Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Perceptions along the Power Axis: A Cognitive Residue of Inter-Racial Encounters.

1976; Linguagem: Inglês

1944-6527

Thomas Kochman,

EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning

This paper is another in series that have examined the language and interactional patterns of white mainstream and black Americans as manifested within intra-cultural and inter-cultural contexts, with the ultimate goal of disclosing something of the cognitive domains underlying their respectively different configurations and use. In this paper, I would like to consider the relative impact of social factor: the power or status differential, on selective perceptions, and attitudes of the more and less powerful interactants, as well as its effect on speech behavior in encounters where the power difference is the determining factor governing the communicative process. Providing the basis of our discussion will be semantic analysis of racial terms that black and white Americans have developed over the years for themselves and each other and which are now part of their respective lexicons. As Johnson has noted (1972:141), race labels emerged within the black lexicon 'as consequence of black people's uniquely disadvantaged position in white society', one effect of which was that a black-white context has been potentially fraught with peril for the black man. Thus, I chose to examine race labels with the expectation that they would retain perceptions relating to the danger inherent in such encounters from the point of view of black Americans specifically and subordinate interactants generally, and, assuming that white racial terms also represented the lexical residue of inter-racial contact with black people from their relatively dominant social position, that I would be presented with perceptions and attitudes specifically white American, but generally indicative of perspective from the super-ordinate end of the power axis as well. The list of terms below is not intended to be exhaustive; all of them were obtained through classroom elicitation from white and black students and can also be found in the literature, e. g., Kantrowitz 1969, Johnson 1972. Rather they were selected to reveal pertinent underlying perceptions and attitudes that might be considered to constitute part of the cognitive residue of asymmetrical encounters. To begin with, we ought to take note that the white labels for black people (WLB) focus essentially on their physical attributes: skin color, hair texture, etc., except for 'militant', which as we shall discuss below emanated from