Discussions of racialized language rarely consider the linguistic practices of Asian Americans. This article examines one Korean American male student's conversational use of lexical elements from an imagined version of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Although the speaker's linguistic practices maintain the dominance of whiteness in racial ideologies in the United States, his particular uses of AAVE index his relationship with both whiteness and blackness. He thereby projects a distinctively Korean American male identity in the context of existing discourses of race and gender in the United States. T he recent academic interest in whiteness in the United States reflectsan important effort to draw attention to the silent ways in which racial hierarchies are maintained. Studies of the ideological construction of whiteness in everyday language are especially revealing of the naturalized ways in which dominant racial ideologies are reproduced, as well as addressing the relationality of social categories in social space. In particular, the examination of talk by European Americans has been a fruitful site for identifying the specific mechanisms through which white identity is performed, for example, by indexing a racial Other through Mock Spanish (Hill 1998) or Cross-Racial African American Vernacular English (CRAAVE) (Bucholtz 1999). However, in order to understand the complex ideological space occupied by whiteness, it is also necessary to examine talk 53 by "nonwhites" (see Gaudio, Trechter, this issue), because whiteness is constructed not only through white language, but also through imaginings of white language and its relationship with other forms of racialized language. In emphasizing the imagined aspect of language, I seek to call attention to the extent to which any linguistically identified variety functions as a convenient racial fiction (Morgan 1994; Walters 1996). Such fictions are resources for the performance of identity (Bauman and Briggs 1990).An examination of talk by Asian Americans is particularly interesting, given the curious location of Asian Americans in popular discourses as "model minorities" who are clearly "nonwhite" but are also granted the status of honorary, or "surrogate/' whiteness (Park 1996:493). In addition, there has been a lack of academic interest in identifying features of Asian American English in ways that parallel characterizations of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This oversight implicitly suggests that through silent assimilation Asian Americans are becoming honorary whites who desire to speak only Mainstream American English (MAE). Although race is relevant to the definition of MAE, I do not characterize this range of varieties as "European" or "White," because it is problematic to claim that the vast majority of Asian Americans who use this variety are speaking "White English." Instead, I consider how language acquires racialized meanings in interaction-that is, how it becomes indexical of race (Ochs 1992).In this article, I focus on one male Kor...

This article examines the practice of reading race, or the explicit labeling of people or practices with race terms. Through the close analysis of interactional moments, I examine how speakers of different ethnicities and genders across a Texas high school community strategically drew on this sociocultural practice for ideological commentary. First, I argue that readings of race often depended on an ideology of racial authenticity according to which students were expected to engage in racial performances that corresponded with their perceived racial identity. Second, I suggest that reading race was a strategy of gender and class commentary that measured speakers in relation to stereotypes of privileged white hyperfemininity and working-class black hypermasculinity. The analysis underscores the importance of attending to how racialized language is a negotiated process, how this process intersects with local ideologies of race, gender, class, and authenticity, and how reading race often achieves more than racial classification alone.

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In order to work towards greater racial justice within linguistics, the challenge remains for linguists to develop a cohesive theory of and approach to race and racial analysis in linguistics that is influenced by researchers of different methodological approaches and racial backgrounds. A formal LSA statement on race will provide linguistic researchers with a framework for studying race and will also serve as a method of intellectual and social inclusion in linguistics. We draw on interdisciplinary expertise in related fields, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, education, and ethnic studies, to examine how scholars from >neighboring disciplines have formally conceptualized and dealt with race and racial classification strategies. Points of convergence as well as divergence are articulated, drawing insights that may advance work related to race within and beyond linguistics.