Jonathan Rosa

The introduction to this special issue frames White supremacy as a central concern within linguistic anthropology, both as a focus of analysis and as a power structure that has profoundly shaped the field's logics and demographics. We emphasize how carefully attending to language, discourse, and signs can productively illuminate White supremacy's slippery logics, organizing principles, dynamic infrastructures, and diverse practices. Centering the role of White supremacy in constituting modern sign relations can contribute significantly to linguistic anthropologists' efforts toward understanding historical and contemporary power structures that organize the dynamic yet systematic interplay between language and context. We hope that this special issue builds constructively on longstanding and more recent linguistic anthropological work that has led us to reconsider the fundamental relationship between language, race, and culture while also pushing our field in important new directions by reconsidering the fundamental relationship between language and racism as a strategy for understanding and contributing to efforts toward combating White supremacy. [anti-Blackness, language, racism, White supremacy]

Following Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the authors of this article reject the type of “abyssal thinking” that erases the existence of counter-hegemonic knowledges and lifeways, adopting instead the “from the inside out” perspective that is required for thinking constructively about the language and education of racialized bilinguals. On the basis of deep personal experience and extensive field-work research, we challenge prevailing assumptions about language, bilingualism, and education that are based on raciolinguistic ideologies with roots in colonialism. Adopting a translanguaging perspective that rejects rigid colonial boundaries of named languages, we argue that racialized bilingual learners, like all students, draw from linguistic-semiotic, cultural, and historical repertoires. The decolonial approach that guides our work reveals these students making a world by means of cultural and linguistic practices derived from their own knowledge systems. We propose that in order to attain justice and success, a decolonial education must center non-hegemonic modes of “otherwise thinking” by attending to racialized bilinguals’ knowledges and abilities that have always existed yet have continually been distorted and erased through abyssal thinking. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15427587.2021.1935957)

This chapter features four applied linguistic anthropology case studies, highlighting how interdisciplinary scholars of language can acknowledge their positionalities, engage in in-depth examination of particular language-related issues, and mobilize to advocate for social change. We will discuss the inherent dilemmas involved in applied linguistic anthropology, including asking who our publics are, what "change" we seek to effect, how identifying the nature of "change" may help us determine if we are "successful" in moving toward social justice, and recognizing that language-related issues are never only about language-they are about ideologies, perceptions, experiences, practices, and histories of both powerful and marginalized groups. These four case studies stem from collaborative work of the American Anthropological Association's Society for Linguistic Anthropology Task Group on Language and Social Justice, an interdisciplinary group of publicly engaged scholars who collaboratively tackle language and social justice issues.

This article presents a theory of raciontologies—the fundamentally racialized grounding of various states of being—that sheds light on complex forms of institutional racism and white supremacy. We are interested in exploring not only how institutional contexts and processes function as sites or vehicles for the reproduction of white supremacy but more specifically how institutions become endowed with the capacity to act in their own right. This approach represents a raciontological perspective that attends to the central role that race plays in constituting modern subjects and objects in relation to particular states of being. Raciolontologies powerfully shape how entities become endowed with the capacity to engage in particular acts, while also conditioning perceptions, experiences, and material groundings of reality. Our theorization of raciontologies combines anthropological analyses of institutional racism and ontologies beyond the human. These analyses point to the role of institutions in the reproduction of white supremacy and reimagine the range of entities capable of action, respectively. The broader goal is to suggest how new ways of understanding the raciontological nature of institutional enactments of white supremacy can inform antiracist theories of change. [race, ontology, institutional racism, white supremacy]

RESUMEN Este artículo presenta una teoría de raciontologías—la base fundamentalmente racializada de varios estados del ser—que arroja luz sobre las formas complejas del racismo institucional y la supremacía blanca. Estamos interesados en explorar no s ´ olo las formas en que los contextos institucionales y los procesos funcionan como sitios o vehículos para la reproduccí on de la supremacía blanca, sino m ´ as específicamente c ´ omo las instituciones llegan a estar dotadas de la capacidad de actuar en su propio derecho. Esta aproximací on representa una perspectiva raciontoí ogica que atiende al rol central que la raza juega en constituir sujetos modernos y objetos en relací on a estados particulares del ser. Las raciontologías poderosamente dan forma a c ´ omo entidades llegan a estar dotadas de la capacidad de involucrarse en actos particulares, mientras que tambí en condicionando percepciones, experi-encias y las bases materiales de la realidad. Nuestra teorizací on de raciontologías combina el análisisan´análisis del racismo institucional y las ontologías m ´ as alí a de lo humano. Estos análisisan´análisis señalanse˜señalan el rol de las instituciones en la repro-duccí on de la supremacía blanca y reimaginan el rango de entidades capaces de accí on, respectivamente. La meta m ´ as amplia es sugerir c ´ omo nuevas formas de entendimiento de la naturaleza raciontoí ogica de las actuaciones institucionales de la supremacía blanca pueden informar teorías antirracistas de cambio. [raza, ontología, racismo institucional, supremacía blanca]

This article presents what we term a raciolinguistic perspective, which theorizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race. Rather than taking for granted existing categories for parsing and classifying race and language, we seek to understand how and why these categories have been co-naturalized, and to imagine their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting white supremacy. We explore five key components of a raciolinguistic perspective: (i) historical and contemporary colonial co-naturalizations of race and language; (ii) perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (iii) regimentations of racial and linguistic categories; (iv) racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (v) contestations of racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect our investment in developing a careful theorization of various forms of racial and linguistic inequality on the one hand, and our commitment to the imagination and creation of more just societies on the other. (Race, language ideologies, colonialism, governmentality, enregisterment, structural inequality)*

After Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election, there was widespread public and scholarly outcry that particularized this historical moment. But the tendency to exceptionalize Trump obscures how his rise reflects long-standing political and economic currents, both domestically and globally. By contrast, the effort to deprovincialize Trump effectively locates his electoral win within broader historical, political, and economic assemblages of which it is but one part. This entails examining how colonial and racial legacies shaped perceptions of the 2016 election, as
well as the role of anthropology in the contemporary political landscape.

In this article, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa critique appropriateness-based approaches to language diversity in education. Those who subscribe to these approaches conceptualize standardized linguistic practices as an objective set of linguistic forms that are appropriate for an academic setting. In contrast, Flores and Rosa highlight the raciolinguistic ideologies through which racialized bodies come to be constructed as engaging in appropriately academic linguistic practices. Drawing on theories of language ideologies and racialization, they offer a perspective from which students classified as long-term English learners, heritage language learners, and Standard English learners can be understood to inhabit a shared racial positioning that frames their linguistic practices as deficient regardless of how closely they follow supposed rules of appropriateness. The authors illustrate how appropriateness-based approaches to language education are implicated in the reproduction of racial normativity by expecting language-minoritized students to model their linguistic practices after the white speaking subject despite the fact that the white listening subject continues to perceive their language use in racialized ways. They conclude with a call for reframing language diversity in education away from a discourse of appropriateness toward one that seeks to denaturalize standardized linguistic categories.

As thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the fatal police shooting of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, news and commentary on the shooting, the protests, and the militarized response that followed circulated widely through social media networks. Through a theorization of hashtag usage, we discuss how and why social media platforms have become powerful sites for documenting and challenging episodes of police brutality and the misrepresentation of racialized bodies in mainstream media. We show how engaging in “hashtag activism” can forge a shared political temporality, and, additionally, we examine how social media platforms can provide strategic outlets for contesting and reimagining the materiality of racialized bodies. Our analysis combines approaches from linguistic anthropology and social movements research to investigate the semiotics of digital protest and to interrogate both the possibilities and the pitfalls of engaging in “hashtag ethnography.” [digital anthropology, digital activism, social movements, social media, semiotics, race, Twitter, Michael Brown, United States]

Growing efforts in the study of digital literacies push for continued (re)shaping of policy and pedagogical interventions. In this column, we take up concerns in participatory cultures to revisit a longstanding issue pertaining to language. Evident in the literature on digital literacies is an implicit treatment of language, particularly around whose languages are included. In our respective research, we are challenged by questions that seek to identify literacies and languages as repertoires of practice in youth's lives. We want to know, if youth are communicating and engaging each other across media platforms, what languages or linguistic forms are leveraged in their lives? In what ways are youth supported socially and educationally? We come together here to make language more explicit in the conversation.

This article presents what we term a raciolinguistic perspective, which theorizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race. Rather than taking for granted existing categories for parsing and classifying race and language, we seek to understand how and why these categories have been co-naturalized, and to imagine their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting white supremacy. We explore five key components of a raciolinguistic perspective: (i) historical and contemporary colonial co-naturalizations of race and language; (ii) perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (iii) regimentations of racial and linguistic categories; (iv) racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (v) contestations of racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect our investment in developing a careful theorization of various forms of racial and linguistic inequality on the one hand, and our commitment to the imagination and creation of more just societies on the other.

In this article, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa critique appropriateness-based approaches to language diversity in education. Those who subscribe to these approaches conceptualize standardized linguistic practices as an objective set of linguistic forms that are appropriate for an academic setting. In contrast, Flores and Rosa highlight the raciolinguistic ideologies through which racialized bodies come to be constructed as engaging in appropriately academic linguistic practices. Drawing on theories of language ideologies and racialization, they offer a perspective from which students classified as long-term English learners, heritage language learners, and Standard English learners can be understood to inhabit a shared racial positioning that frames their linguistic practices as deficient regardless of how closely they follow supposed rules of appropriateness. The authors illustrate how appropriateness-based approaches to language education are implicated in the reproduction of racial normativity by expecting language-minoritized students to model their linguistic practices after the white speaking subject despite the fact that the white listening subject continues to perceive their language use in racialized ways. They conclude with a call for reframing language diversity in education away from a discourse of appropriateness toward one that seeks to denaturalize standardized linguistic categories.