I just reviewed a piece for the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology on a similar topic (title:  Colorblind along the Color line: Racialized fractals, recursive oppositions, and control of meaning in developmental spaces)

The article posits that white students often police race talk in their alignments with the ideology of “colorblindness”.

The author writes that the ideology of “colorblindness” interprets explicit mention of race in addition to the more obvious racial slurs or White supremacist discourse, as racist and makes any discussion of race off-limits. The consequence is that white students are quick to label any transgression of this unspoken rule “racist” and to position such comments as an unwarranted preoccupation with race on behalf of people of color.

The author argues that racialized differentiation is recursively produced by these pre-adolescents, who are being socialized to reproduce the ideologies of colorblind racism and White privilege that dominate society and shape the lives of the actors within it – ensuring the position of White at the top and Color at the bottom.

In regards to your 2011 paper, would you talk a bit about your fieldwork?

Jane Hill who writes that “The theme of race is both everywhere and nowhere, consisting largely of silences, of the failure to be specifically anti-racist, of careful failure to notice racially-shaped phenomena” (Hill 2008, 47).

Your work suggests that it’s more than silence: students actively police – even if it’s in humorous ways – even unrelated mentions of the color term “black”. Is this policing of the ideology of colorblindness a way to suppress race talk or to provoke conversations about it?

Is “crying racist” a plea by students to talk about race because so many teachers don’t want to?

How can this kind of research reach teachers and be applied to their training? To what extent do you see that as part of your role as a researcher?

Regarding the methodology chapter, would you explain Silverstein’s metapgramatic regimentation? How can language regiment its own pragmatics? What is the difference between denotationally implicit and explicit metapragmatics? (p. 460).

Doing discourse analysis across events is potentially relevant to the work several students in this class are engaged in that involve processes like learning, identity formation, and socialization. To what extent is your analysis based on a single event (a within event analysis) or across events?

I challenge each of you to reflect on how you plan to incorporate context beyond the speech event itself and what discreet events and “cross event pathways” each of you could potentially analyze?

Sara’s work on translanguaging practices in computer science lessons;

Carmín’s study of the reactions of readers to the appointment of a female police superintendent and the ensuing debates over whether to use the -e or -a morphological gender marker for her title;

Kelsey’s study of language ideologies in an adult second language program,

Marcos’ study of sharing of political video content on social media, Ekaterina’s examination of constructions of community in Stuytown on Twitter

Andy’s examination of a Colombian-based internet forum visited and maintained by male clients of male-to-female transgender sex workers

Angie Waller’s analysis of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg responds to public outcry around  privacy breaches using prophetic ethos to redirect discourse to the ambitious mission of his social media platform

Anthony’s study of religious indoctrination through radio shows for women under Franco in Spain,

Ariel’s work on cross-racial adoption and how parents navigate racial difference

Angie Pickens’ work on representations of the ongoing Oklahoma teachers’ strike looking teachers’ picket signs, public comments by legislators, and a Facebook group

Angela Reyes, Hunter College (English Dept.) and the Graduate Center (Anthropology), will be our class visitor on April 16th. The readings include a methodological piece about how to do discourse analysis across different events from the perspective of linguistic anthropology and another piece about the regimentation of racist discourse. In preparation for her talk, please post 1-2 questions about each article below. Please formulate your questions in narrative form and reference specific examples or phrases from the texts.

Bio

Angela Reyes (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2003) is Professor in the Department of English at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY), and Doctoral Faculty in the Program in Anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She teaches courses on English linguistic structures and histories, discourse theory and analysis, linguistic anthropology, and language in relation to notions of race, mixedness, and postcoloniality. She is a Faculty Advisory Board Member of the Asian American Studies Program and Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program at Hunter College, and Research Associate at the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society in the Program in Linguistics at The Graduate Center. She is Associate Editor for Linguistic Anthropology of American Anthropologist.

Reyes works on theories of semiotics, discourse, racialization, and postcoloniality. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis, her research examines how ideologies of language and race are formulated through spatiotemporal scales of communicative context in both the U.S. and the Philippines. She has conducted three main ethnographic studies: a four-year study of Southeast Asian American teenagers in an after-school videomaking project at an Asian American community arts organization in Philadelphia; a one-year study of Korean American fifth graders in an Asian American “cram school” in New York City; and a two-year study of Filipino college students and professors at a private university in Manila, Philippines. In this most recent work in the Philippines, Reyes examines conceptions of mixed race/language that link an elite social figure (a type of privileged mestizo youth called conyo) to an elite linguistic register (a form of Tagalog-English speech called conyo). She examines how anxieties about nation, modernity, race, and language are traceable through the circulation of the conyo figure/register on college campuses and across new media sites. She is also in the preliminary stages of researching Riot Grrrl punk feminist zine archives from the early 1990s.

Reyes is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Advanced Research Collaborative Distinguished Fellowship (2016), National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2009-2010), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty (2006-2007), and National Research Council/Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for Minorities (2002-2003).

Selected publications:

Reyes, Angela (2017a) Inventing postcolonial elites: Race, language, mix, excess. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 27(2): 210-231.

Reyes, Angela (2017b) Ontology of fake: Discerning the Philippine elite. Signs and Society 5(S1): 100-127.

Wortham, Stanton and Angela Reyes (2015) Discourse Analysis Beyond the Speech Event. New York: Routledge. *Awarded the Edward Sapir Book Prize, Society for Linguistic Anthropology.

Reyes, Angela (2014) Linguistic anthropology in 2013: Super-New-Big. American Anthropologist 116(2): 366-378.

Reyes, Angela (2013) Corporations are people: Emblematic scales of brand personification among Asian American youth. Language in Society 42(2): 163-185.

Reyes, Angela (2011) “Racist!”: Metapragmatic regimentation of racist discourse by Asian American youth. Discourse and Society 22(4): 458-473.

Alim, H. Samy and Angela Reyes (2011) Complicating race: Articulating race across multiple social dimensions. Discourse and Society 22(4): 379-384.

Reyes, Angela and Adrienne Lo (eds) (2009) Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Reyes, Angela (2007) Language, Identity, and Stereotype Among Southeast Asian American Youth: The Other Asian. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Reyes, Angela (2005) Appropriation of African American slang by Asian American youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(4): 509-532.

Reyes, Angela (2004) Asian American stereotypes as circulating resource. Pragmatics 14(2/3): 115-125.

Reyes, Angela (2002) “Are you losing your culture?”: Poetics, indexicality, and Asian American identity. Discourse Studies 4(2): 183-199.