Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Critical Language Awareness 207
cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama/) and former President
George Bush’s comments (‘He’s an attractive guy. He’s articulate’, http://
www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1781517/posts) incite uproar
from members of the Black community?
The frequent juxtaposition of ‘articulate’ with other adjectives such as
‘clean’, ‘bright’, ‘attractive’ and ‘good’ suggests that, within a worldview
that (un)consciously privileges Whiteness, Blackness is expected to be
‘unclean’, ‘dull’, ‘unattractive’, ‘bad’, and yes, ‘inarticulate’ (or as Black
comedian Chris Rock succinctly put it, ‘You only ever call somebody
“articulate” when you expect them to be stupid!’). From this worldview, it
is rare when you fi nd ‘one of them’ that is clean, nice-looking, attractive
and articulate, and thus, it is something to remark upon; otherwise, it
would be taken-for-granted as the norm.
Another question that might arise is: ‘Well, doesn’t the media refer to
White candidates as “articulate” as well?’ Yes, in fact, they do. But interestingly
enough, they tend to do so when the candidate is from the South
or represents a combination of other marginalized social identities such as
being ‘working-class’ and/or ‘a woman’. This adjective was applied generously
to John Edwards with the implicit meaning that ‘He’s not like
those other Southerners who can’t talk right’, revealing ideologies of language
that are loaded with regional stereotypes that depict Southerners as
stupid, lazy and slow ( just like Obama’s not like those other Blacks who
can’t speak English correctly). The critical linguist might also go beyond
racially differentiated patterns of use to ask about factors such as age. Do
we use ‘articulate’ more often to describe children than adults? If so, what
does that mean? The critical linguist would then also ask about the immediate
interactional context of the comments, the broader social and political
contexts, including US racial politics, the historical relations that
position Blacks as ignorant, lazy speakers of English, along with the historical
use of ‘articulate’ to describe ‘gifted’ Black speakers, as well as the
position of ‘Black Language’ vis-à-vis ‘standard English’ in relation to and
within institutions such as schools. And the list of questions is endless. 1
Many observers were surprised that seemingly harmless statements
like, ‘I love Barack Obama – he’s just so articulate!’ would send some Black
folks into a furor over the implicit and patronizing racist assumptions of
the speaker, and have White folks ‘walking-on-eggshells’ when giving
their Black friends and colleagues what they believe to be compliments?
To think like a critical linguist is to assume, from the start, that language is
never neutral, never simply a ‘means of communication’. It is to take for
granted that language use is always loaded with issues of power, hierarchy
and dominance, as well as contestation, resistance and transformation.
It is to seek to uncover society’s contradictions and to reveal the many
taken-for-granted assumptions and ideologies of race, class, gender,