Dismantling anti-black linguistic racism in English language arts classrooms: Toward an anti-racist black language pedagogy

By April Baker-Bell. 2019

ABSTRACT In this article, the author historicizes the argument about Black Language in the classroom to contextualize the contemporary linguistic inequities that Black students experience in English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Next, the author describes anti-black linguistic racism and interrogates the notion of academic language. Following this, the author provides an ethnographic snapshot that shows how Black students in a ninth grade English Language Arts (ELA) class perceptions of Black Language reflected internalized anti-black linguistic racism. The author offers Anti-Racist Black Language Pedagogy as an approach that English Language Arts teachers can implement in an effort to dismantle anti-black linguistic racism and white cultural and linguistic hegemony in their classrooms using Angie Thomas’ (2017) novel The Hate U Give. The author concludes with thoughts about how an Anti-Racist Black Language pedagogy can help ELA students develop useful critical capacities.

Subfields: Linguistics, Social Sciences & Humanities

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Linguistics

1. Hal Daumé Iii
2. Su Lin Blodgett

In Social Sciences & Humanities

1. Hanna M. Wallach
2. Hal Daumé Iii
3. Solon Barocas
4. Su Lin Blodgett
5. Adrian Weller

Citations in the corpus

• Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of “Bias” in NLP (2020, background): “can also draw on a growing body of work on anti-racist language pedagogy that challenges the deficit perspective of AAE and other racialized language practices (e.g. Flores and Chaparro, 2018; Baker-Bell, 2019; Martínez and Mejía, 2019), as”
• “It’s Kind of Like Code-Switching”: Black Older Adults’ Experiences with a Voice Assistant for Health Information Seeking (2021, background): “Sociolinguists and language scholars have acknowledged the harm of dismissing the linguistic history of Black Americans as being “Anti-Black linguistic racism” [6].”