NIU hosts seminar on ending ‘White Linguistic Hegemony’

Black students should not be penalized for using “Black Language” and college courses should critically interrogate “white linguistic hegemony and anti-Black linguistic racism,” said a scholar who gave a presentation recently at Northern Illinois University.

“People’s language experiences are not separate from their racial experiences,” the University of Michigan’s April Baker-Bell told an online audience during a November workshop for faculty and graduate students at Northern Illinois University.

The way black language is “devalued in classrooms reflects how Black lives are devalued in the world,” she told attendees. “Similarly, the way we think about this notion of standard mainstream English is directly connected to the invisible way that White culture is often deemed normal, neutral, and superior in the world.”

According to Baker-Bell, when educators require black students to compose their written assignments using what is generally considered standard or mainstream English, they are committing acts of “Anti-Black Linguistic Racism,” defined by Baker-Bell in a linguistic justice workbook she distributed to workshop attendees as “the linguistic violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization that Black Language-speakers experience in schools and in everyday life.”

The first half of the workbook provided participants with multiple exercises to give them the “opportunity to think through how [they] might be complicit in the reproduction of anti-Black racism and anti-Black linguistic racism through curricula, language instruction, pedagogies, practices, and language policies,” as well as how they can “move toward an antiracist approach to language pedagogy.”

Goals of the proposed course center around helping students develop their “linguistic consciousness,” understand the historical and cultural context of black language, “write for linguistic justice,” and critically interrogate “white linguistic hegemony and anti-Black linguistic racism.”

Suggested assignments for the model linguistic justice course include a TikTok or digital animation project on how white linguistic hegemony, anti-black linguistic racism, or black linguistic appropriation are perpetuated by the media.

Obey

Article URL : https://www.thecollegefix.com/niu-hosts-seminar-on-ending-white-linguistic-hegemony/