{"id":9335,"date":"2016-10-24T21:14:10","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T21:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/?p=9335"},"modified":"2025-05-13T10:44:41","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T10:44:41","slug":"words-matter-race-in-american-campaign-rhetoric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/words-matter-race-in-american-campaign-rhetoric","title":{"rendered":"Words Matter: \u2018Race\u2019 in American Campaign Rhetoric"},"content":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Augustine Agwuele.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"sa-57-cvr\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Augustine Agwuele is the author of the article “Culture Trumps Scientific Fact: \u2018Race\u2019 in US American Language”<\/a><\/em> appearing in\u00a0Volume: 60 Issue: 2 of\u00a0Social Analysis:\u00a0The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice.<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Momma she send me to school, I get educated<\/em><\/p>\n

I get educated, so sophisticated<\/em><\/p>\n

Not under-rated but really elevated<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

West African youths quickly appropriated this 1983 lyrical refrain of Eek-a-Mus as it aligns with the singular message about education flogged into them since kindergarten. Education liberates, elevates, promotes, empowers, and places one on a distinguished pedestal.<\/p>\n

Words matter, and most certainly \u201crace\u201d matters. Words are the essence of the speaker, words express the content of the speakers\u2019 character, virtue, beliefs and quite significantly, it is a summation of the values and ideals of the community of their belongingness. As this election cycle has shown, we hold up candidates to the content of their words and we ask voters to evaluate them by those things that they have said. Essentially, words matter, the lexical choices of a speaker\\writer has consequences, especially with words of divisiveness like \u201crace\u201d.<\/p>\n

For whatever reason, the concept and consciousness of \u201crace\u201d eluded me in Africa, where there was mostly inter-ethnic competition for dominance in the arbitrarily constructed nation-states. I learned of racism in Europe. Disappointedly, it is in the USA, the land of the free, that I truly cognized \u201crace\u201d; it is the one place where quite unexpectedly the language of \u201crace\u201d is obsessively wielded and thrust in my face. The habitual linguistic usage of \u201crace\u201d exalts it to an ideology that gives credence to laypeople\u2019s biases (Makus 1990). While the politics of Otherness and visual profiling are present in all countries, I have been most confused by the language-use of the American academy and that of its\u2019 products, and elites, that reveals not only a remarkable dissonance between scientific knowledge (fact) and cultural belief systems but also lays bare the tyrannical hold of culture in uniting, sustaining, and furthering obvious contradictions: in this case \u201crace\u201d. What Americans mean by \u201crace\u201d remains nebulous to me; is it skin color, or something else? From Harvard to the least famous university in the USA, there is anti-discrimination policy against: \u201can individual because of race, color, national origin, age, sex, religion\u2026.\u201d Obviously \u201crace\u201d and color are not coterminous and this usage underscores my disillusionment at the \u2018irrelevance\u2019 of scholarly transmitted knowledge in the life of educated elites and opinion leaders whence the larger society draws it cues on social matters. To a mind not culturally American, and that is conscious of colonial history, it is difficult to acquiesce to the egregious disconnect between scientific education, and the eventual irrelevance of such educationally transmitted knowledge as is exemplified by \u201crace\u201d.<\/p>\n

Every college textbook across the vast fields in humanities without equivocation agrees that the variations across humans, regardless of how they are parsed, do not amount to any degree of significance such that there is an identifiable subcategorization of Homo sapiens that constitutes biological races or deserves that appellation. Quite tellingly, despite the separation of scientific facts of biology from culture, and the careful exposition of the myths of “racial” superiority, these books revert to American customary usages of \u201crace\u201d, thereby giving credence to \u201crace\u201d and racism.<\/p>\n