Tianyi Long
I had an internship in an educational recruitment company, one that helps foreign educators find teaching jobs in Chinese international schools or training centres. Usually, recruiters would categorise the foreign jobseekers through tags. Some are innocent, like the target city they prefer or the subject they’d like to teach. But there is a frequently used jargon for defining them, Mu Bai (母白, literally “native White”), short for 英语为母语的白人 (“native English-speaking White”), with which the resume of a jobseeker would be placed into a more “high-quality database” for a better job recommendation. I’d like to tell you more about the hidden logic underlying this suspiciously racist practice, and try to link it to the larger picture of language teaching and racism.
As Van Herk (2018) suggests, people often mark their ethnicity by speaking a different variety of the same language than other ethnic groups, like AAE in English. Although we are exposed to the updated academic arguments that question the definition of so-called standard English, or even the existence of a discrete, whole entity as “language” (e.g., Pennycook & Makoni, 2007), it is still the social reality that the English spoken by (maybe middle-class) American or British Whites is viewed as the Standard English. In an ESL context, learners wish to pick up Standard English for it is associated with more power and social resources, due to the superior position of Whiteness in social power relationships. Language learning, therefore, is viewed as a key to resources and decent social status, rather than a communicative tool. (Interesting fact: many Chinese students learning Standard English complain about the “bad accents” of their interlocutors speaking a minor variety of English, such as the AAE, Indian English, and even Chinese English).
Also, while linguists (like Curtis & Romney, 2006) are questioning the definition of nativeness, the education market in China defines native speakers as “citizens from native English countries” such as the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, etc. This is because the Chinese government has long promoted the belief of equating ethnicity with nationality by incorporating the 56 ethnic groups of China into one shared “Chinese” identity. (This is also why it sometimes strikes people that there’s little awareness of racial and political correctness in China. Employers can explicitly require their employees to be White without being accused of racism—because they don’t see racism is a problem.) Therefore, the political concept of nationality has become the underlying proof of their ethnic identity, and their language, despite the fact that these countries can be multilingual and their citizens are not necessarily fluent in or feel comfortable speaking English.
Such phenomena related to Whiteness and racism appear rather explicitly in the Chinese context. They may be much more implicit since political correctness relating to racism has been a critical issue in many countries. But just as Sensoy & DiAnglo (2014) and Crump (2014) suggests, the requirements of being political correct often silence and stigmatise the discussion of racial issues, thus sustain the structural inequality of race. So, I’d like to hear from you on whether you have noticed similar beliefs in your context!
References:
Crump, A. (2014). Introducing LangCrit: Critical Language and Race Theory. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 11(3), 207-224. doi:10.1080/15427587.2014.936243
Curtis, A., & Romney, M. (Eds.). (2006). Color, race, and English language teaching: Shades of meaning. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Pennycook, A., & Makoni, S. (2007). Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Multilingual Matters.
Sensoy, O., & DiAngelo, R. (2017). Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education (2nd ed.). Teacher’s College Press.
Van Herk, G.(2018). What is sociolinguistics? (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.
