Infinite Tapestry:
Language Repression and the Work of Radical Educators
As the United States galloped into the 20th century, this young nation (with less than 150 years under its belt) was enjoying unprecedented economic growth. This growth was made possible in part through the development of the Southwestern territories, a generous hunk of land that it had won from Mexico only 52 years earlier in the Mexican-American war. Although the natives of these regions suddenly found themselves living under a new flag and ruled by a new government with a new language, they held fast to their identity as hard-working and honest folk. These Spanish-speaking Americans along with their former paisanos in Mexico lay the foundation for this booming economy. Although this was their ancestral land, millions of Mexicans would cross the line at the Rio Grande that had been drawn by their neighbors in the North to make a living for themselves and their families as farmhands. In doing so, they helped to create one of the largest and most successful economies in the world. The US encouraged it, enjoying the cheap labor, and in 1942 they created the Bracero program, a farm labor agreement that helped fortify a war-torn workforce and keep the new world power happily fed (Radical History Book Club).
Despite the obvious boon that Mexican workers brought to an economy that couldn’t function without them, they were met with hostility and treated as foreigners in a land that had been theirs for generations. Much like the Indigenous tribes to the East, the children of Braceros, immigrant workers, and even US citizens of Mexican descent were segregated and forced to attend “Mexican Schools,” where they were coerced to forget their native tongues in favor of English and abandon their culture to make room for the new White-American status quo (RHBC). While educational institutions are commonly idealized as places of learning, enlightenment, and prosperity, the opposite has been true for many millions of American citizens and residents. For most of the United States’ history, schools for people of color have provided little more than institutionalized gaslighting and “fostered a cultural self-hatred.” As the Radical History Book Club points out: “Cultural shame can be deeply internalized when your people have been branded a plague on the country you call home.” In this essay, I will attempt to show the work that many radical educators have done (and are still doing) to acknowledge the brainwashing methods of the educational system in order to change them from the inside.
Chicanx, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples are not the only groups who have had to endure language repression. As the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the National Council of Teachers of English (CCCC/NCTE) has clearly asserted in This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!, Black students have been taught to hate themselves through a dismantling of their linguistic structures for as long as they have been allowed to attend schools. They have five major demands:
- That teachers stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm, which reflects White Mainstream English!
- That teachers stop teaching Black students to code-switch! Instead, we must teach Black students about anti-Black linguistic racism and white linguistic supremacy!
- That political discussions and praxis center Black Language as teacher-researcher activism for classrooms and communities!
- That teachers develop and teach Black Linguistic Consciousness that works to decolonize the mind (and/or) language, unlearn white supremacy, and unravel anti-Black linguistic racism!
- That Black dispositions are centered in the research and teaching of Black Language!
While I do not have space here to fully dissect the educational history of each demand in context to the extent that I would like, all five demands speak to the same hypocrisy that Chicanx and Latinx students have suffered. Namely, that the United States owes much of its culture, identity, swagger, and clout to the languages and linguistic systems of people of color. As a general rule, the best and most profitable pieces of these systems are plucked from the whole without context while the human beings who helped create and sustain them are tossed to the side and forgotten. In a nation where nearly all the cultural gems of our language (and indeed, the way most people talk outside of the academy) come from black culture (ie: lit, woke, yas, bae, bet, on fleek, spill the tea, straight up, word up, after party, no cap, etc…) how does it make any sense that our educational institutions at large teach the dialects that these phrases come from as ‘informal,’ and ‘incorrect’?
As the CCCC itself states:
We are witnessing institutions and organizations craft statements condemning police brutality and anti-Black racism while ignoring the anti-Black skeletons in their own closets. As language and literacy researchers and educators, we acknowledge that the same anti-Black violence toward Black people in the streets across the United States mirrors the anti-Black violence that is going down in these academic streets (Baker-Bell, Jones Stanbrough, & Everett, 2017). …In reflecting on the current historical moment and movement for Black lives, Baker-Bell (2020) argues that “the way Black language is devalued in schools reflects how Black lives are devalued in the world . . . [and] the anti-Black linguistic racism that is used to diminish Black Language and Black students in classrooms is not separate from the rampant and deliberate anti-Black racism and violence inflicted upon Black people in society” (pp. 2–3).
The term “standard English” itself is an oxymoron, and although the attempt to educate our students in it might seem benign, it is not. Just like the line across the Rio Grande, the rules of grammar are drafted by the victors of conquest. The nonsensical structure of the English language itself speaks to the many invasions the British Isles endured from Angles, Saxons, Romans, and Brittany. It is full of contradictions and hardly makes sense (just ask any immigrant who has had to learn the language in order to thrive here). The English language is an ever-flowing river of magma, kept fresh and liquid by the constant eruptions of invasion and migration. The lava has never cooled, and the norms have never solidified. This is why we need a translator to read our own foundational texts like Beowulf or Shakespeare in order to understand them. A Spaniard reading Don Quixote would not have to work so hard. So, to claim that this language has ever had a solid structure is ludicrous, and to punish or shame students based on that false belief is nothing short of lunacy. The CCCC shines a light on a truth that is seldom acknowledged: Educational institutions hail from a tradition of language suppression, which has always been a key instrument in oppression because thoughts take form from words. If an institution can control the way you speak, then they can control the way you think.
While segregation and language suppression are not as blatant as in the days of “Mexican Schools,” “Indian Schools,” and “Negro Schools,” the problems that arose from them are still ever-present. When students are told that their way of speaking is not only incorrect but makes them seem stupid, uneducated, or of a lower class, it is clear that the CCCC is right on target with it says that “standard English” does little more than enforce White Mainstream English and foster a culture of resentment. The student resents the teacher for demeaning them while at the same time downloading instructions to hate themselves for the way they speak.
The way we speak is inseparable from the way we think, which in turn is inseparable from our personal identities as human beings. In her study, English May be My Second Language, but I’m Not ESL, Christina Ortmeier-Hooper points out that “learning in a second language is not simply the accrual of technical linguistic abilities but rather is intimately related to identity — how one sees oneself and is seen by others as a student, as a writer, and as an ethnolinguistic minority,” (Ortmeier-Hooper 392). This study follows three students who have had to take English as Second Language courses, and yet reject the title of “ESL Student,” because it is a glass-half-empty model that focuses on what the student lacks rather than what they can bring to the table. Beyond that, it also ostracizes students, making them feel like imposters or outsiders in their school. They feel isolated. Like they have nowhere to turn, and often do not seek out help, even when it is available to them. While observing these students, and the studies of many other students, Ortmeier-Hooper has noted “that the ‘imposter’ or ‘outsider’ image is a strong one that perpetuates a deficit model of “ESL” that can discourage students from seeking academic assistance.” Indeed, this deficit model leaves many students “convinced that the whole educational enterprise [is] a game, a test of survival,” (393).
There is some good news, however, amid this discussion of racism, language suppression, and colonization. Many educators today recognize the effects that the colonized classroom can have on their students and are working to change things from the inside. Author, professor, and pioneer of freewriting Peter Elbow has explored in his writing how to turn the classroom into its ideal form: a place of learning rather than a brainwashing facility. Much of his approach includes taking a calculated step backward in order to empower the students to hold each other accountable and to take learning into their own hands. In Grading Student Writing: Making It Simpler, Fairer, Clearer, Elbow notes how even the traditional system of grading can get in the way of learning, and do more to create that cycle of resentment:
Grading tends to undermine the climate for teaching and learning. Once we start grading their work, students are tempted to study or work for the grade rather than for learning. They see writing as an exercise in trying to say “what teachers want” rather than working out their own thinking. Students resent the grades we give or haggle over them and, in general, see us as people they have to deceive and hide from rather than people they want to take into their confidence (127).
In saying this, Elbow highlights both the platonic ideal of all that teachers could be, while at the same time showcasing the reality that most students face. Even the most kind-hearted teachers must recognize that they are in a position of power when they teach, and this power dynamic affects the psychological landscape of the classroom and skews it. Elbow is a master at recognizing all the historical and emotional baggage that a teacher takes on, and devises methods to account for it. In A Method for Teaching Writing, Elbow proposes a much more democratized classroom where the students grade each other’s work. In this kind of classroom, students focus on creating writing that is simply “good,” rather than trying to fluff up their papers with academic jargon that they think will please their teachers. In this model, students are able to improve their writing at a holistic level because they are not forced to artificially insert language that is foreign to them while at the same time deleting and omitting so many aspects of their personality that make their identities as writers unique.
Ann Johns echo’s much of what Elbow is saying in her 1986 essay for TESOL quarterly, Coherence and Academic Writing: Some Definitions and Suggestions for Teaching. Johns argues that “rather than relying on teacher correction, the students devote more time to monitoring their own work and to providing an audience for their peers. The teacher sees a more finished product which cuts down considerably on grading time”(254). Although it does not explicitly intend to do so, this model of teaching helps resolve many of the issues of identity posed by Ortmeier-Hooper and the CCCC. Namely: when students are asked to write within the strict confines of the academy they are often forced to excise crucial aspects of their identity. When they are allowed to write without the behemoth of language repression breathing down their necks, the pressure of not embarrassing themselves in front of their peers proves to be a much healthier method by which to produce good writing. This writing is clear and coherent, while at the same time a unique expression of the student’s identity and voice.
The author, feminist theorist, and political activist bell hooks speaks to the fact that writing and reading at the academic level can be more of a hindrance to learning than a help. In an interview with Gary A. Olson, she comments on the deep linguistic gorge that many students and working-class people have to jump over in order to have access to most educational texts. She compares the heady, superfluous, and often lengthy writing in academic journals to a simple book called Breaking Bread by Shahrazad Ali and had this to say:
I wondered how we expect people who work every day to come home and read these ten-and twenty-page essays we are taught to write in the academy. And so I learned from Shahrazad Ali that you can write a kind of book like Breaking Bread…in which people can come home and open it up to any page and read that page and feel that they got some idea and that they understood it, that they could digest it… This is a real challenge to us academics who have been trained to write longer pieces, and I see it as a subversion of the whole sense that there has to be only one monolithic writing style that can be given scholarly legitimation in the academy. Sometimes I write ten pages of something and I think this could have just as well been said in three pages, but most journals aren’t going to want to publish three pages. I’d like to see journals become more open to publishing smaller pieces if they can truly say what we have to say in that short space. (Hooks, Olson, 4).
So, it becomes clear that the pedantic language and self-indulgent length of many pieces of academic writing act as a wall to a world of knowledge that is simply not accessible to most folks. As hooks notes, most of this writing could be dramatically shortened and made more accessible to more readers, but there is no room for that kind of thinking in much of University culture. Looking at writing from hooks’ perspective, we can see the academic register as a classed system, coded specifically to be more accessible to white, upper, and middle-class folk.
Navigating through this kind of language is difficult enough for students of privilege, who have had the resources to learn how to properly translate this kind of language into common understanding. But students who have not been so fortunate, or students who must focus first on learning common English before they can hope to learn “standard English,” the gorge opens up even wider. And so, there is a disparity between what this “monolithic writing style” claims it is doing, and what it is actually doing. It claims to be creating clear and decisive writing that can be used for the betterment of humanity*. That asterisk on “humanity” represents what is hidden in the fine print: that this knowledge will only serve the people inside the wall, who have been able to pay for the price of admission. Recognizing this disparity between what the academy claims it is and what it actually is, forces us to ask a foundational question: What is the university for?
The British-Ghanian author and philosopher Kwame Appiah asks this question and more in his essay What is the Point of College? He explains that there are “two distinct visions of higher education [which] contend throughout our classrooms and campuses,” each with its own agendas and philosophies. These two universities are at the same time connected to each other and at war: Utility University vs Utopia University.
“In the Utility vision,” Kwame explains, “students are consumers; they have needs and desires to be met, at a price they’ll pay.” This vision “focuses on how college can be useful.” It places emphasis on preparing students for the workforce, on GDP growth, and on ROI. The other vision focuses on “building your souls as much as your skills.” Here, priority is given to critical thinking, empathy, and the pursuit of happiness. But from which of these visions do the problems of Language Repression and linguistic wall-building arise? One might be tempted to say Utility U is the culprit, but that would be taking the easy way out. In fact, in an attempt to keep the customer happy, Utility U will often remove much of the necessary intellectual heavy lifting that Utopia U might require of its students in favor of bigger Gyms and shorter class times.
The answer is that both the university-as-business and university-as-utopia have grown from a tradition that has placed quite a lot of emphasis on keeping people out. Both visions take the exclusionary approach when they are operating under the assumption that something like “standard English” could actually exist. Language (the means by which we transfer all knowledge and information) is too grand of an egregore for us to properly classify and standardize. Language creates itself and uses humans, not the other way around. As long as humans exist, languages will be there also, and the rules of those languages will be dictated and maintained by the intimate subcultures that add their own stitch to this infinite tapestry of communication.
Many students and educators recognize this. They know that they are operating in a system that has prejudice and exclusion written into the very code of its being. They acknowledge that by attending or working at a university, they take part in a tradition of education that has often focused just as much on who it can keep out as who it lets in. And so, the responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of students and educators to become surgeons as well as philosophers. To look deep into the system and slowly remove and reform the oppressive structures that are often taken for granted and hidden under the guise of the status quo. It is not easy work, and it is work that will never be complete. We will never be able to fully rectify the dark, prejudiced history of the academy with its more altruistic and utopian ideals, but that is exactly what makes the work all the more in need of doing.
Works Cited
Radical History Book Club, BLOW OUT! (the 1900s-1970s): The Origins and Legacy of Cicana/o student resistance to the colonized classroom.
Appiah, Kwame: What is the Point of College? https://docs.google.com/document/d/12iY-6LtDxMUXU4oUjqhed7DKDv17ipfrxRzUt9yiS_c/edit
CCCC/NCTE, “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/demand-for-black-linguistic-justice
Elbow, “Grading Student Writing: Making It Simpler, Fairer, Clearer” https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.567.4718&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Olson, “bell hooks and the Politics of Literacy,” Journal of Advanced Composition 14.1 (1994). https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.sdsu.edu/stable/20865945?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Ortmier-Hooper, “English May Be My Second Language, but I’m Not ESL,” College Composition and Communication 59.3 (2008) http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/moser/eng%207506/English%20may%20be%20my%20second%20language.pdf
Johns, “Coherence and Academic Writing: Some Definitions and Suggestions for Teaching,” TESOL Quarterly 20.2 (1986) https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.sdsu.edu/stable/3586543?sid=primo&origin=crossref&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
