Raciolinguistic Embodiment as Lived Pedagogy: A Black Teacher's Licensing of Black Language and Uprooting White Linguistic Mechanisms

• In Event: The Epistemologies of Teachers of Color: Disrupting White-Centered Racial and Linguistic Hierarchies in Schooling

Abstract

Persistent anti-Blackness pervades classroom walls when Black Language fails to be linguistically recognized, and school faculty continue to associate the language with deficit stereotypes. With over half a century of research documenting the importance of its legitimacy as a language (Baugh, 2000; Rickford, 1999; Smitherman, 1977), as well as calls for teachers to shift both attitudes and instruction for Black Language speakers (Richardson, 2003; Smitherman & Villanueva, 2003), not much has changed for the educational lives of these children. Such linguistic racism is afforded by a white hegemonic system that tethers language and race together for students of color. In particular, Black and Latinx students are interchangeably discriminated against by their race and language in schools, and find themselves positioned as raciolinguistic “others” vis-à-vis their white monolingual peers and teachers. Classroom teachers often function as arbiters (Howard, 2019) who categorize culturally and linguistically diverse students as raciolinguistic “others” (Flores & Rosa, 2015). In this paper, I feature a Black female teacher who disrupts whitestream norms (Denis, 1997) and licenses Black Language as legitimate in her classroom.

I approach this inquiry through a raciolinguistic perspective (Alim, Rickford, & Ball, 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015) to conceptually explain how the maltreatment of Black Language and Black people are deeply intertwined because of the ways white supremacist ideologies continue to thrive in our understandings of language (Park & Wee, 2013). Teacher Embodiment as Lived Pedagogy (Author, 2015) is a framework that guides my interpretation of how a teacher’s epistemologies and ontologies are mutually constituted with her pedagogy.
Through an ethnographic case study and thematic analysis (Bogden & Biklen, 2006), I utilize classroom artifacts (e.g., student assessments and work) and teacher interview data to excavate the ways Black Language and Black children must continue to succumb to white linguistic norms through the processes and policies of schoolwide assessments. In contrast to these norms, I feature how a Black teacher licenses Black Language as a lineage of Black resistance. This work is significant in illustrating the detrimental potency of white linguistic mechanisms, and how the raciolinguistic embodiment of a critical Black teacher affords a pedagogy that disrupts linguistic hierarchies in schools.

Author

• Alice Y Lee, University of California - Riverside