Abstract
Over the past decade, critical educational linguists have argued for increasing teachers’ and school boards’ awareness of race and racism in language education policy and practice via a raciolinguistics framework (Alim, Rickford & Ball 2016; Cushing & Snell 2023). This framework allows for a close examination of how language and race co-constitute one another, and how their association impacts individuals (e.g., linguistic racism, linguicism, accentism). While the framework primarily developed in postcolonial contexts with a history of racial discrimination against Black and Afro-descendant individuals and communities (e.g., US, UK, South Africa), an interest in raciolinguistics has also recently gained ground in mainland Europe in light of the experiences of both ‘new’ and ‘established’ allochthonous communities (e.g., asylum seekers in Italy [Migliarini 2018], Mexican migrants in Spain [Corona & Block 2020], Black Germans in Germany [Rühlmann 2023]).
Drawing on findings from ethnographic and sociolinguistic research in multilingual Italian schools, this paper argues that plurilingual educators would benefit from the addition of raciolinguistic awareness to their teaching toolkits. In particular, we highlight how the intersection between language and race reveals the mutual shaping of these two practices—how race influences languaging practices and how language plays a role in constructing race. Often a taboo topic limited to the margins of classroom discourse, we argue that raciolinguistic awareness is functional to the inclusive education of new students as well as to the elimination of implicit bias against racialized students. In this presentation, we propose a short program of “do-it-yourself” reflection for teachers and students based on engagement with the linguistically nuanced self-presentations of racialized Italians on social media. This abundant and readily available content about race and language—accompanied by reflection questions grounded in research about raciolinguistics—provides a concrete, practicable, and current means of incorporating raciolinguistic awareness into the plurilingual educator’s toolkit.
References
Alim, H. S., Rickford, J. R., & Ball, A. F. (2016). Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race. Oxford University Press.
Corona, V., & Block, D. (2020). Raciolinguistic micro-aggressions in the school stories of immigrant adolescents in Barcelona: A challenge to the notion of Spanish exceptionalism? International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 23(7), 778–788. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2020.1713046
Cushing, I., & Snell, J. (2023). The (white) ears of Ofsted: A raciolinguistic perspective on the listening practices of the schools inspectorate. Language in Society, 52(3), 363–386. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000094
Migliarini, V. (2018). ‘Colour-evasiveness’ and racism without race: The disablement of asylum-seeking children at the edge of fortress Europe. Race Ethnicity and Education, 21(4), 438–457. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2017.1417252
Rühlmann, L. (2023). Race, Language, and Subjectivation: A Raciolinguistic Perspective on Schooling Experiences in Germany. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43152-5