by Jamie A. Thomas

Though many of us feel there's something deeply wrong about denying opportunities to girls and women, we are okay with demanding that women be judged by their femininity, hairstyles, and nail polish, or lack thereof. Even though we acknowledge that it takes the involvement of men, along with women, to stop sexism, how many of us readily understand that the burden of dismantling racist thinking and practice lies not primarily with marginalized groups?

Just two days after the presidential election result, and students in my regularly scheduled classes seemed lifeless and downtrodden, defeated and deflated. They had no questions, no thoughts for discussion, because their world had let them down. Somehow they had thought one vote would do it all, but I told them that it was never just about this election.

The dog whistles coming from Clinton's opponent (and his tacit supporters) were sounding the very racialization, sexist anxiety, and empowered prejudice that has festered in the U.S. since before its founding. It's a fundamentalist voice that hides behind economic anxiety and patriotism, while minoritizing, marginalizing, and dehumanizing many of the very people who seek to make this union more perfect. Hate speech and its accompanying mob violence, vigilante aggression, structural injustices, and covert, normalized language of biological inferiority have never been fully denounced in this country, and that is the true shame of this moment. 

Anyone clambering to declare "I am not a racist", has likely been unwilling to examine their participation in and benefit from structural inequity. For those of us who think we couldn't possibly be racist, sexist, ableist, class-ist, or otherwise, how do we treat people who (don't) look or sound like us? How much are our lowered expectations, dismissals, fears, and misunderstandings communicated in words like minority, wife, gay, ugly, unattractive, ghetto, poor, weak, foreign? What behaviors do we need to change, along with our language? How can we encourage each other to change?

My students looked so dejected, some close to tears. But this wasn't the time to tap out, I insisted. Now, more than ever, we needed to learn from this election, and from each other. We need to listen, reach out, and work together for social and structural change. And with that, I began preparing us for a visit to Serenity House, a community house and support center in North Philadelphia, where we would have a conversation with community partners about neighborhood activism and identity. 

by Jamie A. Thomas

I've been in touch this morning with a friend in the Netherlands.  Via WhatsApp, she asked me, "Are you scared for what's to come with Trump as president?" Another friend had posed a Trump win as an apocalyptic outcome. "The world will end...as we know it." Then, I was asked, "What will you do if he wins?"

My response was that I would do the same thing, no matter the election result. I would wake up the next morning, with the same plan I've had now for the last months, to take my students to North Philadelphia to local community center Serenity House, for a conversation and discussion with local residents about neighborhood identity and activism. We spent some time this semester in my sociolinguistics course analyzing the language of the presidential debates, and in the previous semester I was following election rhetoric with students in my course on Languages of Fear, Racism, and Zombies. If there's one thing I've learned about zombies, it's that things aren't always what they appear to be. 
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Look, nobody respects women more than I do. *Insert wry laugh* But the last thing I'm planning to do is to throw in the towel, move to Canada (or elsewhere), and give up my social justice work. Hell, no. 

The moment we give way to calling this an apocalypse, we script this occurrence and phenomenon as inevitable and out of our control. We seek to absolve ourselves of our shared responsibility for turning this ship around. Now's the time for critical thinking, instead of conjurings about the end of the world, about deportations and mass executions.

I want to instead think about how to work to educate others, communicate with people I don't already know, and push for new elected representatives and legislation. Even in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, survivors had to begin improvising together, and the U.S. ultimately had to form a coalition with support from the Mexican government. There was always a next step, and it's no surprise that a library, a fountain of knowledge, is what saved the movie's main characters.

by William Marchese

by Amanda Izes

In moments of the Final Presidential Debate of 2016, Donald Trump and moderator Christopher Wallace continuously interrupt one another (CBS News, 2016).  Attempting to gain control over the discussion, Wallace employs a formal, defensive interruptive style. Differently, Trump invokes an informal, staccato-ed style using basic sentence structure repetitively, which is representative of his communicative behavior throughout the election.  Ultimately, the section ends with Trump turning attention to the faults of Hillary Clinton through a nonverbal pointing gesture.  This moment from the debate illustrates the manner in which Trump uses an offensive, truncated speaking style combined with pugilistic body language to gain control over the flow and topic of discussion.   

Trump's success brings up questions about the role of the quality of persuasive language particularly in a debate setting.  How necessary is traditional logic and argumentative skill in this debate? Here, verbal persuasion relies more on quantity than quality.  Repetition and salience capture our attention.  Perhaps, in a rapidly paced interactional context, quantity and tone drive communication more than quality.  Momentary success, in this debate, is defined as the ability to speak uninterrupted (Thomas, 2016).  Quantity, rather than quality, defines linguistic power and effectiveness in combative speech interactions.  ​

by Hayden Kesterson

According to figures from the Center for American Women in Politics, women make up only 19.4% of the current US Congress and only four women ever have been Supreme Court justices, including the three currently presiding (“Current Numbers,” 2016). Considering that an estimated 50.8% of the United States’ population is women (“Quick Facts,” (n.d.)), these are startling statistics. The exclusion of women from public office does not only play out on grand, statistically measurable scales, however. It can be traced to specific instances of sexism enacted along different levels of interaction in public settings.

The current US presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is an important milestone for women in politics, and, as such, is a visible arena for how such specific instances play out and contribute to the historical exclusion of women. An examination of an excerpt of their final debate informed by Fairclough (2014) shows how Trump’s use of language toward Clinton works to establish precedents that further marginalize women from the political sphere.