There is No Racial Justice Without Linguistic Justice
Language Log 2018-01-15
Today we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
One of my favorite Martin Luther King Jr. quotes come from a speech he delivered at a retreat attended by staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in South Carolina, one year before he was assassinated:
“We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We have been in a reform movement… But after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. We must recognize that we can't solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can't really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.” (King 1967)
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words compel us to ask whether our own houses are in order, as linguists and as scholars. King’s words compel me to ask: how do linguists view our responsibility to address injustice? And how can we use linguistic knowledge and tools to combat social inequalities? Within this intellectual frame, King rejects the notion that basic research is separate and distinct from research that is applied and/or oriented toward social justice.
As an African-American Southern woman scholar, I have taken King’s message to heart and to mind in considering what my personal and professional responsibilities are.
Despite the fact that so much linguistic research has focused on African-American English, making it the most-studied variety of American English (Green 2004), linguistics faces a major inclusion challenge. According to the Linguistic Society of America’s annual report, “The population of ethnic minorities with advanced degrees in linguistics is so low in the U.S. that none of the federal agencies report data for these groups” (Linguistic Society of America 2017:20). As Rickford (1997) points out, it is a systemic injustice within linguistics that our discipline has greatly benefited from the examination of the languages and cultures of populations that are underrepresented within the field it is vital to the development of linguistic science to recruit more speakers of African-American English into the discipline.
To address these issues, I’m happy to share information about a new National Science Foundation REU site that I’m co-directing with my colleague Mary Bucholtz. The project would not be possible with out the leadership of my University of California, Santa Barbara African-American graduate students (listed here with their undergraduate institutions): Erin Adamson (Spelman College), Kendra Calhoun (University of South Carolina), Jazmine Exford (University of California, Riverside), Raheem Jessop (Morehouse College), and Jamaal Muwwakkil (University of California, Los Angeles).
National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates (NSF REU) Site: Talking College: Increasing Diversity in the Linguistic Sciences through Research on Language and Social Mobility
The goal of the NSF REU site is to address these issues by increasing the number of speakers of African-American English engaged in linguistics and related fields, such as communication, speech and hearing sciences, and education. Part of the challenge of meeting this goal is that many of the colleges and universities that serve these speakers do not offer undergraduate majors in linguistics.
The project establishes a direct partnership between the University of California (UC) and Historically Black College and University (HBCU) faculty to establish a pathway for HBCU students to enroll in graduate programs in linguistics. The long-term goal of the project is to establish a sustainable model for cross-campus collaborations that broaden participation in linguistics and related fields. Undergraduate scholars will be recruited each year from three HBCUs in my home state with which I have longstanding professional and collaborative ties: Norfolk State University (NSU), Virginia State University (VSU), and Virginia Union University (VUU). Since linguistics is not offered as a major at the HBCUs, a central goal of the project is to raise students’ awareness of and interest in linguistics as a direction for graduate study. Additional students each year will be recruited from UCSB and other colleges and universities. The project is currently funded for a minimum of three years through both the National Science Foundation and the UC-HBCU Initiative of the University of California.
We will investigate the linguistic choices that African-Americans make as they navigate higher education. The research will shed light on the role of language in the social mobility of African-American students. We will conduct interviews with African-American college students and gather samples of their academic writing and social media activity. In 2019, all student participants will attend the Linguistic Society of America’s Summer Institute at The University of California, Davis.
This work is a direct response to a request that my undergraduate advisor, the late Calvert Watkins made to me for such work in my junior year at Harvard. He believed that a comprehensive examination of how African-American students lived and learned on college campuses would answer long-standing questions of the nature of both the linguistic idiolect of individuals in highly unique situations and also provide information on how to best support the African-American academic speech community during their college years.
The research questions that motivate the project are:
(1) What is the sociolinguistic nature of African-American English on college campuses and how does it vary by region, social class, sexual orientation, gender, and other social factors?
(2) How do speakers of African-American English navigate linguistic choices on college campuses, and what linguistic bias do they face? How do these students perceive the role of African-American English and standardized English across settings on their campuses, and how do their perspectives vary by major, type of institution, and social factors such as gender and age?
(3) What relationship does language play in the social mobility of undergraduate African-American English speakers, particularly in their own perceptions of pathways or obstacles to their mobility via higher education? What challenges and supports related to language variation and education have students experienced, and how do these vary by major, institution, and social factors?
The project is one of the first studies of African-Americans’ attitudes toward African-American English. Little research has been done on this issue, which is crucial in understanding speakers’ linguistic choices, especially under conditions of social mobility. Given the complex linguistic landscape that African-American undergraduates navigate, this group’s attitudes in particular merit examination. We will also create a free public archive of African-American English by having our undergraduate researchers document the language of African-Americans on college and university campuses.
Rickford and Rickford (2000) describe African-American English as follows: “The reasons for the persistence and vitality of Spoken Soul are manifold: it marks Black identity; it is the symbol of a culture and a life-style that have had and continue to have a profound impact on American popular life; it retains the associations of warmth and closeness for the many Blacks who first learn it from their mothers and fathers and other family members; it expresses camaraderie and solidarity among friends; it establishes rapport among Blacks; and it serves as a creative and expressive instrument in the present and as a vibrant link with this nation's past.” Our Souls are the heart of the diaspora. Our souls are not just expressed through history or identity, but through the action of speaking out and up for students throughout the African Diaspora.
In the true spirit of Martin Luther King and in what I can best describe as a linguistic altar call, I invite you to reach out directly to me if you have ideas to support the project or if you know of students who may be interested.
King valued the contributions that each person could make to the world using their own strengths. He valued the street sweeper as he did the artist and the scholar.
So, if a love of language and linguistics is what has you reading this blog, involvement in this project is a direct way to support King’s legacy using your own strengths.
We welcome you to serve as a volunteer mentor for the students either by visiting us at UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis, interacting with students at their home campuses, or virtually. Following King’s model, our work dismantles barriers and seeks to re-intellectualize applied and community issues (rather than de-intellectualizing them, as can be common in academia). The more of us that welcome the students in this project into our communities, and discussions, and lives, the more our linguistic houses will truly be in order and our celebration of King will be active and authentic.
References:
Charity Hudley, Anne H. and Mallinson, Christine. 2017. We Must Go Home Again: Interdisciplinary Models of Progressive Partnerships to Promote Linguistic Justice in the New South. In Language Variation in the South IV. University of North Carolina Press.
Green, Lisa. 2004. African American English. In Edward Finegan and John R. Rickford (eds.), Language in the USA: Themes for the twenty-first century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 76–91.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Speech at an SCLC Staff Retreat,” unpublished. Penn Center, Frogmore, South Carolina, (2 May 1967), KCLA, 32.
Linguistic Society of America. 2017. Annual report 2016: The state of linguistics in higher education. Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America.
Rickford, John Russell. 1997. Unequal partnership: Sociolinguistics and the African American speech community. Language in Society 26(2): 161–198. doi: 10.1017/S0047404500020893.
Rickford, John Russell, and Russell John Rickford. 2000. Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. New York: Wiley.
Bio:
Anne Charity Hudley (@acharityhudley) is the North Hall Endowed Chair in the Linguistics of African America at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Director of Undergraduate Research for the College of Letters and Science. Her research and publications address the relationship between English language variation and K-16 educational practices and policies. She is the co-author of three books: The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and Beyond College, Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools, and We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom. She is the author or co-author of over 25 articles and book chapters. She has worked with K-12 educators through lectures and workshops sponsored by public and independent schools throughout the country. Charity Hudley is a member of the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). Charity Hudley has served as a consultant to the National Research Council Committee on Language and Education and to the National Science Foundation’s Committee on Broadening Participation in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) sciences.