From theory to action: Working collectively toward a more antiracist linguistics (Response to commentators)
- From theory to action:Working collectively toward a more antiracist linguistics (Response to commentators)
1. Introduction
The conscience of the world has shifted greatly since we started this direct engagement with the linguistics community on issues of race, racism, and social justice. The COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread protests in response to statesanctioned police violence toward Black and African-American people have renewed and intensified conversations about racial justice and equity. Many linguists and linguistics departments are now actively grappling with what race and racism mean as theoretical concepts, how we can both address the study of race and act against racist practices in our discipline, and how to work on being not just 'less racist' but indeed antiracist in every aspect of our intellectual, professional, and personal lives. We are challenged to think about how we can center the lives and experiences of people of various racial backgrounds, rather than primarily centering whiteness, in linguistics departments. In doing so, we must more directly ask the question: how would linguistics have to change in order for more people from various racial groups to actively want to study, teach, and learn linguistics? We also need to emphasize that these are necessarily intersectional issues and that racialization is intimately tied to inequities on the basis of gender identity, socioeconomic status, disability, citizenship, and other parameters of social difference.
We are grateful to everyone who has written responses to our article (Charity Hudley et al. 2020) and to all who have engaged in conversations with us on their campuses, at conferences, and in discussions in real and virtual spaces; we also thank the editors and referees who selected the responses that appear here. At the same time, however, we want to challenge the gatekeeping practices of our discipline, so we therefore also discuss the responses we received directly from authors that were not accepted for publication. We extend an invitation to other linguists to reach out to us if your response was not selected for this issue of Language or if you have not yet had a chance to engage with us, so that you can share your perspective. The responses presented in this issue, as well as the other commentaries we received, establish an excellent dialogic model for how antiracist work in linguistics can happen. We respond to each of the contributions we received and then turn to a discussion of the next steps that we need to engage in together to work toward the goal of racial justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in linguistics.
2. Antiracism in linguistics: a dialogue
In his commentary, Michel DeGraff (2020) demonstrates that the positions we take in our original article are crucially relevant to conducting linguistic research that is at once theoretically engaged, culturally and linguistically valid, and responsive to community needs. DeGraff traces the moment he became 'woke' on these issues, which inspired him to challenge linguists' raciolinguistic ideologies of Creoles. His commentary inspires us to talk about the too-often taboo relationship between the personal, the professional, and the political, and he offers his MIT-Haiti work as a powerful and effective model for how to achieve racial and linguistic justice and social impact via linguistic research. With his aptly [End Page e307] named 'funder principle', he reminds us that such innovative projects require financial support, and he rightly calls for a refocusing of the priorities of funding organizations to serve the needs of the colonized communities whose languages form the foundation of linguistic scholarship and linguists' careers. We address this crucial issue in more detail below.
Raciolinguistic ideologies in linguistic research are also at the heart of Aris Clemons and Anna Lawrence's (2020) direct and effective call for antiracist scholarship. The authors center their response on research on bilingualism, which, as they point out, often evades and even defensively rejects questions about race in conventional framings of bilingual education. As they persuasively show, this resistance to necessary critique perpetuates racial inequities and reproduces the white supremacy of the field, despite researchers' explicitly progressive goals. An especially powerful aspect of the authors' response is their argument that critical interdisciplinarity and...
