Introduction to the Forum on Language and Anti‐Blackness (original) (raw)
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Introduction: Language and White Supremacy
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2021
The introduction to this special issue frames White supremacy as a central concern within linguistic anthropology, both as a focus of analysis and as a power structure that has profoundly shaped the field’s logics and demographics. We emphasize how carefully attending to language, discourse, and signs can productively illuminate White supremacy’s slippery logics, organizing principles, dynamic infrastructures, and diverse practices. Centering the role of White supremacy in constituting modern sign relations can contribute significantly to linguistic anthropologists’ efforts toward understanding historical and contemporary power structures that organize the dynamic yet systematic interplay between language and context. We hope that this special issue builds constructively on longstanding and more recent linguistic anthropological work that has led us to reconsider the fundamental relationship between language, race, and culture while also pushing our field in important new directions by reconsidering the fundamental relationship between language and racism as a strategy for understanding and contributing to efforts toward combating White supremacy. [anti-Blackness, language, racism, White supremacy]
Rhetorical Criticisms of Anti-Blackness; Interrogating Ontology Before Sociality
Racial rhetorical criticisms should not be conducted through race-focused means. In 2016, L.A. Flores termed the three-step process by which scholars should conduct rhetorical criticisms with a framework of tracking, unpacking, and rendering intelligible "manifestations of both race and racism" (pg. 16). This process has been replicated numerous times in the mere four years since Flores' publication with a variety of applications. Most notably, the concepts have been applied to Black church burnings (Houdek 2018), Donald Trump's rhetoric and "demagoguery" (Johnson 2017), and white feminism as a result of the #metoo movement (Moon & Holling 2020). Proving to be an effective mechanism through which to conduct a rhetorical criticism (Baugh-Harris & Wanzer-Serrano 2018), this project takes up the task of such process with two distinct differences; replacing race with blackness and racism with antiblackness. These distinctions, when utilized in a rhetorical criticism, serve as mechanisms by which non-black, specifically, White scholars can simultaneously atone for their ontological existence being predicted on the alienation of Blackness while serving as workers for the abolition of white society as constructed by an inherently whitened rhetorical situation. To do so, this section serves as a review of three literature bases whom contribute to the overall call to action stated above regarding avoiding racial frames for rhetorical criticisms; afro-pessimism, rhetorical criticism studies, and rhetorical situation studies. Through these authors, this section provides the warrants for the two distinctions made from Flores' original process: replacing race with blackness and racism with antiblackness. Literature Review Diverging from Flores. The distinction between race and blackness is important as it defines the foundation through which this work theorizes the relationship between Black and non-Black persons. Numerous authors have contributed to the claim that the term 'race' is one that was created for the sole purpose of displacing conversations regarding genocide and exploitation to the realm of innate facets of being.
Chapter 10: Black Is, Black Isn’t: Perceptions of Language and Blackness
Language Variety in the New South: Contemporary Perspectives on Change and Variation, 2018
The human activity of language, the social construction of race, and the concept of identity are complicated. The ideologies surrounding language and race are even more complicated when they are examined along with identity. In this chapter, we want to parse each of these elements—language, race, and identity—among African American teenagers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a majority Black city. We do not aim to put words in the participants’ mouths, but instead to let participants explain their own attitudes and beliefs about language, race, and identity. In short, our goal is to let participants tell us their stories instead of us, the researchers, trying to “discover” them. In so doing as the basis of this ongoing research study, we explicate the complexity of language, race, and identity that inevitably leads us to even more complex and complicating views about racial identity and attitudes and beliefs about one’s own language and projections about that language onto others to pursue further. After presenting the analysis of our data, we conclude with future directions for research on African American Language (AAL) and identity generally, as well as specifically with regard to this ongoing research project, to gain a better understanding of the interplay of language, race, and identity of African Americans across generations.
The Idiomatic Violence of Black Rhetoric in an Anti Black World (2019)
This paper attempts to explicate an idiomatic praxis in early black thought that theorizes anti-black logics of signification. I call this meta linguistic theory and praxis Black Rhetoric, and argue that it is a paradigmatic form of idiomatic violence in modernity. Since the 1980s scholars of Black Study and Black Literary History have been interested in how Black writers maneuver Standard Written English for their critical and artistic purposes. For example, Barbara Christian argued that "people of color have always theorized-but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic...our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language" (52). Christian's emphasis on theorizing as a verb rather than a noun reflects a broader methodological emphasis among her contemporaries on the dynamism, movement, and play of Black discursive practice (verb) over produced knowledge (noun). This paper explores idiomatic violence through contemporary hip hop artist Joey Badass' "Paper Trails" and the 19th century orator, Adam Carmen.
Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective
This article presents what we term a raciolinguistic perspective, which theorizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race. Rather than taking for granted existing categories for parsing and classifying race and language, we seek to understand how and why these categories have been co-naturalized, and to imagine their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting white supremacy. We explore five key components of a raciolinguistic perspective: (i) historical and contemporary colonial co-naturalizations of race and language; (ii) perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (iii) regimentations of racial and linguistic categories; (iv) racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (v) contestations of racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect our investment in developing a careful theorization of various forms of racial and linguistic inequality on the one hand, and our commitment to the imagination and creation of more just societies on the other.
Black languaging as antiracist pedagogy in the world language classroom
Rethinking representations, inclusion and social justice in world language teaching: Insights for research and pedagogy, 2024
Language ideologies and languaging practices reflect the intersections of various sociocultural and sociopolitical constructs and ideologies, including race. In this chapter, we position Black languaging as one of many ways to enact antiracist pedagogies in the language classroom. We argue that centering such perspectives normalizes the language of these communities and often brings to light the ways in which these communities have engaged in their own liberation and have experienced joy.
EuroAmerican Journal of Applied Linguistics and Languages
This text is a review of The Anti-Racism Linguist: A Book of Readings, edited by Patricia Friedrich and published in 2023 by Multilingual Matters. The volume features nine distinct chapters written by authors from Brazil, Thailand, Japan, and the United States who, via personal narratives, share their experiences with (anti)racism in teaching, research, and publishing in applied linguistics and other related fields. The authors explain key terminology, concepts, and theories needed to understand and discuss anti-racism in language use. Authors also provide recommendations for change in editorial, research, and pedagogical practices that readers could implement to help counter racism in their contexts.
Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso
Based on the statements that (1) the word in interaction manifests itself as an ideological sign, oriented to a precise social audience, circumscribed in a given historical time; (2) that race is a language and (3) that geographic displacement involves a clash between different systems of meaning, I interpret data from the cultural translation process for the term black [negro, in Portuguese], based on the enunciations of two Portuguese language learners in a course for immigrant mothers held in Southern Brazil. The data presented were generated as part of an ongoing ethnographic investigation.1 The discussion points to controlling images that persist in the social imaginary from effacement procedures, discursive whitening and hypersexualization of the term negro [black]. Data also reveals that the processes of attributing meanings around race are in full dispute in the current socio-historical context.
Whiteness and Language [International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology]
Whiteness, like all racial categories, is a mythic and cunning construct with little biological credibility but tremendous social power. Historically, White social dominance has been propped up not only by violence, political control, and socioeconomic configurations, but also by language ideology and linguistic practice. This entry explores several ways in which White advantages and subject positions have been constructed through language. It looks at the racial politics of colonial-era language policies and attitudes, and the racial hierarchy implicit in the contemporary valorization of “standard” language, particularly in the United States. It examines whiteness as a verbal performance and a matter of style, and how White borrowings from non-standard linguistic varieties have often functioned to affirm White racism. It describes how some non-white communities have mocked White language (and, by extension, the negative qualities they associate with whiteness). And it examines some of the linguistic strategies, from code choice to subtle discursive maneuvers, pursued by self-conscious Whites at pains to avoid accusations of racism.
Linguistic racism: Origins and implications
Ethnicities, 2023
This special issue of Ethnicities focuses on the phenomenon of linguistic racism. Linguistic racism constitutes the intersection of language, race/ism, and in/equality, as seen in racialized discourses on the relative status of languages and bi/multilingual language use, particularly as these are directed toward non-dominant language speakers. The theoretical framings underpinning the contributions in this issue draw on sociological discussions of critical race theory, and sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological discussions of language ideologies, linguistic racism, and raciolinguistics. Racialized discourses of language (use) are situated within sociohistorical and sociopolitical contexts, grounded in nationalism and colonialism, that privilege dominant national and international languages, public monolingualism, and native-speaker competence in those languages. In contrast, related linguistic hierarchies of prestige pathologize the language uses of non-dominant languageoften Indigenous and/or bi/multilingualspeakers and construct their language use in both overtly and covertly racialized terms. The result is regular linguistic discrimination and subordination experienced by non-dominant language speakers, inevitably framed within wider racialized institutional and everyday discursive practices. The contributions herein explore these issues in relation to Indigenous and other non-dominant language use(s), and their (mis)representation, in the media, workplace, and academia, in the contexts of New Zealand, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, and the United States.