Language and Racial Empowerment Tuesday, July 2, 2019 1 2 - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Language and Racial Empowerment

Tuesday, July 2, 2019

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Announcements

• Don’t forget the Advancing African American Linguist(ic)s

Symposium this weekend:

• https://ucsbhbculing.com/special-announcements/advancingaal2019
• Office hours this week
• Today, 5:00-6:00 p.m., 105 Olson
• Office hours next week (via Zoom) TBA
• My Zoom Room: https://ucsb.zoom.us/my/marybucholtz
• Link is also on my website under Teaching
• You may need to wait in the Zoom waiting room if someone else connects

first

• The Google Slides comment feature is now working (I hope)
• Assignment 1: Please submit as .docx via Orbund only!
• Thoughts on Assignment 1?
• Assignment 2 now on Orbund

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Introductions of new class members

• Your name and pronouns
• Undergrad/grad/faculty, home institution, field(s) and

subfield(s) of interest

• What is your racial and/or ethnic identity? (however you

interpret these terms)

• What do you hope to get from this class?

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From racist power to racial empowerment through language

• Two ways to have an impact on the world
• power: backed by structural/institutional authority;

imposed from the top down

• White people use their power to create and reproduce

race and racism

• agency: individual or collective; is often enacted from

the bottom up

• Racialized groups use their agency to produce

empowering ways of challenging racism and creating their own meanings for race

• Language is central to both kinds of processes at

multiple levels: policy, representation, and practice

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Racial empowerment through language policy

• Challenge to white supremacist language policies
• Native American Languages Act (1990), Esther Martinez Native

American Languages Preservation Act (2006)

• Elisa’s Spanish-language commencement speech (Bucholtz,

Casillas, & Lee 2019)

• Students’ Right to Their Own Language (see Smitherman 1995

for the history of this policy)

• Issued by the Conference on College Composition and

Communication (CCCC) in 1972, approved by membership in 1974

• “… We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and

training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language”

• “Black students’ right to their own language has made possible all

students’ right to their own language” (Smitherman 1995: 25)

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Racial empowerment through linguistic representation

• linguistic representation: scripted, planned, and/or

performed use of language associated with a particular social group

• In literature, scholarship, law, education, news media,

entertainment media and performances, everyday social interaction

• Empowering representations challenge hegemonic racist

representations

• Alice Walker’s (1982) The Color Purple, Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987)

“How to Tame a Wild Tongue”

• Linguistic reclaiming of white public space
• Smitherman’s and Alim’s use of AAE in scholarly writing
• “Emphatic Blackness” on Black Twitter (Smalls 2018)
• Intergenerational bilingualism in the TV show “Jane the Virgin”

(Melgarejo & Bucholtz forthcoming in Spanish in Context)

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Racial empowerment through linguistic practices in interaction

• Subversion of the racial and raciolinguistic hierarchy
• Reyes (2011), “Racist!”
• Rosa (2019), “Pink Cheese, Green Ghosts, Cool Arrows”
• Slobe (2018) on “mock white girl”
• Creation, use, alignment with, and nurturing of linguistic

practices indexical of ingroup identity

• Languages/varieties (see Buccio 2018 on Mixtec/Tu’un Savi)
• Slang and ingroup lexicon (Fung Bros. on Asian American slang)
• Translanguaging
• Discourses of linguistic affiliation (Davis 2016)
• etc.

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Discussion

• Introduce yourself to someone near you (if you don’t know

them) and discuss the following:

• What examples have you encountered of racial

empowerment through language? For and by which racialized groups? Consider:

• Language policy
• Linguistic representation
• Linguistic practice

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Empowerment and accompaniment

• empowerment: struggle for self-determination by

members of oppressed groups

• Those who hold structural power cannot “empower” those who do

not

• accompaniment: support for others’ struggle for

self-determination

• Those who hold structural power may try to give up some of their

power through accompaniment

• Bucholtz, Casillas, & Lee 2016

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Toward a less racist linguistics

• accompaniment: What does linguistics as a

discipline—and academia as a profession—need to do to become less racist?

• empowerment: What are racialized scholars and students

already doing to achieve self-determination within linguistics and the academy?

• Again, consider:
• Policy
• Representation
• Practice

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Conclusion

• Race is a tool both of racist power and of racial

empowerment

• Racialized groups use language to challenge racism and

to create shared identities

• White and racialized groups have different roles to play to

end the white supremacy of linguistics and the academy

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