Dichotomizing and "Racism in the English Language" In Wednesday's class we talked about the ways in which society aggregates and disaggregates people. This is fairly straightforward stuff; think of how we single people out or better yet how you have been singled out, and then try to understand why and how that happened. This is essentially a discourse about Otherness, a theory that dates back to Lacan for sure but was probably around long before that.

It occurred to me during this discussion that one of the main reasons we habitually create Otherness is that it's simply easier to deal with someone when they are categorized. Assigning Other qualities to someone lessens the emotional workload required to actually engage and accept someone whose backgrounds are vastly different from our own.

Meanwhile, the reading was also interesting. It dealt mostly with the seemingly innocuous but very problematic nature of connotations, especially when it comes to color, in English. I've actually given this stuff a lot of thought before, and I've come to think there are three kinds of problematic speech: the obvious use of offensive language (think of the high school teacher correcting a kid who says a homework assignment "is so totally gay"); the hidden but important connotations of color as discussed in the reading; and finally, the power structures embedded in language as identified and explained by Foucoult, Derrida, and all those other French dudes (my life will never be the same after that Senior Seminar class). I won't get into that last one other than to say that those in power protect themselves via language in many different ways, most of which are very hard to detect.

Good stuff!  ¶ 3:53 PM