Language & Ethnicity Intro to African american Englishes (AAE)

1. Language & Ethnicity Intro to African americanEnglishes (AAE) Linguistics 187 / Cultural Anthropology 187 / English 187 / ICS 151C Variety in Language: English in the United States Duke University Erin Callahan-Price and Walt Wolfram Spring 2012

2. PRELIMINARIES: Social Construction of Something Called Race* LG C.6 and • Wander, Martin & Nakayama. 2008. “The Roots of Racial Classification” in Paula Rothberg, ed. White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. • New York: Worth Publishers

3. Defining EthnicityAreas of Scholarly Agreement The paradox of race*… • What we conceptualize as race* is socially constructed (remember the Myth of Standard English?) • Social reality • “…race and ethnicity are social realities because they are deeply rooted in the consciousness of individuals and because they are firmly fixed in our society’snstitutionallife” (Smelser et al. 2001:3) • Intersectswith other variables (class, ability, gender, age, sexuality…) • Significance of self-identification and perceptions and attitudes of others Paradoxes in Geometry and Fluid Dynamics…

4. Race, History, and the Creation of a Myth The Story of Race • Shift from thinking about race* as a fixed, abstract category to racializationas a sociopolitical/historical/(pseudo)scientific process • This process can be described in terms of specific historic events: economic interests, Empires, religious discourse (esp. Christianity), Enlightenment science, etc. • This process is largely invisible, and, as such, race* ‘succeeds’ as a powerful idea(ology) “…Historical research has shown that the idea of "race" has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences; indeed, physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. -American Anthropological Association Statement on Race (1998)

5. Race*: The History of an IdeaRace and Genetics • Student Experiment: Sequencing Mitochondrial DNA and hypothesizing results

6. Race*: The History of an IdeaEnlightenment science as racialization Nott & Giddeon (1857)Indigenous Races of the Earth Nott & Giddeon (1857) Types of Mankind: published at the height of polygenism, a theory which posited that human races were derived from separate ancestral lines • Race and Imperialism: Naturalistic science of 17th and 18th century converges with European Westward Expansion

7. Race*: The History of an IdeaThe ‘Great Chain of Being’:The Naturalization of Religious Racism • So called ‘race theory’ used to justify subjugation of peoples in Asia, Africa, (as well as the poor of Europe) • Religious institutions (elites, theologians, scholars) taught that the white* race was tasked with “civilizing” (i.e. Christianizing) those subjugated peoples: Empire was considered a “blessing” to the not-yet-saved.

8. Race*: The History of an IdeaColonial Conquest and Genocide • There was resistance! But it was met with force—6 million were murdered in the Belgian Congo alone. In the Americas, some scholars estimate American Indian populations decreased from some five million in 1492 to less than half a million in 1900— 90% of the indigenous population of the (now)) United States. (Thornton, Russell. 1987. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492) ‘A Memorial for the Perpetuation of My Name’ Illustration from Mark Twain’s parody King Leopold’s Soliloquoy: In Defense of His Congo Rule (1905) Mass Grave at the Massacre at Wounded Knee, on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota (1890)

9. Race*: The History of an IdeaRace in the New Nation It is the province of prejudice to blind; and scientific writers, not less than others, write to please, as well as instruct, and even unconsciously to themselves sacrifice what is true to what is popular." Statement of Abolitionist writer Frederick Douglas, challenging the óbjectivity’of scientific racism (1854) • In the formation of the new (U.S.) nation, the concept of freedom was heavily racialized: the slave-race complex permitted a new legal code where bodies could be owned only if they were considered inferior (i.e. 3/5ths of a person) • More resistance (Douglass quote) • Religious rhetoric/theology in the Colonial South: it was God’s will that the inferior be enslaved by the superior.

10. Race*: The History of an IdeaRace in the New Nation “The Presbyterian Church in the United States…has planted itself upon the word of God and utterly refused to make slaveholding a sin, or nonslaveholding a term of communion.” James Henry Thorwell, 1861. “A Southern Christian View of Slavery.” Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, Vol. I, Augusta, Ga., 1861, Appendix, pp. 55-59. • Important intersections of race and gender: plantation wives had no control • over property or money • These unquestioned discourses created a society where Southern “PSWMs” • (Propertied Straight White Males) tended to oppose Abolition • As such, race* functions as ‘related system of interests’ linking wealthy people together’– cotton farmers in the South and Mill owners in the North.

11. Race*: The History of an IdeaPost-Civil War Racializations and new immigrants who aren’t quite white 1800s Cartoon Comparing Florence Nightengale and Irish pardoy ‘Bridget McBruiser’ Redfield, James. 1852. Comparative physiognomy or Resemblances Between Men and Animals: Irishmen as dogs • Post Civil War Jim Crow Laws perpetrated the race complex by positing, for example the ‘one drop rule.’ • 1912: Woodrow Wilson issues an executive order to segregate federal toilet and eating facilities; the same order said that Black civil service employees could be discharged or downgraded for any reason by a Southern federal official. • 1924: Immigration Act selectively restricts immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans and the Irish, who were considered “in betweens”