Language and Prejudice: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality

The news is filled with accounts of police brutality towards Black Americans, stories of inhumane immigration practices, and descriptions of verbal and physical abuse against women and members of the LGBTQ community. You might wonder what role language plays in forming and perpetuating such bigotry and intolerance. This course investigates exactly this: how language contributes to creating, shaping, and reproducing prejudice. We will examine three general aspects of the way language constructs bias: how we talk (or write) about different people; how we talk (or write) to different people; and how we hear (or read), that is how we judge different people when they talk or write. We will explore how negative attitudes toward language varieties that are different from our own are used against the people who speak these varieties of language. We will study how ethnic slurs, taboo words, and gender-biased language not only create but spread intolerance. We will consider how commonly used names and labels, which exclude many members of society, construct a false sense of what the “norm” is. We will study what sorts of everyday discursive practices demean and/or dominate people. In summary, we will observe how language and cultural assumptions become intertwined and how, in the process of using certain kinds of language, we generate, and sometimes unwittingly, support bias, intolerance, and bigotry in our society.