Month: December 2017

There’s a field for that: Raciolinguistics

After writing the previous post, it was as if the universe decided to answer my questions through the announcement of a new academic book: Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race by Jonathan Rosa. I found exactly what I was looking for through Nelson Flores’s tweet,

Raciolinguistics? It seems so obvious now.

I’ve been doing as much research as I can, time allowing with two sick little people and a raging bout of depression. Raciolinguistics is such a new field of study that there is relatively little to be found about it. According to Wikipedia, Dr. Flores and Dr. Rosa coined the term in the 2015 academic paper, “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education“, which I am currently in the process of reading. H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball edited a book called “Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race“; I plan to purchase when there is some extra cash to be had. Once Rosa’s book comes out, I will be purchasing that as well.

I’m supplementing my studies by following Dr. Adrienne Keene’s wonderfully free course on Critical Race Theory. I’m actually starting there, since I’m forever broke, and so far I think it’s a fantastic place to build on.

 

I really think this is the niche I’ve been looking for. This whole summer has been spent learning about systematic racism and white supremacy, and I’ve been interested in Linguistics and Rhetoric since the last year of my undergrad program in 2011. I definitely would have not found the intersection of these two topic until this point in my life, but I’m glad to have found it. I will be dedicating any time my brain isn’t feeling like exhausted mush on learning as much as I can about CRT, Linguistics, and Raciolinguistics.

 

If you wanna take pity on my poor ass and give me a Christmas/Birthday gift (my birthday is December 30th), would you consider getting me one of these books? I ain’t holding my breath, but it would be a nice surprise. 🙂

Using Linguistics to Eradicate Racism

That’s what I want to do.

Been spending an enormous amount of time on Twitter. I’m getting inspired left and right by the POC community and the Linguistics community. But then I run into articles like this (‘I don’t think there’s anything darker than doing a PhD’), and I’m forced to stop and reflect.

The most important question to myself is

What do I want to dedicate a chunk of my life to?

On my POC twitter feed, where a majority of the people I follow are academic/intellectual black women, I constantly see disdain and derision toward so-called “allies” who do nothing more than type behind a computer screen about how much they hate racism, but won’t do the difficult and uncomfortable part of actually challenging people’s racism. And they have every fucking right to feel that way. When was the last time you remember a white person calling out another white person for their racism? You don’t.

If you have, go give that person a high five. If it was you, you’re awesome.

But not enough white people DO anything to combat systematic racism.

I don’t want to be that person.

 

I am super geeky about rhetoric. Thinking about it excites me. I think learning about language linguistically will give me another angle, a fuller angle, to examine rhetoric in a way that an English degree would not give. Semantics, pragmatics, and a sociolinguistic examination of rhetoric would be the foundation I start building my skills.

I recognize, and am not all that interested in, the linguistic deconstruction of racist rhetoric has already been examined by multiple researchers. And while that research will be prevalent in the crusade I want to embark on, it’s not enough to deconstruct. I want to reconstruct. Or, perhaps even destroy and rebuild anew.

Essentially I want to see how – and at what scale and at what point in one’s life – we can use rhetoric to decrease the likelihood of becoming a racist. Or I want to know if we can train teachers/police/general populace to actively rework their speech patterns to lessen subconscious racism/colonialism.

Something along those lines. Most likely there is a flaw in my thinking somewhere, but the end goal is to use linguistic techniques to eliminate racist thinking.

 

Is it possible? Has it been done? Is someone working on these things now? What do I need to do to find these things out? What type of schooling/training do I need? Which university would best the path I want to take?

Help!