Standards, Stigma, Surveillance: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and England’s Schools

271 Pages·2022·5.923 MB·English

by  Ian Cushing

Standards, Stigma,
Surveillance
Raciolinguistic Ideologies and
England’s Schools
Ian Cushing
Standards, Stigma, Surveillance
Ian Cushing
Standards, Stigma,
Surveillance
Raciolinguistic Ideologies
and England’s Schools
Ian Cushing
Faculty of Education
Edge Hill University
Lancashire, UK
ISBN 978-3-031-17890-0 ISBN 978-3-031-17891-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17891-7
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Foreword for Standards, Stigma,
Surveillance: Raciolinguistic Ideologies
and England’s Schools
White power uses white English as a calculated, political display of power
to control and eliminate the powerless. In America, that power belongs to
white power. School, compulsory public school education, is the process
whereby Black children first encounter the punishing force of this white
power. ‘First grade’ equals first contact with the politics of white language,
and its incalculably destructive consequences for Black lives. This is what I
mean, exactly: both Black and white youngsters are compelled to attend
school. Once inside the system, the white child is rewarded for mastery of
his standard, white English: the language learned at his mother’s white and
standard knee. But the Black child is punished for mastery of his non-
standard, Black English; for the ruling elite of America have decided non-
standard is sub-standard, and even dangerous, and must be eradicated.
Moreover, the white child receives formal instruction in his standard
English, and endless opportunities for the exercise and creative display of
his language. But where is the elementary school course in Afro-American
language, and where are the opportunities for the accredited exercise, and
creative exploration, of Black Language? [White language and Black lan-
guage] are both communication systems with regularities, exceptions, and
values governing their word designs. The problem is that we are saying
language, but really dealing with power. The word ‘standard’...means the
rule, the norm. Anyone deviating from the standard is therefore ‘wrong.’
As a result, literally millions of Black children are ‘wrong’ from the moment
they begin to absorb and imitate the language of their’ Black lives. —June
v
vi Foreword for Standards, Stigma, Surveillance: Raciolinguistic…
Jordan (pp. 65-66), White English/Black English: The Politics of
Translation (1972)
The above excerpt is from June Jordan’s 1972 essay White English/Black
English: The Politics of Translation. Jordan wrote this essay in response to
the objections that her novel His Own Where received because of its use
of Black English. Parents and teachers were concerned that Jordan’s book
would encourage Black children to “shirk the diligent mastery of stan-
dard English that college entrance exams and the job market both require”
(Jordan, 61). As Jordan powerfully illustrates in her essay, this concern is
rooted in linguistic hegemony and standard language ideologies that
‘reinscribe a linguistic and racial hierarchy that position Black Language
and blackness as inferior and white English and whiteness as superior,
thus reinscribing and reinforcing whiteness and anti-blackness’ (Baker-
Bell, 2020, p. 47). White power is at play because white mainstream
English-speaking students get erroneously positioned as academically
prepared to achieve because their languages, literacies, cultural ways of
being, histories, values, and knowledges are privileged in classrooms.
From this assumption, linguistically and racially marginalized students
are falsely positioned as linguistically inadequate because their language
practices do not reflect white mainstream English (Baker-Bell,
2020, p. 20).
Though Jordan’s essay White English/Black English was written 50 years
ago and explored language education in the US context, Dr Ian Cushing
argues that raciolinguistic ideologies that criminalize and pathologize
racialized youth in the service of white supremacy remain commonplace
in England’s schools as well. Standards, Stigma, Surveillance: Raciolinguistic
Ideologies and England’s Schools is a book on how standard language and
raciolinguistic ideologies shape education policy in England’s schools.
Drawing on data from mostly London schools, Cushing offers critical
analyses of (1) how language is used as a sorting mechanism to determine
the educational success or failure of students; (2) how schools and teach-
ers are pressured from the state to impose language policies clustered
around classed and racialized notions of correctness, standards, and prop-
erness; and (3) how language policies are shaped by highly political listen-
ing practices. Standards, Stigma, Surveillance is a robust book that offers a
Foreword for Standards, Stigma, Surveillance: Raciolinguistic… vviiii
variety of theoretical, methodological, and practical implications; how-
ever, I want to underscore two important interventions this book offers
to the fields of raciolinguistics, educational linguistics, and language
education.
The first intervention is related to positionality. I argue that educators
and researchers must engage in radical self-work and think through how
they are complicit in the reproduction of white linguistic supremacy and
linguistic racism through curricula, language instruction, pedagogies,
practices, and language policies. Still, white researchers and educators are
sometimes unclear about what their role is in anti-racist, decolonial work
and how to engage in it. In Standards, Stigma, Surveillance, Dr
Cushing states:
My whiteness, and its combination with my male, able-bodied, English-
speaking and heterosexual status, places me in a position of privilege and
institutional power. I am part of the machinery of white supremacy, and it
is from the inside of this machine that I seek to dismantle it. The burden
falls on those that are white to do this work. My ways of using language are
generally heard as being ‘standard’ by others, although I reject the existence
of an empirically audible spoken ‘standard’. I am a white listening subject,
whose modes of listening have been shaped by my own privilege – and is
also something which limits what I might see and hear. Recognising my
position is essential for the scope of this book, but also in seeing my posi-
tion as one of responsibility – to call out linguistic racism where, for others,
this might carry a risk, or they feel less empowered to do so. (p. 5)
Dr Cushing offers insight into the beginning stages of the kind of radical
self-work white educators and researchers must be willing to engage in in
order to dismantle standard language and raciolinguistic ideologies.
The second intervention involves using critical language policy as an
analytical tool to identify raciolinguistic ideologies embedded in educa-
tional policies. Cushing explains:
Rejecting these ideologies, however, requires more than simply asking indi-
vidual teachers to modify their listening practices to recognise the linguistic
abilities of all students, but requires structural changes which allow us to
build new worlds. How might these new structures affirm the language
viii Foreword for Standards, Stigma, Surveillance: Raciolinguistic…
practices of marginalized speakers as a challenge to white supremacy and
the legacies of colonialism? How might new structures be sustainable so
they avoid gradually shifting back towards upholding the status quo? How
might future research move away from being on communities and towards
being for and with communities in order to generate collective and struc-
tural transformations in schools and society? What kind of actions are
teachers taking to combat structural racism and linguistic violence in their
practice? (p. 114)
Thinking through these questions will support educators and researchers
in dismantling the ongoing struggles against oppressive language ideolo-
gies and policies that are reproduced in curricula, language instruction,
pedagogies, practices, and language policies.
Standards, Stigma, Surveillance is precisely the kind of book we need to
dismantle linguistic racism and raciolinguistic ideologies globally. Dr
Cushing offers interventions that can dismantle these systems within and
outside of England’s schools. “It is only through imagining and enacting
this structural change that linguistic justice might be realized” (p. 115).
Michigan State University April Baker-Bell
Michigan, USA
References
Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity,
and pedagogy. Routledge & National Council of Teachers of English.
Jordan, J. (1972). Civil wars: Observations from the front lines of America.
Touchstone.
Acknowledgements
It has been a huge pleasure to work on this book project over the last few
years, and there are a host of people I would like to take the opportunity
to thank. First of all, thank you to the teachers and students who I inter-
viewed and listened to, who allowed me into their spaces and shared their
lived experiences of raciolinguistic ideologies with me.
I am grateful to colleagues in the Department of Education at Brunel
University London, where I started this work from, and now in the
Faculty of Education at Edge Hill University, particularly David Aldridge,
for granting generous research time which allowed me to finish the man-
uscript. The incredible students I worked with across these two universi-
ties helped to ensure that the lived realities of language policy creation,
negotiation and resistance were grounded in the everyday activities of
schools. My undergraduate students have taken on the role of language
activists with more energy than I could ever have imagined.
This work was supported by a number of research grants. Two grants
from Brunel University London and then Edge Hill University assisted
with archival work and fieldwork in London and New York City. Two
grants from the UK Literacy Association assisted with fieldwork in
London schools. A British Educational Research Association grant
assisted with some of the work looking at raciolinguistic resistance. Jen
Pye provided next-level research assistance, particularly in looking at the
discursive links between language, racialisation and criminalisation.
ix
x Acknowledgements
Anthony Carter played a central role in facilitating workshops at his
school in north London.
I am very grateful to a host of academics and teachers who I have been
fortunate to discuss this work with over the last few years. Julia Snell has
been a brilliant friend and colleague, who continues to push my own
thinking on language and the crafting of inequality. Elisabeth Barakos
offered valuable ideas on research methods in language policy at an early
stage of the project, which helped shape some foundational thinking. Viv
Ellis has long offered general encouragement and academic advice to me,
as has Furzeen Ahmed. Chris Searle was very generous with his time, and
we enjoyed long conversations in east London cafés about 1970s activ-
ism, anti-colonial language policies and the legacies of his work. Thanks
to colleagues at the English and Media Centre in London, especially to
Barbara Bleiman, who welcomed me into her home and gave me time to
look through her own personal collection of materials from the 1970s
and 1980s. Heather Smith shared her original copies of the professional
standards for teachers reaching back to the 1980s with me, and Derek
Gillard sourced various documents which were proving particularly dif-
ficult to find. I was fortunate enough to visit Philadelphia and New York
City on a research trip in 2022, in which I benefitted hugely from con-
versations with María Rose Brea, Nelson Flores, Marcelle Mentor,
Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ruth Vinz and many awesome doctoral students.
These conversations helped shape some of the ideas about language ideol-
ogy/policy diffusion between England and the USA. Thanks also to the
staff at the Gottesman Libraries at Teachers College and their help in the
archives there. In England, thank you to the staff at the UCL IOE
archives, the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, the George Padmore
Institute in Finsbury Park and the National Archives at Kew.
Others I have spoken to about this work and would like to thank are
Clara Vaz Bauler, Rob Drummond, Claire Ellis, Warda Farah, Alexandra
Georgiou, Petros Karatsareas, Emma Moore, Michael Simons, James
Simpson, Mariana Souto-Manning, Sarah Spencer and Benjamin
Zephaniah. A big shout out to Wendy Wong, who produced the incred-
ible images used in Chap. 7, and to the Surveillance Studies Network in
their promotion of the work. Thanks too to April Baker-Bell for writing