Here are 100 books that The Everyday Language of White Racism fans have personally recommended if you like
The Everyday Language of White Racism.
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I’m a citizen of both the US and the UK, and in 2016, I watched as both my countries were suddenly pulled in shocking political directions, with Brexit in the UK and Trump’s election in the US. In both cases, strong pre-existing norms against openly racist speech seemed to vanish overnight. As a philosopher of language who worked on both deception and racism, I wanted to know how this happened. This has led me to an enduring interest in the ways that manipulative language can change norms around racism, allowing what was once unthinkable to become normal.
I was stunned to learn that this book even existed. It was written by a Jewish linguist who survived the rise of the Nazis, observing and reflecting on the language changes that took place and their effects on people he knew.
I found his reflections deeply illuminating, and I remain haunted by some of his anecdotes and turns of phrase.
A labourer, journalist and a professor who lived through four successive periods of German political history - from the German Empire, through the Weimar Republic and the Nazi state through to the German Democratic Republic - Victor Klemperer is regarded as one of the most vivid witnesses to a tumultuous century of European history.
First published in 1957, The Language of the Third Reich arose from Klemperer's conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture. As Klemperer writes: 'It isn't only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’m a citizen of both the US and the UK, and in 2016, I watched as both my countries were suddenly pulled in shocking political directions, with Brexit in the UK and Trump’s election in the US. In both cases, strong pre-existing norms against openly racist speech seemed to vanish overnight. As a philosopher of language who worked on both deception and racism, I wanted to know how this happened. This has led me to an enduring interest in the ways that manipulative language can change norms around racism, allowing what was once unthinkable to become normal.
This book transformed the way that I understood racist messaging. It’s a richly detailed history of racist political campaigning, but its centerpiece is a riveting deep dive into the Willie Horton ad from 1992, which arguably changed the course of history by bringing us the first President Bush and, therefore, the first Gulf War (and all that followed from it).
Mendelberg shows how this ad—and others like it— can act on viewers’ racism without their awareness. Importantly, she shows how this can happen even if viewers actively want to avoid being racist.
Did George Bush's use of the Willie Horton story during the1988 presidential campaign communicate most effectively when no one noticed its racial meaning? Do politicians routinely evoke racial stereotypes, fears, and resentments without voters' awareness? This controversial, rigorously researched book argues that they do. Tali Mendelberg examines how and when politicians play the race card and then manage to plausibly deny doing so. In the age of equality, politicians cannot prime race with impunity due to a norm of racial equality that prohibits racist speech. Yet incentives to appeal to white voters remain strong. As a result, politicians often resort…
I’m a citizen of both the US and the UK, and in 2016, I watched as both my countries were suddenly pulled in shocking political directions, with Brexit in the UK and Trump’s election in the US. In both cases, strong pre-existing norms against openly racist speech seemed to vanish overnight. As a philosopher of language who worked on both deception and racism, I wanted to know how this happened. This has led me to an enduring interest in the ways that manipulative language can change norms around racism, allowing what was once unthinkable to become normal.
I found this book from 2013 deeply illuminating about how we have come to be in the place we are today. It explains how words like "welfare" have become weapons serving multiple nefarious purposes: they help to stoke racism, hatred, and division. And by doing that, they keep groups that share common goals—like low-wage workers seeking a living wage—from uniting to achieve these goals.
Although it’s not out yet, I’m eager for the 2025 revision, which will be updated to reflect all that has happened since Donald Trump's rise.
Campaigning for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan told stories of Cadillac-driving "welfare queens" and "strapping young bucks" buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. In trumpeting these tales of welfare run amok, Reagan never needed to mention race, because he was blowing a dog whistle: sending a message about racial minorities inaudible on one level, but clearly heard on another. In doing so, he tapped into a long political tradition that started with George Wallace and Richard Nixon, and is more relevant than ever in the age of the Tea Party and the first black president.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I’m a citizen of both the US and the UK, and in 2016, I watched as both my countries were suddenly pulled in shocking political directions, with Brexit in the UK and Trump’s election in the US. In both cases, strong pre-existing norms against openly racist speech seemed to vanish overnight. As a philosopher of language who worked on both deception and racism, I wanted to know how this happened. This has led me to an enduring interest in the ways that manipulative language can change norms around racism, allowing what was once unthinkable to become normal.
This book is a devastatingly insightful collection of essays about the killing of Trayvon Martin, the event that started the Black Lives Matter movement. They are written by a wide variety of authors, and each has a different focus. However, several of them are especially illuminating in terms of language.
Foremost among these, perhaps, is the editors’ careful dissection of the transcript of the 911 call between Martin’s killer and the police. Through doing this, they show the racist assumptions made and transmitted, even through the apparently neutral language of the 911 operator.
It’s an absolute model of what the philosophy of language can do at its best, and I teach it frequently in my classes.
On February 26, 2012, seventeen-year-old African American male Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a twenty-eight-year-old white Hispanic American male in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman killed Martin in a gated community. Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, featuring a new preface by editors George Yancy and Janine Jones written after the June 2013 trial, examines the societal conditions that fueled the shooting and its ramifications for race relations and violence in America.
Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics attempts to capture what a critical cadre of scholars think…
My father died when I was a young child, and so my uncle became the nearest I had to a father figure. He was a trade unionist and strongly committed to social justice. I was so enamoured by the compassion he showed towards socially disadvantaged people and the struggles they encounter through no fault of their own that I became an advocate for social justice from an early age. That passion for fairness and inclusion has stayed with me throughout my career and therefore figures strongly in my writings and, over the years, in my teaching, training, and consultancy work.
After football and music, my first love was languages. From an early age I became fascinated with how language works and how significant it is in shaping social life and interpersonal relationships.
That fascination still remains, but what I find particularly interesting (and significant) is the relationship between language and social justice. Unfortunately, this has been hijacked by the simplistic ‘political correctness’ approach that seeks to simply ban certain words. The reality is far more complex and nuanced than this, and so a much more sophisticated approach is needed.
That’s where this excellent book comes in. It provides a very helpful analysis of how language and society interact in a variety of ways.
In this third edition of the bestselling classic textbook, Martin Montgomery explores the key connections between language and social life. Guiding the student through discussions on child language, accent and dialect, social class and gender, as well as a number of other topics, Montgomery provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the function of language in modern society.
This third edition includes:
new sections on dialect levelling and estuary English; hip-hop and rapping as anti-language and 'crossing' between Creole, Panjabi and South Asian English
new material on the Gulf War and the 'War on Terror'
discussions on language in internet…
I have been a Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Linguistics at Dartmouth College since 1997. Previously: Professor of Hebrew at London University. BA Oxford, Ph.D. London. Author/co-author of seven books, including The Story of Hebrew (Princeton, 2017) – one of CHOICE Magazine’s 'Outstanding Academic Titles for 2017', a Princeton University Press nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction – and (co-author Jon Schommer)A Screenful of Sugar? Prescription Drug Websites Investigated. Over 80 papers on language and its social and political impact, in particular in pharmaceutical and financial literacy.
Some of the best language stories lie dissected in the work of social scientists. Not an easy read. But once in a while, someone brings it to life, enjoyably.
One such is John Edwards, whose ‘Multilingualism’ is required reading for my course on language and politics. Most countries are host to several languages – often a source (or a product) of ethnic pride, and why not? Sometimes, however, full-scale political and economic interventions may occur. And then, a language conflict is on the cards.
Nationalism often enflames such situations but sometimes wisdom and fortune prevail. Not long ago, Catalan and Quebecois French faced a bleak future, but have now seen political and cultural rejuvenation. But other vectors can change the story: Take the Southern Irish: The occupation over, they saw little cultural or economic value in Gaelic, which is now severely endangered.
Multilingualism is everywhere in our globalised society. Delving into the 'social life' of languages, John Edwards provides a brief yet compelling overview of multilingualism and its sociocultural implications and consequences. Covering major topics including language origins, language death, lingua francas, pidgins, creoles and artificial languages, this book provides a complete introduction to what happens when languages meet.
A vital primer for anybody interested in multilingualism, this new edition has been refreshed and updated, expanding its coverage and adding new topics such as linguistic imperialism, minority languages, and folk linguistics. A brand new chapter on recent developments also covers the linguistic…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I am a philologist with a passion for Atlantic cultural history. What started with a research project on the African-American Pinkster tradition and the African community in seventeenth-century Dutch Manhattan led me to New Orleans’ Congo Square and has meanwhile expanded to the African Atlantic islands, the Caribbean, and Latin America. With fluency in several foreign languages, I have tried to demonstrate in my publications that we can achieve a better understanding of Black cultural and religious identity formation in the Americas by adopting a multilingual and Atlantic perspective.
This book studies Atlantic cultural history from the perspective of language, with a focus on Curaçao. A unique characteristic of this small Caribbean island is that its colonial rulers spoke Dutch, whereas the Black population used an Afro-Iberian creole called Papiamentu as its lingua franca. Jacob’s study embarks on an intriguing quest for the origins of this language, tracing it back to Portuguese-based creoles from the Cape Verde Islands and the nearby African West Coast. It argues that this seventeenth-century Portuguese-based creole later underwent significant Spanish influence and thereby constitutes a case of “reduplicated language contact.”
This study embarks on the intriguing quest for the origins of the Caribbean creole language Papiamentu. In the literature on the issue, widely diverging hypotheses have been advanced, but scholars have not come close to a consensus. The present study casts new and long-lasting light on the issue, putting forward compelling interdisciplinary evidence that Papiamentu is genetically related to the Portuguese-based creoles of the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, and Casamance (Senegal). Following the trans-Atlantic transfer of native speakers to Curacao in the latter half of the 17th century, the Portuguese-based proto-variety underwent a far-reaching process of relexification towards Spanish, affecting…
I am a professor of English Linguistics interested in all aspects of language, identity, society, and power. I grew up and live in Southern Italy, in the Naples area, except for extended summertime family visits to San Diego, Southern California. I alternate my reading and writing between books on language and identity (how we self-promote ourselves to the public through personal style and narratives, molding our public image in a way we believe most advantageous to us) and texts on language and society (how we as individuals do things with words and gather information about other people from the way they communicate) and how these aspects intersect with power issues.
This remarkably clear and engaging read opened my eyes to the identity dimension of style. Using plenty of examples, it shows how we pick and mix from the many alternative ways we can say something to present and position ourselves in society in a specific way.
Nikolas Coupland, currently Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University, thoroughly reviews previous sociolinguistic studies on style, from traditional to modern, steering research towards a more sophisticated and wide-ranging understanding of the ways specific contexts, local interactions, personal access to the resources of language and individual aesthetic choices make meaning in the presentation of the self.
Style refers to ways of speaking - how speakers use the resource of language variation to make meaning in social encounters. This 2007 book develops a coherent theoretical approach to style in sociolinguistics, illustrated with copious examples. It explains how speakers project different social identities and create different social relationships through their style choices, and how speech-style and social context inter-relate. Style therefore refers to the wide range of strategic actions and performances that speakers engage in, to construct themselves and their social lives. Coupland draws on and integrates a wide variety of contemporary sociolinguistic research as well as his…
I grew up in a bilingual environment (Welsh and English) and have been fascinated by languages ever since, and the way they reflect thought, culture, and history. An English degree course at University College London gave me an academic grounding in language and literature, and I've been exploring and writing on those subjects ever since, eventually as a professor of linguistics, and these days as an independent scholar. My website provides a complete list of my publications, along with links to other materials. And the most fascinating thing about language? Its diversity and change. Whatever a language was like yesterday, it's different today, and will be different again tomorrow.
As the title suggests: there are languages where there's no single word for "friend." What does that tell us about the way the speakers think and about their cultural history? This is a book about multilingualism and about the benefits of bilingualism—the normal human condition, for three-quarters of the people on this planet speak more than one language. It's especially insightful in the way it discusses future trends, such as Babel Fish technology.
A compelling argument about the importance of using more than one language in today's world
In a world that has English as its global language and rapidly advancing translation technology, it's easy to assume that the need to use more than one language will diminish-but Marek Kohn argues that plural language use is more important than ever. In a divided world, it helps us to understand ourselves and others better, to live together better, and to make the most of our various cultures.
Kohn, whom the Guardian has called "one of the best science writers we have," brings together perspectives…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’ve been fascinated by the power of language for as long as I can remember. As a sociolinguist, I study how language shapes our relationships, identities, and the societies we live in. I’ve spent years analyzing how people communicate in high-pressure environments like professional sports, but my passion for this topic goes far beyond my research. Language is everywhere—it’s how we connect, influence, and make sense of the world. The books on this list have deepened my understanding of the profound ways language impacts our lives. I’m excited to share them with you and hope they inspire you to see language in a whole new light!
This book dives into the ways language is intertwined with power in society. Fairclough’s analysis opened my eyes to how even the simplest phrases can reinforce hierarchies and ideologies.
It’s not an easy read, and it has been written more for an academic audience, but it’s so rewarding–every chapter feels like peeling back another layer of how communication works beneath the surface. If you’re interested in the hidden ways language shapes society, this is a must.
Language and Power is widely recognised both as a classic and an essential introductory textbook to the field of Critical Discourse Analysis. It focusses on how language functions in maintaining and changing power relations in modern society, the ways of analysing language which can reveal these processes and how people can become more conscious of them, as well as, more able to resist and change them.
In this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, Norman Fairclough includes a substantial new introduction and brings the discussion up-to-date. He shows both the importance of the book in the development of critical discourse analysis over the…
