Given the current political climate in the U.S.—the civil unrest regarding the recognition of the Black Lives Matter movement, the calls to abolish prisons and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, and the workers’ rights movements—projects investigating moments of inter-ethnic solidarity and conflict remain essential. Because inter-ethnic conflict and solidarity in communities of color have become more visible as waves of migration over the past 50 years have complicated and enriched the sociocultural landscape of the U.S., I examine the ways that raciolinguistic ideologies are reflected in assertions of ethno-racial belonging for Afro-Dominicans and their descendants. Framing my analysis at the language, race, and identity interface, I ask what mechanisms are used to perform Blackness and/or anti-Blackness for Dominican(-American)s and in what ways does this behavior contribute to our understanding of Blackness in the U.S.? I undertake a critical discourse analysis on 10 YouTube videos that discuss what I call the African American/Dominican boundary of difference. The results show that the primary inter-ethnic conflict between Dominican(-Americans) and African Americans was posited through a categorization fallacy, in which the racial term “Black” was conceived as an ethnic term for use only with African Americans.

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Over the past decade, the voice and speech recognition industry has established itself as a multibillion-dollar global market, but at whose expense? In this forum article, we scrutinize the case of Sanas, a US-based company offering an AI-powered accent-modification technology that is tailored for the off-shore call center industry. We offer this critique through a virtue-based framework for AI ethics. Our commentary exposes Sanas as an agent of racial commodification and linguistic dominance, as it rests on the perceived superiority of standardized US English. We discuss how racial commodification enables capitalism. Sanas, and similar programs, are not helping build a more understanding world; it is helping perpetuate and maintain harmful raciolinguistic ideologies that maintain language discrimination and continue to frame the language practices of racialized speakers as deficient. Thus, we write this piece with the intent to expose the fabricated humanity of accent modification technology whose existence perpetuates capitalism’s reliance on dehumanization for economic advancement and the legacy and reproduction of white language superiority.

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