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Mother Tongue Maintenance among North American Ethnic Groups
Robert Schrauf
Cross-Cultural Research (1999) 33, p. 175 (13 pages)

This study looks at the conditions under which some ethnic groups maintain their "mother tongues," while others completely lose their native languages.

'The Vermin Have Struck Again': Dehumanizing the Enemy in Post 9/11 Media Representations
Erin Steuter and Deborah Wills
Media, War & Conflict 2010 3: 152 (17 pages)

This article examines the ways in which the media uses dehumanizing rhetoric to re-construct “enemies and thus to generate and sustain public support for military engagement, particularly in the war on terror.  Beginning with the concept that language is an essential ingredient to the escalation and justification of conflict, the authors argue that propagandistic discourse, in its ability to disengage critical thought while engaging vitriolic emotion, has been deployed through the use of “a remarkably coherent and consistent set of metaphors which represent the enemy as animals, particularly noxious, verminous, or pestilential animals, or as diseases, especially spreading and metastatic diseases like cancers or viruses” (153).  Such depictions of any enemy serve to dehumanize those persons, to mark them as both different and lesser, and work to justify and sustain racially and ethnically grounded stereotypes.   “This dehumanization of an entire group or race encourages an unconscious transformation, the imaginative transference that is metaphor’s chief function (Hawkes, 1972: 1), and by which entire populations are collectively stripped of their humanity” (452).

Bringing Afrocentricity to the Funnies: An Analysis of Afrocentricity Within Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks
Tia C. M. Tyree and Adrian Krishnasamy
Journal of Black Studies 2011 42: 23 (21 pages)

This article examines the cartoon strip (not the televised version) of The Boondocks, drawn by Aaron McGruder, to discover whether McGruder’s underlying rhetorical position is essentially Afrocentric.  They look for the principles and concepts of Afrocentricity, particularly the 10 principles of nommo - an Afrocentric word that refers to the power of a word or other kind of work to generate and create reality; nommo is also a communal event that moves toward the creation and maintenance of community, as well as the power of words to create balance and harmony in disharmony.

The Internet for Empowerment of Minority and Marginalized Users
Bharat Mehra, Cecelia Merkel and Ann Peterson Bishop
New Media Society 2004 6: 781 (23 pages)

This article examines the results from 3 digital divide studies to examine the ways that marginalized members of society utilize computers and communications technology as tools of empowerment.  Underlying their investigation is the critical concept that these technologies have the potential to allow people to create social equity, and that technology also can serve as a way to deconstruct the burdens of marginality and inequality.  Grounding their research is a commitment to engage researchers in a fundamental deconstruction of the digital divide.

The Media as a System of Racialization: Exploring Images of African American Women and the New Racism
Marci Bounds Littlefield
American Behavioral Scientist 2008 51: 675

This article presents the argument that “[US] society views a daily discourse on race, gender, and class that continues to reproduce dominant and distorted views of African American womanhood and sexuality” (675).  By linking these media representations in popular culture to social constructions of identity of African American women , the author argues that the media serves as a system of racialization that marginalizes, penalizes, and discriminates against these women as a way of constructing the broader racial discourse as a method of social control.