Language is a Telling Clue to Unacknowledged Racial Attitudes
Overt racism is declining, but studies show that unconscious bias remains widespread
公开的种族主义正在减少，但研究表明，无意识的偏见仍然普遍存在
“When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” tweeted Donald Trump (invoking a slogan from the 1960s), when unrest broke out after the killing of George Floyd. “thugs”, the president wrote, were disrespecting Mr Floyd’s memory. Mr Trump likes “thugs”, tweeting it often. He almost always does so when some matter of race is at issue—either the treatment of African-Americans or in reference to “illegals” and “gang members”, implicitly Latinos.
当因George Floyd被杀而引发骚乱时，Donald Trump在推特上写道："一旦开始抢，枪声就会响。"（引用了20世纪60年代的口号）。总统用的"暴徒"二字，体现了对Floyd先生悼念活动的不尊重。Trump 先生喜欢 "暴徒"这个词，经常在推特上用。在一些种族问题出现时，他几乎总是这样做--要么是非洲裔美国人的待遇问题，要么是暗指拉美裔的"非法移民 "和 "帮派成员"问题。
Are “looting” and “thugs” a kind of racist code? Many people detect a “dog-whistle” which, without saying anything explicitly racist, the president intends listeners to hear. Mr Trump forcefully disagrees. In 2015 he tweeted: “They now say using the word ‘thug’ is, like so many other words, not politically correct (even though Obama uses it). It is racist. bull!” Plenty of people approve of calling thugs thugs, and object to being labelled racists for doing so.
“抢劫” 和 “暴徒 ”是种族主义代名词吗？很多人察觉到总统在吹狗哨，期望听众在没有任何明显种族主义词语的情况下听懂。Trump先生却极力否认。2015年，他在推特上写道 "他们现在说，使用'暴徒'这个词，就像许多其他的词一样，是政治不正确（即使Obama也用它），是种族主义。胡说八道！" 很多人赞同把暴徒叫做“暴徒”，并且反对因此就被贴上种族主义者的标签。
The intentional dog-whistle is not unknown. But people can allude to race without realising it, too. Explicit racism is declining in America, as a pile of evidence shows. For instance, there is a widespread reluctance to admit racist attitudes that many Americans were once perfectly comfortable with. On the other hand, unconscious and semi-conscious prejudice is alive and well. When people use racially linked language, without overt slurs or other racist tropes, linguists call it “racialisation”.
故意的吹狗哨并不少见，但人们也可能在无意中说出暗含种族歧视的话。大量数据表明，在美国，明目张胆的种族歧视正在减少。例如，美国人现在普遍对他们的种族主义态度闭口不谈，而过去许多人对谈论这种问题感到毫无压力。可是，无意识和半无意识的偏见仍活生生地存在着。当人们没有使用公然的诋毁或其他种族主义比喻，而是使用与种族相关的词句时，语言学家们称之为 "种族化"。
Some ingenious research has teased out the links between prejudice and language. A classic method for fingering implicit bias asks subjects to take a quick-fire, button-pushing test that associates positive or negative words with white and black faces. In one such study (at implicit.harvard.edu), 58% of online test-takers are slower to associate positive language with black faces than with white ones. Just 14% display the opposite tendency.
一些精妙的研究已经挑明了偏见和语言之间的联系。探索人们潜意识中偏见的一个经典的实验方法，就是要求受试者进行一个快速的按按钮测试：被试者被要求将“积极”或“消极”与黑人和白人的脸庞联系起来。在一项这样的研究中(at implicit.harvard.edu)，58%的线上被试者将积极的词与黑人联系起来比与白人联系起来要慢，而只有14%的人表现出相反的倾向。
Or consider more deliberate forms of language, formulated by people who are generally unlikely to consider themselves racist—journalists. A study by Dana Mastro of the University of California at Santa Barbara looked at hundreds of news reports in three big American papers (the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and usa Today) about professional athletes accused of crimes. Such articles were more accusatory of the alleged perpetrators when they were black. They were more likely to provide context and humanising detail when the accused were white.
再来看一看记者创造的更考究的语言形式，记者们一般不太可能认为自己是种族主义者。加利福尼亚大学圣巴巴拉分校的Dana Mastro的一项研究调查了美国三家知名报社（纽约时报、洛杉矶时报和今日美国报）关于职业运动员被指控犯罪的数百篇新闻报道。当被指控的肇事者是黑人时，这类文章更多的是对他们的指责。当被告是白人时，他们更有可能提供生活环境相关的信息和人性闪光点。
Praise can be racialised, too. Crystal Dunn Soubrier, a black player for America’s women’s football team, wrote recently that commentators attribute her ability to play in several positions to athleticism, never to her reading or study of the game. This seems a persistent pattern in sportswriting. Kelly Wright, a doctoral student of linguistics at the University of Michigan, used machine-learning to predict an athlete’s race based on words that appear in an article containing their name. Purely relying on the language of news reports, the model was able to predict that Ronda Rousey, a wrestler, was white with a 96% certainty, whereas there was only a 3% probability that Eric Berry, a National Football League player, was white. So it went with other athletes; the algorithm’s guesses were almost always loaded starkly towards black or white.
赞美也可以被种族化。美国女子足球队的黑人球员Crystal Dunn Soubrier最近写道，评论员将她能踢不同位置的能力归结为运动天赋，而不是她对比赛的理解或研究。这似乎是体育报道创作中的一种固定模式。密歇根大学语言学博士生Kelly Wright利用机器学习，根据一篇包含运动员名字的文章中出现的词语来预测运动员的种族。纯粹依靠新闻报道的词语，该模型能够预测摔跤手Ronda Rousey是白人的概率为96%，而国家橄榄球联盟球员Eric Berry是白人的概率只有3%。其他运动员也是如此，算法几乎总是能明显地指出这是黑人还是白人。
When racialisation happens, words do not change their dictionary definition; rather, they take on associations with other words. Brains are statistical machines, in which learning involves a gradual strengthening or weakening of different synapses. Introduce one concept and related concepts are “primed”, or made more quickly available to the consciousness. Just because these associations are hard to prove conclusively does not make them less real.
种族化显现时，单词本身的定义并未发生改变，而是与其他词产生了关联。大脑是数据化的机器，学习涉及不同的神经元突触之间的逐渐加强或减弱。每当引入一个概念，相关的其他概念就会被 “激活”，或者说，被更快地应用到意识中去。不能因为这些关联很难被证实，就当它们不存在。
The difference between “racist” and “racialised” helps explain why Americans often talk fruitlessly past each other when discussing words such as “thug”. With overt racism waning, it has become painfully obvious to some people—though not all—that the submerged part of the iceberg, implicit racial beliefs and associations, plays a bigger role than was once realised. Overcoming those is particularly difficult because of their semi-conscious nature.
"种族主义 "和 "种族化 "的区别，有助于解释为什么美国人在讨论 "暴徒 "这类词时，经常会无果而终。随着明目张胆的种族主义的消减，那些隐性种族信念和关联所起的作用，如海下冰山般，比人们意识到的有更大的影响力。虽然不是所有人， 但是一部分人已经清楚的认识到了。由于这些信念和关联半潜意识的性质，克服起来尤为困难。
A long struggle has made “racist” one of the worst things you can be. That counts as a great success, but the corollary is that the remaining problems are hard to talk about. Some fear being branded racist just for trying. Seeing the bias in even innocently intended language is a first step towards understanding that there is still work to do.
经过长期的斗争， "种族主义者 "已经是人们最厌恶的标签之一。这算得上是一个巨大的成功，但也必然会导致那些遗留的问题很难被谈及。有些人害怕仅仅因为尝试去讨论，就被打上种族主义者的标签。觉察出全无恶意的语言中存在的偏见，是明白“革命尚未成功”的第一步。
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