Language and ethnicity: sideways crossing

Eva

I was a Spanish teacher at a small high school in a Latinx community in California for four years. The school aimed to improve the graduation rates of Latinxs from high school, in particular Latino boys, which are much lower than graduation rates for Whites and Asians in the state. In line with that mission, there was a strong social justice culture that encouraged fairly open discussion of social justice issues. A subgroup of the school population, mostly Latino boys, was very invested in Hip-Hop culture. As Low, Sarkar & Winer (2009) express, it is more than just music, but encapsulates dress, gestures, walk, ideologies and language. While this culture originated in the Black community and continues to be centered within it, these Latinos had embraced it as their own, and had enacted sideways crossing (Van Herk, 2018). Crossing is when White or prestige groups adopt language from a lower prestige group, which leads to the term sideways crossing, or lower prestige groups borrowing language from another lower prestige group. So in the case of the United States, Latinxs using Black language, or vice versa, is considered sideways crossing (Van Herk, 2018). 

A side effect of sideways crossing, as these Latino teenagers enacted, is when sensitive terms reserved for use by the original community are brought into the new group of “sideways crossers.” Maybe you’ve already guessed what I mean by this, but yes we are talking about the N-word. My lovely, goodhearted students were casually dropping the N-word.

As a White person growing up in a left-leaning US American community, I was very aware that that horrid word was not something I could ever let fall from my lips, no matter the intent. Not even reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school could I read aloud the word on the page in front of me and none of my classmates did either (maybe a Black one would, but my school had very few Black students and I can’t specifically recall any moments of this). So hopefully you can understand my shock when I first heard that taboo word spoken from a non-Black person’s mouth.

So, I calmly sat down with the boys to discuss the issue. Their response surprised me. There was none of the shame and denial you would perhaps expect from a White person, but many reasons and a carelessness that blew me away. In their perspective, they were also racialized by White supremacy and their community suffered similar negative effects of this oppressive system, like police brutality, the school to prison pipeline or a devaluation of their ethnolects. This I definitely agreed with. They saw themselves as not-White, and thus exempt from the universal ban on Whites’ use of the N-word. I tried to explain the best I could how history plays a significant part here, and Blacks have specifically suffered from the N-word as a weapon of oppression and humiliation. Apart from Afro-Latinxs, Latinxs in the US simply do not share this specific history, regardless of their other shared experiences of discrimination. 

My students’ other reasoning was that they were just following along with their favorite songs and rap artists. In my opinion, this is still not a valid excuse, but it’s also fairly controversial. Whether non-Black people can sing along the N-word in rap songs could arguably be a whole other post in and of itself. In addition, my own identity as a White woman who doesn’t practice Hip-Hop culture, even though I am still a fan, surely made it more difficult for them to listen and relate to me. 

Even with what felt like significant and productive conversations, it often felt like my crusade (and other teachers’) to end N-word use at our school seemed like an uphill battle. And this issue extends far beyond the classroom walls, like when Latina actor Gina Rodriguez took down a video of her singing the N-word after significant backlash. Despite my students’ fairly valid reasoning and strong connection to Black language in Hip-Hop culture, racism still plagues the Latinx community too and can explain some of the carelessness associated with their use of the N-word. While sideways crossing is a natural and inevitable result of the intermixing of ethnicities and more fluid identities, we should still be sensitive and cognizant of the pain of the past and its effects on language and ethnicity today.  

References

Low, B., Sarkar, M. & Winer, L. (2008). ‘Ch’us mon propre Bescherelle’: Challenges from the Hip-Hop nation to the Quebec nation Journal of Sociolinguistics 13/1, 2009: 59–82

Van Herk, Gerard. (2018). What is sociolinguistics? 2e Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.