Barbara Bird
September 27, 2016
The Most Important Sentence

TRUMP IS A BIGOT AND A RACIST!

The headline above is a classic example of social constructionism.  Defined in 1966 by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, social contexts are fluid, sometimes contradictory and a complex process situated in settings, communities, or ideas.

The sentence, or section that really made me think about how we communicate on certain matters was social constructionism.  “Social Constructionists embraced the notion that students of communication should gather the communicator’s diverse and divergent understandings of their lives, cultures, and communication behaviors” (Fassett, 2011).  In other words, students of communications should gather information, both similar and separate, from their viewing and listening to the communicator’s words, actions, and general beliefs.  A more direct way of saying it is, “Know your subject and know your facts”.

It is through listening and observing the narrative in front of you that you learn about your subject.  Without which, your perspective could become skewed, and even, untrue.  Since our social reality is based on the collaborative meanings in social constructionism, it seems to me that it is important that these meanings are not assumptive.

So, you may ask, what does this have to do with the headline “Trump is a Bigot and Racist?”  Well, here’s my answer.  When seeing and hearing the virulent attacks on politicians exploding all over our media, news, internet, and print, it made me realize that this is a form of social constructionism that is being used to influence, even alter, our thoughts about who is socially acceptable.  If we were to take this one persons’ opinion as fact, then we would have to decide that Donald Trump must indeed be a prejudiced person who believes in segregation and holds blindly and intolerantly to a particular creed, or opinion (Webster, 1975). 

Of course, this brings up a whole new series of questions:  Is this really true?  Based upon what? Does the author of this headline have “clean hands” with no skin in the game? Based upon this headline, am I personally exempt of all prejudice, intolerance, and opinions for which I am being told to judge Donald Trump? 

                I don’t know about you, but if I am being completely honest about myself, I know I can find prejudices and intolerance in my views of the world – I mean, if this were not true of most of us, then why do humans encounter so much conflict when communicating with one another?

So I decided to do a little research.  It didn’t take long for me to find another inflammatory headline that read, “Half of Donald’s Supporters are racists and ‘other deplorables’.”  Really?  But then I said to myself, “there is no way this sort of narrative will be allowed to take hold in the social construction of our society.  Right?”  Yet within days of this headline a journalist said that, “…she [Hillary] wasn’t wrong.  If anything she might have low-balled the number.” (Milbank, 2016) Whoa!  So just what are we saying here? That if you choose to vote for your party’s candidate you must be racist and deplorable?  Is that the new social constructionism?  One person decides, without facts, who the rest of us are?  50% (or more) of the U.S. is “deplorable”, and 50% (or less) is acceptable?  What happened to voting your conscience and letting others vote theirs without criticism, judgements, or attacks?  Not good.  And if 50+% is “deplorable” shouldn’t we remove their rights as citizens, maybe even as humans, so we can just keep the “good ones”?  Is our current narrative sounding so incredibly intolerant simply because we are in the middle of a presidential election and emotions are running high, or is our society’s social construction changing, and not for the better?

Even as I was writing this blog (and multi-tasking by watching the news), I listened to a debate between two well-educated men discussing their different perspectives on current events.  Obviously, the goal was not to come to an agreement, but share their different views, when, suddenly, one of the men broke the rules and accused the other a being “one of those deplorables and a traitor to his people.” And there is was…An attempt to make separation and prejudice a normal part of the conversation and our new social construction.

This is a narrative that I don’t want to see our society adopt, and I can only hope for the sake of communication in our society, that this free use of words as weapons will be a narrative that goes away after the election.  After all, history has shown us, time and again, the destruction that comes from such narrow narratives.

I didn’t research to see if Donald Trump is a Bigot and Racist, or if over half our country’s population are racists and deplorables because, in the end, it doesn’t matter.  I decided what does matter is that I battle my own imperfections.  That I not berate others for possibly not being “good enough” or having a different point of view.  And while I cannot do anything about the headlines and media-bytes that currently ravage our society, what I can do is try to base my social constructionism on a narrative of kindness and facts. And when I see personal attacks happening, protect those who are being deliberately wounded with words.  In doing so, hopefully, I can have a small influence on the social construction of my minuscule part of the society.