Our guest blogger this week, Chelsea Privette, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is a certified speech-language practitioner with a background in sociolinguistics. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, language, and disability in the school setting and improving the educational experiences of racially and linguistically minoritized students. Her current work focuses on developing culturally sustaining assessment practices for bilingual and monolingual language minority preschoolers through transdisciplinary collaborations and community-based participatory research.

Twitter: @TheeDrP

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.

I am a Black woman. If you are listening to me read this post, you have probably already assumed as much¹. Regardless of who you are or where you are in the world, you have some pretty specific ideas about what that means. If you are not a Black woman – or if you are not Black at all – those ideas might be based on what you’ve seen on TV or social media, or on your interpretation of the Black women you know (or think you know). Many of those ideas – though maybe not all – are problematic, and that in itself does not mean you’re a bad person. The problem is that the common understanding of how those ideas come about is rooted in the interpersonal. That is a mistake. No doubt, the interpersonal plays an integral role in propagating racist ideas and enacting racist practices. Indeed, interpersonal race-based discrimination causes significant harm; but it is not the root.

All over the world, racism has a home. The local particularities differ, the histories vary; but anti-Blackness and the erasure of Indigenous histories, presents, and futures are global phenomena that uphold the structure of white supremacy. If that is a hard truth for you to hold, that is a privilege. People who are marginalized by the social hierarchies around which institutions are structured know it all too well. We know it through our ancestral wisdom, our lived experiences, and through the stress we carry in our physical bodies. But, too often, the truths we hold are ignored because they do not have the validation of academic journals and Western white logics that institutions require. The ways that racism operates through institutional practices (what many call “traditions”) are illegible to most. Those of us who work to reveal, critique, and intervene on how apparently “race-neutral” policies and practices maintain racism need a framework for systematically delineating the historical continuity of contemporary racial disparities. That is the beauty of critical race theory (CRT).

It really is that simple. No personal accusations. No claims that this group is better than that. No partisan affiliation. Only an urgency about naming and changing the fact that that racism will continue to live wherever it remains unconfronted, no matter how well-intentioned the people involved may be. And that is uncomfortable for those who wish to remain comfortable. By saying CRT is simple, I do not mean that it is not challenging. It is absolutely a challenge – one that most people aren’t up for. It’s hard to change what you have always done, especially when it is all you’ve ever known. To shake the very foundation of what you’ve been taught was true about the world. That is what CRT feels like when the world revolves around your culture, your knowing, and your being. But for those of us in the margins², it feels like a release. An acknowledgement. A validation. It feels like the proof of our existence – of everything we have always known. As one of my mentees who is studying for her doctorate said: “When I first learned about CRT, it made me sit up in my seat.”

I first learned about CRT when I was a doctoral student myself, and it was a relief. I was doing my dissertation at the time, and none of the frameworks I’d been taught in speech-language pathology could capture what I – what my community – had to say about Black Language. The only narrative that the field had to offer was that of deficit. But CRT gave me a framework and a language for naming the linguistic hegemony of “standard English” and interrogating the science that claims to be objective about what constitutes “good language.”³ I knew that what I was doing was new for the field and that I would get pushback. However, I did not anticipate the forceful rejection I got from my committee when I insisted that I would not count features of Black Language as “errors” because they “overlap with disorder.” I did not expect for self-proclaimed language experts to tell me that changing my protocol to respond to local needs did not count as cultural responsiveness, because apparently all Black children are the same. I certainly did not expect them to cancel my defense three days prior to the scheduled date without ever having offered any feedback.

Now that I’m on the other side of my doctoral program, thanks to a new committee, I understand the rejection of the first. I understand why they refused to engage CRT and, therefore, could not follow what I intended to do with my project. In fact, I now believe that their acceptance of my framework would have been the most surprising and unlikely outcome. Engaging CRT would mean deconstructing all they had built throughout their decades-long careers. And that is an endeavor that few are willing to pursue. And, so, our professional discourse remains at surface level, not daring to go any deeper than is necessary to put on the appearance of advancing equity.

We talk a lot about culture in language-related disciplines, with a limited understanding of what that really means. Conversations about culture tend to essentialize ethnicity as a static, immutable trait that minoritized people “have” and that professionals need to be “sensitive to.”⁴ It’s a distraction, really. This “culture talk,” as Ruha Benjamin calls it, “functions as an elaborate alibi, or proof of innocence, letting institutionalized racism and structural inequality off the hook, as much for health disparities as other forms of injustice” (p. 228-229).⁵ That is not to say that culture is not important, but that our conceptualization of culture is misguided. When we conflate race and culture, and when we reduce disparities to “cultural differences,” we misidentify the problem as lying in interpersonal shortcomings – as the fault of minoritized communities, even – when we should be grappling with the ways that the epistemologies in which our professional practices are rooted are the source of racial disparities. So as long as we are talking about “culture,” we are deferring equity. Culture, then, becomes a palatable substitute for talking candidly about race. That is why justice seems like an elusive dream – because justice is not what we are working towards when we avoid the hard work of dismantling long-standing traditions that were created without marginalized people in mind.

Ruha Benjamin writes that a critical race approach requires a “methodological reversal,” a reorientation towards the systems that produce injustice (p. 234).⁵ CRT is uncomfortable because it requires an undoing. The process is long and requires constant vigilance to not default to the status quo. It’s messy, and it leaves us with more questions than answers. It is undesirable because it disrupts the efficiency of the machine. But it’s a false efficiency. While “business-as-usual” is easy because it’s familiar, it dehumanizes everybody by assuming a universalism that erases the specificity of our experiences. As a result, the problems we seek to solve persist. We need a new way; and that requires an imagination that is liberated from the structures that define our social relations. And that requires vision. So, in essence, CRT is about hope. And, dare I say, CRT is about love; because CRT is about getting everybody free. And when everybody is free, we can all rest, together, knowing our belonging.

References

[1] Purnell, T., Idsardi, W., & Baugh, J. (1999). Perceptual and phonetic experiments on American English dialect identification. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 18(1), 10-30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X99018001002

[2] hooks, b. (2015). Feminist Theory: From margin to center. Routledge.

[3] Privette, C. (2021). Critical Race Theory for Speech-Language Pathology: How race-conscious practice mitigates disparities. In R. Horton (Ed.), Critical Perspectives on Social Justice in Speech-Language Pathology (pp. 84-104). IGI Global.

[4] Austin, T. (2022). A hard time seeing the relevance: Race and discourse identity in language teacher preparation. International Journal of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education, 2, 20-38. https://doi.org/10.14434/ijlcle.v2iMay.34386

[5] Benjamin, R. (2017). Cultura obscura: Race, power, and “culture talk” in the health sciences. American Journal of Law and Medicine, 43, 225-238. DOI: 10.1177/0098858817723661