Confronting Linguistics as a Racist Discipline Friday, July 5, 2019 - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Confronting Linguistics as a Racist Discipline

Friday, July 5, 2019

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Announcements

• Schedule for Week 3 is now on Orbund (or coming soon)
• Heads-up: Assignment 4 will be due on the last Friday of

class at 5 p.m., but it’s just a revision of Assignment 3

• Feedback on Assignment 3 will be provided on Wednesday, July 17
• Don’t forget the Advancing African American Linguist(ic)s

Symposium tomorrow and Sunday!

• Today is my last day at the Institute, but I’ll try to Zoom

into class and I’ll still have office hours via Zoom

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The racism of linguistics

• Due to its colonial roots, linguistics has a longstanding

and ongoing racist legacy that it has not confronted

• Linguistics is not uniquely racist; practically all disciplines

are, as is pretty much the entire academy (and the entire society), including in the following ways:

• Disciplinary content, scope, and ideologies
• Scholarly practices (theory, method, writing)
• Inequities facing students of color (curriculum and other

requirements, recruitment and retention of undergrad and grad students, mentoring…)

• Inequities facing faculty of color (recruitment and retention,

tenure/promotion, workload…)

• How departments, disciplines, and organizations function (climate,

leadership selection, policies and decision making)

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“That’s not linguistics”

• Disciplinary border policing excludes many of the topics of

urgent importance to students and scholars of color, especially “applied” topics that are devalued

• Education
• Legal justice
• Health care and access
• Activism
• Other community needs
• This utterance reveals many linguists’ insecurities about their

disciplinary identity; they just need to get over it

• If a linguist does it in their capacity as a linguist, then it’s

linguistics!

• Pro tip: You only need your advisor to go along with your

project, not the whole department/discipline

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Some of linguists’ (racio)linguistic ideologies

• Linguistics is an objective science
• Linguistics isn’t about knowing a lot of languages
• Linguists are descriptivists, not prescriptivists, so we can’t advocate for

inclusive language use

• Languages exist (Leonard 2017; Otheguy, García, & Reid 2015)
• The distinction between languages and dialects is linguistic, not social (even

when linguists say otherwise)

• The lexicon, all of sociolinguistics, and other culturally significant aspects of

language aren’t “interesting

• Exoticism: Only “unusual” languages are worth studying OR False

universalism: All languages are pretty much the same, so let’s just study HAVE

• Indigenous languages are precious vanishing resources (Davis 2017)
• Linguists are experts, language users are naïve, and “we” can’t trust what

“they” say about language (Collins 1991)

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Racism in epistemologies, methodologies, and scholarly representations

• Linguistic theories, methods, and writing practices are

white, Western, colonizing, and racist

• e.g., the “objective” white gaze
• The discipline has an urgent need for Indigenous, Black,

and other alternative theories and methods

• Critical Race Theory (and critical race theory)
• http://linguisticanthropology.org/sla-blog/creating-online-resources-l

anguage-revitalization/

• Exclusionary and distorted representations of racialized

groups in research articles, monographs, and textbooks (Morgan 1994a, 1994b; Walters 1996)

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Inequities facing students of color

• cf. Zentella 2018
• Finding linguistics, knowing what it even is
• Feeling (un)welcome in the major
• Highly technical/abstract required courses that drive

students away

• Course content that excludes their linguistic repertoires
• Tokenism (e.g., bias against “diversity” recruits;

commodification of racialized students; being called upon as an expert on ”their” language in class)

• Not having instructors who look like them or share their lived

experiences

• No/few assigned readings by scholars of color
• The hidden curriculum: Not being told the rules of the game

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Inequities facing faculty of color

• Rampant structural and individual racism on the job

market

• Doing work that isn’t recognized as linguistics
• Massive uncompensated service overloads, especially

student mentoring and committee work

• Senior colleagues who devalue or discourage innovative

research programs

• Lack of meaningful mentoring or peer support in the

department (and possibly anywhere on campus)

• Unspoken expectations and shifting goal posts for tenure

and promotion

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How departments, disciplines, and

• rganizations function
• cf. Battacharya, Jiang, & Canagarajah 2019
• Hostile climate and no recourse
• Exclusionary practices and outcomes in selecting leaders,

making decisions, and rewarding “excellent” work

• Reproduction of the same unjust system: “We’ve always

done it this way”

• Invocation of “standards” and “quality” as justifications for

perpetuating white supremacy

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What’s been working at UCSB

• Find your allies, sideline your antagonists
• Create a critical mass
• Offer flexible programs
• Welcome innovative research
• Reward social justice and service work
• Establish clear procedures in writing
• Additional goals
• Better funding
• Better mentoring for every student (grad and undergrad)
• Make non-sociolinguistics classes more inclusive (e.g.,

talk about AAE in morphology class and Spanglish in syntax)

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Discussion: How can you intervene to make linguistics a little bit less racist?

• Assignments 3 (draft) and 4 (final version): Come

up with a racial justice plan for linguistics or the academy that you could actually carry out (and we hope you do!)

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Conclusion

• We have a lot of work ahead to undo the white supremacy
• f linguistics, but it can and must be done!
• The next two weeks: Making linguistics less racist

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