Sociolinguistic research reveals that listeners racialize voices with notable accuracy—even without visual cues (Haley, 1990, as cited in Thomas & Reaser, 2004 ; Purnell, Idsardi, & Baugh, 1999 ; Thomas & Reaser, 2004 ; Weissler, 2021 )—and criminalize Black speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) ( King & Rickford, 2023 ; Kurinec & Weaver III, 2019 ; Jones et al., 2019 ; Rickford & King, 2016 ). Despite this, AAVE speakers are offered no federal legal protections, even within US institutions. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, and national origin, but not language ( Civil Rights Act of 1964 , Title VI, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d). Thus, to build a case to offer these protections, this study investigates whether listeners’ criminalization practices are driven by their auditory perceptions of Black speakers’ race or the speakers’ objective linguistic practices (i.e., using sound-level correlates of AAVE). One hundred US-based speakers participated in this study, providing speech samples that were auditorily racialized by 300 listeners. Another set of 100 listeners completed an online experiment designed to assess their association of the speakers’ voices with criminality. The results were insignificant for all speaker groups except Black men. For this group, when listeners perceived a Black man's voice as “sounding Black,” his voice was associated with more crime-related imagery. This association was not mediated by the men's use of three prominent AAVE features, suggesting that listeners’ criminalizing responses may stem from racially biased listening practices rather than from the speakers’ actual language use—potentially offering grounds for legal recourse under Title VI.
This research analyzes the German term migrationshintergrund (MH; “migration background”), looking at data from 2005 to 2023 in newspapers and X. In the newspaper data, othering discourses are dominant. Counter-discourses noting discrimination in German society appear only infrequently. This pattern reproduces the affective-discursive canon of legitimizing fear and resentment of migrants and reproducing feelings of superiority for the imagined majority. Although the discourses are much the same in the X data, there are some differences in the details. There is a higher rate of counter-discourses that challenge the cultural superiority of the (ethnic) majority and resist the framing of people with a migration background as a legitimate source of fear and resentment. The othering discourse remains more strongly represented but appears in some different ways. In the early years in the X data, the most common use was mocking “political correctness” by applying MH to non-human entities. There are also tweets that claim reverse discrimination, heightening the emotional response of fear and resentment. Overall, the X data can be seen as more polarizing, showing a different role for participatory media in the circulation of affective discourses.
Public health crises caused by infectious diseases have long been racially charged in Western countries, frequently functioning as vectors for the stigmatisation and othering of ethnic minorities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge of Sinophobic sentiment and violence against Chinese and East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) communities brought renewed attention to these dynamics. Although communication scholarship has examined overtly racialised news framings in the United States, the United Kingdom remains comparatively underexplored. This is because British political and mainstream media discourse appeared to reject explicit racialisation of the virus at large. In this paper, we argue that a subtle yet consequential form of cultural racism is detected in press coverage and is responsible for the reproduction of “othering” logics, negative evaluations, and elite-level scapegoating of minority communities for public health mismanagement. Employing corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, this study examines UK press coverage of Chinese and ESEA communities across 14 newspapers and online outlets. The time frame for the study was from 29 January 2020, when the first two COVID-19 cases were reported in the United Kingdom, to 21 February 2022, when all COVID-19 restrictions were lifted. The findings demonstrate that medical scapegoating operates in the UK media context through subtle narrative strategies. Our study advances scholarly understanding of racism in media representation by proposing a new concept of public health crisis racism, which shapes media narratives and functions to construct a positive self-image for the majority population and to unite social groups against ethnic minorities as “others.”
Words matter—even small words like pronouns. This study explores an under-researched aspect of English pronoun usage: The deployment of the neuter pronoun “it” to refer to young children. Based on an online survey of Aotearoa/New Zealand English speakers, it shows that speakers’ views on the appropriateness of this usage differed. For some, it was perceived as innocuous and conventional; many others viewed it as diminishing children's status as persons, as humans. This paper suggests that influential publishers, such as the mainstream media and academic presses, reconsider their use of the pronoun “it” in reference to children.
