‘Brown Morning:’ classed interpretations of anti-racist text

ABSTRACT

This article examines the interpretations of high school students from different socioeconomic locations (in terms of socioeconomic class and ethnicity) with regard to the text Brown Morning, used as a didactic tool for antiracism education within the framework of Civics courses. The research findings uncover differences in the students’ interpretations of the text. An in-depth understanding of these differences will be attained through clinical analyses based on the distinctions between metaphor and metonymy made by linguist Roman Jakobson. Among students from low socioeconomic locations, interpretations related to racism were dominated by metonymic characteristics, while that of students from higher socioeconomic locations were predominantly metaphoric. Study findings do not only show the different interpretations among the students, but also the various ways in which metaphorical and metonymic language affect teachers. These analyses will focus on the reasons for these differences and their implications regarding the links between social locations, language, and education.

KEYWORDS:

• Class
• ethnicity
• language
• metaphor
• metonymy
• racism

Notes

1. All the names are pseudonyms.

2. These associations were suggested publically by the teachers to the students. It is feasible that if the teachers had used a different method (for instance, a request from the students to write their associations on a piece of paper), we would have obtained more varied responses. In other words, it is possible that the first students who suggested associations in a specific direction (black color or end of the world) ‘infected’ the other students with similar associations.

3. This expression about the ‘learning’ of the students in Tavor is not offered only with regard to their language, but also with regard to their study habits, their level of cooperation with the teachers in the classes, and their attitude to school.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dana Amir

Dr Dana Amir is a clinical psychologist, supervising-analyst at the Israel psychoanalytic society and a faculty member at the Department of Counseling and Human Development, Haifa University.

Avihu Shoshana

Dr Avihu Shoshana is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Israel. Avihu’s area of research include social psychology; discourse and subjectivity; ethnicity, race and social class; anthropology of education.