par Derinöz, Sabri ;Louazon, Elena ;Menalque, Lise
Référence Discourse Theory: Ways Forward, 2nd Edition (23-24/3/2023: Brussels)
Publication Non publié, 2023-03-23
Communication à un colloque
Résumé : In the French-speaking Belgian media, in 2018, a Black weathercaster’s video denouncing racism led to a unique moment when a large number of articles carried “antiracist” discourses. Based on a press corpus focusing on the event (261 articles), we decided to use critical discourse analysis in order to observe the social representations that are conveyed by the journalistic discourse. We developed an analysis grid based mostly on the literature to understand how those discourses pictured alterity, race and racism. In a constructivist approach inspired by Nancy Fraser’s (1992) view of the public sphere, media discourses can be seen as a reconfiguration of representations and social beliefs reflecting an unequal social structure, consequence of a disparity of access and participation (Cervulle 2013). According to Van Dijk (1993; 2012) journalists are part of a symbolic elites (along with politicians, scholars, etc.) that have the most influential public discourses, thus contribute to the reproduction of dominant knowledge and ideologies in society, including racism. Some discourses on a possible “post-racial era” emerged in the past decades and accelerated after Barack Obama’s election in 2008 (Behrent, 2016) where Western societies would have achieved a state of non-racism. Different scholars show different tendencies of how racism is depicted: among others, de-historicized racism (Lentin, 2016), universalization of the experience, seeing it as moral deviations from individuals (Titley, 2019), and not as a system that keeps stratifying societies (Goldberg, 2004).  As a consequence, it is not uncommon to find discourses labelled as “antiracist” perpetuating a racist representation of society. Antiracists discourses are part of the social representation of the group in most of Western societies, in which tolerance towards the “other” is promoted and blatant forms of racist behavior banned (Van Dijk 1992; Archakis 2021). Nevertheless, in the antiracist's discourses started on cases of racism in the public sphere there are different types of arguments that can deny racism and at the same time, create racism (Lentin, 2015).

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