Presuming a color of language essentializes racial identity – regresses to racial determinism
Kubota ’06 (Ryuko Kubota, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and, Angel Lin, University of Hong Kong, “On Race, Language, Power and Identity: Understanding the Intricacies Through Multicultural Communication, Language Policies, and the Ebonics Debate,” TESOL Quarterly Vol. 40, No. 3, September 2006)
A reader would have to turn to Baugh’s (2002) Beyond Ebonics to get a fuller understanding of how the problematic wording of the resolution, which was built on Smith’s theory that African American students are not native English speakers, has contributed to the media misrepresentation and to the hostile legislations that ensued. Baugh points out that by positing such a deterministic relationship between language and racial identity, the Oakland resolution violated a basic principle that should be well known to linguists: One should never define a language or speech community based solely on racial classification of its speakers. The history of colonialism proves this fact. The global spread of English, French, Russian, Portuguese and Spanish — to name a few languages diffused by colonialism — confirms that speech communities and racial communities are not coincident. The fundamental premise of Afrocentric scholarship, which focuses exclusively on people with complete or partial African ancestry, flies in the face of the fundamental linguistic principle that a language can never be equated with a single racial group (Baugh, 2000, p. 85). It is also unfortunate that this anthology left out the voices of the primary stakeholders of the debate: students and parents who, unlike the author of these essays, have not yet mastered the dialect of power. Canagarajah’s invitation to pay closer attention to the insider’s perspective when doing research in LP is most relevant. My experience as a teacher of developmental writing at Bronx Community College has been that African American students are often averse to the notion that there is such thing as “Black English,” let alone to the suggestion that they, as African Americans, are not native English speakers. It is true that a lot of my African American students have strong misconceptions about Ebonics, which they often equate with “slang,” “street language,” or “bad English.” These misconceptions certainly have a lot to do with the reason many black learners are not eager to identify with Ebonics, at least in a classroom setting. But students might also be resisting a discourse that delimits possibilities for constructing a Self on the basis of race. As teachers of academic literacy who seek to increase students’ access to the dialect of power, it is our duty to try to dispel misconceptions about Ebonics. But it is not our duty to essentialize students’ subjectivity by suggesting that they need to identify with any particular language or dialect because of their skin color. As Holliday, Hyde, and Kullman show in Intercultural Communication, discourses that essentialize subjectivity have disempowering effects.
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