I want to talk a bit about the ways the media reinforces the power structures between dominant and marginalised groups through discursive constructions. I think the language and specific word choices used when referring to white and non-white constitute a largely un-noticed and naturalised view reinforcing the disparate perspectives held by society. It is interesting to note some of the words that have become associated with people of different racial groups and a large contributor to this is the media’s contrasting representations of whites and non-whites.
So the two words I find this at work are ‘immigrant’ and ‘expatriate’. By definition alone, both of these words refer to someone who is residing in a foreign country. However we seem to have attached a higher value to the word expatriate and a very low value to the word immigrant. Mainstream news media seems to prefer the word “expatriate” when referring to white people living abroad, however when it comes to talking about non-white people in the West, they are overwhelmingly referred to as immigrants. The use of these words work as labels to reinforce the separation and distinction of white and the other. The word expat holds connotations of high skill, education or corporate level status while the word immigrant is usually linked to illegality, political problems and menial workers. Is it any coincidence that a brief search of ‘expatriate’ news articles result in positive stories about white people abroad, and a search of ‘immigrant’ reveals negative articles about non-whites.
Apart from the obvious problems associated with the unbalanced use of these two words, it becomes worse when assumptions and value judgements are developed because of their use. That a relatively low-skilled, white, English tutor in China is referred to unquestioningly as an expatriate but a high-skilled Indian doctor in Canada is referred to as an immigrant, reveals the way in which non-white individuals are negatively stereotyped as groups, regardless of actual individual merits. It also ignores the institutional and structural racisms preventing high-skilled non-white people from obtaining relevant jobs in the West.
This article talks about the use of ‘expat’ and ‘immigrant’ in more detail and is very interesting:
The images of the definitions are from the Oxford dictionary website.
I completely agree with this, I've been to the U.A.E almost 5 times now and I've noticed the people there always refer to White ethnic immigrants as Expats and Indian or Filipino immigrants as immigrants. This despite the fact they do the exact same job, sadly in the U.A.E there's a very established racial hierarchy and it doesn't even matter how highly skilled you are in your work there they seem to have internalised this hierarchy to the extent it becomes part of the way they view people naturally.
ReplyDelete