Composition Forum 47, Fall 2021
http://compositionforum.com/issue/47/

“Your Grammar is All Over the Place”: Translingual Close Reading, Anti-Blackness, and Racial Literacy among Multilingual Student Writers in First Year Writing

Sophie R. Bell

Abstract: This essay describes writing and conversations that took place in my First Year Writing class at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. I analyze student responses to my invitation to consider more deeply—and wield more consciously—the language resources they bring into classrooms. I seek to understand the potential for their often deeply racialized assessment of their own language resources, and those of others, to enable them to build common cause across language communities and racial communities. In particular, I look at the role of Black language as a recurring trope in multilingual students’ writing about their experiences navigating the designation of “ESL” in school. I argue that the volatility of this trope—Black language serves in their work as a call-to-arms, stumbling block, source of strength, or taboo—poses a challenge to contemporary scholarship on language diversity. Ultimately, I center students’ invocations of Black language in the emerging discussion of translingual writing in composition studies, arguing that these students do the work Keith Gilyard has called for in connecting global and local US language struggles. This essay draws from a longer chapter in my book, Mapping Racial Literacies: College Students Write About Race and Segregation, in which I argue that student writing can contribute to and reshape contemporary understandings of how US and global citizens are thinking about race.

This article responds to Keith Gilyard’s 2016 call to realign translingual studies with its original political commitments to racial, as well as language, justice. I undertake this response to Gilyard’s call through close readings of texts by multilingual student writers in my First Year Writing course at a private Catholic university in Queens, New York. In what follows, I make two central claims. First, I argue that, over 45 years after the Conference on College Composition and Communication made Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) their official policy, multilingual student writers still tend to reject linguistic theories of the benefits of multilingualism. Neither when they navigate multiple languages and codes in their speech and writing, nor when they celebrate interpersonal and intercultural connections made possible through multilingualism, do these student writers identify linguistic or cognitive benefits to these connections. In fact, despite wielding tremendous language resources, almost no students celebrate the specifically linguistic value of those resources. Students’ lack of buy-in to the linguistic benefits of their experiences navigating among languages likely results from setbacks to the implementation of both language rights and Civil Rights.

Second, I make a related, more speculative, claim that multilingual writers have the potential to wield their often deeply racialized language resources as tools for building common cause across language and racial communities. In other words, I contend that the cultural work of navigating among languages described by my students often supported them in forming intersectional alliances across racial lines, despite decades of schooling that pushed against both linguistic variety and interracial contact. This makes sense, since the very act of “translanguaging” that I observe in their writing has been theorized by Otheguy, Garcia, and Reid to directly counter the ways that language features labeled as “linguistic” are more often “socially and politically defined labels and boundaries” (298). If, as these scholars explain, translanguaging is “the act of deploying all of the speaker’s lexical and structural resources freely,” speakers and writers who push against strictures to the free deployment of their linguistic resources also push against the social and political—and thus, racial—divisions that have been constructed around language and language learning.

Gilyard’s crucial contribution to the 2016 College English special issue on “Translingual Work in Composition” warns the translingual scholarly community not to lose track of the sociopolitical context in which language debates occur. Specifically, he reminds translingual scholars of the origin of composition’s language rights work in the activism of 1960s and 1970s Black and Latinx college students. However, while language activism began in U.S. higher education with “a particular political problem, the harsh penalizing of students who were firmly tethered linguistically to an institutionally discredited heritage,” he finds the current “translanguaging subject generally comes off in the scholarly literature as a sort of linguistic everyperson, which makes it hard to see the suffering and the political imperative as clearly as in the heyday of SRTOL” (285). Gilyard describes translingual studies as susceptible to disembodied and depoliticized notions of difference. He calls for translingual scholars to take up archival work that centers Civil Rights Era Black and Latinx student activists’ rhetorical practices (288).

Gilyard is particularly interested in writing by student activists driving radical changes in university demographics and language policies. My students write from a different, but related, perspective. They have attended schools during the backlash against the landmark civil and language rights victories achieved by the earlier generation to which Gilyard refers. This article draws from a larger project in which I investigate the potential for cross-race exchanges of writing about students’ personal experiences of neighborhood segregation to promote interracial connections, sharper racial vision, and greater racial literacy. In the course of collecting an archive of student writing and peer review focused on race, class and geography, I also collected student writing about language differences and language resources. The interactions among the linguistic dimensions of social difference and the racial and class dimensions (which I have come to think of as linguistic, racial and class “geographies” in the course of reading and analyzing this work) began to seem worthy of study. This article thus represents a productive linguistic detour in my larger project, examining the ways that language attitudes and practices interact with and impact racial attitudes and practices.

My methodology in reading these student texts is inspired by John Trimbur’s term “translingual close reading.” Trimbur traces a genealogy of close reading as an emergent strategy for discerning student negotiations of difference in the same volume as Gilyard. I take up this concept to closely read texts by multilingual student writers whose families immigrated to the United States recently, in their own or their parents’ generations.{1} My “translingual close readings” are also influenced by scholars who link writers’ languaging identities and experiences to their cultural identities and experiences. I am thinking particularly of Juan Guerra’s linking of linguistic, cultural, and citizenship differences in his analysis of “transcultural repositioning” (7), and Rebecca Lorimer Leonard’s assertion that multilingual writers practice “rhetorical attunement” by “assum[ing] multiplicity and invit[ing] the negotiation of meaning across difference” (228). I am curious about the ways in which student writers’ orientations towards linguistic difference translate into orientations towards racial differences. On my mind as I read these texts was Lorimer Leonard’s tentative assertion that multilingual writers’ rhetorical attunement involves an element of “empathy,” which is “not simply cognitive capacity, [but] a connecting quality—an ability to jump from individual literate experiences to those of many others” (244). Since such empathy potentially undergirds alliances across race and language, I interrogate the ways in which my students offer and withhold such empathy in their interactions across language and race.

In these readings, I connect my students’ experiences with translanguaging to their views on racial groups other than their own—especially through those groups’ languaging practices. To do so, I adopt the term “racial literacy” from Critical Race Theorist Lani Guinier to describe racial attitudes that are dynamic, intersectional, and account for geography and class. “Racial literacy” is a salient term in my class (it appears on my syllabus as a core skill of the class), and features prominently in my other writing about my students’ writing. Guinier coined the term “racial literacy” as a “thought experiment” to envision an alternative to the limitations of twentieth century racial liberalism’s faith in “rights,” particularly as embodied in the mid-twentieth century legal strategy of Brown v. Board of Education. She describes rights-based liberal reform as insufficient, driven by elite agendas and based on a constricted view of racism as “a departure from the fundamentally sound liberal project of American individualism, equality of opportunity, and upward mobility” (100). Guinier envisions racial literacy as “the capacity to decipher the durable racial grammar that structures racialized hierarchies and frames the narrative of our republic” (100).{2}

By naming and studying racial literacy, Guinier appears to be making a move similar to that of translingual studies, searching for ways around discourses of “rights” to mobilize intersectional alliances against systemic racism in a post-Civil Rights Era. My readings of these student texts about their language attitudes and experiences strengthen my understanding of their racial literacy. Through sharing them, I hope to contribute insights of significance to teachers and scholars interested in the racial politics of language learning and its impact on writing instruction. My data analysis looks for new ways that student writing contributes to and reshapes contemporary understandings of the ways in which a new generation of US and global citizens are thinking about race and language.

To lay the groundwork for the larger project this article draws from, I read thousands of texts written by the 512 students I taught between 2012 and 2016. I looked for texts that offered the most salient insights into my central research questions: What did students do with the specific opportunities to write about race that this class offered them? What could I learn from their responses? As I re-read this student work, I built an archive of 688 student-authored texts about experiences with race.{3} Because I developed themes and patterns as I read texts, I used an open-coding approach, taken from grounded theory (Oktay; Bryant and Charmaz). As I began to write about the coding groups that emerged, I used textual ethnography as my methodology, embedding my students’ writing—and my intentions in assigning, responding to and analyzing it—in broader pedagogical, institutional, historical, and theoretical contexts.{4}

While collecting this larger group of student texts about their experiences with race, a subset of 214 student texts emerged that shed light on the ways in which student experiences with language impact their thinking about race. Of these, I coded 79 as descriptions of “code-switching,” 42 as descriptions of English Language Learning, 38 as descriptions of what I called “racial language,” or language that itself is explicitly about race, 38 as descriptions of “translingualism,” and 17 as descriptions of “multilingualism.”

In re-reading this group of texts, I sought to understand the ways in which they could help me understand how these student writers’ ideas about and experiences with language impacted and intersected with their ideas about and experiences with race.

Ultimately, two themes emerged most clearly. First, accounts of confronting Anti-Blackness appeared in many experiences of language learning, whether explicit or implicit, and among students of many racial backgrounds. Students described language sponsors—whether family, friends, schools or employers—embedding “racial lessons”—which almost always focused on Anti-Blackness, whether promoting it or countering it—in a large number of “language lessons.”

Second, I found the significance of students’ lived experiences of linguistic geography—where and how they spoke various languages—also influenced their ideas and experiences with language and race. This seemed particularly significant given that the largest finding I drew from my work reading the entire archive was that students’ lived geographies deeply influenced their experiences and ideas related to race. This finding became the subject of my new book, Mapping Racial Literacies: College Students Write About Race and Segregation. The linguistic corollary to this appeared in many of the texts that addressed language as well as race.

In order to best understand these two main findings about Anti-Blackness and linguistic geography, I focused on six texts in which students wrote about their experiences with translanguaging in the context of learning English as an additional language in school. For this article-length study, I focus on four of those students who wrote about their experiences navigating linguistic and racial geographies in ways that I found particularly significant and complex.

The four student writers who I take up in this essay do resemble the multilingual students who Gilyard describes as “polyglot products of contemporary global dispersion,” and on whom he believes much translingual scholarship trains its energy (285). However, these students also evidence a preoccupation with the languaging of students Gilyard identifies as crucial to, yet disappearing within, translingual studies—“the repressed indigenous ethnics overdetermined by dialect” (285). I have chosen to focus on these students in order to pursue the ways in which Anti-Blackness occupies a latent role in U.S. language education, while purporting to have little to do with Blackness at all. I hope this will make for an intersectional analysis, and also make visible the ways in which students either buy into Anti-Blackness or push back against it.

Through “translingual close reading,” this article brings together the analytical tools of translingual studies, in particular, its refusal to segregate languages across “error” and its embrace of difference as constitutive of all languaging—and those of critical race theory—in particular, the strategy of counterstory, adapted for rhetoric studies by Aja Martinez as a methodology that “empower(s) the minoritized through the formation of stories that disrupt the erasures embedded in standardized majoritarian methodologies” (Counterstory 3)—to parse the harm of racial segregation on young people’s abilities to ally together across racial differences. Arguing that linguistic and racial segregation cause parallel harms, I explore what it looks like for students when those lines are crossed. Further, I discuss how writing teachers might most productively frame and respond to those crossings.

As this project unfolded, I was influenced by the powerful scholarly, pedagogical and activist work of April Baker-Bell in classrooms in Detroit, Michigan and at Michigan State University. Baker-Bell’s incisive analysis of the impact of Anti-Black Linguistic Racism on Black students, and the role largely white teachers play in enforcing such racism, has been a model for me in two particular ways. First, she deftly analyzes the immense harm to her students of these Anti-Black ideas embedded—both consciously and unconsciously—in cultural discourse and educational practice. Second, she uses education to counter this harm. Her promotion of Black Linguistic Consciousness is compelling, and she offers a roadmap to teachers who want to make their classrooms into spaces that do that work. My project attempts to respond to her invitation late in her book, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, to do related work in multiracial classrooms as well. She writes:

Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy is designed to give Black students the tools to liberate themselves from oppression. However, let me also point out that the Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy that I outline in this book offers ALL students and their teachers a critical linguistic awareness of language and identity, language and power, language and history, linguistic racism, and white linguistic and cultural hegemony. These critical capacities are just as important—if not more important—for white students as they are for Black students and other students of color, as white students are more likely to perpetuate Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and uphold white linguistic hegemony by way of their privilege, power, and lack of awareness of language varieties other than their own. And although an antiracist Black Language education and pedagogy are specific to the linguistic and racial needs of Black students, the principles and pedagogy can be adjusted and applied to benefit other language groups. (100)

My analysis of intersectional language and racial dynamics in my students’ writing strongly affirms Baker-Bell’s assertion that Anti-Blackness is an animating force in all student attitudes towards language and race. Further, it is clear that countering Anti-Blackness is a crucial step for people of all races to cut themselves loose from notions of raciolinguistic inferiority and superiority, both internalized and externalized. My analysis attempts to employ Baker-Bell’s important insights and practices in a classroom where students from a range of linguistic and racial backgrounds hold widely-varying investments in racialized views of language.

I argue that the racial and linguistic allegiances and disallegiances my students forge in their writing are impacted by two intersecting histories: first, the Civil Rights Era fight for racial integration of schools and communities and the subsequent pushback towards resegregation; second, the struggle to articulate and implement language rights pedagogies for racially minoritized speakers of English.

This essay’s four close readings of writing by multilingual college students all have an eye on the connections between emergent translingual and antiracist languaging practices. I begin with a deep dive into the writing of one student who articulates intersectional allegiances with other marginalized speakers of English. These allegiances appear to inoculate her against raciolinguistic ideologies and language assimilation despite her lack of value for her own multilingualism and translanguaging skills. Second, I briefly introduce two multilingual students who do something quite different, opposing translingual pedagogies and using Black language to mark the limits of acceptable academic discourse.{5} I postulate that their linguistic anti-Blackness results from their lack of translanguaging opportunities and racial literacy sponsorship. Finally, I conclude with a look at a student whose linguistic and racial allegiances are formed in tenuous contradiction to the monolingualism of his formal education. In my close reading of his work, I call for better pedagogical support for students’ valuing of intersectional linguistic risk-taking in order to foster their racial literacy.

The student writing I cite in this article comes from the opening section of my First Year Writing course, titled “Exploring Language Resources.” In this series of assignments, I introduce language rights and language resource issues and histories, and encourage students to compare them to their own experiences and ideas about language. To begin, I share materials that highlight and celebrate present-day linguistic innovation and introduce a history of global Englishes and language standardization practices. Next, I stage a debate inspired by my former colleague Carmen Kynard and developed with my former colleague Amanda Moulder among contemporary “Academic Code Switchers” in which they debate the policy and execution of SRTOL. The exercise is framed as a collaborative writing and performance of a Burkean “parlor play” in which students enter, observe, and contribute to an ongoing scholarly debate on the effective role of language rights in the teaching of “college writing.” Ultimately, students compose a public letter to a language pedagogy scholar, explaining how their experiences with language differences, language learning, and language resources inform their views on language variation. Most of the student writing I quote in this article comes from that final culminating assignment.

“I suck at English and Malayalam”: Tentative Racial Allegiances through Language

Sarah, a student writer whose work I discuss at greatest length in this article, takes up the most urgent question in my work: What is the potential for inclusive language practices to promote interracial connections and alliances?{6} I chose her writing out of dozens of possible examples because the challenges she underwent navigating school as a marginalized English speaker inspired her to critique White Mainstream English dominance in schools despite her lack of faith in the rich translingual resources she possesses. I believe her writing reveals the potential of positive translanguaging experiences to promote common cause among marginalized English speakers across intersectional lines. Sarah’s linguistic and racial alliances occurred in direct contradiction to the academic monolingualism and racial segregation she encountered throughout her education. Her account of her experience with language and race thus offers a counterstory, in the spirit in which Aja Martinez uses that term, in an era of widespread resistance to implementing pedagogies of language rights and language resources, despite research that clearly supports it. Sarah’s counterstory works “to expose, analyze, and challenge majoritarian stories of racialized privilege” (Martinez, “Critical Race Theory” 24). In addition, I believe her writing can “strengthen traditions of social, political, and cultural survival and resistance” (24).

Sarah expresses leeriness of both monolingual and language resources approaches, placing herself outside both oppressive linguicism and liberatory language pedagogies. At the same time, she articulates intersectional allegiances to fellow speakers of several languages: global diasporic speakers of Malayalam, people of color who speak an “urban”-inflected form of English, and speakers of “white suburban” English. Such allegiances appear to inoculate her against language assimilation and racial prejudice, although she identifies no investment in her languages as linguistic resources per se.

In a scene in the school library, Sarah describes a range of linguistic challenges she faces while describing her love for then-new British boy band One Direction. After referring to Zayn Malik as her “most favorite person out of the group,” Sarah reflects in this passage on being called out by a classmate for her grammar:

“...Most favorite? Seriously?” Emma announced as if she was the smartest person in the world.

I honestly didn’t know what she was asking so I replied, “Yeah, I like him better than the others... So what?”

“Didn’t you hear what you’ve said? You said ‘most favorite’... that doesn’t make sense,” Victoria said in a pleasant tone.

I said to myself, “She best not be trying to correct my grammar in front of all these people... Makin’ me look like a fool.”

“Oh, sorry... I didn’t know.” the innocent Sarah who doesn’t want to cause a scene said.

Sarah—whose family is from Kerala, India and is the first member of her family born in the US—at first accepts her challenger’s grasp on the distinctions between comparative and superlative adjectives as a matter of superior intelligence—“as if she was the smartest person in the world”—an expert on who “makes sense” and who doesn’t. Initially, Sarah meekly assents to the correction, accepting the authority, if not intelligence, of the more “native” speaker of English, despite the quite evident sense of her own initial statement.

However, another voice emerges at the same time. In her head, Sarah begins code-switching into Black language-inflected speech even as she stays externally meek. “‘She best not be trying to correct my grammar in front of all these people... Makin’ me look like a fool.’” Sarah’s internal voice evokes the history of language learning that she narrates in a side note after her opening anecdote. Sarah explains that she spoke only Malayalam until elementary school, when she entered an English as a Second Language (ESL) program in an urban school system.

[ESL class] really didn’t help as much as my parents thought it would have because all the kids I hung out with spoke ‘ghetto’ English. What I mean by “ghetto” is when a person talks with so many derogatory terms and slang in their everyday language. So instead of learning the typical “Standard” English, I pretty much learned “poor” English because of my peers.

Being the kid who knew “poor” English was very tough. My parents didn’t notice it because they don’t really know the difference between types of English. Neither did my brother because he was born and raised in India for seven years. I started to notice my English was terrible when my friends in high school would always correct me. It actually started when I moved from [the city] to [a suburb], which was predominantly a white town. I was a sophomore in high school at the time and my friends would wonder why I had an accent. It wasn’t a foreign accent, it was more of a “New York” accent. In the city, seventy five percent of the population had a different ethnic background, so they would all be coming in with different types of accents. I just developed an accent, that was pretty much a mix of everything, and brought it into [the suburb].

Sarah describes ESL as a place where she picked up “ghetto English,” which then appeared to symbolize for her an allegiance with Black and brown classmates that she carried in her move to a majority-white suburb. She didn’t learn what she was supposed to learn in ESL, which was access to a language of power. Instead, she learned a stance toward language that resists assimilation to whiteness, and promotes alliances with other people of color.

Initially, she appears to describe this language in ways that evoke racial stereotyping and internalized racism: “‘ghetto’ is when a person talks with so many derogatory terms and slang in their everyday language,” the vernacular of her childhood is both “terrible” and “poor.” However, when a second suburban student joins the critique and makes clear the cultural and racial implications underlying the question of “making sense,” Sarah responds quite differently. This student adds, “‘Yeah, you say a lot of things differently. Your grammar is sometimes all over the place. You have an accent, not an Indian accent, but more like a ‘ghetto’ accent when you say certain words like coffee, or water. And you talk really fast when you talk in that accent.’” The second student clarifies that she is not challenging Sarah on her “Indian accent.” Instead, she challenges her about why she “talks ghetto,” which appears to stand in for both talking in a way marked as “talking Black,” and for talking with a New York accent.

Unlike the previous correction, which she deferred to, Sarah takes this as an occasion for linguistic self-defense. “All over the place” does not name Sarah as a “foreign” Asian immigrant. To be clear, she is not an immigrant; she is US-born but highly identified with India. Instead, the allegation of her “grammar” being “all over the place” corresponds with Sarah’s description of her accent as “pretty much a mix of everything,” marked by her Malayalam-speaking family and her New York City peer group of Black and Latinx ancestry. Once this context is evident to Sarah—and through her story-crafting, to her readers—Sarah’s response shifts dramatically.

I got up because at this point I was pretty fed up with this stuck up town. My first year here and this is the type of impression I get.

“I’m sorry I’m not perfect to your eyes. English was not my first language. Unlike you, I’m bilingual. If you don’t know what that means, look it up. I come from a place where English is spoken differently. You can say it’s ghetto, I really don’t care. But don’t pick on me for a flaw many people have. Just deal with it or you can just walk away because to me... you’re irrelevant.” I said as everyone at the table looked at me in complete shock. They never knew I was that type of person to be that blunt. But in all honesty, judging me by the way I talk was something that easily irritates me and something I had to get off my chest.

Sarah’s “blunt” response, unexpected by her white peers, appears to embrace and defend all her languages. Suggesting that bilingualism is an unknown phenomenon to her apparently monolingual and monocultural critic, she flips the tables and establishes herself as possessing a larger range of linguistic practices and experiences than her interlocutor, regardless of her errors in any particular language. She further challenges all of her listeners to learn to deal with different forms of English and different forms of language, or face “irrelevance.”

Sarah’s defense of her bilingualism appears to draw from her positive experiences of alliance with other people of color against the homogenizing linguicism of her new peers. Sarah’s comfort in the culturally heterogeneous student body of her early schooling (and she points out many New York City schools would not have been so integrated) meant that she wasn’t “the odd girl out” since “everyone was sort of like a ‘minority.’” This heterogeneous racial experience meshes well with her linguistic heterogeneity, contrasting starkly with the racial and linguistic homogeneity she describes in her suburban school. Geographic and linguistic movement and combination characterize her ability to resist a potentially meek assimilation into a form of White Mainstream English explicitly framed—by her white challengers and herself—as a disavowal of her connection to the city and the Black and brown people there. Instead, she commands an intersectional language and accent that her classmate describes as “ghetto” and that she uses to defend her own cultural affinities. This defense of urban vernacular in turn buttresses her defense of her Indian diasporic language and culture.

Sarah’s description of this encounter calls out what Flores and Rosa call “raciolinguistic ideologies,” in which listeners “conflate certain racialized bodies with linguistic deficiency unrelated to any objective linguistic practices” (150). Her classmate’s white gaze both conflates Sarah’s racialized body with “linguistic deficiency” and is baffled by her linguistic and cultural practices, which don’t display the appropriate code segregation, which is described as geographic segregation, of the greater New York area. Sarah’s white peer literally calls her accent “all over the place,” referencing her linked geographic, linguistic, and racial heterogeneity. Malayalam speakers have tripled in Sarah’s suburban New York county in the last twenty years, but her family’s detour into New York City’s linguistic and cultural mixtures mean she can’t or won’t read as an “immigrant,” which she isn’t. Sarah’s linguistic deviance from racialized expectations of language assimilation and racial segregation result from her occupation of interracial, translingual spaces—including a diasporic household and an urban ESL classroom.

Despite Sarah’s staunch loyalty to non-standard forms of English, and their connections to her family, to India, and to a network of students of color in her old and new schools, it is crucial to note that she never defends her “Englishes” as linguistically rich and important in their own right. In fact, her assessment of her linguistic resources ascribes to a language deficit model: “Currently, I still have trouble speaking English and Malayalam, so you can say I pretty much suck at talking.” She asserts that being multilingual impedes, rather than enhances, her language abilities. However, she “does not regret” the perceived sacrifice of precision in any one language necessary for her to build relationships across languages, whether those relationships are with her family, the global Indian diaspora, or with other young people of color in the New York area. Without institutional or pedagogical support for the inherent value of her language skills, she nevertheless makes common cause with other marginalized English speakers.

Sarah’s intersectional allegiances and skills form as her family navigates a diasporic landscape that crosses lines of racial segregation. As Sarah describes it, these movements result in crossing lines of language segregation as well, fostering a sense of solidarity with other people of color, and to some extent inuring her to the pressure of assimilation. She is not exposed to any academic rationale for the value of her translanguaging skills. She thus makes common cause with other marginalized English speakers in the absence of institutional or pedagogical support for the inherent value of her language skills themselves. However, without defending her own language resources, she does depict a focus on error as a form of intolerance or ignorance—a preservation of narrow language rules that correlate with narrow racial views.

“The Special Case of Black Language”: Civil Rights, Language Rights, and Racial Literacy

While she does not attribute her resistance against raciolinguistic “correction” to a faith in her own languaging abilities, Sarah does consistently link such resistance to her adolescent friendships and alliances with people of color from a range of backgrounds. Sarah’s internal adoption of Black language to resist segregation and language assimilation supports Geneva Smitherman’s descriptions of the ways in which Black language—both the language itself and the political movements around it—has moved all linguistically and politically marginalized people’s rights forward in the U.S. Smitherman explains that scholarship and activism on Black language have been central to all struggles to democratize language instruction in the US. She cites linguistic and racial reasons for this. First, she explains that “because of ... major linguistic differences, African American language was, and continues to be, the most studied and showcased U.S. English variety, resulting in numerous publications and broad-based exposure in academic and popular venues” (Foreword, vii). Next, she argues Black language occupies such a central role in scholarship and legal rulings on language diversity in the US because of the history of Black activism and Black leadership in intersectional activism. “Blacks were the first to force the moral and Constitutional questions of equality in this country. Further, of all underclass groups in the U.S., Blacks are pioneers in social protest and have waged the longest, politically principled struggles against exploitation” (SRTOL: A Retrospective, 145). Smitherman offers “an ironic footnote in American life—whenever Blacks have struggled and won social gains for themselves, they have made possible gains for other groups—e.g., Hispanics, Asians, gays, etc., even some white folks!” (145). I believe Sarah is a beneficiary of this protest tradition. She reports turning to Black language and to other people of color to navigate racial segregation by language and geography.{7} Sarah’s intersectional languaging practices support her resistance to both racial segregation and linguistic assimilation.

Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL), the document written by Smitherman and other members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Language Policy Committee in 1972 and passed by the CCCC in 1974, has been deemed by Catherine Prendergast an “antidiscrimination measure” that uses “rhetoric to indict language discrimination based on racial discrimination and move people to combat it” (96). The policy’s aim was to protect students from (1) those teachers’ monolingual approaches to writing instruction; (2) the potential use of monolingual approaches to language instruction as screens for raciolinguism, or as Horner et al. put it, “faux-linguistic covers for discrimination against immigrants and minorities: in place of discrimination on the basis of presumed national, ethnic, racial, or class identity, discrimination is leveled on the basis of language use” (309).

SRTOL was a stand-out policy identifying language rights as civil rights in a long and brutal history of nineteenth and twentieth century deployments of literacy as a gatekeeper for the privileges of “whiteness.” Literacy tests have limited the extension of citizenship rights to people of color through two hundred years of US domestic and global expansion, including the Fourteenth Amendment and the Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924, which all but halted immigration from anywhere besides Northern Europe. These laws remained on the books throughout the first half of the twentieth century (Prendergast).

Even when language rights laws were passed, their implementation was undermined—in clear parallel to the implementation of other civil rights. A few examples:

• Despite its importance for college teachers of writing, SRTOL was never fully adopted by the larger body of English teachers of which CCCC is a part, the National Council of Teachers of English, nor was a clear curricular path ever laid out for implementing or enforcing these ideals (Smitherman).

• Although the Supreme Court ruled in their 1974 Lau v. Nichols decision that students have a right to instructional support in public school if they speak a language other than English, the “Lau remedies,” or implementation recommendations, were withdrawn in 1981 (Ancheta).

• After Black and Latinx students pushed for Open Admissions to City University of New York (CUNY) in the 1960s and 1970s, the institution was defunded, and free tuition was eliminated (Reed).

• Beginning in the 1980s, the evasions, disavowal, and dismantling of integration that followed mandatory school integration in 1954 under Brown v. Board of Education have led U.S. schools to be more segregated now than they were in the 1950s (Kucsera and Orfield).

• Beginning with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, literacy tests acted as barriers to citizenship (Ahmad and Nero).

• After progressive immigration laws of 1965 finally removed those barriers, the 1980s saw the rise of English-only movements (Ahmad and Nero).

Hard-won language and civil rights for Black people and for immigrants who are emergent bilinguals have been thwarted, blocked, and diverted by the very courts that made them into law. This history underscores how essential intersectional analysis and alliance are to combating the continued uses of monolingual literacy policies and practices to withhold rights, to exclude, and to marginalize.

Raciolinguistic Ideology and Black language in Multilingual Student Writing

While I have offered Sarah’s adoption of Black language code-switching practices as a productive instance of intersectional racial literacy sponsorship, allowing her a broader view of her own language situation and capitalizing on Smitherman’s assertion of the special case of Black language, I certainly do not have enough evidence to establish a robust theory of marginalized World English writers turning universally to Black language for racial literacy sponsorship. In fact, some of the evidence I have collected from student writers points in the opposite direction. Some multilingual student writers actively adapted raciolinguistic stances towards language after reading scholarship on language rights and resources. Their raciolinguistic attitudes formed despite—or perhaps because of—their own experiences being sidelined in language. What is curious is that these student writers are equally preoccupied with Black language in contemplating the prospect of pedagogies that encourage translingualism’s stance of openness to difference. Black language, instead of being the sponsor of new literacy, becomes the specter they invoke to point out the dangers of linguistic openness itself. I will sketch out two instances along these lines to suggest that the “special case” of Black language can be wielded to promote, as well as contest, raciolinguistic ideology. Further, I speculate that the Anti-Blackness that erupts in these two students’ writing correlates directly with their stances against translingual approaches in the classroom, or against SRTOL itself. I postulate that these students’ lack of racial literacy may differ from Sarah’s due to a lack of support for translanguaging in their own lives, across language varieties and conventions. They are multilingual, but they don’t describe opportunities to practice translanguaging across their language communities, using the resources at their disposal.

Maja, who entered U.S. schools at age seven after growing up in Poland, describes her own success in school as a result of speaking and writing “standard English.” She accepts that she has a “right” to speak Polish, but she dismisses any need for support of that right. Further, she marks the dangers of supporting other novice speakers of English, both in public and in school.

She offers her own story of learning English in the U.S. not merely to argue against SRTOL, but to imply that an English-only approach might be better. Describing her arrival in US schools as a young child who did not understand English—“No, seriously like teachers would say ‘Hi’ and I would just stare at them with a blank expression”—she became “Student of the Month” three months into her first year of school.

Why? Because I worked my butt off to learn English as fast as I could because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to live in New York, anywhere in America for that matter, if I didn’t know the language. I knew (with the help of my teachers and parents) I had to accept the responsibility to learn English in order to survive in a country where the most prevalent language is English.

“I have the right to speak Polish,” she clarifies, “I don’t expect everyone to understand Polish or cater to my needs when it comes to speaking that language.” There appears to be a note of resentment in her formulation “cater to my needs” here, and she explains in the next sentence, “if I was of Hispanic descent, I wouldn’t expect people who live in America to have everything translated to Spanish (which a majority of it is now anyway, but that’s a separate discussion that I have a strong position on).”

Maja migrates towards an English-only approach as the linguistic moral to her experience of immigration and assimilation, ending with an explicit monolingual stance much more extreme than the academic code switcher she addresses, Stanley Fish, who critiques SRTOL’s impact on teaching writing, but renounces the English-only movement she begins to endorse.

I speak the “official” (I put that in quotes because the United States doesn’t have an official language) language of the United States; English because that is the most prevalent language in which all documents are written. They are not written in slang from the hood using ‘n****’ after every sentence, they do not use contractions such as a ‘ya’ll’ from the southern states. They are written in proper grammatical sentences, such as “clean English sentences.”

Maja’s uses of a racial epithet, imagined as part of “slang from the hood,” to warn her audience about the dangers of abandoning “clean English sentences” is alarming and explosive. She invokes both a “hood” version of English and a southern version to introduce terms that are anomalous to “clean” English sentences, making these racially-coded geographic terms sound “dirty.” Choosing two words with long linguistic histories both associated with Black people and/or Black speech, she uses Black language to signal what lies outside of acceptable language. Maja’s rhetorical positioning reads as rhetorically “non-attuned.” Her pugilistic style cordons off non-White Mainstream English, keeps Polish entirely up her sleeve, sends up flares around Black language, flames Spanish without explanation, and dead-ends with an unexplained imperative to use “clean” English. The topic of language diversity seems to have short-circuited her thinking, which is elsewhere fairly flexible and creative. In both cases—her rejection of Spanish and of Black language—the raciolinguistic logic of her embrace of monolingualism is pronounced.

Anika reveals a similar trajectory. In an assignment responding to an excerpt from Suresh Canagarajah’s “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued,” she begins by using Canagarajah’s self-designation as a “simultaneous bilingual” to situate her own experience as a Queens-born speaker, from birth, of English, Hindi, and Punjabi. Excited by the idea that English really isn’t a second language for her, after having been placed for several years in ESL, she described feeling haunted by “this concept of English as a second language [which has] followed me around even after I had passed the [ESL] exam.” Canagarajah’s idea that one can be at home, a “native speaker,” of more than one language, appears important to her as she has felt sidelined by the label “ESL.” She writes, “I knew [my] errors had nothing to do with English being a second language, but that’s what others claimed the cause was.” This experience leaves her feeling under-confident and “non-native” to English, symbolized by the freighted label “ESL.”

Having found this common ground, she then discourages Canagarajah from pursuing translingual pedagogies. Like Maja, she uses Black language as a marker of the chaos that she imagines will ensue: “As a code-switcher and multilinguist yourself, I ask, will you be able to learn all the possible vernaculars of English and keep up with the changes that each new generation brings? Will you accept code-switching in your classrooms especially if it’s a ‘ghetto’ version of English?”

Anika’s writing suggests that the foreclosure of multilingual writing, which has been enforced on her in school, and which she has enforced on herself as well to survive and succeed, can foreclose empathy towards differences, or at least throw it into crisis. Her intermittent moments of interracial solidarity—at one point she writes favorably about the Black Lives Matter movement and expresses agreement with the struggle against colorblindness—go up against her invocation of “ghetto” language as a danger to effective teaching and her allegation in a reflection journal that Black and Latinx activism on campus is “very selfish” and not “relevant” to her.

I argue that, as a result of the curtailing of their linguistic and racial empathies, Maja and Anika imagine a raciolinguistic threat unleashed by a more open stance towards language differences. Unbidden by the assignment or texts they are responding to, both of these multilingual writers summon up Black language, racial epithets, and racially-coded language to condemn pedagogy geared towards language rights or translingualism. Further, their skepticism towards translingual pedagogy and linguistically inclusive notions of English has direct parallels in their racial attitudes. Maja advocates English-only policies in public discourse, while Anika finds that “ghetto” language and Civil Rights lack “relevance” in her education.

One way of reading Maja and Anika’s writing is to observe that it lacks empathy. That lack of a “connecting quality” is consistent across linguistic and racial lines. I have already established my belief that Sarah’s refusal of raciolinguistic attitudes by her classmates stemmed from a network of linguistic and racial allegiances. And I believe that something like Lorimer Leonard’s notion of “empathy” may be an effective term for the ways in which she formed allegiances to other people marginalized through language and race. Sarah certainly does not describe these empathetic connections as linguistic or literate resources per se, but rather the function of sharing community with marginalized and racialized people.

I contend that some combination of factors foreclosing their own translanguaging skills and opportunities—the trauma of monolingual education for a multilingual student, family and community racism unmitigated by integrated schools or neighborhoods, fetishization of Black language, access to white privilege (in Maya’s case) and pseudo-white privilege (in Anika’s case)—may have caused these multilingual writers to support monolingual education, and to invoke Anti-Blackness to mark the need for it. They are prey to what Guinier calls “the distinctive, racialized asymmetries [in] the DNA of the American dream” (116). Because they have not been able to contradict the lies, and the racism, of that “dream,” Maja and Anika lack intersectional empathy and instead voice pervasive raciolingual ideologies. This includes the linguistic corollary to Anti-Blackness, a fear of Black Language as a polluter of “proper English.” Their adoption of the connection between linguistic and racial discrimination divides them from their natural allies, and isolates them.

Tenuous Empathy and the “Shared Hardship” of Immigrating into English

The writing of a final student, Hyun, foregrounds struggles and resources in forming cross-cultural alliances that are both more explicitly linguistic and also more tenuous than those Sarah forms. Since I am interested in the possible connections between language and racial attitudes of my students in a landscape saturated with raciolinguistic ideologies, Hyun’s experience demonstrates the particular instability of linking linguistic dispositions and interracial empathies, especially when questions of citizenship arise.

Arriving in the U.S. as a middle-school-age speaker of four Korean dialects, Hyun experienced his first year in the US to be “like walking in an invisible storm.” Struggling profoundly to understand or make himself understood in English, he describes developing an extreme sensitivity to “body language and face expression,” growing “shy at the sight of a frown,” while his “nerve system began to develop to catch every detail of physical expressions.” This physiological image helps convey a sense of high alert brought on by living outside of the dominant language: “While there are some people who try to understand what I am trying to say with patient, others throw frowns at me and disregard me as soon as they realized my inability.” Hyun’s phrase, “walking in an invisible storm,” became a class touchstone phrase to describe the struggle of language learning. His propensity for unexpected metaphor and intriguing juxtapositions meant his writing commanded attention from his peers, despite the devastating reception his Englishes had received throughout his schooling in the United States.

As he grew more accustomed to the U.S. language scene, Hyun described gaining a sense of linguistic multiplicity, of easy movement among the language communities he inhabited:

As I gained confidence, I could switch from one dialect to the other. I try to speak “Standard English” in front of teachers or professors because that is what they want students to learn in school or college. I speak Konglish (Korean + English) with my friends because, sometimes, mixing them can convey my meaning more clearly. And I let myself free of sticking to grammars at home by speaking my own version of Korean. Even in Korean, I speak ‘broken’ language. I do not care orders of verbs and subjects. I switch them as I want and still people understand.

He sounds much more confident than Sarah, who claims she “sucks” at English and Malayalam. However, despite having acquired languaging skills, Hyun expressed leeriness of the course’s investment in accepting multiple versions of English. He was both intrigued by and skeptical of widely-anthologized texts we read by multilingual writers supporting the value of multilingualism and non-White Mainstream English, like Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” and Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Although he says they “easily arouse my empathy and interest” and agrees “there is no such thing as ‘Standard English,’ and it is fine as long as you convey your idea clearly,” he is not sure how useful this insight is, since “some people are not that liberal as I think to accept that idea.”

He finds these texts unrealistic about the “liberal” acceptance of multiple forms of English and other languages in schools, where he finds himself “afraid to make a statement in class because I felt everyone was eager to check my grammar and make fun of me.” The lack of empathy he experiences in his attempts at mastery of White Mainstream, school-based forms of English contrast with moments outside of school, when relaxed language rules actually increase connection:

There is also advantage in speaking different dialects of the language. For example, there are a lot of Spanish workers at my job. People who stick to “Standard English” would not understand them because their English is not in complete sentences and mixes English with Spanish. But we can communicate and be friendly because we go through same hardship. Speaking “broken” English can be a way to be friendly to those who speak “broken” English as well. Similarly, I could easily be friend with someone who came from same part of Korea because we spoke same dialect.

In Hyun’s description, language differences create opportunities for very different kinds of connection. First, in cross-language encounters, native speakers of other languages can build connections through their shared “breaking” of English into a form they can mutually understand, and additionally through their shared “hardship;” he does not clarify whether that’s exclusively linguistic hardship, or other hardships immigrants experience. Second, in almost the same breath, he equates friendships forged through sharing “broken English,” a term he adopts from Amy Tan, to friendship he would share with anyone from his region of South Korea, who would speak the same dialect he does. He equates these two very different forms of kinship, defining both as “advantages of speaking different dialects.” His fluidity in describing translanguaging appears linked to his hard-fought confidence in translanguaging.

Hyun’s description of empathy for other immigrants marginalized by language is highly tenuous. In the course of end-of-semester research he did into the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act, which was being implemented during the semester he was my student, Hyun struggled with whether or not to endorse the policy and support other students in his generation in obtaining a path to citizenship. He reversed his position several times over the course of his research. On the one hand, he was swayed by anti-immigrant arguments made by people in his high school that the DREAM Act would make college, financial aid, and the workplace more competitive for current U.S. citizens. On the other, he heard the painful stories of his friends who were unable to go to college because they were undocumented. The final factor in developing his opinion was his anger at the great expense and stress he and his family had endured fighting for his green card, which he had recently obtained. This factor perhaps unexpectedly interfered with his solidarity with undocumented immigrants, since he thought it was unfair for people to have an “easier time” than he did going through legal channels to get papers.

Eventually endorsing the DREAM Act, he described being swayed by his friends’ stories, rather than his own. I believe these stories, shared in “broken English” outside of formal spaces, created a thin but vital thread of empathy running between himself and even more vulnerable immigrants. His attunement with their experiences of “shared hardship” in language and citizenship appears to offer a linguistic roadmap to highly idiosyncratic, tenuous, interracial and intercultural allegiances.

Like Sarah, and unlike Maja and Anika, his descriptions of translanguaging with other marginalized English speakers tip the balance of his empathetic response. He and Sarah both interacted with linguistically and racially marginalized people who weren’t from their own specific cultural or language groups, people whose language resources were also non-standard, but different from theirs. Positive translanguaging experiences led to greater racial literacy in both accounts. Although I do not have time in this article to compare their experiences to those of other students whose accounts are in the archive, this pattern is borne out in other student texts. This suggests that translanguaging opportunities can have a critical impact on students’ stances, not just towards linguistic differences, but racial differences as well.

Conclusion

This study of First Year Writing student texts has several implications for the teaching of college writing. It suggests that even students with tremendous linguistic resources may not recognize the value of those resources, given the failure to implement either language rights or language resource pedagogies in elementary and secondary schools. It suggests that the more students are ruled by fear, by accepting their own marginalization, and by monolingual and raciolinguistic ideologies, the more vulnerable they may be to Anti-Blackness and anti-immigrant beliefs. On the other hand, the more they risk miscommunication, discomfort, “looking stupid” and being novices, the more resistance they may offer to raciolinguistic and straight-up racist beliefs.

This is where composition classrooms play a crucial role. More punitive approaches to language differences promote more intolerant approaches to racial differences. Teachers need to actively promote and foster language and civil rights despite the full-on assault against both in legal and educational policies. We need to build translingual competencies by providing translanguaging opportunities and spaces for reflection on translanguaging into our writing instruction. We also need to build racial literacy by supporting intersectional experiences and histories that answer Guinier’s call to “extirpate the distinctive, racialized asymmetries from the DNA of the American dream” (116). We need to give students opportunities to debrief negative experiences of language shaming, language loss, and raciolinguistic targeting that shrink their sense of possibility and common cause, discourage them from linguistic risk-taking, and foreclose their potential alliances with other marginalized people. If we do these things, translanguaging will support racial literacy.

Notes

1. I accept Lu, Horner, Royster and Trimbur’s assertion that there are no “monolingual” English speakers and writers, since, “virtually all students who are monolingual in the sense that they speak only English are nonetheless multilingual in the varieties of English they use and in their ability to adapt English to their needs and desires” (311-312). Despite the importance of this insight, Otheguy, Garcia and Reid describe a key difference in the experience of monolinguals and bilinguals:

   “[A]ll speakers, even monolinguals, monitor their speech to some extent in order to adapt to the interlocutor and social situation at hand. Our point has been that since bilinguals have idiolects with larger sets of lexical and structural features than monolinguals, and since they are often of necessity in situations where they must communicate with monolinguals, more of the language features of their idiolects are often of necessity suppressed, that is, their monitoring is more intense than is usually found in monolinguals. For most monolinguals, to deploy all, or nearly all, of their linguistic resources, that is, to translanguage, is closer to normal everyday behavior, because monolinguals are usually granted license to operate at full or nearly full idiolect. But for bilinguals, the deployment of full linguistic resources can run up against strong norms articulating the sharpness of linguistic boundaries.” (297)

   (Return to text.)

2. Important insights and work have constellated around the concept of “racial literacy” in education, composition, and diversity work. While some scholars promote racial literacy among pre-service (mostly white) teachers to improve their teaching of students of color (DiAngelo, Grayson, Sealey-Ruiz), other researchers use racial literacy as a term to describe and analyze the tools people of color use to name and counter the racism they encounter, from daily microaggressions to large-scale historical and institutional racism (Kynard, Twine, Stevenson). My hope, in the larger work from which this article draws, is to listen for, support, and promote racial literacies in both of these analytic frames—a tool to combat white racial illiteracy and a tool to heed and amplify the critical racial literacies of students of color. (Return to text.)

3. Before I began collecting this archive, I applied for and received IRB approval from my institution to use student writing for research. For 8 semesters, I asked students for consent to use their writing in my research. I have included only writing by students who gave consent during that time, and I have changed all of their names to maintain anonymity. These texts had been stored by students on password-protected websites used in class. I uploaded selected student texts to a similarly data-secure archive. I reviewed each text that consenting students had written in response to assignments that asked them to write about race. I coded each text I entered into the archive. (Return to text.)

4. A model for this is Sara Ahmed’s “ethnography of texts” in her interviews with university diversity workers, and in particular, her insights into their relationships to the documents involved in their work (On Being Included 11). (Return to text.)

5. Until recently, I used the term African American Vernacular English (AAVE) to refer to traditions of speech and writing in U.S. Black communities, in order to be able to name and link disparate moments in which this set of traditions is referenced by my students. To refer to the set of linguistic norms often misperceived as “standard,” I used “Standard English,” employing scare-quotes on “Standard” most, but not all of the time, and on the whole phrase “Standard English” at times as well. You can see from my students' writing that this is the term we used in class.

   However, more recently, I have been influenced by April Baker-Bell’s use of “Black language” and “White Mainstream English” to refer to these same sets of linguistic practices. Baker-Bell writes, “By linking the racial classifications Black and white to language, I am challenging you, the reader, to see how linguistic hierarchies and racial hierarchies are interconnected. That is, people’s language experiences are not separate from their racial experiences” (2). Her purposes resonate deeply for me, given the connections between language and race that I attempt to make in my classroom. Further, her political purpose of using Black language “to align with the mission of Black Liberation movements like Black Lives Matter” is highly strategic and worth emulating (3). (Return to text.)

6. I identify all student writers in this article with pseudonyms. (Return to text.)

7. What Sarah does with language certainly represents cultural appropriation of Black language as well. As a white teacher who analyzes the work of students who are mostly people of color, my ability to perceive such dynamics, as well as the danger of participating in them myself, is palpable. I do not wish to discount the ways in which Sarah is exploiting Black language, but to emphasize that she is exploiting it in service of multiracial translingual solidarity. At the time of this writing, I believe the ways in which Sarah adopts Black language—in her head and on the page—fortify her defense of Black and South Asian multilinguals and their communities. However, the appropriative move in her assumption of Black-inflected speech is real. (Return to text.)

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