DEMONIZING, DEHUMANIZING, AND WHITEWASHING: LINGUISTIC EXAMINATION OF THE CONNECTICUT COURANT'S COVERAGE OF SLAVERY

Abstract

Slavery and racism existed in the American Northeast as in the South. New England, however, did not suffer the same negative representations for its involvement in slavery or the slave trade, and some of its states tried to whitewash their contributions to the revolts of their African American population. This study analyzes a corpus from the historical newspaper The Connecticut Courant (TCC), which spans 70 years (1764-1827). It utilizes van Dijk's (2006) ideological discourse analysis model and his socio-cognitive approach (2009) to determine how African Americans were represented in TCC. The results indicate that racist discourse in TCC was used to reproduce social domination and to magnify the brutality of slave treatment in southern states in order to overshadow its region's involvement in slavery. A significant contribution of this study is combining empirical linguistic data with the CDA paradigm to shed light on the Northeast's complicity in colonial America's racist ideology.