How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, Or What Do We Do About White Language Supremacy?
Presentation: http://tinyurl.com/yyzvdam2
Between 2011-2016:
Black men were nearly six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men, getting 19% longer prison sentences.
Hispanic men are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated as white men. (Sentencing Project)
Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.
What is particularly important to keep in mind is that any given wire of the cage may or may not be specifically developed for the purpose of trapping the bird, yet it still operates (together with the other wires) to restrict its freedom. By the same token, not every aspect of a racial caste system needs to be developed for the specific purpose of controlling black people in order for it to operate (together with other laws, institutions, and practices) to trap them at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. (179)
--from Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Today’s capitalist economic order is a monstrous cosmos, into which the individual is born and which in practice is for him, at least as an individual, simply a given, an immutable shell [Gehäuse], in which he is obliged to live . . . he is caught up in the relationships of the “market,” the norms of its economic activity. (13)
Today this mighty cosmos determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly in business but of every individual who is born into this mechanism . . . In Baxter’s view, concern for outward possessions should sit lightly on the shoulders of his saints “like a thin cloak which can be thrown off at any time.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become a shell as hard as steel [stalhartes Gehäuse, or ‘iron cage’].” (120-21)
--from Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism
During the years between the American Revolution and the Spanish-American War, “iron cages,” to borrow and expand Max Weber’s graphic metaphor, emerged in American society as the self was placed in confinement, its emotions controlled, and its spirit subdued. As white men in power separated themselves from the king during the War of Independence and as they set themselves even further apart from blacks and Indians, they promoted a republican ideology rooted in the Protestant ethic and devised what may be called republican “iron cages” to help Americans rule the emotional part of themselves. (ix)
--from Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
--from Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Sympathy”
The free bird thinks of another breeze
And the trade winds soft through
The sighing trees
And the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright
Lawn and he names the sky his own.
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing
--from Maya Angelou, “Caged Bird”
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
Between men and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it . . . To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem?
--from W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Racial habitus
A set of “structuring structures” that are racialized in society and marked on and through bodies and their languages in at least three ways:
Taken from Bourdieu (1977; 1984), also in Inoue (2015).
“Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?” Ihab Hassan asked my group of teaching assistants in 1968. We are still trying to come up with an answer.
--from Mary Rose O’Reilley’s “Exterminate . . . the brutes”
Freire’s Problem-Posing Pedagogical Process
The Social and Structural
Social values and biases from which I can draw
The boundaries, limits, and pressures toward particular dispositions
Personal Agency (habitus)
My judgement made up from my own dispositions, values, and biases
White Supremacist Society
The way out of these systems [for Freire] is through the problematic, by questioning the things we don’t normally question, questioning just how natural the “natural” is. (54)
--from Victor Villanueva, Bootstraps: From An American Academic of Color
From Aaron Williams and Armand Emamdjomeh “America is more diverse than ever — but still segregated,” Washington Post, May 10, 2018.
From Aaron Williams and Armand Emamdjomeh “America is more diverse than ever — but still segregated,” Washington Post, May 10, 2018.
Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing Task Force Members
Peggy O’Neill, Linda Adler-Kassner, Darsie Bowden, Debra Frank Dew, Susanmarie Harrington, Jeffrey Klausman, Susan Miller-Cochran, Chris Thaiss, Cathy Fleischer, Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt, Jennifer Fletcher, Kathleen Dudden Rowlands, Richard (Dickie) Selfe, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Don Zancanella, Anne-Marie Hall, David Carithers, Kirsten Jamsen, Samia Yaqub, Rina Gonzalez, Dewayne Dickens, Annette Harris Powell, MaryCarmen Cruz
Peggy O'Neill, Linda Adler-Kassner, Cathy Fleischer and Anne-Marie Hall, "Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing." College English, Vol. 74, No. 6 (July 2012), pp. 520-524.
Peggy O’Neill
Linda Adler-Kassner
Anne M. Hall
Cathy Fleischer
Freire’s Problem-Posing Pedagogical Process
[W]hen do we listen? How do we listen? How do we demonstrate that we honor and respect the person talking and what that person is saying, or what the person might say if we valued someone other than ourselves having a turn to speak? How do we translate listening into language and action, into the creation of an appropriate response? How do we really "talk back" rather than talk also? The goal is not, "You talk, I talk." The goal is better practices so that we can exchange perspectives, negotiate meaning, and create understanding with the intent of being in a good position to cooperate, when, like now, cooperation is absolutely necessary. (38)
-- Jacqueline Jones Royster, “When The First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own”
Rhetorical Listening comprises of the following moves:
-- Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness
. . . it deals with the whole rather than with the parts: it attends not to the momentary faltering but to the long path of the soul, not to the stammer, but to the poem being born. It completes the clumsy gesture in an arc of grace. One can, I think, listen someone into existence, encourage a stronger self to emerge or a new talent to flourish. (21)
--from Mary Rose O’Reilley, Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice
We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our live is only to possess, it is not love . . . We must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs, aspirations, and suffering of the person we love . . . . sit close to the one you love, hold his or her hand, and ask, “Darling, do I understand you enough? Or am I making you suffer? Please tell me so that I can learn to love you properly.” (80)
--from Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
[W]hen do we listen? How do we listen? How do we demonstrate that we honor and respect the person talking and what that person is saying, or what the person might say if we valued someone other than ourselves having a turn to speak? How do we translate listening into language and action, into the creation of an appropriate response? How do we really "talk back" rather than talk also? The goal is not, "You talk, I talk." The goal is better practices so that we can exchange perspectives, negotiate meaning, and create understanding with the intent of being in a good position to cooperate, when, like now, cooperation is absolutely necessary. (38)
-- Jacqueline Jones Royster, “When The First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own”
The key to fighting White language supremacy is in changing the structures, cutting the steel bars, altering the ecology, in which our biases function in our classrooms and communities.