"Will This Hell Never End?": Substantiating and resisting race-language policies in a multilingual high school (original) (raw)

This article presents a critical race theory analysis of teachers' and students' language policy negotiation. It draws on an ethnographic study in a high-school English as a Second Language (ESL) program. Results demonstrate how race-language processes create conditions that trauma-tize immigrant and bilingual youth of color through embodied nativist policies. On the other hand, youth made dynamic bilingual policies. It is argued that critical race-language scholars must question the legitimacy of ESL programs that function as white supremacy. [immigrant youth, critical race theory, policy, ethnography, English Learners] Yes, it is the dawn that has come. The titihoya wakes from sleep, and goes about its work of forlorn crying. The sun tips with light the mountains.. .For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret. [Paton 1948:312] In 1988, Kimberlé Crenshaw argued that white supremacy, formerly explicit, was now implicitly circulated through contemporary stereotypes based on notions of culture rather than genetics (1988:1379). She writes, " The rationalizations once used to legitimate Black subordination based on the belief in racial inferiority have now been reemployed to legitimate the domination of Blacks through reference to an assumed cultural inferiority " (1988:1379). Likewise, with a shifting and highly politicized socioscape of immigration politics in a post-9/11 United States, race and immigration status are heard, as language is reemployed to legitimate the continued subordination of brown and black bodies. The subordinated status of immigrants of color is circulated through a discourse of linguistic " otherness " that denies how bilingualism is intertwined with the development of our country and the benefit of linguistic diversity globally. Sociolinguists argue that the work of integrating more effectively into U.S. society through Standard English acquisition is a specific burden relegated to the bodies of brown and black communities (Alim and Smitherman 2012). Here I argue that English-only language policies are enacted on the backs of brown and black immigrant 1 and bilingual youth through segregated education programming. The stories narrated in the following pages share trauma, anger, and anguish. They direct our attention towards the ways in which white racial consciousness and white supremacy use youths' languages as means of oppression. They are stories of hope. The youths' actions to counter nativist language policy put cracks in the system of white supremacy that open up space for new ways of being, ways that spur us to act with authentic love and to transform the conditions that traumatize bilingual and immigrant youth of color. In the following article I analyze teachers' and students' participation in language policy to question how white supremacy is legitimated, critiqued, and resisted in educational settings. In this 18-month ethnographic study of a high school in California, teachers and students (a) substantiated English-only policies, (b) critiqued the policy of segregating