Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race ed. by H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball (review)

Raciolinguistics, edited by H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball, is an invaluable cornerstone work for researchers and scholars whose interests lie at the intersection of race and language. Alim et al. offer cutting-edge articulations about the nature of how we “race language” and “language race.” Contributions foreground the study of the experiential realities of living language through racialized selves and societies. Standout chapters in this emerging field of raciolinguistics include: Chapter 13—“‘It Was a Black City’: African American Language in California’s Changing Urban Schools and Communities,” by Django Paris; Chapter 5—“‘Suddenly Faced with a Chinese Village’: The Linguistic Racialization of Asian Americans,” by Adrienne Lo; Chapter 3—“From Mock Spanish to Inverted Spanglish: Language Ideologies and the Racialization of Mexican and Puerto Rican Youth in the United States,” by Jonathan Rosa, and, using more traditional applications of linguistic tools to understand the linguistic heterogeneity of Black (African American and second-generation Caribbean American) New Yorkers, Chapter 8—“Toward Heterogeneity: A Sociolinguistic Perspective on the Classification of Black People in the Twenty-First Century,” by Renée Blake.

The opening chapter is Alim’s “Who’s Afraid of a Transracial Subject,” in which he highlights the fluidity of prescribed racial and ethnic categorizations through his wonderfully nuanced autoethnography of having been “raced 9 different ways in 5 days” (38). Illuminating and certainly a groundbreaking contribution to the instability of hegemonic racial and ethnic constructs, Alim’s chapter comes close to underlining the full potential for the transracial project. Alim states, transracialization is “a political project performed by those whose racial enactments and commitments challenge racial hierarchies” (34). A truly transgressive project of this nature, one aimed at a paradigm shift away from the black-white racial binary, is visionary. To fully undercut the destructive and confining nature of global racial hierarchies, examining the concept of transraciality is an excellent starting place. However, it must be noted that to fully grasp the ontological promise of this ideological move, one must also offer frameworks for those at the racial endpoints of the same racial spectrum, which allows Alim himself to be transraced. This moves one to ask, can black or white people also be transracial? While I am not implying that the Rachel Dolezal’s of the world need to creep out and proclaim victory over ascribed racial categorization, I am highlighting the fundamental nature of this political project as one that absolutely must include all raced peoples. For example, consider the mixed-race student, raced as white, who is of mixed heritage and who claims a cultural and linguistic métissage that is not linked to mainstream cultural whiteness. Is she not also transracial? It is in this way that all subjects raced within the black-white binary must be imagined in order for the full political and empowering nature of this transracial “border crossing” epistemology to take hold. No serious discussion of dismantling racial hierarchies can move forward without a precise and pointed interrogation of whiteness in the imposition of all racial categories. Thus, Alim’s piece begins a conversation about the fallibility of race, but misses out on a total annihilation of racial hegemony. That being said, Who’s Afraid of a Transracial Subject is excellent fodder for (re)imagining contemporary subjects and their syncretic practices as revolutionary: “the transgressive figure of the transracial subject as one who knowingly and fluidly crosses borders while resisting the imposition of racial categories…” (36).

In Chapter 2, Jennifer Roth-Gordon offers the reader the fleshing out of her “racial malleability” concept by way of sharing how and in what ways Brazilian black male youth move toward and move away from whiteness and blackness for socially relevant reasons. She carefully analyzes the linguistic utterances toward whiteness as signifying associational familiarity with all that is deemed white and “good”—in Brazilian culture anything...