Language, Discrimination and Employability: Employers’ Othering and Racist Representations of Domestic Migrant Workers on Social Media

Abstract

Discursive othering deals with the many ways in which language is used to express prejudice against minorities, and it outlines the processes and conditions that promote group-based inequality and marginalization. This article focuses on online othering, and it analyzes a corpus of 615 comments posted by Hong Kong employers of domestic migrant workers (DMWs) on social media. First, a quantitative analysis of the corpus outlines the content categories found in the posts, and second, a discourse analysis of representative excerpts illustrates the claims made about DMWs. Employers engage in othering of their helpers, and the analysis shows how demeaning racist comments function to publicly shame them and warn others not to employ them. The article uses Language and Social Psychology frameworks to analyze the posts, and it discusses the functions of using racist derogatory language. The paper concludes by discussing how research may be used to address pressing social issues.