Philosophical Topics 45 (2):97-116 (2017)
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Abstract |
The rise to power of Donald Trump has been shocking in many ways. One of these was that it disrupted the preexisting consensus that overt racism would be death to a national political campaign. In this paper, I argue that Trump made use of what I call “racial figleaves”—additional utterances that provide just enough cover to give reassurance to voters who are racially resentful but don’t wish to see themselves as racist. These figleaves also, I argue, play a key role in shifting our norms about what counts as racist: they bring it about that something which would previously have been seen as revealing obvious racism is now seen as the sort of thing that a nonracist might say. This gives them tremendous power to corrupt not just our political discourse but our culture more broadly.
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Keywords | General Interest Racist language Accommodation Pragmatics |
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ISBN(s) | 0276-2080 |
DOI | 10.5840/philtopics201745215 |
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Ideological Diversity, Hostility, and Discrimination in Philosophy.Uwe Peters, Nathan Honeycutt, Andreas De Block & Lee Jussim - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (4):511-548.
Political Vandalism as Counter‐Speech: A Defense of Defacing and Destroying Tainted Monuments.Ten‐Herng Lai - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 28 (3):602-616.
Propaganda.Anne Quaranto & Jason Stanley - 2021 - In Justin Khoo & Rachel Katharine Sterken (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language. pp. 125-146.
Amelioration Vs. Perversion.Teresa Marques - 2020 - In Teresa Marques & Asa Maria Wikforss (eds.), Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy and Psychology of Conceptual Variability. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
What is Happening to Our Norms Against Racist Speech?Jennifer Saul - 2019 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93 (1):1-23.
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