"It's Just Funny": Laughing About Race and Racism in a Cross-Racial Classroom

• In Event: 75.026 - Beyond Empowerment: Accompaniment and Sociolinguistic Justice Through Youth Research

Abstract

Focusing on discussions of race and racism in a cross-racial classroom, this paper explores some of the challenges of fostering an atmosphere of accompaniment in spaces intended to advance social and sociolinguistic justice. Previous research on discussions of race in cross-racial contexts has demonstrated that white privilege is often reiterated in various ways in interaction, notably through the avoidance of the topics of race and racism (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 2003), a discourse of colorblindness (e.g., Bonilla-Silva 2003), and an overall dominance of what McIntyre (1997) has called white talk. However, because there are as yet few programs like the one examined here, little is known about how or whether educators can promote a sense of accompaniment while building on the linguistic and cultural expertise of all members of racially and linguistically diverse classrooms.

The present study addresses precisely these questions by analyzing how white and Latina/o high-school students and undergraduate mentors and a white adult instructor in a special program undertake the complex work of talking—or not talking—about race and racism. Guided by previous work on whiteness and discourses of race (e.g., Bucholtz, 2011; Casillas, 2011; McIntyre, 1997), and taking a sociocultural linguistic approach to the analysis of interaction (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005), this paper draws on over 60 hours of classroom video data recorded over the course of a semester-long class. The video data were coded for discussions of race and racism, and on this basis representative examples were selected from a lesson on linguistic racism. The paper presents fine-grained interactional analyses of three of these examples, supplementing them with distal information from fieldnotes, interviews, and classroom artifacts.

Findings suggest that despite the program’s aim of fostering social and sociolinguistic justice through accompaniment, oftentimes the discursive, affective, and theoretical space at this school was dominated by white voices and hegemonic discourses. Especially notable was the white laughter that reverberated within the walls of the classroom when students were invited to analyze multimedia examples of mock Spanish and other racialized varieties of English. The most vocal students—usually white students, but sometimes Latina students—tended to dismiss racial and linguistic stereotypes as a “just funny.” At the same time, one Latina focal student voiced an alternative ideology by emphasizing the possibility of a wide range of reactions from cultural insiders. I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings, paying particular attention to the importance of researchers’ and educators’ ability to recognize white laughter and to understand how to mobilize laughter (as well as other interactional resources) in ways that can work toward accompaniment and work against sociolinguistic inequities.

Author

• Meghan Corella Morales, University of California - Santa Barbara