Language Tensions Podcast
Where the messiness of language meets a good conversation.
Language Tensions Podcast
Language and Race Tensions
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In this episode, Dr. Tasha Austin and Dr. JPB Gerald explore how raciolinguistic perspectives reveal links between language, race, and identity. It examines linguistic pushout, colonial power, and barriers shaped by race and class. The hosts question who counts as a “legitimate” speaker and urge educators to challenge deficit narratives, disrupt hierarchies, and center students’ lived experiences.
This podcast season was generously sponsored by the Spencer Foundation in partnership with the Adelphi Faculty Center of Professional Excellence.
Language tensions, where the messiness of language meets a good conversation. This podcast season was generously sponsored by the Spencer Foundation in partnership with the Adelphi Faculty Center for Professional Excellence.
Speaker 1My name is Dr. JPB Gerald. I am I don't know who I am. I'm a person who, if you're paying attention to these sort of things, you probably know my name. I exist in the world. I write books. My third book just came out. You know my name. I'm here today with Dr. Tasha Austin, and I'm gonna let her introduce herself.
Speaker 2For sure, yes. My name is Dr. Tasha Austin. I am an assistant professor of teacher education, language education, and multilingualism at the State University of New York at Buffalo, just for you. And so uh as a research researcher, practitioner, um, I do teach qualitative methods for doctoral students. So anyone who's interested in um kind of like the non-numeric side of how do I make sense of you know data in the world that could probably solve some problems uh in the social sciences, it's not specific to education or language education in that regard. And on the master's level, I teach those who want to become world language teachers. So um anyone who wants to teach any language in a K-12 space in the United States, um, I teach that course for them. My research um is really looking at manifestations of blackness and anti-Blackness in language and language teacher education. So that is from anything related to pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, policy, and everything in between. Um, really just trying to make sense of what these narratives are surrounding the black presence or absence in language study. Um, and I have um probably a heavier focus on world languages um in terms of my published work. So I'm grateful for the invite. I'm excited to talk about this with you. And JPB, we got we got some uh history. We've been doing this for a few years. So it's nice to see you still doing your thing.
Speaker 1All right, so you sort of mentioned a bit about your work. But if you can talk a little bit about your work and so how it relates to language, race, identity, and sort of the tensions between all of these things. I know they overlap, but they don't just overlap neatly. There's tensions between them, right? Especially for race and language, because all these podcasts are about language and identity and related disability. But how do these things overlap and push against each other in the work that you do?
Speaker 2Yeah, so um in a lot of ways, I consider myself an educational linguist. And the reason I like that framing is because educational linguistics always starts with the problem. It doesn't say, well, I'm only a linguist, so I can only do things related to X, or I'm only an ed researcher, so I can only do things related to Y. So an educational linguist is first grappling with whatever that problem is within the context of schooling, and then applies the framing and the expertise of linguistics to try not only to make sense of it, but then to offer some roads forward. And so I say that first because it kind of helps to put, you know, a grouping around some of the things that I've pushed into, which would otherwise maybe seem like disparate. So some of my earlier work is very much focused on teacher education, but the education of world language educators and language educators more broadly. So world languages, particularly in the US, refers to folks who want to teach languages other than English. And that's my background. I taught Spanish for about a decade in the northern area of New Jersey, so right across from New York City. So hyperdiversity, loads of multilingualism, loads of socioeconomic diversity, more on the poor or working class side. Um, and there's a big um distinction between the way languaging happens in the community and the way it happens in the school building. And so I grew up seeing that. And, you know, to be a professional and then a researcher and someone who's preparing world language teachers and to kind of watch how that happens from, you know, what I call linguistic push out in these areas where you may have the capacity to do advanced language study and find success and use language in the world, but there seems these incessant barriers at every step of the way. If it's not the counselor telling you that that's not for you, then it's the teacher who is kind of saying you're a disciplinary problem. If it's not the entry exam that only honors imperial varieties of whatever the language is that you're studying, be it like Castilian Spanish or Parisian French, then it's this uh lack of articulation between what's offered in your high school and what's needed to continue in college. There's just incessant barriers. And so to see that not only through my own experience, but then as I'm trying to prepare the next generations of language teachers, I see the tensions like abounding. And most of it, it from what, from my perspective as a linguist, is the discourses surrounding who can do language. It's the discourses surrounding who's rightfully in these spaces and who doesn't belong. Um, it's the discourses of a broken pipeline and lack, and we don't have enough teachers and no one's capable of doing this. That really leads me to kind of have studies around policy, practice, genealogical work. Like, how did we get here from the inception of what we call, you know, the United States. So I could go research paper by paper and tell you some of the inroads I've made in different ways. But those tensions, I think, at least how I'm trying to get it to make sense for you all as to why I do what I do, is the result of not just seeing it as a professional, but seeing it in my own life. Becoming a Spanish teacher was overwhelmingly driven by spite of all of the times I was told, no, you don't belong here. No, you can't do that. Sure, you have a 98 average, but you're not a native speaker. On and on and on at every stage, um, recognizing that this is super political. Um, it wasn't really merit-based almost at any point. So those those are some of the tensions.
Speaker 1Um, do you want me to go physically cover my mouth so I didn't interrupt you because I was thinking things in responses to what you were saying? You know, it's just sort of like I it's kind of like stopping it, stuck stuffing a sock in my mouth. So I didn't say anything because I wanted you to finish your point. There's a couple of things to go through there that like there's so much spite in my education career, you know. When it started, it was just sort of like I don't know what to do, and then I did it, and then like one of the things that I noticed, and I've written this in some of my publications myself, is like in the moment, what I'm about to say was sort of goofy, but in retrospect, it makes sense in a sort of colonial language sense, which is that when I was living in Asia, the assumption they never met not, you know, they they knew of white people, but they and they vaguely were aware of brown and black people, and they weren't I was not treated with hostility whatsoever, right? That doesn't mean there isn't racism there, that just means different, right? And the assumptions they made of where I was from until I spoke. Once they spoke, they knew I was American, you know, but um were first they would say Philippine Philippines, right? And I I don't look Filipino, right? But that's not like a good or bad thing. I just I just that's just not what I look like. Um or or Betanam, which Vietnam, right? And I'm just like, I don't look Vietnamese, right? I am short, but um, and then in retrospect, I've done all this work, and then I learned a little bit about the country I was living as living in South Korea, was that like these are a lot of the places that were the sort of underclass professionally, right? And so until I spoke, they're like, in what underclass can I place you? Right? I didn't understand this at the time because I hadn't done the work and so forth. Yeah, right? Once I spoke, they're like, Oh, he's American, yeah, but he must be a soldier, which is its own imperialism thing, but it's also he can't be a knowledge person, right? And then when I said I was a teacher, they just sort of blinked at me. Again, nobody in Korea, aside from other Americans, were unkind to me, right? It was just sort of a lack of experience, right? And so that and part of the reason my most recent work is about sort of pop culture and so forth is that like if you're in a place where you don't have direct experience, you're gonna learn from the social media and the internet and pop culture and so forth. And I don't blame people for that because how would you know? I don't know a lot of people from let me just make up a country here. I don't know a lot of people from like Tajikistan, like I don't know, and I I never met these people before. Um, so like I my assumptions would be based on what I've seen popularly. And what you said, especially about how it's really a challenge not to sort of fall into the things you're sort of it's like how do you, as this person who's trained in scholarship, not replicate that archaic scholarship when you're trying to train teachers, but you also have they have to learn what the old research is, otherwise someone's gonna come at them with well, you don't know the old research. Right? And so how do you frame the old research as like you need to know this, but it's bad, or it's it's it's old, or whatever, but then like they're like, Well, why would I learn? So it's like that's a really difficult tightrope to walk on, and I've experienced that myself. To go into the next thing, which will allow you to go back into the some of the things you already mentioned, the the the thing about language, race, identity, and these things they're like a Venn diagram, you know, they all overlap. And I would say that to me, what do you think is something that people don't really understand about the ways, even after you know, what has it been, 10 years since the racio linguistics original article, right?
Speaker 22015 2015, 2017.
Speaker 1Yeah, only there's a couple of them, but the first one, the one that like the term and people were like, oh, for the Florida, it was 2015, I believe, right? And what do you think people still don't still don't understand, even if they read the article? Because we're talking, I'm sure it's gonna be academics and so forth listening to this and students, and so they probably heard you're not listening to this if you pay attention to that, right? So, within that realm, what do you think is still not understood? And I'm not blaming Flores and Rosa for that. I've spoken to both of them, they're great, uh, but like one article can only do so much.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, your comment about like which underclass do I place you in, I feel like speaks volumes because I think the fact that there is a shared struggle beyond these geopolitical borders is one of the hardest battles to fight in terms of shaping discourse. The challenge being that being racialized as the permanent underclass serves a function no matter where you are. Overwhelmingly, those tend to be black folks wherever you are. And when I think about my application of a racio-inguistic perspective, because the term itself, just racioinguistics, right, could be traced back to a number of scholars. But the raciolinguistic perspective itself, which is the one that I draw from, I think um the deep theory of it is not necessarily engaged, right? Because it is so um recognizable and valuable and it feels immediately applicable to a lot of, like I said, being an ed linguist, anyone who is like, I want to tackle this problem and this framework is perfect for it. And so we run, right? We take off and we run. But if we kind of dig back into the theory, um particularly for what shaped the racioinguistic perspective, then we realize like it is not the application of a racio-linguistic perspective if you're not centering in colonialism. And a lot of people who draw from the framework don't, right? They're like raciolinguistics is a study of race and language, and they move forward. And that is true, but the racialinguistic perspective is theoretically very, very tight, well-grounded, and draws on black and women of color feminisms. And it does so because of a lot of what you're talking about, like how are you supposed to separate these things, right? Like class from third-world women's struggles, from, you know, um, the way that gender plays out as a construction of domination and power, from um, you know, again, colonialism, what are the aftermaths and the remnants of setting up these discourses that determine who is fully human as opposed to who is not. Um, those, as deeper theoretical underpinnings of how you apply a racio-linguistic perspective, will really shift the work that you do if you if you tap into them. If it's drawn from kind of from a surface level, like look at what happens when these two things are tethered to one another, it will, I think, advance maybe your argument. But if we're actually trying to get to the root of things and pull them up, right, um, and actually disturb the secondary, tertiary, and all the aftermaths of the effects of what the root cause is, then it has to go back to these encounters of colonialism and how empire continues to be reinstantiated in classrooms, not just by teachers, but through policy, through the law still, right? Who qualifies under these particular titles? Who gets to be an emergent bilingual? Who gets to be a world language student? Who has access to AP levels of language learning? Like this is no coincidental kind of construction. So if you want to kind of do some of that deeper eradication of some of the taken-for-granted phrases and categories and titles that we use that lock folks into these stratified categories, it takes using the theoretical back end of the raciolinguistic perspective.
Speaker 1You know, I think that there's sort of an additional tension here, right? Because what you're saying is obviously of a lot of value, and it's something that I didn't understand before I started my own studies, and I'm sure you didn't either. That's what the point of the studies are. I mean my doctoral studies, right? And which is that I I sort of misunderstood the value of theory, right? I think that some of it is we should probably use a different, I don't mean academics, but like there should probably be a different word for a framework that we use to understand the world, which is more or less what we mean by theory. I'm I'm oversimplifying, but you get what I'm saying. Maybe we could add another sentence to it, but you get what I'm saying, versus like on the more um physical science side, something like how gravity gravity is a theory, right? And so when I would hear theory, I'm like, well, that means it's not real, right? And I'm not saying that you're saying that, I'm saying that for the outsiders, which is most people, it's like 98% of Americans, right? It it seems like, okay, well, this is just someone's thoughts, right? And to be clear, everything I write is my thoughts, but they're based on stuff. So what I'm saying is that I think that to really dig into these sort of hierarchies, divisions, however the particular issue is construed, right, depending on what the topic is, um, is that what I misunderstood when I first started thinking about these things on top of each other, even before I read the Nelson and Flores article, right? Which I didn't read until I was at my doc program, because like who reads journal articles if they don't have to? Who's like, I'm gonna read a journal article? Like, why why would you ever do that? Um, which is a problem, by the way, it's a whole different problem we can talk about. But which we actually talked about like a few years ago on the podcast, right? It's just like yeah, anyway, um, not that the article itself is bad, it's just mean like the fact that this great knowledge transfer is happening inside of a bubble, right? The point I'm making is that like before I even knew that that was a thing, I knew there was something missing from my understanding, yeah, right? But I didn't know what it was, like I felt it, but I didn't have the language to express it. Yeah, you know, and I think that that's one of the things that can be a challenge for people like you and me, but particularly you, because you're more directly plugged into academia than I am, of like getting the ideas across. Like you can publish in the journals, and I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, you do do that, but what I'm saying is that in just sort of conversations with people where it's this or or any sort of public-facing thing, yeah, like there is a I've said the type up already, balance beam, whatever metaphor you want to use for a thing that is thin, um, that you have to not fall off of, of like, how much am I speaking to people who should know this but don't? Yeah. And how much am I bringing in new people? And I'm not even talking about class, I'm just talking about public communication here. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And like it's a challenge to do both at the same time, especially. Because, like, me trying to harangue academics into letting themselves understand that they don't know enough, yeah, is a different effort than me taking the stuff I've learned from theory and presenting it to everyone else. I try to do both at the same time, it's hard, it doesn't always work. And I think that your work, and I'm now therefore giving you an opportunity to go through your work. You see, you see the segue, um, is uh is like you've done a really good job of balancing that, but it's it's it's still hard. Yes, because like the outlets that it's in, yeah, which is not your fault, again, you you know, publish parish, whatever, right? You know, and like for me, like my first book was quote unquote successful in academia. So like a couple thousand copies, yeah, right? And it's like for academia, yeah, yeah. It's like, wow, yeah, but for like the world, the world is reading like the let them theory or whatever. And so, yeah, how how how could how do you try to balance that? And you can go through some of the stuff you've published in this moment uh to think through all of those, again, tensions.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, so for me, I think the benefit and I think about um you you probably know Dr. Yolanda Sealy- Ruiz. She always says that she's like an accidental academic. And I love how she describes that. And for me, I think it's to my benefit that I, you know, I'm first gen, like that my parents didn't go to college. They're brilliant, but they didn't go to college. And so to have the PhD and to be preparing more generations of researchers, everything to me is like a surprise, right? I I I'm not moving from some pattern. And the reason that that benefits me is because oftentimes I'm doing things in ways I think it makes sense. And then later it will be said to me, wow, that was such a such an innovative. And I'm like, it's not innovative if in my mind the goal from the outset was to make as much sense as I could to as many people as I could. And so, you know, like I know, if you're doing the journal publishing thing, you know, they'll give you very strict expectations. I push back against those for sure, because often those expectations diminish the work, right? They reduce the message, they ask you to be more, to hedge more, to be more careful. But the data say what they say. And so if I were to, I'm having a meeting with my research team on Friday, so we can talk through a paper that just was accepted, but the reviewer comments were so awful. Like I've never seen a paper be accepted, and you're still getting feedback that are saying, you are so defensive. It it would have been a better paper if you had just. And then putting the findings of your work in quotation marks as if to say, so called. Like it's very demeaning these processes when you are looking to like uh have scholarly output, right? But at the same time, I don't see that as my only level of impact. The fact that I'm working with doctoral students, I'm pulling back the veil every step of the way, saying, I want you to see this. This is a person who X, Y, and Z, right? Like, I'm not hiding that and just being this person who, for all intents and purposes, like, oh, I publish easily. And no, every paper of mine on average takes about two and a half years because that's how much I'm fighting in the background, because I'm not going to take away the language, because I'm not going to erase the emotions behind being a part of the group that I study. I am not sitting behind a glass looking through a peephole on folks that I'm trying to understand. I'm a part of that group and I refuse to shrink and try to make it seem like I'm detached from them. And in the meantime, I'm teaching about it, being vulnerable, being transparent, being authentic, and telling them what those struggles are. I'm showing them the inside and the messiness and the fact that, nope, this was my sixth version of this. Oh, it got rejected for the third time. Because I think we have to dispel some of the mystery. I think that helps. And then, of course, there's public scholarship. Like I do have the papers that you can read in foreign language annals, educational linguistics, urban education, these places that hopefully these are the target audiences in terms of research to get these insights out. But I've published a children's book, a bilingual children's book, right? El Barrio Mio, my neighborhood. The book is just about, it's like autobiographical. Why does this African-American girl speak Spanish? Because I grew up around a bunch of Puerto Ricans in Jersey City. And I wanted to be able to talk to my friends. And I wanted to go to the bodega. And I was in the Quintanera. Like it's giving the type of perspective on language learning that has really been pushed out of academic publishing, where they only want to marinate on world languages is for the elite. Too bad these communities don't have enough money to learn language. That's not how language is learned in the real world, particularly not in contexts like Jersey City, where language is everywhere. And so my goal is to simultaneously, yes, push the research, but also show folks who want to do work like this. You don't have to let people tell you that your work isn't good enough to publish. Fight. Fight. Every step of the way, fight. Some of us who were not coming from multiple generations of academics, we know how to fight because we had to fight. It's just a different way to fight in these places. So beyond the children's book, you know, I have the podcast, episodes of critical conversations. It was two years, various episodes of talking to those who were trying to do better as language educators to push back against anti-blackness, but also folks who are doing incredible work. I'm talking about Patrienne Smith, Aris Clemens, Shandel Niro, uh Keisha Bryan. I was talking to these brilliant folks who are also a part of the same communities that they're studying in the legacy of Zora Neil Hurston, where you have to fight to tell people that we're worth studying too, and not from uh looking in on the natives' kind of disparaging outlook. Um, and and and the articles that I feel like most speak to the tensions across these various domains are the one that I co-authored with Uju Anya in Foreign Language Annals, uh, World Languages for Black Linguistic Reparations, because for one thing, it goes back to the roots. We were talking about the colonialism and using the racio-linguistic perspective from its theory-based contributions. And we're recognizing like the policy and the legal forms of restrictions on Black literacy and civic participation, particularly in the US, and how that is the foundation of world language study. And it has to be reckoned with in that way from its colonial inception in order to rightfully shape any inquiries surrounding world language education today. So we push the field and we say, first you have to redistribute the resources that we have in this field, right? We keep making it a question of lack, and there is not a lack in world languages. We're watching the programs close, right? But if you really ask the question about who's being prepared, where are you looking for potential language teachers? Who do you see is eligible? Those are very different questions than how many people enrolled in the program. How many people can afford to not work and get an income for two years on an unpaid internship to become a teacher is a better question. Then we say you have to repair world language teaching so that it meets the standards of Actful, the standards that say it's about communication and community and connections, as opposed to just looking for language as a commodity to put more things on the resume. And then we say you have to recreate the field in general to be narrated through a global lens, back to thinking about the farce of the geopolitical boundaries. There is an underclass all around the world. And if you think about presenting the field of world languages as a place where you can be connected to folks who have a similar experience, as opposed to where do you fit in your local hierarchy, like it might be more enticing. So, I mean, that paper, I think, is one that it is open access. Um, it is not an empirical paper. So it's it's very historically and genealogically oriented, which I think is valuable for folks across different domains. Then I would also recommend, for example, um more of an empirical work where we looked at and worked with a Spanish teacher in Miami, Florida, who's of Afro-Cuban descent, who is teaching Spanish to Afro-diasporic elementary students. So you're talking about nine-year-olds who are essentially all black class, but from different areas of the diaspora. And she's having amazing success teaching these young people because she assumes that they're capable, right? And she's not over-disciplining them. She's being very innovative in her approaches, she's not sticking to the limitations of the lesson plan, but she's responding to them and their needs, either through music, through play, through the dynamics of COVID, which restricted other opportunities she had. But again, people don't typically ask these questions. They're going in already to see where's the lack? Why aren't these kids doing this? What can't be done? What's the sad story? There's success all the time, but we're we're asking questions around the trauma and the deficit. So we find what we're looking for. I have two other papers that I think would be valid.
Speaker 1At the very end, a moment to just sort of list a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1Sort of like just titles. So you can Google your titles offhand because I'm sure you remember every single word of those subtitles. Um, nobody, nobody's ever remembered their own subtitles. So I will give you a moment after this next question or two to just sort of just run through like let's just say top five, right? Just because no one's gonna read 30 papers. Um they're just not gonna do it. They're just not gonna do it. I would you wouldn't huh? You wouldn't mean because I looked you, but that that's not how people in the world. Like, because I'm just like, Tasha, I'm going there. That's not, but I know you and I know this. Like you're telling me things that I kind of already knew, but you're telling the audience. So anyway, you know, when I first got into sort of researching race and language, like I had obviously been a language teacher for most, for my career at that point. I'd done that for like nine years, and I really thought at that point that the data that was clear, because you know that big Gorenson study, right? That just showed that just having one black teacher had a large correlation with uh graduation rates and was it North Carolina, South Carolina, something like that, right? Which correlation and causation aren't the same thing, it's more probably a school that bothered to have a black teacher would be supportive of. I don't think that one teacher fixed everything, right? It's more if a school thought that it would be a good idea to have a black teacher, then the school was probably doing the right thing for the kid. Um, not to say the black teacher didn't help, but like I can't prove that that one teacher. So anyway, I was refusing to believe that I was that important for learners. But like all of my classes when I was teaching sort of like these three adult ESL classes on the east side of Manhattan, those were the ones where the educational results were just so much better than the other classes. Now there were teachers who were less experienced, and I was like, well, okay. I mean, that's just any job. People less experienced might not be as good. And then I had someone who was fully experienced, but it was like it was only my classes where they would show, and I don't even mean the best plus oral test, which is kind of nonsense, but like they would clearly show a gain in like success, confidence, etc. Right? And I'm like, well, it's not me. It can't just be me. I know I'm a good teacher, but I'm not like the best teacher who's ever existed. So it was all all this delving into the research was based on my refusal to believe that I was that good of a teacher. And um, but as you sort of said a second ago, in terms of like sort of an understanding of the students, a true humanity of them. And like I look back, I guess it's like seven or eight years ago, and think like I don't know if it means that I'm that good of a teacher, but it also means that I think that they were that bad of teachers. I don't know which one it is, but there's a gap, is my point. And so I think about that. I think something you mentioned, uh Dr. Silly Ruiz was like the only person with she was like the main blurb of my second book, so fully agree on all of that. And then I wanted to think about sort of what you said in terms of oh yeah, the underclass and so forth. Yeah, I think that um in terms of language, especially, one of the things that's really interesting to me is that like I was told, and and Koreans are very honest people, and I appreciate that. That it's not like the Midwest where they'll pretend where they told me, and all of my colleagues were very nice to me, they clearly had stereotypes in their heads, but they were very nice to me, right? And like I'm not gonna blame them for learning what they learned from movies, but then being nice to me. Like you can learn what you learn from movies and be mean to me. And so they said to me, you know, we were a little bit concerned when we saw your picture, but because you went to Princeton, we hired you. And I'm just like, and it sort of makes me think of these sort of what is it, the um, you know, the Broderick and Zemotius article, is that what it is? The the sort of um smartness and whiteness article. I forget what the you know these academic titles, you know what I'm talking about. Um, you know what I'm talking about from 2011, right? And um it it was that and then like thinking through things and doing this work that made me realize that like then I thought back to high school, and um, and I mentioned this in my second book because I was talking about neurodivergence, but I thought back to when I had white friends who were having a conversation in the like student lounge, and they were talking about like affirmative action and saying like they thought it was unfair, and I'm sitting there and they said, What about Justin? And they said, Well, Justin's smart, which is to say, in the moment, I'm like, Well, yeah, I'm smart, right? But in retrospect, what they were saying was he's not like the other ones. Yep. And in the moment, I'm like 15, 16, like, I don't know what I'm thinking about. I don't want to like piss off my colleagues, my classmates, or whatever, right? Um, not because I was scared, but just because, like, what is the point of pissing somebody off at 11 o'clock in the morning? You know, it's just Tuesday at 11. Like, I'm not gonna have a fight right now. But it's one of the things I look back on in retrospect, thinking about like how my identity, in this case, is being uh, you know, Cisette black man without um language oppression that is outside, without named language oppression, I should say, although identity, language oppression, so forth, compared to certain things like even when I I worked at a senior center years later, right? And this story I tell people sometimes where like because I used to live in Korea, one of my new colleagues was Korean, right? And everyone was calling her Huen, which that's that's a name, you know. I didn't think anything of it. And then I heard her on the phone once speaking in Korean, and it's clear she was doing some sort of appointment, and they were like, What's your name or whatever, right? And she said Hyoin. And I'm like, interesting. And so I said, Okay, can you write your name down for me in Korean? Because Korean's phonetic. Right? Like this is uh some of it's imperialism in the sense that they wanted to appeal to other countries. But in the late 19th century, they changed their characters to be like, this character is this sound. Right? There are a couple of exceptions, but it's mostly that. And so I said, Can you write your name down in Korean? Because I I do know the alphabet. I don't like speak speak Korean, but if you write down what a bunch of characters, I can pronounce it. I may not know what it means, but I can read it. And so she wrote it down and it's Hyo in. And I'm like, so your name is Hyoin? And she said, Yeah. And I said, So why do they call you that? She said, I don't feel like correcting them. Right? And so then, and this is a very neurodivergent thing that I did, I went to my colleagues, and whenever they would bring up her name, I said it's Yoin. And they're like, No, it's he win. And I'm like, but it's Join. And I'm like, just ask her. What's her name? Yeah, and and they asked her, and she said, Showin. And they got all quiet for a few days. And I'm just like, the point is that there's just sort of this understanding that that the uh a certain type of languaging is infantile. Is you're a child, right? If you don't communicate the way we expect you and want you to, you're a child. And this is a woman with like a master's degree and all. I'm not saying credentials mean you're a better person. I'm just saying this is a woman who's done enough where you cannot, if she didn't have a Korean accent, you wouldn't think she wasn't a child, right? I talk about this a lot because the fact of the matter is she was sort of drummed out of the professional community eventually because she got tired of this and she's like her her her husband was adopted, she just decided to be a stay-at-home parent. I don't know what she's doing now because her kid's like 12, so she's probably doing stuff now. But the point is like she got tired of it.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1And this sort of thing pushes people out where it's just sort of like you don't get that respect, you you don't you may get that affection. There are people who may like you as a person, which isn't really identity-based, but like they won't respect your intellect.
Speaker 2Yep.
Speaker 1And I think that that's really one of the most unfortunate things about this intersection. Right? And then if you stand up for yourself intellectually, you're arrogant. Or angry. Or depending on the particular circumstance. Right. You're angry or you're arrogant, right? And it's like, I don't know about this guy or this woman, or non- You know what I mean, this person. And you it's just sort of like if if I was white or or or spoke a different language, or depending on the particular circumstance, you'd be like, oh, what a firebrand. What a trill, what a maverick. Standing up for himself. Go you. Don't be disrespected. Right? And they I think they think all of us are Jaiman Hansu in Amistad. Where I think you I see your face. I think they think all of us are out here saying, give us us free. And I'm not blaming him, because that was a really good performance, but like it's and also that apparently really happened, but like still, it's just sort of like I think they think all of us, when we stand up for ourselves, need to be standing up for ourselves in a pigeon, and by that I mean P-I-D-G-I-N language. And it's like if we stand up for ourselves in a lower register of English or whatever language, then we're allowed to stand up for ourselves. Like, good for you. You're still not equal to me, but you said some things, and I respect your ability to say some things, but you still said it wrong, so I can think I'm better than you anyway.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, so what stands out to me about that is like I I see the utility of using the word push out, which is why, and it's funny because that's what was put in quotes on my on this article feedback, like whatever this push-out thing is. I'm like, it's real. You don't have to respect it, but it's real. Uh, the spaces that we're in that we get pushed out of, which is, you know, this is my take on Monique Morris's work of the criminalization of black girls, right, in schools, particularly in the US, where you're not allowed to stand up for yourself. Like you're not, and you certainly aren't allowed to stand up for others, which is what black women and black girls are characterized for doing. But rather than it being, you know, kind of marked as, wow, what an upstander, uh, you know, what a type of group or person that thrusts forward the potential of what society could be, it's your disciplinary issue, right? Because you're pointing out what it is to be a part of that permanent underclass, but not to take it sitting down, right? Or to even witness it and then intervene. And so the reason the language of push out was so valuable to me, and this is this is um a piece that I wrote called Linguistic Imperialism, um, which is, you know, countering anti-Blackness in world language teacher preparation, is because, in terms of the theory that substantiates it and how it plays out in these spaces, is that it's predicated on three things: idealized whiteness and native speakerism. Um, the absence of critical and cultural histories of black peoples in these spaces. So we just pretend that there's no reason that we would characterize particular people as being either infantilized and not capable of thinking or speaking for themselves, and others as being um scary and intimidating and aggressive, like that's detached from historical contexts. And the third is outright anti-blackness and racism. So among those three reasons, we end up pushed out of these spaces. So for that colleague to have spoken up for themselves, a lot of folks decide it's not even worth it. I'm not even gonna say anything. I know I'm gonna be made into this archetype of the mammy or the angry black woman or the matriarch or the Jezebel. Like, that's why the archetypes exist, because you can find them repeated in the exported media that are the likes of which your South Korean colleagues were familiar, right? Which is like, oh, you must be a military, like, because there's no other reason for you to be here. Um, and then when you think about the notion that there are levels to how we perceive language, I don't care if he said, give us us free, I'm gonna punch you in the head. I don't care what he said, like pigeons, creoles, uh, named languages, all the varieties of our survival and brilliance, there is no hierarchy except for that which is imposed upon it from the very same people who are oppressing us in the very same systems that are oppressing us. So, within that linguistic imperialism article, I talk about an activity that I've done ever since with my world language teachers, the pre-service teachers, called the linguistic imperialism padlet. Because what I noticed is that they'll be at the last stage, I'm about to be a high school Spanish teacher, high school French, German, Italian, whatever it is. And they have no notion of how that language traveled from its imperial center to the rest of the places it is around the world. And so you're supposed to be the expert in the room, not just on the words and the language and the code, but on the people and the cultures. But you don't know why people in Peru speak Spanish. You don't know why people in New York City speak Spanish. You don't know why people in Equatorial Guinea speak Spanish. And that's a problem. And so what they do in that activity is that they have to trace at least three places around the world outside of the empire, where the language is used, under what circumstances the language arrived there, and as a result, how they need to teach with an understanding of imperial and colonial impacts to recognize that somebody who's saying, give us us free, is actually not only resisting and brilliant, they can rock out in your language, their language, and the third language they had to come up with to be able to communicate without you being a surveilling entity in their lives.
Speaker 1So, what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna give you about 60 seconds to pull up your Google Scholar page so you can list a few articles by actual name. And I'm so I'm gonna talk for about 60 seconds. Which is to say, yeah, I think about the give us free thing and so forth, which is not to to to to to uh denigrate the character he's playing and so forth, but I think that it's it's it's telling because like his statement of Liberation, his his his request for liberation is the same as any human's, right? Depending on the circumstances. Obviously, he people have different things they need to be liberated from. But I think what racial linguistics does is it means that because he's not saying it right, then it's like, well, I'm glad, you know, you know, pat him on the head, right? Like, oh, here's this child or animal, whatever. You know, I feel like that the black people around the world, and depending on the context, but anyway, are both subhuman and superhuman at the same time. Whatever whatever we are, we're not human, right? Which is to say we're subhuman in terms of our intelligence and so forth, but superhuman because, well, we don't feel pain. But it's like we know animals feel pain. Like that's the thing, is like even these people who will be who are racist will understand that they don't want to hurt their dogs, right? I have a dog, but I'm not, I mean, I'm not gonna try to hurt my dog. I'm just saying that like somehow we're both unable to comprehend things, but also when we do things, we we we don't feel the same way that other beings of our level feel. And it's like even like like spiders feel pain. Like, what are you talking about? I like spiders, I'm gonna say this negatively. It's just like pain is not feeling pain would be a pretty terrible way to live in there. That's like a disorder, that's like a thing that happens, and it's like those people mostly just die because they don't realize they're like arms hanging off or something like that, right? So, you know, to be both of those things, because that basically means you're like a monster. You're not a real person if you're both subhuman and superhuman, you're Frankenstein's monster at that point. Um, and I've said in various writings that that's just sort of like the projection they have of us, which is to say, I think that there's sort of an under explored explanation, which is that the image that has been created of us is what they think would happen to them had they been through what we've been through. Which is that we would lose our ability to think and we would be uh not susceptible to pain and struggle and so forth. Because they probably and I don't think this is conscious. I mean, the framers maybe, but just an individual person. I think what they've been handed down for 300, 400, whatever years, is like these people like if I had been in that situation, I would be a literal monster.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1Right? And it's like the fact that that's not true, not that there aren't individual black people who are monsters, but like uh as a culture, is sort of it's sort of when when we break out from that, is when they can't deal with it. And like not just break out from it to be kind, which I don't think that that makes them break their brains. I think it's when we break out from that and succeed in their world, intellectually, especially, financially is one thing, especially if it's within like athletics and art and whatever. I'm not blaming the athletes and artists or whatever, right? In fact, those are some of the the only like wealthy people who I think have earned their money, because like, yeah, you did earn that contract, LeBron, right? You know, so like he did play. But I think that one of the only things I think there is that when we are purely penetrating intellectually, that's the one thing they just they just can't, they can't. It's just they can't, they can't deal. So, anyway, that's the last thing I'm gonna say. Dr. Austin, uh, thank you for your time. If you have a couple things to recommend, or if you just have like a website and it's all on there, it's probably the easiest thing, or something like that, or if it's all on Buffalo EDU or something.
Speaker 2Yeah, I'm grateful for the conversation. Like, I wrote down some things that you said because I'd I'd like to follow up with you because we've had some really curious overlaps in our experiences just as we navigate being like black professionals within the language space. Um, but probably um the only two pieces that I haven't mentioned that I feel like are worth um taking a look at um is one that's just a commentary. So again, like these pieces that aren't like, oh, empirical works and here's the methodology. But really, this is more of a reflection um on what they call countertext. Like, what can we look at to give us the stories that push back against these same discourses of black inferiority or, you know, this sense that um when you encounter black folks in the world, they're either super or subhuman. Um, and again, I feel like that's the value of the theoretical end of the raciolinguistic perspective, because that's Sylvia Winter, no humans involved, where she comes from the real world in the 90s, where, you know, this kind of brutality towards black men, particularly um by the police, where they're using a code when they call in the violence, saying NH NHI, NHI, no humans involved, right? Um, and so I think we have a lot that we have given the world that is so far beyond the response to hate, the response to violence. We are not the white imaginary. We have existed long before the violence is perpetuated against us. Um, and so in language awareness, um, I was invited to write a piece um just on these countertexts. And so it's called the role of black languaging in conjuring contextual knowledges. And the fact is just to look around from newspapers to boycotts to protests to poetry to songs, blues. Um, there's just so much that we've put into the world in terms of language and discourse that shows you who we are, our humanity, innovativeness, creativity, brilliance. Um, that's just not considered because it doesn't have a DOI, right? Because it didn't go through double mass peer review. Um, and so it's just a very quick recap of all the places that you can look and go. Um, because we've been speaking since times immemorial, from glyphs to hip hop. Um so if you really want to know, just look. Um, but outside of that, you know, I think probably just my Google Scholar is a decent place to start. Of course, there's the Critical Conversations podcast series, which you can just find on YouTube that's open to the public. And yeah, I guess just keep an eye out for the children's book because it is already published. It's been out since 2012, but I'm reissuing it. So it'll be uh widely available again soon in the coming months.