With reference to extracts from Adolf Hitler’s “Why are we anti-Semites” speech and Donald Trump’s “Pearl Harbor Rally" speech, how does political discourse racism?

This study analyses two political speeches to examine how the language used constructs racism. The first speech was given by Adolf Hitler in 1920, and the second by Donald Trump in 2015. The data is analysed separately for overt and inferential racism using Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2010), Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1982) and Tactics of Intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004). The results of these analyses are compared and the similarities and differences in how racist ideas are created by the speakers are explored. Initial findings suggest that there are similarities between the ways the speeches construct racism, seen in the way the group discriminated against are referred to – typically in a negative way and with language which dehumanises the specific social groups. However the speech given by Hitler typically displays more overt racism, seen particularly when identifying himself directly as an anti-Semite and encouraging his audience to join him in this identification, whereas Trump’s speech displays more evidence of inferential racism, particularly by imputing negative characteristics to the Muslim community and by the use of unreliable statistics to support these claims. Trump also uses a number of the tactics for the denial of racism (Van Dijk, 1992), which are absent in Hitler’s speech.