Enshrining English, Censoring Equity: Language Appropriation in Anti-Diversity Mandates

• In Event: Speaking Truth to Cacophony: Raciolinguistic Frameworks as Resistance to a Renewed Onslaught of Racist Policy

Abstract

OBJECTIVES:

Recent policies have sought to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts across the U.S. At the same time, attempts to enshrine English as the U.S. “official language” impose additional restrictions on language use. These mandates have major impacts on education, including curricular restrictions, funding cuts, and termination of offices supporting multilingual and other minoritized populations. In this presentation, we offer an analytical framework for interpreting the rapid spread and largescale entrenchment of these policies in education. Drawing on the discursive concept of grafting (Gal, 2019), we demonstrate how such policies can appropriate language from widely favored initiatives (e.g., civil rights) to bolster less popular counter-initiatives, often in ways that paradoxically undermine the racial justice.

FRAMEWORK

In agriculture, "grafting" refers to a practice in which a “shoot” (i.e., a vine or branch) from one plant is attached, or grafted, onto a different plant, allowing the shoot to thrive in climates where it would not otherwise take root. Gal (2019) analogized this process to political discourse wherein a policy draws language from a well-established concept or institution to support an opposing, often more tenuous policy or idea. This presentation illustrates how grafting can provide a potent framework for understanding the rapid spread of anti-DEI initiatives in education and beyond.

METHODS AND DATA SOURCES

We illustrate the grafting process through a discourse analysis of anti-DEI mandates at the federal and state level, including early attempts to restrict “Critical Race Theory” (Trump administration, 2020), state bans on “divisive concepts” in schools (e.g., Virginia, 2022), and recent “Dear Colleague” letters from the federal government proscribing DEI efforts at universities (Trump administration, 2025). We employ Gal’s (2019) analytical methods for identifying and explicating grafting in political text by identifying linguistic turns in which new policies are “grafted” onto well-established concepts.

RESULTS

Our findings illustrate how anti-DEI initiatives “graft” onto discourses from well-established, popular concepts. For example, the analyzed anti-DEI mandates often frame DEI efforts themselves as “inherently divisive” (Virginia, 2022), “racist” (Trump administration, 2020), or as violations of civil rights protections (Trump administration, 2025). This linguistic grafting reinforces these policies in two key ways. First, policies with less popular support (e.g., cutting school funding) can discursively “borrow” authority from more accepted discourses and concepts (e.g., civil rights law). Second, tracing the discursive chains across these different policies illustrates how the policies are re-grafted onto one another. For example, early policies focused on banning specific named frameworks (e.g., critical race theory) while later policies expanded the bans to “divisive concepts” (Virginia, 2022) facilitating the later expansion of these bans to position DEI itself as “unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious” (Trump administration, 2025).

SIGNIFICANCE

This presentation will provide implications for recognizing and disrupting the impacts of grafting in policy and practice to reclaim the mantle of racial justice. These implications will draw on audience participation to crowdsource examples of other initiatives for which the concept of grafting is useful for analysis, interpretation, and action.

Authors

• Chris K. Chang-Bacon, University of Virginia

• Kara Mitchell Viesca, University of Nebraska - Lincoln