some of my readings seem to be converging at the moment, which always gives me a sense of creative energy. i have been reading about priming in blink (really interesting book) today about how appearance in court can be considered a genre of reality in that trial. what i am beginning to see more and more evidence of is how linguistics at a syntactic level is not easily dissected out of context. while this was once a common practice (not only among linguists – remember all those sentences you once had to diagram!!!), it is becoming more and more evident in the field of social and cognitive linguistics that context is key…not least considering how we are all primed in different ways.

one priming example that gladwell uses in his book, blink, has to do with the association of African Americans with ‘bad’ and Caucasian Americans with ‘good’. as gladwell puts it:

So what does this mean? Does this mean I’m a racist, a self-hating black person? Not exactly. What it means is that our attitudes toward things like race and gender operate on two levels. First of all we have our conscious attitudes. This is what we choose to believe. These are out stated values, which we use to direst out behavior deliberately. The apartheid policies of South Africa or the laws in the American South…are manifestations of conscious discrimination, and when we talk about racism or the fight for civil rights,, this is the kind of discrimination that we usually refer to. But the IAT measures something else. It measures our second level of attitude, our racial attitude on an unconscious level – the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we’ve even had time to think…The disturbing thing about the test is that it shows that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values.

and so i ask the same…what does this mean? well, for world politics, or even local courts, it can mean a lot. our subconscious discriminations affect our judgment as soon as the accused walks into a courtroom. combine dialect, non-standard patterns of speech and that person must have a hugely convincing case to walk back out of that courtroom freely. (yes, hugely simplified )

as i immerse myself more and more into the field of linguistics (which i have entered relatively recently, my undergrad is in education), i am learning that it is about the language itself – yes – but also about how we communicate in general. words, gestures, and presence all combine to create a unique communicative self.

after writing this, i saw this picture comparison on jill’s bloga black woman was found to be ‘looting’ food while the white couple ‘found’ the food…need i say more!

from Dustin3000