Language, Race, and White Public Space Notes

  • Jane H. Hill is a sociolinguist focusing on Native American languages and identity construction.
  • Racism in anthropology: A shift towards studying racism as a central cultural phenomenon, akin to studying irrational beliefs.
  • Linguistic anthropologists initially combatted racism through education, emphasizing the equality of all languages.
  • The focus has expanded to include studying the "culture of language" of dominant, "race-making" populations and racializing discourses.
  • Key Questions for Linguistic Anthropologists:
    • What makes signs publicly accessible via racializing discourses?
    • What discourses are deemed racist and by whose logic?
    • How do racializing discourses vary and distribute across communities?
    • How are children socialized into racial subjects through discourse?
    • What do discourses of resistance reveal about racism?
    • How does body racialization connect to speech racialization?
  • Urciuoli's research highlights how Puerto Ricans experience language in two spheres: a blurred "inner sphere" and a sharply defined "outer sphere," where linguistic order is crucial.
  • Whites permit themselves linguistic disorder, especially at the Spanish-English boundary, creating a "White public space."
  • White Public Space: Contexts where Whites are invisibly normal, and racialized populations are visibly marginal and monitored.
  • Whites exhibit linguistic normalcy through "orderly disorder," using Spanish in ways that would be unacceptable for Puerto Ricans.
  • "Mock Spanish" is used by Whites, incorporating Spanish to create jocular or pejorative tones.
  • Strategies of Mock Spanish:
    • Semantic pejoration (e.g., macho).
    • Use of obscene Spanish words as euphemisms (e.g., Casa de Pee-Pee).
    • Adding "Spanish" morphology (e.g., el-cheap-o).
    • Hyperanglicized pronunciations (e.g., Grassy-ass).
  • Mock Spanish functions to elevate whiteness by directly indexing cosmopolitanism, regional authenticity, or humor.
  • Indirectly, it relies on negative racializing representations of Chicanos/Latinos.
  • Mock Spanish is a covert racist discourse, differing from vulgar or elite racist discourse because its racialization is indirect.
  • Whites create a desirable persona through linguistic heterogeneity, but this is often unavailable to racialized groups.
  • Linguistic elements are incorporated into White public space from various sources, including African American English (AAE).
  • Crossover from AAE can be indeterminate, sometimes masking its origins.
  • Mock forms may have parodic potential, but can also reinforce racial hierarchies.
  • "Crossing," where adolescents use out-group linguistic tokens, may challenge racial order, but its long-term impact is uncertain.