Critical Ethnographic Monitoring and Chronic Raciolinguistic Panic: Imperatives for Policy Activism and Change

• In Event: Talking Back: The Intersection of Multilingualism and Racism Through a Critical Ethnographic Lens

Abstract

In 2001, the anthropologist Jane Hill argued that “language panics”—media-fueled hyperbolic reactions to certain language practices and policies—are not about language, but rather about race, “the single most important category of social organization in the United States” (2001, p. 245). At the time, Hill’s prime example was the 1996-1997 Ebonics controversy in Oakland, California public schools. Two decades later a new generation of critical language scholars has shown “how and why particular linguistic forms are constructed as emblematic of particular racial categories, and vice versa” (Rosa, 2019, p. 7; see also Alim et al., 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa & Flores, 2017). By definition, panic is an acute rather than a chronic condition, associated with uncontrollable fear and irrational response. Yet, in the U.S., raciolinguistic panic has been chronic, from early language policies intended to eradicate Indigenous languages (and speakers) deemed threatening to the settler state (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006), to present policies that segregate English learners—mostly students of color—in English-only “blocks” (Arias & Faltis, 2012; Gándara, 2012).
Objectives, Perspectives, and Mode of Inquiry.
This paper engages the “unfinished business” of Dell Hymes’s ethnographic monitoring (Van der Aa & Blommaert, 2011, 2017) to de-settle raciolinguistic panic in contemporary U.S. language education policy and practice. As Hymes (1980) proposed it, ethnographic monitoring uses the epistemic, conceptual, axiological, and methodological tools of ethnography to critically examine language policies from the “ground up,” starting with local community and student language repertoires, and moving to the meso level of school programs and the macro level of official policy. A hallmark of ethnographic monitoring is collaboration with local stakeholders—community members, teachers, school leaders, and others—as co-inquirers in the work. For Hymes, this represented ethnography’s inherent democratizing potential, a means of “accepting educational responsibility” (AERA, 2020) to employ our research in the service of multilingual equity and social justice (cf. De Korne & Hornberger, 2017).
Data Sources and Evidence
I draw on three ethnographic datasets: two from studies of language policy for English language learners and Indigenous students, respectively, in the state of Arizona, described as “ground zero for the most restrictive language policies” (Arias & Faltis, 2012, p. xix; Wiley, 2012, p. xix). The third dataset is from an ongoing national study of Indigenous-language schooling. Methods include participant and non-participant observation, in-depth interviews, and the analysis of documents and cultural artifacts.
Conclusions and Significance
This comparative analysis illuminates the ways in which language policies operate as tools of raciolinguistic segregation, but also how racialized communities reclaim rights and school space for their languages and learners through “practiced policies” that normalize bi/multilingualism (Hélot & Ó Laoire, 2011). The paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which ethnographic monitoring can be a form of “citizen scholarship” in support of the self-determination of racialized language communities and the imperatives of racial, linguistic, and educational justice and positive change.

Author

• Teresa L. McCarty, University of California - Los Angeles