The Representation of African Americans in Donald Trump’s Presidential Messages on Juneteenth: A CDA Study

Document Type : Original Article

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Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, KSA, Dammam

Abstract

Abstract

Presidential speeches and comments trigger the interest of language researchers, particularly those working in the field of critical discourse analysis. The present paper attempts to identify the linguistic inclusion and exclusion patterns in Trump’s Presidential messages on Juneteenth from a CDA perspective to see how African Americans are viewed and represented as a social group by the American administration. These messages are issued annually by every American president on behalf of the government to (de)emphasize ideologies and values that are related to the political system, the political actors (the president and the citizens), and the political event. On this occasion, Trump referred to the efforts exerted to abolish slavery, for which he commended the Americans, emphasizing equality among people. The study adopted Transitivity Analysis (TA) from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Social actor Network (SAN), and the strategy of Ingroup(white Americans) vs. Outgroup(African Americans) representation to describe how the social actors such as American statesmen and African Americans were represented. Th study found that racial discrimination, which was cloaked in themes of victory and celebration, was systematically enacted and reproduced in these messages; therefore, the reiterated principle in these official messages, that all men are equal, remains questionable.

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