run by Andrew Anglin and Andrew Auerbheimer (Daniels, 2019). In the years of early Internet, there were no gatekeepers as there were in broadcast news and print media, so the new virtual world acted as the perfect platform for white supremacists to create and disseminate racist propaganda (Daniels, 2019). For example, Stormfront’s motto stated, “white pride worldwide”(Daniels, 2019).
However, as communications is not limited to the internet, we must take a look at the leaders of linguistics, such as it’s governing body, the Modern Language Association, (MLA). It is prevalent in America today that masses of people harbor negative assumptions about the different ways other people speak.
Before the eighteenth-century speakers like Chaucer and Shakespeare used double negatives commonly, but they are now socially unacceptable (Luu, 2020). African Americans who speak in what is known as African American or Black Vernacular English (AAVE or BVE)have been stigmatized as uneducated by using double negatives and other grammar not typically used in standard American English (Luu, 2020).People who speak dialects that are not considered standard, or mainstream face several challenges like, renting an apartment, getting job interviews, and interacting with police because many people harbor negative assumptions based on how one may speak (See also the section on English for a discussion on this) (Luu,2020). Western linguistics, particularly its study of Eurasian languages, arose against a background of Eurocentrism, colonial racism, nationalism, and related theories, later espoused by Nazism and other White Supremacy movements. Significant traces of this racism remain in contemporary western linguistics, casting a dark shadow over how the world is viewed by those educated by the American educational institutions.
In 2021, the MLA held two panels titled “Decentering Whiteness,” with one panel for scholars of color and another panel for scholars of white heritage (Flaherty, 2020). Several postcolonial literary theorists have drawn a link between linguistic discrimination and the oppression of indigenous cultures. Prominent Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o argues in his book "Decolonizing the Mind" that language is both a medium of communication, as well as a carrier of culture (Kamoche, 1987). As a result, linguistic discrimination resulting from colonization has facilitated the erasure of pre-colonial histories and identities (Kamoche, 1987). If we are to achieve true equity in the United States, we must rewrite the relationship between race,language, and racism, which plays such a key role in reflecting and defining the way our society is structured.