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!