On April Baker-Bell: What does language have to do with anti-racist education?
Pre-script: I am a white, junior scholar who is promoting/discussing the work of a Black scholar/elder. The credit belongs to Dr. Baker-Bell and the hard work she has done with Detroit high school teachers and students. If you like what you read, share the post and BUY HER DANG BOOK!
Key words:
anti-black linguistic racism
white mainstream english
linguistic hegemony
color-evasiveness
linguistic appropriateness
respectability pedagogy
Not 4 months ago I was preparing my business-launch video, listing the ways teachers (who are mostly white, middle-class and ‘nice’) could begin thinking about how to bring a sociolinguistics lens to their classrooms. This was back in June 2020, as the nation horrifyingly watched George Floyd’s life slip away under the knee of a police squad, and protests erupted in the streets. Day after day. The cognitive dissonance in my brain was undeniable: is my “nice little list” (that includes teaching Black youth to code-switch during appropriate times in school) really doing enough to help Black youth achieve in our schools?
Enter stage right April Baker-Bell, a rising-star scholar from “the D” who published THIS BOOK for the English teachers (the book is a part of an NCTE series). Think of this text as the teacher-accompaniment to Ibram Kendi’s tome on how to confront racism in your life. Baker-Bell grew up (and raises her family) in Detroit where she has a position at Michigan State University, and has studied with some of the great Black applied linguists of our time: Geneva Smitherman, David Kirkland, and Sammy Alim. Collectively, their work has been signaling that anti-Black linguistic racism permeates even well-meaning, cutting-edge curricula and that Black students are perpetually being taught that their home language is inferior and error-ridden.
Enter a nice, white junior scholar (yours truly) who shirked the pursuit of an Ivory Tower position to work directly with teachers on matters of applied linguistics in the classroom. As I entered the 2020-2021 school year, teachers asked me how the BLM movement intersects with my work in bilingual education? And then I began to wonder whether I have benefited from white mainstream English in ways that my friends with melanin haven’t?
If language matters (as my brand presumes), then what does language have to do with anti-racist education?
For the remainder of this post, I’ll highlight focal quotes from Dr. Baker-Bell’s book, to invite the reader in conversation with my evolution of thought on the topic of anti-Black linguistic racism.
This does challenges me, the reader. If I buy into this theory it has implications that academic language requires some undoing/de-valuing in our system. I also wonder what implications this has for non-Black students who’ve had little to no interaction with Black youth in school. What kind of literacy education does ABB want for them? As another literacy coach reminded me, white privileged youth are the default population of curriculum writers. And a part of that privilege is not needing to ask these kinds of questions.
The parallels to Kendi’s book are explicit: white supremacy has invaded every nook n cranny of our institutions, so why wouldn’t it have invaded our literacy practices, too? Her quote similarly reminds me of Bourdieu's assertion that, “schools are sites of social reproduction.” That schools have historically socialized Black youth to disassociate from their home languages is a blatant form of institutionalized linguicism.
Though my history as a teacher (and teacher educator) has been predominantly with Latinx youth, I can imagine a classroom where I leveraged the power of accessing standard English as a pragmatic tool to lift up Black youth. I’ve said is much in my graduate courses and papers written on the topic of academic English.
My default way of seeing and ’separating’ Latinx and Black students (achem, are Dominicans, Haitians and Afro-Peruvians not a part of this group?) means I’ve got more critical work to do in recognizing that categories create monoliths in my mind. Again… language matters greatly and the way we think about and label students influences how our decisions and behaviors form around these learners.
God bless Dr. Smitherman! This quote answers my framing question about what language has to do with anti-racist education. People are, think, behave, and move through the world in their language. It’s wrapped up in their identity, sense of self-worth and binds them to their lineage. For all my assertions that teachers should adopt linguistic Funds of Knowledge pedagogies, I have mistakenly endorsed code-switching. This is a practice that discourages Black Language empowerment and is a form of “Anti-Black Linguistic Racism” pedagogy (Baker-Bell, p. 23).
When teachers shame Black youth for speaking Black Language, the affect is deep/wide discrimination on a child’s soul. For too long educators have hidden behind the valence of ‘helping’ by correcting/re-directing Black youth to speak in standard registers. Until I began to see the harm as its laid out in a Linguistic Justice framework, I’d continue to promote the same “Respectability Language Pedagogy,” (p. 28).
These are my thoughts on the matter of integrating racial categories/hierarchies onto the work of language teaching and learning. What do you think of the quotes? Have you read her book? I invite you to comment below on how some of this work can promote an anti-racist pedagogy in your classroom.