Antilocution

The term antilocution was introduced by Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport to identify forms of speaking that damage out-groups. This neologism appears throughout his well-known text The Nature of Prejudice, published in 1954. For Allport, the antilocution is the most elementary form of prejudice. Thus, profanity is not, in itself, antilocutionary until it is directed at a demarcated and marginalized group—a race, an ethnicity, or a gender, for example. Allport's term is important to diversity studies because it establishes a category for speech that, at some level, inhibits tolerance, diversity, and, ultimately, social justice.

For Allport the antilocution is the first and least-damaging form of prejudice, followed by avoidance, discrimination, physical attack, and extermination—each one being, in his view, more harmful than the ones that precede it in this, his prejudice scale. It is likely, given current attitudes toward out-group-malediction and its consequences, that contemporary readers will take issue with Allport's full description of the antilocution, which would, for example, regard hate speech as occasionally cathartic and thereby defusing of the prejudicial situation at hand. Scholars might also disagree with Allport's benign conclusions, not conceiving the antilocution as the mere base of a prejudice pinnacle but as a noxia present in every other step, serving as the scaffolding as well as the foundation for all forms of prejudice. All the same, both readers and scholars might appreciate Allport's pioneering recognition of the role language plays in prejudice and discount his oversights, given he wrote during an era when out-group malediction was common and well tolerated—the era of the lyrical aphorism “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” In the song “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” written around the time Allport wrote, for example, no judgment is ever made against the other reindeer that tortured Rudolph because what Allport refers to as the “mild” persecution of out-groupers, be it the consequence of ethnicity, race, or color of the nose, was normative, both for the persecutor and the persecuted. The power of ideology to hide and promote prejudicial inclinations is nowhere better demonstrated than in the happy singing of this Christmas song by public school children, even in the midst of the antibullying movement. Changing that ideology is a gradual and ongoing process.

Despite the lack of an explicit framing on Allport's part, his meandering usage of the term throughout the text provides some opportunity to decipher his understanding of its range—thus, Brian Mullen and Tirza Leader suggest Allport recognized how it could (1) express hostile prejudice, (2) promote exclusion, (3) precipitate violence, and (4) Directly harm the referent. All this overlooks, however, the fundamental effect of the antilocution: that it establishes and reinforces the social conventions that (1) demarcate a group, (2) thematize the character of its members, (3) mythologize its History, and (4) propose conventions governing how it might be handled. In terms of this issue, Allport's failure to establish a typology for the antilocution has crippled research aimed at understanding it and its influence. Unfortunately, since the time of his writing, the Many who have referenced his term and cite his work take the idea no further than he did—where they have given the title of antilocution to out-group-malediction, they have made no effort to elaborate on the antilocution's nature.

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