Discursive Racism – the debate on affirmative action policies in the press

Abstract

This article deals with discursive racism. We examine the way as the Brazilian press presented the debate concerning the affirmative action policy for blacks in universities, an initiative that began to be implemented in Brazil about ten years ago and that raised a major debate in the press. The work is based on theoretical studies on race, racism and affirmative actions, and also on language and critical discourse analysis. We examine a set of 1533 texts of various genres of journalism from three daily newspapers. From this total, we extract a corpus consisting of 352 texts. Based on them, we develop the analysis. We analyze vocabulary, titles, use of denial, modalization, argumentation and rhetoric (metaphor and irony). The research shows how the focus of the debate is diverted from the problem of racism to the question of the education system in the country, how blacks are shown in a position of subordination in the social process and how the media takes a conservative position in this debate. The article is a condensed presentation of the research that gave rise to a doctoral dissertation in linguistics, defended in December 2004 in the University of Brasilia, which became a book in October 2011, published by the Federal Senate of Brazil.