A Lexico-Semantic Feature Analysis of Racist Hate Discourse Disertation Abstracts International, 2000 Hate Speech and First Amendment Absolutism Discourses in the U.S. Discourse and Society, 1999 Re-In/citing: Linguistic Injuries: Speech Acts and Cyberhate Computers and Composition, 2001 A Thorn by Any Other Name: Sexist Discourse as Hate Speech Discourse and Society, 2007

In search of…

“I Have a Dream” August 28, 1963 Lincoln Memorial # 1 Top 100 Speeches of the 20 th Century American Rhetoric

Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association September 12, 1960 Houston, Texas “ Fifty years ago…John Kennedy gave one of the best political speeches I ever heard, a plea for religious tolerance that has strange pertinence now…” David Broder, Washington Post September, 2010

Guiding premise: The boundaries of existing figured worlds can be expanded to inform new possible worlds. “In the actual life of speech, every concrete act of understanding is active: it assimilates the word to be understood into its own conceptual system...and is indissolubly merged with the response… Mikhail Bakhtin

My Questions: How do the authorial voices of these speakers acknowledge intolerance, discredit intolerance and begin moving toward a solidarity of tolerance? In pursuit of this solidarity, how do their discourses orient to prior utterances and inflect them with new ideas? How do the discourses ultimately construe the audience as agents of tolerance?

My Methodology: Three passes through each speech Pass 1: Discursive moves of inclusion and exclusion

My Methodology: Three passes through each speech Pass 1: Discursive moves of inclusion and exclusion Pass 2: A search for use of common ground and the shifting of possible worlds

My Methodology: Three passes through each speech Pass 1: Discursive moves of inclusion and exclusion Pass 2: A search for use of common ground and the shifting of possible worlds Pass 3: Modal Markers (dreaming, wishing, believing)

Blurring the lines between us and them Creating a shared discursive world. King: But one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.

Blurring the lines between us and them The Inclusive “We” King: We [all of us] can never be satisfied as long at the Negro is the victim of police brutality. We [the Negro community] can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and hotels of the cities. We [all of us] cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.

Blurring the lines between us and them “I” equals “We” Kennedy to ministers and nation… I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish. I believe in an America…where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

Ambiguous blame A place not a people King: Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check… We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now.

Ambiguous blame Are you the people you say you are? Kennedy: I believe in an America where…no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote… I believe in an America …where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him.

Building on common ground Putting co-texts in new contexts “…a speaker who uses …audiences’ own habits of thought, values and predisposition…in a way brings the audience to persuade itself.” Ruth Wodak

Modal manipulation An invitation to partake in the possible Kennedy: I believe… (10 times) King: I have a dream… (10 times)

Address to the 2008 Democratic National Convention Barack Obama Coming soon: Do the consistencies of tolerant discourse hold a half century later?

Language of tolerance …is built on a disorienting accumulation of discursive moves

Language of tolerance …must empower listeners as agents of change.

Language of tolerance …not a language of revolution but evolution.

There will always be an “other.” Learning to replicate the language of tolerance may provide a clearer path to repeating the best—not worst— of human history.

Janet Palmisano English 611 Fall 2010