6.1 Race and Anti-racist Pedagogical Possibilities in World Language Teaching
Hongni Gou and Wenhao Diao
INITIAL REFLECTIONS
- What does it mean to learn and teach languages in today’s world?
- What do the qualifiers ‘critical’ and ‘intercultural’ add to the way in which we may conceptualize this endeavor?
Introduction
Antiracism has become a central concern in language learning and teaching, with the publication of several volumes and articles that highlight how, as language educators, our responsibilities and practices can and must incorporate decolonization and cultivate diversity. However, language teaching has not historically been a space for antiracism. On the contrary, the field of second language education emerged largely against the backdrop of colonialism and imperialist expansion (Heller & McElhinny, 2017). White supremacy (see whiteness in glossary) has since ideologically produced and reinforced racial hierarchies of speakers and languages in many parts of the world (Von Esch et al., 2020), creating institutionalized incentives to teach and research some languages (with English being a notable example), but not others. But critical applied linguistic scholarship has propelled us to consider how the work of language education has been a part and parcel of colonialism and imperialism (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Kubota, 2020), and with the growing body of scholarship on this topic, it is now possible to provide a chapter such as this to show why and how antiracism can be our pedagogy.
In this chapter, we draw upon the Critical Race Theory (CRT) —a framework that argues racism is endemic, systemic, and intersectional (e.g., Crenshaw et al., 1995)— to highlight the intersection between race, language, and language education. Therefore, racism is not just acts limited to “only some bad individuals,” but antiracist education must aim to educate “people to identify, name and challenge the norms, patterns, traditions, ideologies, structures, and institutions that keep racism in place” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017, p. 142). Another relevant notion is whiteness[1], which is about sets of social norms and moral values that are ideologically contrasted with what are considered non-white (Garner, 2007). These dichotomies then create hierarchies that work with other systems of inequality, i.e., intersecting with each other to engender “unique dynamics and effects” that impact our lives (Center for Intersectional Justice, n.d.). For example, in terms of language, people of color in the United States are often associated with linguistic varieties other than Standard English; even when they speak English, their English is often scrutinized and heard as deviant, incomprehensible, or incorrect— a process known as dissociation of language from speakers in the sociolinguistic literature about race (Alim et al., 2016). Ideologies about the English language thus reproduce whiteness as the norm and the ideal (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Within this ideological framework, English language pedagogical practices by educators of color also tend to be devalued as illegitimate (Ferreira, 2007). These ideological forces that promote whiteness as the norm are not limited to the teaching of English; race can operate as an intersectional principle that organizes the education of other languages as well (Diao et al., 2024). For example, it arranges the demographics of our language students and teachers (who), the objectives of their learning (what), and the cultural logics behind the teaching practices (how).
While English has dominated the published works on race and language education (Von Esch et al., 2020), our chapter here deliberately decenters English by focusing on issues related to race in the teaching of languages other than English (LOTEs). This decision to depart from the convention is based on several considerations. First, antiracism aims to disrupt white supremacy, but the global spread of English has been inseparable from the history of white settler colonialism (Motha, 2014). Second, race remains an underexplored issue in the pedagogical research that focuses on LOTEs. This has been partially due to a long tradition in language education of overlooking and even stigmatizing race (Kubota, 2015), while upholding a color-blind stance (Magro, 2023). It may have been further complicated by a sense of complacency that, in the face of the global dominance of English, teaching a LOTE is automatically and inherently the work of diversity. However, the history of WL education in the United States has been intertwined with the imperialist power struggles for hegemony during the World Wars (Pavlenko, 2002) and the Cold War era (Heller & McElhinny, 2017), and it continues with nationalistic agendas of regional influence and global control (Diao & Trentman, 2016). Meanwhile, Black students, as well as their historically rooted struggles and perspectives, remain underrepresented in WL programs in America (Anya, 2021). While some individuals and communities of color (e.g., Asian Americans, Latinx) participate in the learning of WLs as their linguistic heritage, that very choice can reinforce the white gaze that equates these students as perpetual aliens (Flores & Rosa, 2015). These complexities propel us to reflect here on how race and racialization may enter LOTEs programs and practices, how they connect to the larger cultural and political discourses, and what we must do to cultivate a pedagogy of empathy and solidarity (Zembylas, 2012) in language education.
In what follows, we present a review of the existing literature that explicitly tackles issues related to race, racialization, and (anti-)racism in the teaching and learning of LOTEs. By entering keywords that included “race,” “racism,” “racialization” and “language learning” in research database searches, we identified studies that focused on the issue of race in both formal and informal teaching and learning in a variety of settings where language learning occurs. While some studies on the teaching of LOTEs have tangentially touched upon concepts that may intersect with race, such as those that focus on national, ethnic, or heritage identities, we opted to focus here exclusively on the scholarship that explicitly discusses race and racism. This decision aligns with the CRT-informed scholarship that urges us to challenge the color-blind tendency by explicitly mentioning race (e.g., Kubota, 2015). In addition, our goal is to outline the possibilities for antiracist language teaching and language pedagogy research through a review of the existing literature, and therefore we limit our inquiry to formal WL classrooms and/or programs, while leaving out language use in community schools or family settings. Because antiracist teaching of LOTEs is still an emerging discussion in the field, this is admittedly a small yet growing body of work, especially in terms of empirical studies. We thus also included advocacy papers, pedagogical suggestions, as well as other scholarly works, to show some of the emergent work that can guide language teachers toward antiracist possibilities.
Our chapter is organized around three major contexts of language education in US-based LOTEs programs: WL classrooms, bilingual education programs, and study abroad. Following a discussion of these three contexts, we provide a data-driven exercise where we invite our readers to examine how a K-12 language teacher reflected on her own experience with racialization and how such experience informed her in designing anti-racist teaching practices. In doing so, we hope our discussion of the existing scholarship can not only provide research insights but also inspire new possibilities for anti-racist pedagogy in language education.
(Anti)racism in WL Classroom Teaching and Learning
As CRT asserts, racism is deeply embedded in our educational systems, practices, and interactions. Despite the popular assumption that WL education is automatically the work of diversity and equity, Anya and Randolph (2019) illuminated several key issues in the WL classroom: 1) access, opportunities, and success for racially minoritized students; 2) critical pedagogies that acknowledge historically rooted racial struggles and facilitate racially minoritized students’ participation in WL programs; 3) language education policies that disrupt the historic erasure of the culture and identity of different groups; and 4) engagement with underserved communities. For instance, pedagogical practices and teaching materials that we use in WL often promote multilingualism as a desirable enrichment only for white (and English-dominant) students, while marginalizing and disenfranchising linguistically and racially minoritized students (Flores & Rosa, 2019). Anya’s (2021) ethnographic participatory research convincingly revealed how racism and anti-Blackness were manifested in the focal Spanish programs’ policies and practices (e.g., recognizing the Fourth of July as the Independence Day in the United States, but failing to acknowledge the cultural significance of Juneteenth). While these findings provide a powerful explanation regarding why Black students remain disproportionately unrepresented in WL programs in the United States, Anya (2021) proposed a critical race pedagogy for WL teaching that aimed to acknowledge the Black identity and culture. Through a systematic examination of the instructional materials with the Spanish language instructors, the researcher and the instructors together developed new program policies and practices that better cultivate an “equity-minded, anti-racist, and inclusive” Spanish learning environment for Black students (p. 1058). These results are compelling evidence that WL education can and should transform into antiracist work, if we intentionally design practices to facilitate Black and other racially minoritized students’ meaningful participation and support their success in language learning.
Meanwhile, heritage language learners, who are often ideologically deemed as non-white (Flores & Rosa, 2015), may encounter troubling racial positionings in the classroom even when they study the language associated with their ethnoracial heritage. For example, when heritage learners are grouped with other non-heritage students in the same language class, their instructors may treat their white English monolingual peers preferentially, distancing them “from their own linguistic and cultural heritage” (Harklau, 2009, p. 233). Clemons and Toribio’s (2021) CRT-informed study utilized surveys and interviews with Spanish-English bilinguals who participated in Spanish language classes to further illustrate that pedagogical and assessment practices— such as language placement, the profiles of the teaching force, as well as instructors’ corrective feedback— frequently framed heritage Spanish speakers as a homogenous group and as the racialized Other.
The racialization experienced by heritage language learners is not limited to Spanish speakers. Heritage language learners are linguistically, ethnically, and culturally diverse (Diao, 2017; Shin, 2016). Some heritage speakers may be immigrants themselves who are already bi/multilingual (Doerr, 2018), whereas others may be children of immigrants who are transnational experts (Kwon, 2022). Yet some other heritage language speakers may grow up in multilingual and multiracial households that have largely switched to English for cultural and linguistic assimilation (He, 2024). However, when a heritage language track is available in a WL program, it is often structured with the assumption that heritage language learners are racially and culturally homogeneous. As a result, those who do not fit these assumptions, such as the mixed-race Korean heritage learners in Harris and Lee’s (2023) study, can feel excluded from both the heritage language track and the regular language track because these two tracks are racially organized. The racialization of heritage learners has effects not only in the classroom; it can also impact students’ decisions about whether to pursue or continue language study. Race-based stereotypes and hostility that racially minoritized individuals sometimes have to confront, such as what Chinese heritage language speakers endured during the surge of the anti-Asian violence in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, may be enough to lead individuals to reject any association (linguistic or otherwise) with their heritage and shift to English instead for assimilation (He, 2024).
Despite the centrality of race in language learning, antiracism has only very recently become a core concern in the WL classroom (e.g., Randolph & Johnson, 2017). But over the last few years, several publications explicitly addressed pedagogical needs and possibilities for antiracist WL teaching. This has particularly been the case for Spanish. Granda (2021) provided pedagogical examples of how to use authentic materials representing the Afro-Latino community to address antiracism in high school and undergraduate Spanish classes. For instance, when focusing on Baltasar, one of the Three Kings in the Spanish novel Ser mujer negra en España (Bela-Lobedde, 2018), Granda’s (2021) ideas engaged students in critical discussions on race and racism through popular lesson themes such as holidays, and beauty and aesthetics. Another monograph by Magro (2023) began with an analysis of how race intersects with everyday academic lives in and beyond the language classroom in a postsecondary Spanish language program in the United States. It then provided detailed guidance, with actual teaching materials, on how to integrate sociopolitical contents (SPCs) in an advanced Spanish language syllabus to develop students’ antiracist linguistic awareness. By guiding students to explore sociolinguistic concepts and topics such as ‘language ideology,’ ‘language and identity,’ and ‘stigmatization of Spanglish,’ the curriculum aimed to foster students’ ability to critically reflect on language ideologies in society and racism as a form of systemic discrimination resulting in unequal power distribution. Seltzer and Wassell (2022) drew from a Spanish classroom as a case in point to demonstrate how a translanguaging approach can foster an antiracist learning environment for WL classrooms. Specifically, the instructor, Ms. Williams, employed a translanguaging design in her classroom space by putting up bilingual posters and engaging her students in the creation of bilingual music videos on social media and bilingual public service announcements. She also encouraged heritage students to explore the use of Spanish not only in the classroom but also in their communities and families, which affirmed these heritage speakers’ bilingual realities and connected language learning with their own identities.
With regard to other languages, teachers and researchers of German (Criser & Malakaj, 2020) and French (Bouamer & Bourdeau, 2022) have also published thematic volumes with hands-on lesson plans, assessment tools, and classroom activities to explicitly diversify and decolonize the teaching of these European languages that have historically been associated with colonialism, imperialism, and racist oppression in many parts of Africa and Asia. These discussions of antiracist pedagogies have also led to calls to disrupt epistemological racism in and through LOTEs teaching. Based in New Zealand, where the racial reckoning intertwines with its own history of colonizing the Indigenous land of the Māori and other groups, Wang (2022) described pedagogical designs that can connect the teaching of Chinese language with Indigenous epistemologies and worldviews in New Zealand. These calls for action further coincided with other special issues and volumes on inclusive WL education (e.g., Nara, 2020, on Japanese; Tao et al., 2021, on Chinese), fostering an ongoing and dynamic conversation about incorporating antiracism in language pedagogies.
Finally, several pedagogical guidebooks have provided concrete ideas for antiracist practices for WL teaching in recent years. One such example is the book by Hines-Gaither and Accilien (2022), The Antiracist World Language Classroom. Filled with expressions from different languages that reveal linguistic processes of racialization, as well as hands-on classroom activities, this book is a practical guide for teachers designing antiracist pedagogical practices.
Race and Language Teaching in Bi-/Multilingual Immersion Programs
Bilingual education, particularly the Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) model in the United States, was originally established with the primary goal of providing a socially inclusive space where minoritized language speakers can develop and maintain their family and community language, alongside their monolingual English peers who can have the opportunity to develop their multilingual competence by learning a new language (Lindholm-Leary & Block, 2010). The majority of published research on DLBE is based on Spanish/English bilingual education, partially because Spanish is the largest community language in the United States. A key aspect of linguistic racialization is that individuals are ideologically grouped together and stereotyped as one homogeneous race based on how whites perceive their language use, such as what many Latinx individuals and communities experience in the United States (Rosa, 2019; Zentella, 1997). These instances of racialization can be found in spaces for bilingual education as well, as linguistic and racial inequities continue to entrench many Spanish/English bilingual classrooms and schools (Potowski, 2007; Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017).
Research focusing on race in bi-/multilingual education has shed light on how racism and racialization have been manifested, reinforced, and sometimes disrupted through pedagogical practices and instructional materials. A study by Cervantes-Soon et al. (2021) described a kindergarten two-way DLBE program situated in an urban community in Texas, where the majority of the students were low-income Black and brown students. Despite the Latino teacher’s initial attempt to create a democratic learning space, there was institutionally endorsed surveillance and control that targeted students of color. The teacher also experienced a lack of support from the district, which became even more apparent when compared with programs in the same area that mainly served white students. These factors together reinforced the English hegemony in the bilingual classroom and silenced the voices of these very young students of color. Tracking the six elementary school years of one young white student in a Spanish/English DLBE program, García-Mateus et al.’s (2023) longitudinal study demonstrated the role that teachers and everyday classroom practices could play in organizing racial and linguistic relationships in bilingual classrooms. The focal white student, “Tessa,” was often assumed to be an expert in both English and Spanish and frequently assigned the role of a helper to her Latinx peers, whom even Tessa later learned to describe —falsely— as “my classmates that only speak Spanish” (García-Mateus et al., 2023, p. 262). These practices thus endorsed (middle-class) whiteness by delineating Latinx students as a homogeneous and less competent group, while also failing to guide white students, like Tessa, toward critical linguistic and racial consciousness (Palmer et al., 2019). These findings from research on DLBE resonate with what Flores and Rosa (2015) critiqued as the institutionalized colonialist discourse that equates heritage language learners as simultaneously non-white and ideologically not speakers of English.
While DLBE researchers reveal these racial and linguistic hierarchies that have been reproduced and redistributed in bilingual education, many are also seeking ways to counteract these deeply embedded systems of inequity through program and classroom practices. For instance, the series of case studies in the edited volume by Dorner et al. (2022) not only reveals the raciolinguistic ideologies that underscore DLBE; it also advocates for the transformative potential these programs can create to promote racial and linguistic inclusion. Other studies have provided pedagogical suggestions for language educators to advocate for antiracism in bilingual education (Lacorte & Magro, 2021). For example, teacher-student interactions can become spaces in which the instructor and their students jointly learn to recognize the “racially-loaded” tendencies in the teaching texts, and such teacher-student collaboration can create “a Latino-centered curriculum” that helps foster a critical awareness of race, culture, and identity in the DLBE classroom (Michael-Luna, 2008, p. 287). Meanwhile, digital storytelling that encourages translanguaging can empower racialized heritage learners in the bilingual classroom (Prada, 2022), and strategies such as autoethnographies, creative writing, and oral histories, can also give heritage speakers voices and make bilingual classrooms more inclusive (Burgo, 2023). These concrete teaching practices illuminate the possibilities of DLBE in promoting the work of racial and linguistic diversity and equity.
Race and Racialization in Language Programs in Study abroad
Study abroad researchers have explicitly engaged with race in language learning. Indeed, race and racialization are not a uniquely American phenomenon. Knowledge about racial hierarchies spreads transnationally and intertwines with local systems of inequities to reinforce racism at both local and global levels (Lan, 2019). In addition, in the study abroad setting, where forms of racialization can be distinct from what has been normalized in students’ native societies and cultures, students may be keen to notice these differences. Research has shown that, while these moments can become opportunities for students to develop a critical awareness of racism in diverse cultural contexts, racialized learners may also be prone to the profound psychological impact of racism when studying abroad.
Talburt and Stewart’s (1999) study was among the first to focus on race and LOTEs learning. The focal Black female student, “Misheila,” frequently experienced unwanted attention to her gendered and racialized body, even to the extent of sexual harassment, while studying abroad in Spain. These experiences led her to feel unsafe in the host community. Quan’s (2018) study showed similar feelings of vulnerability. “Vera,” an Iranian American student studying in Spain, reportedly encountered negative racial positionings from native speakers of Spanish. In return, she distanced herself from them, and she also attributed her lack of access to local communities to her race and ethnicity, as she believed she was discriminated against as an incompetent Other because of her appearance and her lack of Spanish proficiency. While racialized women may experience feelings of vulnerability, Goldoni (2017) documented the experiences of a Spanish language learner, “Albert,” a Black American male student studying in Valencia, Spain. Despite his strong motivation, he had to endure racial microaggressions, such as being stopped by the police for no reason and being called a “run-away slave” on the train. These experiences led him to disengage from the host community, and subsequently, he made unsatisfactory language gains. Vera and Albert’s stories illustrate that learners who experience racialization due to their skin color, phenotype, and/or ethnicity in the United States can be particularly vulnerable when they study abroad, especially when they are visibly marked as a racial minority in that context as well.
Meanwhile, heritage language speakers may also experience scrutiny and racialization in study abroad settings (Pizzolato & Lee, 2023), even though they may have an apparent ethnoracial affiliation with the host community. For example, the ideological link between one’s ethnic/racial identity and their expected language proficiency may create linguistic anxieties and identity crises. “Caroline,” an American heritage learner of Spanish in Quan’s (2018) study, held the belief that she must speak Spanish like a real native speaker so she could claim her Mexican heritage; however, she developed feelings of shame due to her less-than-native Spanish proficiency. In other cases, heritage language learners had to confront an ideological preference for whiteness while they studied abroad. Du (2018) included in her case study an American heritage language learner of Chinese, “Olivia,” who was routinely assumed to be a local native speaker of Chinese because of her phenotype and the absence of a foreign accent in her spoken Chinese. The people she encountered in China frequently displayed a preference for her white American peers in daily interactions, which eventually led to her disengagement from the host community. Similarly, Jing-Schmidt et al. (2016) also showed two heritage learners of Chinese who described being treated differently from their Euro-American peers. Such racial bias triggered these students to feel discouraged from interacting with Chinese people and to instead reclaim their American identity through the use of English.
Despite these above cases of unsuccessful engagement with host communities due to racialization, several studies have also demonstrated the potential of study abroad for de-normalizing U.S.-based racism. Anya’s (2017) seminal monograph offered an in-depth account of four Black American learners of Portuguese who were studying abroad in Brazil. Through analyses of interviews, journals, and classroom interactions, Anya argued that these focal students’ learning was mediated by their racialized identities both from their experiences in their home country – the United States – and their newly discovered social possibilities as Black individuals in Salvador, an Afro-Brazilian city. Anya’s ethnographic case study thus offered implications for how to better support Black American students in language teaching so that they can benefit “from meaningful participation in foreign language education and equitable access to resources that reduce their isolation in our globalizing world” (Anya, 2017, p. 5). Meanwhile, Diao’s (2021) research showed how two American students of color studying in China drew from their prior experiences with race and racism in the United States as their framework to make sense of their experiences in China. For example, although the Afro-Latino student, “Bobby,” routinely experienced hair touching in China, he regarded these instances as simple gestures of friendliness and curiosity, because he considered them different from the anti-Black exclusion and violence that he had encountered in the American South. These studies highlight the antiracist possibility of study abroad, because study abroad may allow students to unlearn (some of) the racial hierarchies that may seem natural in their native cultures, while engaging themselves in alternative discourse possibilities to challenge racism by utilizing another language.
Indeed, these findings illustrate the paramount need for explicitly anti-racist language teaching practices and strategies in the study abroad context. Focusing on a study abroad program in Guatemala, Quan and Menard-Warwick’s (2021) case study showcased how the incorporation of critical reflections and intentional local engagement in the study abroad curriculum facilitated students’ awareness of race, language, and culture. In their study, the focal participant, “Terry,” a Vietnamese American learner of Spanish, was encouraged to make sense of her classroom learning and local culture by drawing upon her lived experience as a linguistically and racially minoritized individual in the United States. As she reflected on issues such as ‘white supremacy’ and how they were manifested in people’s language use, the structured activities contributed to her development of transcultural and translingual competence, meaning she gained the ability to interpret cultural and linguistic systems as fluid, symbolic and intersectional resources for meaning creation and negotiation. These activities also allowed her to reclaim her identity as a heritage speaker of Vietnamese through the creative blending of Spanish, English, and Vietnamese. In another Guatemala-based study, Chang (2017) demonstrated the potential of counter storytelling. Chang’s findings showed how four U.S. Latina students were guided to make critical parallels between the struggles of their own Latinx communities in the US and the indigenous people of Guatemala. These findings urge us to consider the potential of anti-racist language teaching in study abroad. As race is a culturally embedded construct, language learning in the study abroad setting can become a productive space for comparative discussions about how race may be interpreted very differently in their home and the host societies, how racism/racialization may be manifested in different or similar ways, and how local racial struggles may be globally connected.
Summary
Taken as a whole, the literature we have reviewed in the chapter offers insights into how race/racialization can shape practices in the teaching of WLs, and some of these pieces also illuminate the pedagogical possibilities to resist, challenge, and even disrupt white supremacy and racism. It is our hope, therefore, that the brief introduction in this chapter can inspire more educational practices that can continue to dismantle racism in language classrooms, programs, schools, and our society at large. In the final part of the chapter, we will look at some data excerpts from a study that focused on Chinese language teachers in American K-12 schools soon after the surge of anti-Asian racism. Through this case, you will have a chance to consider some of the key points and concepts from the prior discussions.
- “Throughout this chapter, we follow the stylistic suggestion from leading institutions of journalism, such as “Why we capitalize ‘Black’ (and not ‘white’),” and make an intentional decision to capitalize Black but not white. We do so to show our respect for and recognition of the shared identity, culture and history of Black people. We choose not to capitalize brown or white because these terms may represent a variety of cultures that are not shared across a particular racial group as the term Black does. As has been pointed out elsewhere (e.g., in Why We’re Capitalizing Black by the New York Times), using lower case in white also avoids the risk of promoting white supremacy and racist hate. ” ↵
As a socially constructed racial category, whiteness (e.g., Garner, 2007) refers to the ways that morals, practices, and beliefs associated with white people are accepted as the default standard in society, against which non-white people are measured and judged. Such normalization creates a white-dominant culture in which white people are believed to be normal, ideal, and superior while non-white people are seen as abnormal, lacking, and inferior, an ideology called white supremacy. Whiteness also grants white people privileges and advantages that non-white people do not receive in social life, resulting in an unequal distribution of power by virtue of people’s skin color.
Critical race theory (CRT) was originally proposed by legal scholars in the 1980s out of frustration with the existing discourses around civil rights and racism. Racism until then was perceived as a particular set of conditions and actions, which was considered to be no longer common in the American mainstream – and particularly in legal and other institutional spaces. The central proposal of CRT was therefore to reject the status quo as the ideal for racial justice and instead to argue that racism continues to be systemic, epidemic, and institutionalized (Crenshaw et al., 1995). Racism in this sense is no longer limited to explicit and formal exclusion of people of color – which has been largely, if not entirely, prohibited. In order to continuously progress towards racial justice, we must recognize and combat the many implicit forms of discrimination and racial politics. Framed by CRT theory, language educators’ recent work (e.g., Anya, 2021) argues that WL teaching should also reject a color-blind assumption and instead embrace race as a key principle that organizes who comes to language classes, studies what language(s), for what goals, and how they learn.
Critical race theory (CRT) was originally proposed by legal scholars in the 1980s out of frustration with the existing discourses around civil rights and racism. Racism until then was perceived as a particular set of conditions and actions, which was considered to be no longer common in the American mainstream – and particularly in legal and other institutional spaces. The central proposal of CRT was therefore to reject the status quo as the ideal for racial justice and instead to argue that racism continues to be systemic, epidemic, and institutionalized (Crenshaw et al., 1995). Racism in this sense is no longer limited to explicit and formal exclusion of people of color – which has been largely, if not entirely, prohibited. In order to continuously progress towards racial justice, we must recognize and combat the many implicit forms of discrimination and racial politics. Framed by CRT theory, language educators’ recent work (e.g., Anya, 2021) argues that WL teaching should also reject a color-blind assumption and instead embrace race as a key principle that organizes who comes to language classes, studies what language(s), for what goals, and how they learn.
Raciolinguistics (e.g., Alim et al., 2016) rejects races as a variable that conditions language use; instead, it argues that race and language are inseparable from each other. This line of thinking can be traced to early sociolinguistics research that examines race as a variable that conditions how we use language (e.g., Labov’s works on African American Vernacular English). Later, Jane Hill’s (1998) pioneering work on Mock Spanish – the excessively Anglicized use of Spanish to mock Latinx individuals and communities in the United States– revealed the central role that language plays in reinforcing, redistributing, and normalizing such everyday racism (Hill, 2008).