Racism

When #CRT Legislation Hits the Language Learning Fan

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by Kami Anderson

In my rites of passage group, my Babalawo said one day, “The greatest example of ego is white supremacy.” What more poignant moment to take this quote head-on than by addressing the recent influx of governors across the nation banning Critical Race Theory (CRT) from being taught in the k-12 classroom?

Now, let’s be clear: Critical Race Theory is NOT being taught in the k-12 classroom.  But from a pedagogical perspective, limitations on CRT can significantly impact the type of content a teacher can offer in the classroom. I want to take a moment to provide examples from a specific place in the k-12 school, the foreign language classroom.

Crenshaw explains that CRT acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continues to permeate the social fabric of this nation.

LangCrit, or Critical Language and Race Theory, is a critical theory of language and race that challenges fixed assumptions related to language, identity, and race and argues that these categories are socially and locally constructed. Specifically, it is a theoretical and analytical framework that puts the intersection of the subject-as-heard and the subject-as-seen at the forefront of interpretation and analysis. It looks for ways in which race, racism, and racialization intersect with language, belonging, and identity issues.

The work I do in CRT is in the classroom. Specifically, my foreign language classroom uses an Afrocentric derivation of LangCrit. I want to take a moment to use Tennessee as my example. Looking at the Tennessee law, it “will restrict what public school teachers can discuss in Tennessee classrooms about racism, white privilege, and unconscious bias.” This limits authentic identity for the racialized child in the classroom.

What does that mean exactly? It means that the whole and complete child cannot be acknowledged. It means that the sociocultural history of various racial and ethnic groups represented in the classroom cannot be fully recognized in the books or lessons.

I say this boldly and without apology, because my research examines how black culture, history, and identity are critical for language retention in the foreign language classroom.  In particular, I use raciolinguistics to analyze how language is used to construct race and how ideas of race influence language and language use.

Rosa and Flores purport raciolinguistics is “part of the broader structural project of contesting white supremacy.” From an Afrocentric perspective, studying raciolinguistics would examine the impact of race on foreign language learning and the influence of race on foreign language retention.

Raciolinguistics can be applied to the study of Blacks and foreign language learning because of the hegemonic presentation of language within the classroom and the hegemonic presentation of language outside of the classroom. It not only allows one to approximate race and culture in the classroom but also challenges examining how race plays a factor in language acquisition and retention. It is this intentional act that brings social and racial justice into the foreign language classroom.

By restricting CRT, teachers cannot complete this work. If you insist that race is no longer be a prominent factor, I am no longer allowed to question its absence in the foreign language classroom. As Brown and Edouard note, being able to see authentic representations of race and culture relatable for the student, particularly the Black student, is an “untapped intellectual resource.” By allowing students to identify similar racial and linguistic features in course content, students can witness the “perceived authenticity of language” This can’t be adequately tested without methods in CRT.

Language activism examines the structures of privilege and power exacerbated through the supremacy of language. It attaches language to contestations of power and critiques standard forms as codes of power. Specifically, in the foreign language classroom, it perpetuates supremacist elitism of foreign language learning among monolinguals seeking access to bilingual education.

In seeking to further Afrocentric language activism, I can focus and center the Black student in languages and focus on the Africanisms present in language and analyze how the appearance of Africanness affects our listening to language. For example, I can teach the West African connection between yam and ñame (they are the English and Spanish names for the same root vegetable), demonstrate and teach the history of how when in a Palenque neighborhood in Colombia you may hear “Lo no hagas pa’na” and it has the same connotation as “You bet’ not” in their communities. No, it is not grammatically accurate. It is culturally accurate, and that is just as important, especially in the foreign language classroom. This cannot effectively be taught without CRT methods and analysis.

Critical Race Theory is a threat because of the lack of acknowledgment of the research as it relates to Black children and education. To use a proverb as an analogy, we allowed the lion to share its side of the hunting story and then chose to rewrite the narrative back to favor the hunter because we were too uncomfortable talking about the hunter’s role in the lion’s pain.

There is an assumption that students of color in the classroom and carefully placed non-threatening images of well-known people of color as decoration in the classroom and the school are adequate in ensuring Black students see their identity represented. However, one can argue that this representation is shallow at best and exacerbates white supremacy issues within the education system. Shallow will not move our people. We are deeply profound, deeply critical, and deeply connected to an ancestral history with multilingualism. Limiting discussions around this can cripple our beloved community.

Kami Anderson is a Hooks Academic Research Fellow and founder of Bilingual Brown Babies, a specialized service for families of color who are serious about raising their children bilingual in English and Spanish. She was also one of the panelists for our event, “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and What It Isn’t.” 

 

Behind the Model Minority Myth

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by SunAh M. Laybourn

Photo: Andre E. Johnson

Last month Robert Aaron Long opened gunfire on Asian-owned/operated spas in the Atlanta metro area, ultimately killing eight people, including six Asian women. This mass shooting brought national attention to what many Asians in America were already aware of rising anti-Asian violence since the beginning of the COVID-19  pandemic. In the weeks preceding the March 16, 2021 mass shooting, Asian and Asian American activists, social media influencers, and prominent figures had taken to social media, calling out the lack of news media attention to anti-Asian harassment, particularly to attacks on elderly Asian people. While reports of anti-Asian harassment and violence began to spike in March-April of 2020, for the most part, knowledge of these attacks was internal to the Asian community.

Why has the rising anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic received scant mainstream media attention? And, why, in the immediate aftermath of Long’s mass shooting, were media hesitant to label his actions as racially motivated, much less a hate crime?

The answers to these questions can be traced to how Asians in America have historically been portrayed.

In 1966, New York Times Magazine featured an article by William Petersen, a sociologist, and demographer, entitled “Success Story, Japanese-American Style .” In it, Petersen lauded Japanese Americans for overcoming “color prejudice,” the denial of their “elementary rights,” exclusionary immigration legislation, and internment rather than becoming “problem minorities.” Over the next decade, Newsweek [1], Los Angeles Times [2], and U.S. News and World Report, among other mainstream press, ran similar stories extolling Chinese and Japanese Americans for “outwhiting the whites .”[3] Attention was also given to their educational and economic achievements, crediting their “meaningful links with an alien culture” along with their values of familial obligation and respect for authority.

“Prior to these mainstream press features, the two largest Asian ethnic groups in the U.S., Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans, desiring to attain full social, legal, and cultural citizenship within their home country, launched their own campaigns to prove their belonging emphasizing their work ethic, commitment to family values, and patriotism, while minimizing juvenile delinquency, poverty, need for social services, and discrimination experienced by their ethnic community [4]. Thus, the model minority myth was born.

These 1960s-1970s mainstream news features seemingly presented East Asians in America within a complementary light, a sharp turn given how mainstream press, the U.S. government, and academics had constructed them throughout the 19th century thru the mid-20th century, alternatively, as a Yellow Peril threatening the U.S. way of life, aliens ineligible for citizenship, and foreign enemies on American soil. Yet even as news media heralded East Asian Americans’ success, they did so by reinscribing their distinct differences from (white) American culture while simultaneously using East Asian Americans to denigrate other racially minoritized groups, specifically Black Americans. In news media and scholars’ explanations, if East Asian American’s “successful” assimilation into whiteness was a function of their “culture,” then Black Americans’ failure to assimilate into the (white) American ideal was a result of theirs. Moreover, if Asian Americans could pull themselves up by their bootstraps without government social services and in such a way as to “outdo Horatio Alger,” then other racially minoritized groups should, too. A 1966 U.S. News & World   article made this stance clear, stating, “At a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese Americans are moving ahead on their own with no help from anyone else.”

Claire Jean Kim conceptualized this process of comparative racialization as racial triangulation. She theorized that the continuous process of creating and assigning racial meaning to groups of people is mutually constitutive and constructed across multiple dimensions. Lauding East Asian American’s “culture” and denigrating Black Americans’ while simultaneously reinforcing East Asian Americans’ persistent foreignness are examples of this process. In turn, these various cultural constructions are linked to the differing ways that racially minoritized groups are oppressed, whether through race-specific exclusionary immigration legislation, discriminatory practices, and/or unequal distribution of resources. Cultural constructions, public policies, and institutional practices together maintain white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and xenophobia.

When news media fail to identify a mass shooting targeting Asian-owned/operated spas as racially motivated, this omission continues the cultural construction of East Asian Americans as model minorities and upholds white supremacist ideology. By not connecting Long’s mass shooting to racism (and misogyny), East Asian’s “success story” of assimilation into American society is maintained. Simultaneously, Long’s targeting of Asian spas due to his seeing these businesses as a “temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate” is similar to how Asian women have historically been sexualized, constructed as lacking moral character, and feared for carrying. It is these same ideas of Asians as disease-carrying and threats to U.S. culture and way of life that were called forth when former President Trump referred to COVID-19 as the “China virus.” While his words alone did not cause the rise in anti-Asian violence throughout the past year, they reinforced ideas of Asians as unfit for citizenship in America. As demands for racial justice and the end to all oppression are receiving increasing attention, we must consider the multiple and enduring ways that racism, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, and other systems of power create a matrix of domination. By understanding the links between the past and present manifestations of white supremacy, we can dismantle these systems of power in all of their forms.

Dr. SunAh M. Laybourn is a Hooks Academic Research Fellow and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Memphis. 

[1] Newsweek. 1982. “Asian-Americans a ‘model minority.’” December 6. Pp. 39-51.

[2] Los Angeles Times. 1977. “Japanese in U.S. Outdo Horatio Alger.” October 17. P 1.

[3] Newsweek. 1971. “Success Story: Outwhiting the Whites.” June 21.

[4] Wu, Ellen D. 2014. The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Where Has the Racism Gone?

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By Elena Delavega, PhD, Hooks Institute Associate Director

 

Elena Delavega, Ph.D., Associate Director, The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change

When I first arrived in Memphis, I was awe-struck by the racism. I everywhere, and it was visible. I could feel it. I could smell it. It was so thick, one could cut it with scissors. At first, I could not put my finger on it, but by paying attention, I was able to observe that people’s position in society seemed to be determined by their race. I also paid attention to how well the city took care of white areas, and how poorly it took care of African American areas. By carefully paying attention, it became clear to me that oppression and exclusion were a feature of the community.

Fast forward seven years, and the racism does not feel so awful in Memphis. This is incredibly dangerous and it is the lull that leads us to accept the racism as a natural part of life. It does not “feel” so awful anymore because I have become used to it and inured to it. It is still there. It is the same racism and the same oppression that existed seven years ago, that has not changed. I have to conclude that what has changed is my perception.

Humans have a great ability to adapt and to accept new environments. It is this ability is not accidental, but necessary for survival. However, that which is adaptive in an environment and would have allowed our ancestors to survive changing conditions can have horrible and maladaptive consequences in other places and times.

That is what has happened here. Our ability to adapt to circumstances has led me to accept racism as a natural part of the community and to not even see it anymore.

I fight against this. I recognize the awfulness of the still existing deep and noxious racism in Memphis and in the State of Tennessee, but I wonder how many people, otherwise good and decent people have become so well adapted to Memphis that they have stopped feeling and seeing the awful racism that pervades everything here?

This is a call to examination and to critical consciousness. We need to become careful observers of our environment and to recognize the need for awareness and for attention. Racism has not gone away. Just our ability to see it has. If you open your eyes with honesty, you will see it. It is there and it must be fought, lest it takes over and destroys our souls.

The Hooks Institute’s blog is intended to create a space for discussions on contemporary and historical civil rights issues. The opinions expressed by Hooks Institute contributors are the opinions of the contributors themselves, and they do not necessarily reflect the position of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change or The University of Memphis.