A Critical Mixed-Race Perspective for Bilingual Education

• In Event: Breaking the Silence: Amplifying Asian/Asian American Voices in Bilingual Education

Abstract

Bilingual education programs have often been put forth as a solution to the linguistic discrimination and marginalization of racialized and linguistically minoritized students in U.S. schools (Flores et al., 2021; Lindholm-Leary, 2000). However, on-the-ground implementation of these programs reveals that bilingual education programs often reinforce monolingual ideologies, language separation, and preferences for white, elective bilingualism over racialized, circumstantial (heritage) bilingualism (e.g., Lee et al., 2021). These ideologies and attitudes often operate in ways that are not detected by those who perpetrate or benefit from them (Godley et al., 2007) and can even be internalized and reinforced by the very individuals harmed by them. Therefore these ideologies and practices often go on unquestioned.

As mixed-race Asian American individuals, our lived experiences have attuned us to not only monolingual but monoracial paradigms through social interaction and schooling policies, often forcing us to pick one language to learn/use and one race to identify with. As early career scholars in the fields of language education and applied linguistics, we know how these oppressive monoracial/lingual ideologies also exist in bilingual education in the U.S. and East Asian contexts. For instance, narrow profiles of heritage language learners not only exclude Multiracial learners from opportunities to learn their “mother tongues,” but exclude them as legitimate members of their heritage communities (Author 2, 2022; Shin, 2010; Tsai et al., 2021). These issues are pertinent to examine as the Asian Multiracial demographic represents at least 14% of the Asian population (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021).

Drawing on MultiCrit (Harris, 2016), raciolinguistics (Rosa & Flores, 2017), and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), we reflect on how oppressive monoracial/lingual ideologies have been salient in our lived experiences and ask: How do our intersectional Multiracial identities and experiences make visible the ideologies of race and language particular to the East Asian (American) experience? How did we unlearn these ideologies and move towards liberation and resistance? And how can centering multiraciality create affordances for disrupting ideologies of language and race in bilingual education?

Through a collective autoethnography (Lawrence & Nagashima, 2020), we demonstrate how ideologies of race and language circulate in ways that impact Multiracial heritage learners’ access to language learning and socialization opportunities. Focusing on our experiences as multiracial East Asian American heritage learners in bilingual education spaces like international schooling, community-based heritage language programs, and university language courses, we discuss what “East Asianness” and “mixedness” means in these contexts and argue that translanguaging (García & Li, 2015) and raciolinguistics (Rosa & Flores, 2017) are essential conceptual frameworks to begin a process of liberation from internalized shame related to our racial and linguistic identities, which do not fit existing categories discussed in bilingual education research and practice. The number of bilingual education programs and heritage learners identified/identifying as mixed-race is growing; therefore, research should also shift to confront “normative,” singular, distinct, and definable languages, racial assumptions, and other essentializing social categories. Perspectives from critical mixed-race studies and scholars will be valuable for a reorientation toward the original transformative vision for bilingual education.

Authors

• Kevin M. Wong, Pepperdine University

• Samantha Harris, University of California - Santa Barbara