[Linganth] Language & Culture Course / Covid syllabi and Race

Mon Jun 22 22:01:11 UTC 2020

Hello again colleagues,

Thank you to everyone who has responded publicly and privately. Listservs
can feel simultaneously anonymous and personal, so though we are far and
our SLA conference has been postponed, I do find solace that we can
continue to engage in meaningful conversations here. Looking forward to
holding space with you all in person one day, hopefully soon.

Shannon, I’m definitely glad we are in conversation! Yes, please do share
what information you find for syllabi. In terms of what I think can be
done, my first thought is that it’s probably good to solicit advice from
linganth faculty who have been on hiring committees, and the Dean of your
college. I know there are allies in the subfield, and that there are
faculty who have been working to create change regarding the points of
diversifying their departments and their syllabi for years. I assume the
labor for changing hiring practices is not easy, but the question
nonetheless remains why racial diversification is slower in linganth than
in our sister disciplines.

Another good resource is all the amazing work done by people who focus
explicitly on the issues of inclusion in higher education. A nice overview
is from applied sociologist Zuleyka Zevallos’ work on Intersectionality,
Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Access
<https://othersociologist.com/intersectionality-equity-diversity/>.

In the meantime, for reading and then assigning Black language scholars to
our syllabi, I have created a Google doc
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l2_E2GFDD6yqPqXEHdpREEnhvFk9gPaCVZgyJECE8Oo/edit?usp=sharing>
that we can all update.

All the best,
Teru

Teruko Vida Mitsuhara, Ph.D.
Lecturer, UCLA Anthropology
https://terukomitsuhara.com

Preferred pronouns: she/her/hers

On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 11:54 AM s.t. bischoff <bischoff.st at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> Thank you all very much for taking the time to reply to my inquiry. Over
> the coming weeks I will collate all the replies and send out an organized
> list of all the readings and attach all the syllabuses I received.
>
> Teru, if I may, thank you for your thoughtful reply. It resonated on many
> levels. This year our college promoted our first African American colleague
> to Full Professor in our history. It was a bittersweet moment. We mentor
> the students, we accept the graduate students, we hire the faculty, we
> create the P&T documents, we review the P&T cases: There is much we can do
> and are doing.
>
> Teru, I would like ask, based on your experiences, what specifically do
> think we can be doing to affect meaning change?
>
> Thank you all again! Be safe and best of luck with your fall semesters!
>
> Kind Regards,
> Shannon
>
> On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 7:14 PM Teruko Vida Mitsuhara <tmitsuhara at ucla.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> Dear Shannon and colleagues,
>>
>>
>> I wrote my online Spring 2020 class of Language in Culture as one
>> dedicated to Covid-19. I only had a few days to design it before the UCLA
>> quarter started, so pardon any omissions. The idea was to frame the class
>> as a therapeutic process to shift into analyst mode and chronicle the
>> changes as they were/are happening. Students kept fieldnotes throughout
>> their quarter and online (and some in-person) ethnographic projects, and my
>> hope was that it would be helpful in their own healing to journal
>> throughout the quarter. My syllabus is attached. Overall it was an
>> incredibly fruitful class. And the online modality opened up so many
>> opportunities for teacher-student engagement.
>>
>>
>> *About the class:*
>>
>> I spent one week teaching a handful of chapters from Lisa Capps and
>> Elinor Ochs' *Constructing Panic*, as the home was being reimagined and
>> experienced for all of us at the onset of stay-at-home orders. Students
>> really liked that text. Moral panics and the role of the media in creating
>> such swirls was a focus as well, which I then used to transition into moral
>> panics about race and language. That was in the middle of the quarter and
>> acted as my segue into more explicit conversations about race.
>>
>>
>> I had designed a final where students could do an in-person or online
>> ethnographic project that was somehow related to Covid-19. In the end, I
>> decided to make it optional. However, many students did submit or met with
>> me to share their findings on topics such as online dating during Covid,
>> Zoom classes, Trump’s press briefings, an analysis of late-night talk show
>> monologues and switched comedy formats during this time, conversations with
>> family members who are essential workers, conspiracy theory, debates about
>> Black lives on The Shade Room, and more. I had integrated online
>> ethnographies into the entire class since those works would mirror their
>> own research process best. And then finally I sent the class resources on
>> how to publish their work beyond the academy whether in op-ed form or in
>> platforms such as this one <https://anthrocovid.com/1-2/> that’s
>> collecting anthropologists’ accounts of what’s going on.
>>
>>
>> *About race issues*:
>>
>> I understand where the request for resources about the “race issues we
>> are experiencing” is coming from, but the wording of that request hints at
>> a sense that race issues we experience are new in the US and abroad, which
>> is a problematic basis from which to teach the topic at this time, or
>> anytime. I’m confident you do not mean it this way, but I think this is a
>> good opportunity to bring up in this community the topic of racism and
>> teaching about race and racism in linguistic anthropology.
>>
>>
>> As I’ve followed recent online discussions on race, I have noticed that
>> they tend to center on two issues: 1) The potential of our analytical tools
>> for activism and structural change and 2) Diversity within academia. There
>> is overlap between these points, but they are different.  #1 does not
>> address the problems regarding #2. Both need to be addressed in my opinion
>> when teaching about racism in linguistic anthropology courses.
>>
>>
>> 1) We know that the tools in linguistic anthropology can be used to
>> understand and analyze what is going on, and that there are numerous
>> readings and research that attend to race and racism, like the ones Rachel
>> and others have generously shared already. In my syllabi, I also make sure
>> to talk about the creation of whiteness and racial socialization of that
>> racial identity, indeed many students think “race issues” are about Black
>> people and do not have to do with White people as racialized subjects,
>> though perhaps there is an opening for change there now… In any case, I
>> make a nod to Toni Morrison’s recorded interview
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S7zGgL6Suw> about racism as White
>> people’s problem to fix in class. I supplement that video with readings
>> from *White Kids* (2011) by Mary Bucholtz. Students have also really
>> enjoyed reading articles and excerpts by sociologist Margaret Hagerman.
>> This spring I taught one chapter ‘Shaking Those Ghetto Booties*’*:
>> Family Race Talk from her 2018 book *Growing Up With Privilege in a
>> Racially Divided America*, and students were shocked to read about
>> liberal upper class family conversations on race. These works encapsulate
>> how close attention to language and the tools of linguistic anthropology
>> can be mobilized to dissect racism and I place them and others on my
>> syllabus whenever possible. But of course, reading and teaching is one
>> thing and structural change in the discipline’s hiring practices is
>> another, which is what leads me to #2:
>>
>>
>> 2) This second issue is one where I have felt the great hypocrisy of my
>> subfield. There’s now again heightened awareness among the white majority
>> of racism and black representation in institutions. So now is a good time
>> to ask:  Where are the black linguistic anthropologists in tenured
>> positions? Where are the black female linguistic anthropologists on
>> syllabi? Why are there more black scholars in sociolinguistics as opposed
>> to in linguistic anthropology? What is going on in our subfield? Let’s talk
>> about representation on syllabi, in the subfield, and why our field is
>> great at dissecting racism but clearly not in creating inclusive
>> anti-racist spaces where Black people want to be or are welcomed to thrive.
>>
>>
>> I am Japanese-American and Afrolatina. In this country I am often read as
>> an ethnically ambiguous Latina and/or Asian-American unless my hair is
>> braided or is natural, and in such cases my treatment is markedly
>> different, and I have found it takes more energy to move in academia as a
>> Black woman than as an Asian or an ambiguously non-white one. When read and
>> treated as Black I am petted in hallways and gatherings with some
>> colleagues, stared down, told that my placement in my graduate program was
>> because of affirmative action, and generally I feel so much more
>> vulnerable. Of course I can say more, but my point is that there is
>> something askew with how Blackness and Black people (esp. women) are
>> treated in academia, in anthropology, and in linguistic anthropology. My
>> vantage point as a “transracial subject” (Alim 2016) has allowed me to see
>> and experience this very specific issue with Blackness in our discipline.
>>
>>
>> The problem therefore of race issues and racism cannot be only about the
>> points in #1 and remedying it by making sure we have a token Black person
>> citation on a syllabus or present at a conference. I of course do not think
>> that was the spirit of Shannon’s inquiry at all, but I’m using this as an
>> opportunity to voice my concern that the syllabi that come for summer and
>> onwards do not simply make a nod to the “race issues we are currently
>> facing.” These are long-standing issues and my stance is that the catch-22
>> of it all must be addressed. Readings by the very few black linguistic
>> anthropologists need to be assigned consciously since without that effort
>> it is not consistently done across the field, and at the same time “race
>> and racism” cannot be relegated to one day in class, it must be integrated
>> throughout the course. I affirm that students need to *see *and *read *that
>> there are black linguistic anthropologists, especially with mention of the
>> history and presence (and lack thereof) of Black people in this field.
>>
>>
>> Why is there such a dearth of Black people in our subfield community? I
>> started a list below, and I would absolutely love to see that list grow,
>> I’m hopeful that there are more faculty than I am aware of and I trust
>> there are more newly minted Phds like myself on this list. (And of course
>> we must also be aware that the graduation rates for BIPOC in grad school is
>> a very related issue as well. Racial and class diversity in the beginning
>> cohort of a grad program is one thing, conferred Phds is another.)
>>
>>
>> Below is the list of Black linguistic anthropology tenured or
>> tenure-track professors I know of and whose work I cite in my syllabi
>> and/or lectures, please add more, I would like to learn their names and
>> read their work:
>>
>>
>> Lanita Jacobs
>> <https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1003379>, Associate
>> Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology at USC. She
>> received her PhD in Linguistic anthropology at UCLA about twenty years ago.
>>
>> Marcyliena Morgan <https://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/people/marcyliena-morgan>,
>> Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences, Professor of African and
>> African American Studies, and Executive Director of the HipHop Archive and
>> Research Institute at Harvard University.
>>
>> Claudia Mitchell-Kernan
>> <https://aas.princeton.edu/people/claudia-mitchell-kernan>, Professor
>> Emerita of Anthropology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at
>> Princeton. Her early work formed the basis of linganth centering focus on
>> Black women's speech.
>>
>> Krystal Small
>> <https://linguistics.illinois.edu/directory/profile/ksmalls>s, Assistant
>> Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
>>
>> Samy Alim <https://www.anthro.ucla.edu/faculty/h-samy-alim>, Professor
>> and David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair in the Division of Social
>> Sciences at UCLA.
>>
>> Django Paris <https://education.uw.edu/people/dparis>, Associate
>> Professor and James A. & Cherry A. Banks Professor of Multicultural
>> Education at the University of Washington.
>>
>> Jim Baugh <https://sites.wustl.edu/baugh/>, Professor of Psychology,
>> Anthropology, Education, English, Linguistics, and African and
>> African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
>>
>>
>> All the best,
>>
>>
>> Teru
>>
>>
>>
>> Alim, H. Samy. 2016. “Who's Afraid of the Transracial Subject?
>> Raciolinguistics an the Political Project of Transracialization.” In *Raciolinguistics:
>> How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race, *First edition, edited by H.
>> Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball, 33–50. New York: Oxford
>> University Press.
>>
>>
>> Teruko Vida Mitsuhara, Ph.D.
>>
>> Lecturer, UCLA Anthropology
>>
>> https://terukomitsuhara.com
>>
>>
>> Preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
>>
>
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