Tài liệu America through language of solomon northup’s autobiography twelve years a slave

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGE AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES BÙI THỊ HỒNG RACISM IN THE NINETEENTH – CENTURY AMERICA THROUGH LANGUAGE OF SOLOMON NORTHUP’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY “TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE” (Kỳ thị chủng tộc ở Mỹ thế kỷ XIX qua ngôn ngữ tự truyện “Mười hai năm nô lệ” của Solomon Northup) M.A. MINOR THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 8220201.01 Hanoi, 2021 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGE AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES BÙI THỊ HỒNG RACISM IN THE NINETEENTH – CENTURY AMERICA THROUGH LANGUAGE OF SOLOMON NORTHUP’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY “TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE” (Kỳ thị chủng tộc ở Mỹ thế kỷ XIX qua ngôn ngữ tự truyện “Mười hai năm nô lệ” của Solomon Northup) M.A MINOR THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 8220201.01 Supervisor : PhD. NGÔ TỰ LẬP Hanoi, 2021 DECLARATION I, Bùi Thị Hồng, hereby state that, this minor thesis is the result of my own research and all the materials used in this study has been identified and acknowledged. In addition, the thesis has not been submitted for any degree to any other universities or institutions. Except where the reference is indicated, no other person‘s work has been used without due acknowledgement in the text of the thesis. Hanoi, November 2020 Bùi Thị Hồng i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My minor thesis has been successfully completed thanks to the assistance and guidance of my lecturers, friends and relatives. First of all, I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to my supervisor, PhD. Ngô Tự Lập for his valuable instructions, comments as well as his advice. Secondly, I am greatly indebted to the lecturers and officers at the Department of Post-graduate studies, University of Language and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi for their contribution to my study. PhD. Ngô Tự Lập, Prof. Nguyễn Hoà, PhD. Huỳnh Anh Tuấn have encouraged me a lot and given me excellent pieces of advice, without which the work would not have been completed. Finally, I owe the deepest gratitude to my family and friends. Without their valuable support and encouragement, this study has not been completed. ii ABSTRACT Racism is a treatment of races in which one race regards as superior and the other as inferior. The group who considers themselves as superior thinks that they have special rights toward the other group. This study aims at analyzing and explaining racism and resistance in the nineteenth-century in America linguistically and socially using critical discourse analysis. This present research takes that into account and chooses Twelve Years a Slave, a memoir by Solomon Northup, as data that clearly illustrates how racism occurs. This memoir is narrated by a slave working in the Deep South of the America. This research seeks to see the representation of racism in the U.S. in the nineteenth century. This study starts from analyzing the social context in which the memoir was written. The findings show (1) the social grouping in the memoir as the condition in which racism was exercised, (2) racism was represented in different discursive strategies. This research sought to contribute to the literature on racism in the U.S. history in the nineteenth century, to the local literature in Vietnam through understanding of memoir as a genre. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION .............................................................................................. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................ ii ABSTRACT .................................................................................................... iii ABBREVIATIONS ........................................................................................ vi LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................ vii LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................. 1 1.1. Rationale ................................................................................................. 1 1.2. Aims and objectives ................................................................................ 5 1.3 Research question .................................................................................... 5 1.4. Research scope........................................................................................ 6 1.5. Research significance ............................................................................. 6 1.6. Research design ...................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW ...................................................... 8 2.1. Slavery as discourse in American literature ........................................... 8 2.2. Racism as discourse ................................................................................ 9 2.2.1. Definition ............................................................................................. 9 2.2.2. Racism as discourse ........................................................................... 16 2.3. Discursive approaches to racism .......................................................... 18 2.3.1. Prejudices and stereotypes ................................................................. 18 2.3.2. The socio-cognitive discourse-analytical approach........................... 19 2.3.3. Collective symbols, discourse strands, and dispositives supporting racism ........................................................................................................... 21 2.3.4. The Loughborough group or discursive psychology of racism ......... 22 2.4. (Critical) discourse analysis .................................................................. 23 2.4.1. Discourse analysis ............................................................................. 23 2.4.2. Critical discourse analysis ................................................................. 24 2.4.3. Critical discourse analysis and racism ............................................... 26 iv CHAPTER 3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY........................................ 31 3.1. Context of the study .............................................................................. 31 3.2. The data................................................................................................. 31 3.3. Research questions................................................................................ 34 3.5. Summary ............................................................................................... 35 CHAPTER 4. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION ......................................... 36 4.1. An overview of social groupings in ―Twelve Years a Slave‖ .............. 36 4.2. Racism in ‗Twelve Years a Slave‘ ....................................................... 39 4.2.1. Referential strategies ......................................................................... 39 4.2.2. Predicational strategies ...................................................................... 41 4.2.3. Argumentation strategies ................................................................... 42 4.2.4. Perspectivation, framing or discourse representation ........................ 43 4.2.5. Intensifying strategies ........................................................................ 45 4.3. Summary ............................................................................................... 48 CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION.................................................................. 49 5.1. Recapitulation ....................................................................................... 49 5.2. Implications .......................................................................................... 50 5.3. Limitations ............................................................................................ 51 5.4. Further study ......................................................................................... 51 REFERENCES .............................................................................................. 52 APPENDICES .................................................................................................. I v ABBREVIATIONS DA Discourse analysis CDA Critical discourse analysis RQ Research question vi LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1. A systemic review of racism in discourse analysis ....................... 26 Table 4.1. Social groupings in ‘Twelve Years a Slave‘................................... 37 Table 4.2. Argumentation strategies in ‘Twelve Years a Slave‘ ................... 43 Table 4.3. Prescreptivization in ‘Twelve Years a Slave‘................................. 45 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1. Schematic representation of the discursive reproduction of racism ... 20 Figure 4.1. Character system in ‗Twelve Years a Slave‘................................. 38 vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. Rationale At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a lack of research into racism as well as the understanding about race. According to Garner (2010), scientists only built on the groundwork more in the Enlightenment period. Science began to eclipse religion as the legitimate authority for explaining phenomena in both the natural and social worlds. Texts produced by these natural science disciplines demonstrate that the notion of dispassionate and disinterested scientific endeavor held no sway over those interested in ‗race‘: the logic underlying experiments is erroneous, and the interpretations of data are so weighed down under the assumption of explicit existing hierarchies based on racial difference that the findings are not compelling. American craniologist Samuel Morton (1839), for example, filled the skulls of various ‗racial‘ types with lead pellets to measure their capacity. He emerged with a league table showing that English skulls had the largest capacity, followed by Native Americans, and then Black Americans. His inference was that the English mind was larger, more powerful and superior. At that time, there were 3 disciplines about the race: Phrenology, Craniology, Anthropometry. Phrenology was the study of the structure of the skull (bumps and indentations) to determine a person‘s character and mental capacity. However, phrenology is based on the idea that these can be identified from the external surface, and people‘s behavior thus predicted. Craniology was the measurement of cranial features in order to classify people according to race, criminal temperament, intelligence, etc. The underlying assumption of craniology is that skull size and shape determine brain size, which determines such things as intelligence and the capacity for moral behavior. Anthropometry was the study of human body measurement for use in anthropological classification and comparison. In the nineteenth century, anthropometry was a pseudo-science used mainly to classify potential criminals by facial characteristics. Thus, for Dennis (2005), racism is a relatively modern concept which arose in the European age of colonization, the growth of European capitalism and especially the Atlantic slave trade. The concept also took its developments behind racial segregation in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth 1 centuries, behind the apartheid in South Africa. Ever since, racism has been well documented in Western culture and become a reference point in the studies and discourses about racism (Bowser & Hunt, 1996; Fredrickson, 2015; Jordan, 1974). Apartheid, for example, was a system of institutionalized racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s. Apartheid was characterized by an authoritarian political culture based on baasskap (or white supremacy), which ensured that South Africa was dominated politically, socially, and economically by the nation's minority white population. South Africa abolished apartheid from 1990-1994 and today the international crime of apartheid is a crime against humanity under international law (Mayne, 1999). Therefore, racism is not a word. It‘s a war with forces, struggle, emancipation, frontiers as Nelson Mandela put it: We stand here today to salute the United Nations Organization and its Member States, both singly and collectively, for joining forces with the masses of our people in a common struggle that has brought about our emancipation and pushed back the frontiers of racism. (Nelson Mandela, address to the United Nations as South African President, 3 October 1994). Racism has now become an everyday life construct. According to Essed (1991, p. 1), ―many studies have identified the mechanisms of racism at a societal level, but few have revealed its pervasive impact on the daily experiences of Blacks.‖ Du Bois (2007) was among the first to point out that, over the generations, Blacks in the United States developed a ―double consciousness‖. This idea is premised on the view that Blacks are familiar with dominant group interpretations of reality and, therefore, have knowledge of racist ideas and interpretations of reality. With their sense of history, through communication about racism within the Black community, and by testing their own experiences in daily life, Black people can develop profound and often sophisticated knowledge about the reproduction of racism. Du Bois (2007) offers us a crucially important account of racism and everyday life. In the recent sociological past, however, the first key point of reference is the pathbreaking work of Essed (1991), Understanding Everyday Racism, as she explains, from a desire to contest a view of racism which understood it either in merely subjective terms (as a problem of prejudiced individuals) or in abstractly objective terms (as something which could be studied only at the level of 2 social or institutional structures). Essed‘s research, in contrast, concentrated on the lived experiences of racism and was characterized by careful attention to the hardwon understandings of those who had to routinely navigate and respond to such experiences. A key insight of her respondents, in this respect, was that acts of racism in everyday situations were neither arbitrary nor happenstance, but were part of a wider pattern and had to be named as such: ‗Specific instances acquire meaning only in relation to the sum total of other experiences of everyday racism‘ (Essed, 1991, p. 288). It is in this sense, then, that she describes racism as ‗a process [...] routinely created and reinforced through everyday practices.‘ Racism has effect, at least in part, through its ‗cumulative instantiation‘ day after day, its repetition and reproduction in mundane ways of speaking and acting. In the case of local context of Vietnam, racism has mainly been directed by the majority and dominant ethnic group of Vietnamese Kinh against other ethnic minorities. For example, the minorities have not benefited much from the economic reforms (Taylor, 2007) and experienced the problem of ‗cultural remoteness‘ (Baulch, Chuyen, Haughton, & Haughton, 2002). For the case of Degars (người Thượng) in Central Highlands, they were subjected to state sponsored colonization by ethnic Vietnamese dwellers under the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. During the ‗March to the South‘ (Nam Tiến), much of Khmer and Cham territory was seized by the Vietnamese Kinh (FitzGerald, 2009). In the work of Elliott (2003), he found out that ethnic minorities in general have also been referred to as ‗mọi‘. Vagrants in the city are named ‗bụi đời‘ (dust of life). This term is used to refer to ‗children of United States Citizens‘ when there were some more than 21 thousand Vietnamericans born during the Vietnam War and they were under the name ‗bụi đời‘ (Gallagher & Mahé, 2019). For Smith and Feagin (1995), these mixed-race Vietnamericans, in the United States, were referred to as the criminal class (Smith & Feagin, 1995). Thus, the Vietnamese Kinh dominated government media, propagated negative stereotypes of the ethnic minorities, those who are impoverished and underdeveloped because of their own lack of economic and agricultural skills (McElwee, 2008). This present study attempted to study a memoir as discourse. Couser (2012) states that Memoir has eclipsed ―autobiography‖ as the term of choice for a certain kind of life narrative. ‗According to various cultural commentators – critics, 3 scholars, and reviewers - this is an age – if not the age – of memoir‘ (Couser, 2012, p. 3). Memoir is the literary face of a very common and fundamental human activity. It takes its root in deep human needs, desires, and habitual practices. Thus, memoir should help readers better appreciate the way that memoir represents human experience (See more discussion of memoir in Chapter 3, section 2). For Couser (2012, p. 9), ‗memoir may take the form of – among many other things – conversation narrative, confession, apology, testimony, and coming-of-age narrative.‘ If it is a covert or a confessor who defines him/himself or her/herself in opposition to some earlier self, an apologist seeks to defend an earlier self. In other forms, memoir opens up a Pandora‘s box and stems the fact that it is rooted in the real world and therefore makes certain kinds of claims of truth. The memoir ‗Twelve years a slave‘ by Solomon Northup was among the most famous memoirs of all time. Northup concludes his memoir with the truth claims as follows: My narrative is at an end. I have no comments to make upon the subject of Slavery. Those who read this book may form their own opinions of the "peculiar institution‖. What it may be in other States, I do not profess to know; what it is in the region of Red River, is truly and faithfully delineated in these pages. This is no fiction, no exaggeration. If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture. I doubt not hundreds have been as unfortunate as myself; that hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana. But I forbear. Chastened and subdued in spirit by the sufferings I have borne, and thankful to that good Being through whose mercy I have been restored to happiness and liberty, I hope henceforward to lead an upright though lowly life, and rest at last in the church yard where my father sleeps (Northup, 1968, p. 252). Such truths of the American society in the nineteenth century motivated the researcher to carry out this present study. The local literature on racism also interested me to carry out this study project named ‗Racism in the nineteenthcentury America through the language of Solomon Northup‘s memoir ‘Twelve Years a Slave'‘. This study also took its root in a study of autobiography genre, Rak (2005, pp. 483-484) concerns that ‗unlike autobiography, memoir has received very little critical attention in its own right‘ and that ‗memoir has remained largely unexamined by literary critics and theorists. . In addition, I had strong personal interest when I read this memoir that made me motivated to do the study. 4 1.2. Aims and objectives Racism has been part of the American history since the European colonization of the North America beginning in the seventeenth century. Many African were traded to America struggling their lives as slaves, being kidnapped from their homelands even when they gained freedom in the U.S. The social problem of racism and discrimination just ended after the Civil War in 1865 twelve years after the publication of ‗Twelve Years a Slave.‘ In those years, the white Americans were in priority and the native Americans (Indians), African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic and Latino Americans were in discrimination (Wood, 2003). Parts of the U.S. gradually came in a binary system of race, causing free people of color to lose status as they were grouped with the slaves. They lost certain rights as they became classified by American whites as officially ‗black‘. Thus, the U.S. society was divided into two groups: the American whites, who were in legal and social priority and the American blacks in which Salomon Northup was a representative. This present research took interest in revealing how racism was represented in the U.S. society in the nineteenth century from the perspective of a ‗black‘ slave, the author of ‗Twelve Years a Slave‘. In brief, theoretically this research seeks to fill these gaps and look into the representation of racism in a slavery memoir from top-down analysis and bottom-up point as a form of resistance toward the out-group. 1.3 Research question The research question is as follows: How is racism discursively constructed in the nineteenth-century America in the memoir „Twelve Years a Slave‟? This research question sought to cut to the heart of the racist logic represented in the text and talk of the inferiority and the superiority in a historical moment in the U.S. history. On answering this research question, we took interest in answering sub-questions: (1) How are persons named and referred to linguistically in the memoir? (2) What traits, characteristics, qualities and features are attributed to them? (3) By means of what arguments and argumentation schemes do specific persons or social groups try to justify and legitimize the exclusions, discrimination, suppression and exploitation of others? 5 (4) From what perspective or point of view are these namings, attributions and arguments expressed? (5) Are the respective discriminating utterances articulated overtly, are they even intensified or are they mitigated? 1.4. Research scope The linguistic resources used in this present research were the five discursive strategies suggested by Reisigl and Wodak (2001): (1) referential strategies, (2) predicational strategies, (3) argumentation strategies; (4) perspectivation, framing or discourse representation; and (5) intensifying strategies. The analysis was from two approaches: top-down analysis to reveal the representation of the in-group‘s racial discrimination and bottom-up analysis to reveal the racial resistance following the denial of racism or racist resistance (Van Dijk, 1992). In this research, the researcher focused on analyzing the memoir ‗Twelve Years a Slave‘ using the analytical framework proposed by Reisigl and Wodak (2001). In the Northup‘s memoir, the characters in the story can be divided into some categories based on the point of view taken, major and minor character, protagonist and antagonist character, round and flat character, dynamic and static character, typical and neutral character. In Twelve Years a Slave, there are 15 major characters such as Solomon Northup as the main character and 14 others grouped in the table 4.1 (see Table 4.1) and 25 minor characters. The minor characters were not analyzed in this research because of the scope of the study. 1.5. Research significance The theoretical significances of this research were to contribute to the development of literature of racism in the world and in the local context, especially the phenomenon of racism in the darkest age of the American history. Besides, this research gave contribution to development of understanding, particularly the literary study on the memoir ‗Twelve Years a Slave‘. This research sought to contribute to the understand memoir genre because it has been neglected. Practically, teachers and students may benefit from the awareness of racism in American history. 1.6. Research design This thesis consists of five chapters. Following this first chapter introduction, which briefly drew attention to the basic concepts of racism, and the 6 rise of the problems of racism in America in the nineteenth-century, racism in Vietnam and the researcher‘s drive to carry out this research. A focus for the research question was subsequently discussed and guidelines for an appropriate methodology were proposed. The scope of the study was also set up to narrow down the research problems and to explain the feasibility of the study. Chapter 2 reviews the extant literature and previous studies that motivates the researcher to conduct this research and generates the research problems of this thesis. This chapter suggests a literary contribution that defines the concepts of racism in a historic time in the U.S. and the importance of memoir in the U.S. literature. A brief discussion on racism as discourse and approaches to studying racism in discourse were discussed. Critical discourse analysis was discussed as an approach to the study of racism and the final section reviews previous related studies. Chapter 3 describes the data collection procedures, the research design and theoretical and analytical framework of the study. Key findings from analysis of the research data are presented in Chapter 4 along with a detailed account and interpretation of the findings of the study, with reference to the research question and in relation to previous relevant research findings. Chapter 5 summarizes the study findings, focuses on theoretical and pedagogical implications of the study. 7 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter begins with a discussion of the role of slavery in the American literature. Slave narrative is one of the most influential forms of American literature, in which slave narrative is a form of autobiography. Section 2.2 discusses many definitions of racism before going on to discuss racism as discourse. Section 2.3 discusses the approaches to racism in discourse from prejudices and stereotypes, socio-cognitive, collective symbols to the Loughborough school. Section 2.4 discusses discourse analysis as a chosen approach to study racism in this research. 2.1. Slavery as discourse in American literature Literature is a written or printed work which expresses feeling, attitude and life of human in society. So, essentially literature can also be called as a creative act of the writer‘s imagination in selecting, ordering, and interpreting life experiences in a written work. It also gives lesson from various aspects of human life such as religious, social, moral and also cultural. Slave narrative or an account of the life is either in oral or written form by the slave or a former slave personally. Slave narrative is one of the most influential traditions in American literature, which shapes the form and themes of both fiction and autobiography in the history of the U.S. In which, autobiography can take different forms including diaries, journals, memoirs and reminiscences to a formal book. An autobiography can be divided into four sub-types: thematic, religious, intellectual, and fictionalized. ‗Autobiography is ideally understood by both its authors and its readers to be exemplary, as a reliable and true portrayal of a life from which others can learn‘ (Cuddon, 2013, pp. 60-61). The most prominent feature of this form of literature is that it is told or written by African Americans. From the 1760s to the end of the Civil War (1861-1865) in the U.S., there were about 100 autobiographies of African American slaves. It was in the 1930s that these autobiographies were gathered and counted up to 2500 works. American slave narrative typically focuses on the author‘s rite of passage from the deep South to freedom. The rise of the abolition movement in the early nineteenth century witnesses the awareness of the harsh realities of slavery in the U.S. In response to that, the narrative of Solomon Northup (1853) claimed its attraction to readers not only in the U.S. but also internationally. 8 2.2. Racism as discourse 2.2.1. Definition Contemporary racism is a complex societal system in which peoples of European origin dominate peoples of other origins, which happens mostly in Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand (van Dijk, 1991). This relation of dominance may take many different forms of economic, societal, cultural, and political sphere where usually negatively valued characteristics ascribed to the dominated peoples. In other words, ‗race‘ is about physical appearance and has been a characteristic of humanity for centuries (Garner, 2010). Historically, the basic categorization and negative ascription were first perceived due to the bodily appearance, mainly because of their color. These differences soon developed into folk taxonomies about different races. Along with the pseudo-scientific arguments against superior races in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to the conclusion that the ‗white‘ race was superior to the other races (van Dijk, 1991). Although nowadays racism is not presently disused because most white people are no longer assumed to believe in their racial superiority since after the World War II and the Holocaust. While black people‘s knowledge about racism is relevant. As Du Bois (2007) was among the first to recognize that over the generations, Blacks in the United States developed a ‗double consciousness.‘ So, if we accept that there are physical differences possible, yet when we think about ‗race, there are not many features that we are interested in, and the problem may become ‗why is this the case?‘ (Garner, 2010) when the physical description is not actually exact. Nobody living is actually white. Nobody is really ‗black‘ in the sense of the ink on this page. Thus, such terms must have social meanings, but not biological ones. There are certain ways of distinguishing between one group to another in a specific context, and we accept ‗race‘ is one form of categorization, one of the legitimate ways in which we try to make sense of difference. However, in the case of the United States, Michael A. Omi observed that: ‗… the meaning of race in the United States has been and probably always will be fluid and subject to multiple determinations. Race cannot be seen simply as an objective fact, nor treated as an independent variable‘ (Omi, 2001, p. 244). From an anthropological perspective, ‗race‘ is a ‗cultural category of 9 difference that is contextually constructed as essential and natural – as residing within the very body of the individual‘ (Silverstein, 2005, p. 364). In this sense, race is a social construction, and its meanings have effects on social relations. ‗The concept of ―race‖ can rationalize the claim of collective as well as individual superiority, and it can be used to exercise power, to oppress and exploit specific social groups. Often, ―race‖ is employed to deny specific groups access to relevant resources, to work, welfare services, benefits, housing, and political rights‘ (Wodak & Reisigl, 2015, p. 577). Racism was obvious under the Nazi Germany, South Africa under apartheid (1948-1994), and the segregated southern states of the U.S. which resulted in Jim Crow laws. However, we recognize that these systems are not paradigms that run constantly through time but rather they were extreme points in time. Besides, it is perfectly possible that individuals hold discriminatory opinions, racism constitutes much more of just personal opinions. This idea holds true that the understandings of racism are of different levels of the phenomenon, some of which are to do with historical legacies (The Holocaust, for example) and some of which are to do with social formations in an unequal collective power relationship (Garner, 2010). For Garner (2010), terms such as ‗racialism‘ and ‗race prejudice‘ were used in previous eras to describe more or less what the field of study is today. Nonetheless, Williams (2015, p. 191) persuades us that racialism which appeared in the early years of the 20th century has been shortened to racism and racist to describe the opinions and actions of the proponents of racial superiority or discrimination. We understand that ‗racism‘ is a form of social discrimination based on practices of racialization in semiotic practices that construct social relations in terms of race categories (Wodak & Reisigl, 2015). In a loose sense, racism and racist can be understood quite differently as ‗genetic‘, ‗biological‘, ‗cultural‘, ‗ethnopluralist‘, ‗institutional‘, and ‗everyday‘ racism, a ‗xeno-racism‘, a ‗racism at the top‘, an ‗elite racism‘, a ‗racism in the midst‘, an ‗old‘ and a ‗new‘ or ‗neo-racism‘, a ‗positive racism‘, even a ‗non-egalitarian‘ and a ‗differentialist racism‘ (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, pp. 5-10). It is commonly agreed that racism existed before the coinage of the word, but there is not a wide agreement on a single definition of what racism is and what it is not (Garner, 2010). 10 During the last seventy years or so, racism has become a key idea in daily discourse as well as in sociological theory. In which, the concept itself is also heavily negatively loaded, morally and politically (Miles & Brown, 2003). One of the most systematic and radical approaches to the issue of ‗race‘ and ‗racism‘ is that of Robert Miles (1993). For him, to analyze ‗race problems‘ adequately, we must eliminate all conceptions of ‗race‘ as a thing in itself, with the power to have effects. We must do this despite the fact that the idea of ‗race‘ constitutes an element of everyday common sense. He adds: There are no ‗races‘ and therefore no ‗race relations.‘ There is only a belief that there are such things, a belief which is used by some social groups to construct an Other (and therefore the Self) in thought as a prelude to exclusion and domination, and by other social groups to define Self (and so to construct an Other) as a means of resisting that exclusion. Hence, if it is used at all, the idea of ‗race‘ should be used only to refer descriptively to such uses of the idea of ‗race‘ (Miles, 1993, p. 42). Miles‘ analysis was influential in such a way that: first, the notion of ‗racialization‘ denotes the dynamic and dialectical representational process of categorization and meaning construction in which specified meanings are ascribed to real or fictitious somatic features. Racialization is also an ideological process (Miles, 1989, pp. 74-77; Miles & Brown, 2003). Second, Miles used the term ‗exclusionary practice‘ to avoid a semantic overstretch of the term racism (Miles, 1993); third, Miles viewed that ‗racism‘ is an ideology both of exclusion and inclusion (Miles & Brown, 2003); fourthly, racism seems to have been equated with institutional racism, denoting any institution with the power to discriminate rather than a systematic ideology of ‗race‘ (Miles & Brown, 2003, p. 69). Finally, Miles contributed the concept of ‗ideological articulation‘ as to illuminate how ideologies such as racism, nationalism, sexism and ethnicism can verge on each other and how they are connected as well as overlap (Miles, 1993, p. 79). With a reference to the two concepts ‗inegalitarian‘ and ‗differentialist racism‘: the concept of ‗inegalitarian racism‘ is intended for denoting the legitimization of domination, discrimination, and separation based on overt doctrines in support of genetic, biological inferiority, whereas ‗differentialist racism‘ focuses on cultural differences such as lifestyles, habits, customs, and 11