Date of Award

Summer 2025

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Linguistics

First Advisor

Elaine Chun

Abstract

This dissertation follows how public discourses that emerged during the 2020- 2022 “Critical Race Theory Panic” played out in different contexts and at different scales in the United States, from conservative national media to South Carolina legislative action. While political discourse has become increasingly nationalized (Berry & Sobieraj, 2014), new legislation has largely taken place at the state level (Johnson, 2022). Drawing on over two years of fieldwork and methods of discourse analysis, I thus examine how nationally circulating discourses about race and racism were taken up by South Carolinians to create partisan alignments and distinctions as well as to further concrete legislative objectives. Focusing on the seven months in 2021 when critical race theory (CRT) received the most national media coverage, I first show how speakers on the conservative talk show Tucker Carlson Tonight discursively constructed a version of American history that suggested that racism had been solved and that CRT reintroduced racism into the public consciousness. Then, I look to the ways that the debate was taken up in the South Carolina Legislature and among politically active South Carolinians in 2022. Across these contexts, I analyze three discursive strategies that conservatives used to establish and rationalize their political position that CRT had infiltrated public life and must be banned from schools. In particular, I show how partisans, in arguing their positions, imagined historical narratives of racial progress and decline and drew on commonsense assumptions about how language works, or “semiotic ideologies” (Keane, 2018), to support these racial chronotopes (Koven, 2013; Rosa, 2016) that implicitly vii answered questions such as, when was America racist, where was America racist, when did America stop being racist, what did the Civil Rights Movement accomplish, and how has racism changed over time? Several important patterns emerged in my analysis that support an overarching observation: I found that while partisans on both the left and the right constructed nuanced language ideologies and chronotopic imaginaries to justify not only their political positions but also their ostensible worldviews, these ideologies were flexible and strategically applied, despite longstanding rhetoric that positions conservatism as backward-looking (Abramowitz, 2018; Robin, 2018; Stanley, 2024; Stern, 2019). As I demonstrate, a fiercely maintained language ideology in one discourse event could be utterly rejected in the next, and in one context, conservatives constructed themselves as future-focused—even linguistically and socially “progressive”—while in another they argue for a return to an idealized past. I ultimately argue that conservatives’ orientations to ideologies of language, race, and history were hardly reflective of a fixed set of beliefs about the world but discursive strategies that served their political and moral interests (Irvine, 1989).

Rights

© 2025, Paige Pinkston

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