Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective

Abstract

This article presents what we term araciolinguistic 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. (Race, language ideologies, colonialism, governmentality, enregisterment, structural inequality)*

Fighting Words: Antiblackness and Discursive Violence in an American High School

“…In other words, my charges of antiblackness and discursive violence (or acts of harm) derive from their specific assessments of the practices, processes, and policies that they had to navigate. Taking direction from Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores's “raciolinguistic perspective” () which concerns the co‐articulation of racial and linguistic ideology (and is an offshoot of “raciolinguistics,” or scholarship concerning race and language more broadly [Alim ]), this project interrogates the discourse of schools, communities, and mainstream news media through the theoretical frame of antiblackness and the analytic concept “trouble” (which emerged from nearly a decade of ethnographic research with transnational young people from several African countries and from the United States). Rosa and Flores's () theoretical and methodological intervention, among other things, urges a recentering of analytical focus on the ideologies, discourses, and related practices that perpetuate racism and interconnected systems of oppression, rather than only attending to the responses of individuals who must contend with these ideologies and their machinations.…”

Complicating categories: Personae mediate racialized expectations of non‐native speech

“…The unexpected memory benefit for Picture A could also be attributed to differences between the present study's and prior studies’ respective participants. As noted, the participant pool was predominately white, and these results are likely indicative of a racially hegemonic listening subject, regardless of actual racialized backgrounds of individual participants (Rosa & Flores, ). However, regional diversity of the participant pool, recruited from across the US, and perhaps increased popular discussion or awareness of implicit and explicit racialized bias since the earliest studies in this paradigm could perhaps account for the tendency of these participants to attend more rather than less to a speaker expected to be accented.…”

“…Just as acoustic percepts can influence social evaluations of a speaker, attitudes towards or expectations of Asian individuals can influence how those acoustic cues are heard, a phenomenon Kang and Rubin () term “reverse linguistic stereotyping.” Lippi‐Green () describes the findings above as listeners opting out of an expected “communicative burden.” That is, listeners ascribe an expectation of non‐nativeness to an Asian individual, and they thereby become less willing to expend effort towards understanding their speech, regardless of its actual auditory properties. This ideological process is one of “indexical inversion,” by which “language ideologies associated with social categories produce the perception of linguistic signs” (Rosa & Flores, ).…”

White affects and sociolinguistic activism

“…There's no question that language is a key basis for the perpetuation of social injustice, and particularly racial injustice, given that race and language are inextricably bound together (Flores & Rosa 2015;Alim, Rickford, & Ball 2016;Rosa & Flores 2017). Understanding these processes is therefore an urgent task confronting sociocultural linguists.…”