Hill's project is to study the discourses of racism in the United States that are not readily identifiable on the surface. Focusing on the objectification of Hispanics, Native Americans, and Blacks, she examines the prejudicial discourses of the white middle- and upper-middle classes, whom she labels the “White elite,” holding that “elite White racism in the United States is the most important and influential form of racism in the world” (x). This statement may seem jarring at first, but it holds up well under Hill's scrutiny. It is precisely in the discourses of the (upper) middle class where racist attitudes are at their most potent.
In Ch. 1, “The persistence of white racism,” Hill repeatedly tells the reader that the problem does not lie in the ethnic slurs of the uneducated, nor with the redneck yelling the n-word, but instead in the polite, disguised, and qualified pronouncements of the classes in power who prefer narratives that place racism in “a peripheral part of America's past” (174) and gambit around the glaring facts of economic inequality, for instance, the fact that Black household net worth is one-tenth that of White households. These narratives engage in “folk theories” of racism that essentialize the victim. She makes good use of Susan Gal and Judith Irvine's concept of “erasure,” which generates utterances that separate Blacks from “Americans.” She also shows how folk theories of race persist in the face of scientific evidence that “race is a social and political fact, not a fact of human biology” (9) and takes to task the “baroque systems of the United States Census” (21), which “homogenizes Whites, but divides people of color into multiple subgroups” (9). She astutely observes that “white virtue is protected by projecting racism onto an imagined category of ‘skinheads’ and ‘Ku Kluxers’ that Whites seldom encounter in real life” (23). Thus “the vast capture by Whites of the resources of people of color” (23), along with the undercompensation of the working poor, suburbanization, and de facto residential segregation, are not perceived as racist and are maintained largely by “silences and inattentions” (29). Whites claiming to be antiracist share negative racial stereotypes, communicated by “invitations and clues … silences … inferences” (33).
In Ch. 2, “Language in white racism,” Hill takes great pains to deconstruct damaging ideologies of referentiality and intentionality in the discourse of racism that enable the speaker to avoid the consequences of a prejudicial utterance and to claim misinterpretation. For Hill, and rightly so, there are only consequences and not intentions in such matters; Whites need to recognize the consequences of their borderline utterances; not doing so is a mere ruse in the preservation of the privilege of racist discourse. Hill focuses sharply on the effects of “mock Spanish”—the Anglophone use of Spanish phrases—and shows how it communicates negative stereotypes while passing itself off as a sign of intercultural awareness. Here, she recommends “painful and difficult personal reflection and constant attention to thought and action” (48). Her conceptual tools derive largely from the performative speech act theory of John Austin and John Searle: “utterances can be ‘acts’ that produce material changes in the world” (55); and in Ch. 3, she devotes twenty pages to a painstaking discussion of the use of the word squaw as a slur, especially in place names (e.g. “Squaw Peak”), and meticulously illuminates submerged racial ideologies in numerous examples of White resistance to the suppression of its usage.
Ch. 4 offers a study of the emergence of racial slurs through jokes, gaffes, and slips. Here, Hill again attacks intentionalist and “personalist” ideologies that attempt to insulate the speaker from the consequences of the faux pas. She fully brackets intentionality, which renders mute the defense: “I was just joking.” The chapter also offers an illuminating discussion of the “moral panic” (100) that arises when a virtuous White public figure commits a racial faux pas, such as in the case of Trent Lott's public admiration of the arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond in 2002. Lott's justification, that he had made “a mistake of the head, not of the heart” in the context of media attention devoted exclusively to his “beliefs and motives,” generated, for Hill, the triumph of the personalist/intentionalist ideology over “the effects and impacts of speech” (103). Here, “personalist ideology helps speakers avoid the label ‘racist’ or ‘bigot’ by providing a rich and diverse lexicon for motives” (112).
Ch. 5 focuses primarily on mock Spanish. Hill makes good use of Nathalie van Dijk's litmus test for detecting covert racist utterances: if the statement can be prefaced with “I'm not a racist, but …,” then it is visibly racist. If this preface would be dissonant with the statement that follows, then the utterance can be seen as covertly racist; for example, Hill holds that the use of mañana in English implies that Mexicans are lazy. The utterance “I'm not racist, but let's mañana this problem” would be quite odd: the qualifier is not necessary. Thus the use of mañana acts as a displacement for the overtly racist idea. Hill makes good use of Peircean concepts of indexicality, specifically “creative indexicality” (153), to illuminate the submerged slur and to show how mock Spanish expressions “invite hearers to make negative references” (153). The use of mock Spanish expressions by White Americans is, for Hill, a gesture of comfortable and confident supremacy. They “construct themselves as humorous, delightful, all-American, and ‘knowing a little Spanish,’ while projecting a very negative image of the Spanish-speaking world” (152). Whites engage in confident play with the language and culture of the subaltern, effectively neutralizing the other. Hill could perhaps point out that this ludic mode also makes light of the subaltern condition and camouflages the state of economic inequality, dismissing it all with a happy and facile no problema and adios.
Ch. 6 offers analyses of similar linguistic appropriations from Amerindian and AAVE and shows how “linguistic appropriation … has been historically an important tool of White racism” (174); it “aims to control the linguistic resources of subordinated populations, permitting these to survive only to the degree that they are useful” (174).
Hill's stance that the use of mock Spanish by monolingual Anglophones is invariably derogatory and racist could, however, benefit from a bit of nuancing. Her view that the use of cerveza for beer implies that Mexicans are drunkards should be squared with the fact that Mexican beer is an expensive prestige import and also with the problematic attitudes towards alcohol consumption in the postprohibition US, which has the highest legal drinking age in the world. Hill's analyses could also benefit from distinctions between mock language and the normal processes of blending and creolization, processes that constructed the English language itself. And here, comparative international data from occidental countries with disadvantaged minorities would help, for example, French loans from Arabic and German loans from Turkish.
Hill's employment of speech act theory to focus on the tangible effects of prejudicial utterances is clearly limited: the utterance is biased only if objected to by a definable group. But the most damaging discourses of race in the United States are largely transparent. Indeed, they are even perceived as proper and beneficial. Take for instance the discourse around lowering taxes, which is properly viewed as empowering to the individual. The fact that it suppresses the development of social programs for the disadvantaged and favors the rich is marginalized. Other examples can be found in Thomas Frank's What's the matter with Kansas? (2004), which studies counties that consistently vote Republican while suffering from Republican policies. The instruments needed to hear the plutocratic voices in such discourses are largely those of Marxist-materialist analysis, aided with some psychoanalysis.
Hill does see that the telos of racist discourse is socioeconomic inequality: suburbanization, ghettoization, imprisonment of young Blacks by a “carceral dystopia” (176), the “absence of any provision for the legal movement of labor” (175) in NAFTA, the toleration of a shamefully high Black infant mortality rate, and so on. Her study, however, does not focus on the infrastructural discourses that generate socioeconomic inequality, but instead on their superstructural symptoms. Clearly, the linguistic appropriations that she analyzes, the examples of mock language, are indeed codeterminative of the ideologies that generate socioeconomic devalorization of ethnic minorities; these act in symbiosis. But the true racist culprit is found in the discourses of the Ameri can political economy, which suppress the emergence of democratic counter-discourses. These discourses change word concepts (e.g. liberal, conservative) to mean what they do not mean in the industrialized democracies; they silence the American socialist parties, while making a radical “Tea Party” fully audible; they make it possible to call a conservative president “a socialist;” they efface the working class, pretending that all are “middle class;” they suppress a socialization of the economy that would guarantee free education, a livable minimum wage, health care, and so on. These are the discourses that maintain American minorities in destitution, and that need to be amplified from the suburban sounds of silence.
Hill's solutions are as individualist as the ideology of personalism that she critiques. Ch. 7 concludes by recommending that “the usual civilities of everyday life should prevail: the speaker should acknowledge respect for the claim of pain” and “hold people responsible for their words” (181). This is a facultative solution to a profound problem that demands, instead, the basic social programs advocated by the mainstream political parties of all the industrialized democracies. Optional solutions, instead of systemic ones, maintain the status quo.
Hill succeeds well in exposing the surreptitious communication of prejudice below the surface of consciousness and intention. Her analyses give welcome pause for introspection; but they also inadvertently illuminate the truly culpable discourses that need to be studied.
