While
doing research on the connection between language, race and gender I came upon
many articles that say our language reflects our society's deeply rooted power
structure. It establishes a specific gender's dominance over another and gives
way to sexist and racist thinking.
"Language,
Gender and Power", written by Sally Raskoff, is an article that reveals
our society as one characterized by male power. Raskoff explains how the
English language is a sexist language and talks about different terms
that set males and females apart and give males the upper hand in situations.
She mentions the way we address people formally. While men
are referred to as "Mr.", women can be referred to as
"Miss" (single or a girl), "Mrs." (married), or
"Ms." (grown woman, marital status undetermined), giving them three
titles to categorize themselves into while men only have the one. Raskoff
also goes on to argue that while there are curse words that are gender
neutral, such as referring to one's posterior, there are some curses
that specifically target women and their body parts. For example, the
"b-word to indicate a crabby female", or the c-word and p-word that
refer to a women's genitals. Raskoff explains that even though the words
may be aimed at a man or a woman, they have a negative affect on the female
gender. The words all correlate to women giving them a bad representation and
image. Her last point is that American culture teaches boys early on to be
masculine or "assertive, aggressive, strong, a leader, and
heterosexual" while encouraging girls to be "passive, nurturing,
caring, mothering, and otherwise subordinate." It seems no
one wants woman to come up from under a man.
Language
is not only related to gender, it's also related to race. In the article
"Hearing Skin Color: The Connection Between Language And Race",
written by Nic Subtirelu, Subtirelu explains that physical features are
not the only things that categorize people by their race. The language used to
describe them or even the people's voices can be used to assign race to others
also. The author talks about experiments that were done to see if people
can identify the race of a person by just listening to their
voice. Subtirelu says that "people's physical characteristics are
simply one route we can take to arrive at a judgment of a person's race...
language allows us to assign people into different races as well." He
discusses the ability of language to signal race and exploit racial
stereotypes like is done in The Lion King. The two hyenas in the movie
have African American or Latino accented English and they're both thugs, while
Simba speaks in Standard English and is a hero. Subtirelu says that things
like this give way to racial discrimination and we need to be wary of tones
used when speaking about a certain race as well as stay away from racial stereotypes
when describing a person in terms of his or her race.
My
research to find the relationship between language, race and gender opened my
eyes to things I never paid attention to before. I've always known that we live
in a male dominate world but I never realized the affects that it has
on language and vise versa or the affect of language on race. Raskoff and Subtirelu made excellent points that were both
interesting and unfortunately true. I agree with Raskoff when she mentioned
the difference in the way men and women are greeted. I don't see why women
should have to reveal their marital status while men just get the title
"Mr." which says that it doesn't matter what the man's marital
status is, it's irrelevant. The title gives a woman a certain identity or
image, and informs people about her personal life while a man's title gives
nothing away about who he is. I really like Raskoff's piece because it
showed out of the box thinking. She mentioned how people use the word 'seminal'
"to credit people with creating work so important that it has changed
the way we think about something" and then makes the connection that
seminal is derived from the word semen, which makes it sound like men
create things that are so important that it changes our views on things. I
think it's a bit far fetched but I really like that she made
that connection. Where did that thought even come from? But then later on
she mentions that "men have received credit, even if women
were involved in their creation" and I really liked this point
because women are sometimes left in the shadows while men get the praise
even though I bet no man would survive without a woman, even if it’s his
mother. Raskoff's article made it clear that the English
language is sexist. Women grow up learning that they're not the ideal image of a particular role because our language uses sexist words, like policeman, councilman, mankind, and fireman and it excludes the female gender in many instances, but for
it to change and become gender neutral it would take decades and both genders
would need to start using gender neutral words. I have a feeling that that will
never happen so there is a very small chance that language will change to be
neutral. Many people don't realize how hurtful language can be. The fact
that we use words that are offensive to one another in order to show power
proves that we have a power struggle in our society. Words definitely impact
the way we view one another, whether it be about race or gender. Subtirelu
proved how specific genders are perceived and how language further
promotes racist thinking. So words certainly have the ability to
label us and affect the way people regard us. These articles were very
effective in showing me different views of the connection
between language, race and gender and I enjoyed reading other people's
opinions. I agree that the connection stems off of power and I don't think
that it will ever necessarily change but anything can happen. Maybe one-day
society will willingly change our language for the better.
http://nortonbooks.typepad.com/everydaysociology/2007/12/language-gender.html
https://linguisticpulse.com/2013/09/08/hearing-skin-color-the-connections-between-language-and-race/
5/5
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