In her essay, “The End of White Innocence,” Cathy Park Hong writes, “English was not an expression of me, but a language that was out to get me, threaded with invisible trip wires that could expose me at the slightest misstep" (anyone who has watched Fox News has witnessed a host attacking someone's grammar or use of English when they cannot tackle and grapple with their logic). Her “bad English” and obvious Asian features combined, becoming the target that white Americans aimed their criticisms at; the worse her English and the less adept she was at picking up on American references and recognizing American pop culture symbols (she once wore a thrifted t-shirt to school with the Playboy bunny on it), the bigger the bullseye. The essay argues that literature, as a reflection of society, drapes its children in white innocence and nobility, something that is rarely granted to non-white children who are treated as adults when they are children, and infantilized in adulthood. One way to demean an English-as-a-second language speaker is to tease and mock their English. The English that is formed out of survival in a society coursing with white language supremacy.
As a teacher, I recognize the complexity of “innocence” and its consequences for my students. In “The End of White Innocence,” Hong cites the scholar Robin Bernstein who writes that innocence is not just an “absence of knowledge” but an “active state of repelling knowledge.” Hong analyzes this innocence in action and claims, “Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement...The ironic result of this innocence, writes the scholar Charles Mills, is that whites are ‘unable to understand the world that they themselves have made.’” This innocence is embedded in our teaching of English and our policing and regulating of language in the classroom. Teachers who innocently preach to their classes that they are giving them tools for survival by helping them learn “academic English” in order to learn the vocabulary and grammatical structures that will make them “successful” are operating from their white language entitlement and simultaneously perpetuating the oppressive system that they may claim to reject.
Standard English as a “standard” is oppressive, and in Hong’s essay “Bad English, ” she explores “bad English” as a practice that is alive and adaptive, and unique and cultural. “Bad English” in its delivery is always under the pressure to conform to the homogeneity of standard English, and it suffers scrutiny when speakers and writers do not live up to it. She personifies English and its effect on other languages, “English disrupts and devours other cultures. It transforms it.” Hong argues that the American “melting pot” fantasy is just that. Any person who has learned English as a second language learns from those around them that English reigns supreme, especially in school. It sits at the top of the language hierarchy as the most dead and boring, yet the most revered. This white language supremacy results in social othering for anyone who speaks or writes in an English that fits outside this standard. Hong writes about her own “bad English:” “It was once a source of shame, but now I say it proudly: bad English is my heritage. I share a literary lineage with writers who make the mastering of English their rallying cry--who queer it, twerk it, hack it, Calibanize it, other it by hijacking English and warping it to a fugitive tongue. To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.” Hong’s process of revealing English’s (and America’s) “dark histories” is “to eat English before it eats me.” While Hong has the luxury of writing poetry and being able to play with, taunt, and transform English with her artistic freedom, our students do not always receive that luxury. Instead, we tell them some version of “you have to learn the rules before you can break them.” We make them meet white language standards to prove their worthiness, and clarity, and ability to write in fluid and elegant ways without acknowledging that there are both elegance and clarity in other Englishes, too. We might just not be able to see it or understand it because we, most of us as teachers, place the myopic standards that inform our instruction on a pedestal.
Part of the danger of our instruction is our reliance on code-switching; we operate within a system that tricks us into thinking that we are free. We are convinced that code-switching is innate and not something that has been crafted by the codes that consistently benefit standard English fluency. Code-switching is a linguistic term that refers to the switching of languages and speech patterns in conversation; its definition lacks the power dynamic at work: privileging standard white English in professional situations while privileging the first language of the speaker in comfortable, familial, cultural, and/or social settings. Code-switching has been joked about by Key & Peele in skits “translating” for Barack Obama. Obama has been documented code-switching within the same social situation (ex. shaking the hand of Coach K while turning and dapping up Kevin Durant). The use of language holds power depending on the social situation; the phrase “speaking the same language” moves beyond just words that make sense and includes nuance of grammatical structures, tone, inflection, and a variety of uses of vocabulary. We praise people who can do it fluently and with ease (ex. Obama) and often mock or criticize those who cannot or even refuse to (ex. our students). But we cannot blame those who lack the ability to code-switch if they do not see value in it; Hong writes that “English was not an expression of me, but a language that was out to get me, threaded with invisible trip wires that could expose me at the slightest misstep.” The pressure that we create in the classroom and within academia to code-switch bleeds into the way that we teach, assess, and also communicate with our students. We encourage students to express themselves, but then tell them that they are not expressing themselves in the right way. We set the “trip wires” with our instruction and expose students through our grading practices. Rhetoric professor Asao B. Inoue describes this dynamic in his keynote speech at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, “The ways we judge language form some of the steel bars around our students and ourselves--we too maintain white supremacy, even as we fight against it in other ways. We ain’t just internally colonized, we’re internally jailed...But [teachers of color] have made it despite the system, not because of it, yet we are part of the system now. We are the exceptions that prove the rule, as Victor Villanueva has told us.” Inoue’s speech is titled “ How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, Or What Do We Do About White Language Supremacy?” suggesting what Bettina Love calls “spirit murdering our babies” in the classroom through persistent and racist practice and policies. Inoue’s title ignites urgency and deep pondering while implying that white language supremacy kills, literally and figuratively, starting in the classroom.
Like Hong and Inoue describe, people of color and speakers of English as their second language survive and operate in the liminal space between English and _____. Teachers of color especially live in this space, straddling purgatory and privilege, relating to their students on one side while attempting to pull them to the other. Both Hong and Inoue use language as a commodity to capture this tension while also suggesting ways to alleviate it.
Hong argues that the “bad English” she uses is her form of resistance against the “globalization” of English and the way it “cannibalizes” other languages it contacts. She writes, “As a poet, I have always treated English as a weapon in a power struggle, wielding it against those who are more powerful than me.” Through writing poetry, she controls who has access and who she boxes out, an exertion of control that is reflexive to her pain and trauma from her and her family being taunted for speaking “bad English.” Language has become a commodity that she hoards in an attempt to defend her background that she values while white America does not. Hong writes that there is danger in this practice that is a result of the market-economy: “In reacting against the market economy, we have internalized market logic where culture is hoarded as if it’s a product that will depreciate in value if shared with others; where instead of decolonizing English, we are carving up English into hostile nation states.” It isn’t so much that language is a “product that will depreciate in value if shared with others,” it is that once it is shared, others won’t find the same value. This is what happens in the classroom. Students share their English, and it automatically depreciates in value due to our operating point of view that holds any English other than standard English as invaluable to the market economy (unless exploited for profit).
Inoue similarly includes a comparison to the market economy, emphasizing the restrictions that it places on us. Inoue cites Max Weber, a Marx-inspired, German historian and economist who described the American, overdetermined structures in the market economy as an “iron cage.” This “iron cage” also facilitates the “iron cage of racism” that operates in our classrooms. He creates the parallel between capitalism and racism by claiming, “No matter what you as an individual believe or do, you always are implicated and circulate in market economies that dictate the nature of the care around you--that is, dictate your own self-governance, your boundaries, and desires. You are always beholden to the market.” Inoue anticipates counter-arguments that “educational racism and the white bias of those systems [is] about something else, mostly economics, laziness, or bad values,” which echo typical claims from those who refuse to acknowledge racism in our education system and American society. While Hong argues that white language supremacy is locking us into separate “nation states,” Inoue argues that it locks us into an iron cage of racism that further entraps us the more we try to use it to free ourselves and others. We aren’t free until we are free from white language supremacy.
Inoue and Hong also offer solutions to lead us to freedom. Hong addresses whiteness in her writing and everyday interactions “because Asian-Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country,” and as a writer, she is determined to, “help overturn the solipsism of white innocence.” Hong’s solution is her use of English, confronting it while breaking it apart. She also offers a recommendation to those who need to broaden their understanding and appreciation of other forms of English: “If you want to truly understand someone’s accented English, you have to slow down and listen with your body. You have to train your ears and offer them your full attention.” We can’t give people our full attention and understand them if we are constantly looking for fault. But, if we listen closely, we can use our power to listen our students’ language use into existence and create its worthiness in the classroom. Inoue wants us to extend this attention to our instructional and grading practices and the racism that is sewn into them. He implores teachers and instructors, “[L]et me compassionately urge you to sit in discomfort: If you use a single standard to grade your students’ language, you engage in racism. You actively promote white language supremacy, which is the handmaiden to white bias in the world, the kind that kills Black men on the streets by the hands of the police through profiling and good ol’ fashion prejudice.” We as teachers must sit in the paradox of the limits and pressures that we operate in and exert in the classroom to move our students towards a determined direction. Inoue ends his speech by completing his metaphor of the language economy:
“The point is a Marxian one. Who owns the means of production in the classroom?... Just because our students of color are linguistically rich does not mean that by default those riches can be exchanged in your classroom economies if the economy is not set up to accept those riches. Some of your students may be starving with pockets and purses full of useless coins in the bustling market of your classrooms because you don’t accept their money, even though you tell them how valuable it is. Hold on to it, you say. It’s your identity, your heritage. But everywhere we go, those heritage coins ain’t worth shit in the white economies of the academy and marketplace. So, you tell them, you gotta exchange that currency, code-switch. But we tell you, I don’t have access to the money-changer, and he charges interest that I cannot afford--there is value lost in the exchange. And you say, try anyway.”
While we wait for society to catch up, our students are suffering at our hands through our instructional and grading practices, thinking that they have to experience this suffering in order to have access to academia. We should not be gatekeepers to knowledge or the genius of our students because we want to emulate the educational experiences that we had. Students’ need in the classroom is too often determined by structures and people far removed from the students themselves. Teachers have the professional discretion, knowledge, and ability to determine what is taught and how it is assessed. They are beholden to the structures of education, but they also have the power to change it, if they are willing to free themselves from the steel cage.
Post a Comment