Whiteness

The problematic paradoxes of white race scholars (by Scott Stillar)

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This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

Scott Stillar, our guest blogger this week, is a PhD candidate in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His doctoral thesis will discuss the role of raciolingustic ideologies in the reproduction of globalized white supremacy via English language standardization in post-secondary ESL contexts. His other recent work includes analyses of the reproduction of racist ideologies within online gaming communities and the demarcation of white public space via geosemiotic discourses.

Echoing the sentiments of James Weldon Johnson (1912), there are few things I am more certain of than the fact that People of Color understand whiteness better than white people. Considering this, difficult questions arise regarding the role of whites and the performance of scholarship on race. Are white race scholars even necessary? What can they actually contribute that hasn’t already been said? As a white male whose scholarship focuses on intersections of race and language, I genuinely struggle with these questions. What I can say with a degree of certainty, however, is that race scholarship performed by whites has several inherently problematic paradoxes.

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Does my voice whiten me or not? A reflection on the instability of race and accent (by Vijay Ramjattan)

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Guest blogger Vijay Ramjattan is a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, a division of the University of Toronto. His research interests lie at the intersection of language and race as these relate to the experiences of marginalized people in the workplace. These interests are exemplified by his MA research examining the professional microaggressions experienced by racialized English language teachers and his doctoral work on the racialization of accents found in the communicative labour of international teaching assistants.

My parents make fun of how I pronounce the word “water.” When I pronounce this word, the /t/ sounds more like a /d/ (what linguists refer to as flapping) and the second syllable is unstressed. In contrast, my parents, who were born in Trinidad, pronounce “water” as “wata.” For them, the way that I pronounce this word is a result of being born and raised in Canada and thus having a so-called Canadian accent. However, according to my parents, a Canadian accent is a metonym for something else. In fact, when they comment on how I sound Canadian, my parents are actually remarking on how I sound white. That is, they usually connect my speech to that of people in the Canadian media, who are mostly white and identify as Canadian.

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