Word, Sound and Power: Decoding the Racialization of the English Language

by Arthur Dion Hanna Jr.

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Dion Hanna is a Bahamian legal scholar, lecturer, researcher and community activist based in the UK

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Summary: This article explores the social realities underpinning the language of race and its historical etymological congruence with and institutional structural operation as a substratum of the English language. We review the pervasive integral essence of hierarchy and subordination that is inherent to the spoken and written word in the structural linguistics of the English language. Of necessity, this is an essential historical and sociological  exercise that engages the wider concern of constructs of race and identity in English society

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“For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice”[1]

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought”[2]‘

When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”[3]

“Learn the language that they understand, and when they come upon our doorstep to talk we can talk, and they will get the point. There will be a dialog, there will be some communication, and I am quite certain that then there will be some understanding”[4]

“Writers are obliged, at some point, to understand that they are involved in a language which they must change. And for a Black writer in this country to be born in the English language is to understand that the assumptions on which the language operates are his enemy. For examples, when Othello accuses Desdemona, he says he ‘threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe’. I was very young when I read that and I wondered ‘richer than all his tribe?’. I was forced to reconsider similes: as black as sin, as black as night and blackhearted”[5]

 

This article explores the social realities underpinning the language of race and its historical etymological congruence with and institutional structural operation as a substratum of the English language. We review the pervasive integral essence of hierarchy and subordination that is inherent to the spoken and written word in the structural linguistics of the English language. Of necessity, this is an essential historical and sociological  exercise that engages the wider concern of constructs of race and identity in English society.

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Christine Mallinson points out that language is “fundamentally at work” in how we operate as individuals, as members of various communities and within cultures and societies. She indicates that as speakers, we learn not only the structure of a given language; we also learn cultural and social norms about how to use language and what content to communicate.[6] In this regard, it has been indicated that “standard language ideologies” can result from and contribute to ideologies about race, ethnicity and nationalism as well as contributing to “ideologies of prescriptivism, tinged with racism and xenophobia”.[7] In this respect the concept of race has been integral as to how languages have been “defined” over time, with language being central to the theorization and expression of race in western scholarship.[8] As such, it has been asserted that current ways of talking about race are the “residue” or “detritus” of earlier ways of talking about race and are the “pale reflection of a more full bodied race discourse that flourished in the last century”.[9] This underscores the assertion that, given that racial prejudice is an unnatural and learned phenomenon, the attempt to understand the “mechanisms through which literature shapes and is shaped” by it is an important one.[10]

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However, as pointed out by Hudley, conflicting models of racial classification have been utilized in linguistics, with linguists failing to develop a “cohesive theory or model of race”.[11] In this context, this is compounded by the fact that there has been minimal formal discussion about race, particularly in the United States but also in the United Kingdom, due primarily to the under-representation of Black and ethnic minority scholars.[12]  However, it has been contended that the relationship between race, language and racism plays a “key role” in reflecting and defining the manner in which human societies are structured and is deserving of study as a separate field described as “raciolinguistics”.[13] In this regard, it has been indicated that some linguists study race in a vacuum without theorizing race at all but that race scholars who do think about race a lot often neglect the “central role” that languages play in the processes of “racialization”.[14] In this respect, it has been pointed out that language is often overlooked as one of the most important cultural means that enables people to distinguish themselves from others but that, rather than being fixed and predetermined, racial identities can shift across contexts and even in moment to moment interactions, with race being both a social construct and an important social reality.[15] This amoeba like intersectional nature of racism is enhanced by constant interaction with other social phenomena such as gender and class and results in hybrid manifestations often ignored or unobserved by Western academia.[16] As indicated by Judith Baxter, reciprocally, identities are constructed by and through language but also produce and reproduce “innovative forms of language”.[17]

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This confirms Foucault’s assertion that language as a system does not represent human experience in a transparent and neutral way but always exists within “historically specific discourses” and that these discourses are often competing, offering “alternative versions of reality”, serving different and conflicting power interests.[18] He indicates that such interests usually reside within “largescale institutional systems” such as law, justice, government, the media, education and the family, with a range of institutional discourses providing the network by which “dominant forms of social knowledge are produced, reinforced, contested or resisted”.[19] This underscores the fact that contemporary discourse is littered with “confused and contradictory meanings” regarding race and racism.[20]

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It has been pointed out that critical to the understanding that race is a social construction is the recognition that language must play a strong role in assigning “racial meaning to bodies”,[21] which has inspired studies of language ideologies that pay careful attention to race,[22] often occurring through “covert racializing discourses” that do not explicitly mention race[23] but work to produce “whiteness and the privileged place of whites within racial hierarchies”.[24] In this regard, it has been indicated that race and ethnic perception are “intertwined” and depend largely on the “historical and geographical context” and the “specific community discourse” that has emerged out of this context.[25]

However, it is important to consider that race, ethnicity and language are “products of colonial distinctions”, with ideas about language coming from “profound sites of reproduction of inequality”.[26] In this transnational frame of reference, the modern world is “profoundly shaped” by the globalization of European colonialism, with a continual re-articulation of colonial distinctions between Europeanness and non-Europeanness and “by extension, whiteness and non-whiteness”, with these distinctions anchoring the “joint institutional reproduction of categories of race and language”, as well as “perceptions and experiences thereof”.[27] This “coloniality of language” is a process of racialization of colonized populations as “communicative agents” beginning in the 16th century and continuing until today.[28]

 

In this respect, it has been pointed out that contemporary raciolinguistic ideologies must be situated within colonial histories that have shaped the “co-naturalization of language and race as part of the project of Modernity”.[29] It has been indicated that this is critically important because the construction of race was an “integral element of the European national and colonial project” that discursively produced racial Others in opposition to the “superior European bourgeois subject”,[30] with this positioning of Europeanness as superior to non-Europeanness being part of a “broader process of national-state/colonial governmentality”[31], a form of “governmental racialization” that imposed European “epistemological and institutional authority” on colonized populations worldwide as a justification for European colonialism.[32] In this regard, this ideology was defined by a process of “othering” in which the colonized were portrayed as “primitive, backward and savage”, validating their enslavement and disempowerment. In a British context, the colonized other was placed:

 

 “in their otherness, their marginality by the nature of the 'English eye', the all encompassing 'English eye'....The 'English eye' sees everything else but is not so good at recognizing that it is itself looking at something. It becomes coterminus with sight itself. It is, of course, a structured representation nevertheless and it is a cultural representation which is always binary. That is to say, it is strongly centered; knowing where it is, what it is, it places everything else. And the thing which is wonderful about English identity is that it didn't only place the colonized Other, it placed everybody else”.[33]

 

In a socio-cultural frame of reference, Stuart Hall points out that Black people are “typically” the objects but “rarely” the subjects of the practices of representation. He further indicates that the “struggle” to come into representation was predicated on a critique of the degree of “fetishization, objectification and negative figuration” which are so much a “feature of the representation of the Black subject”.[34] This was perpetuated through popular culture and “imprinted in everyday imagery”, as demonstrated in a Pear's Soap advertisement from 1899 in which Pear's Soap was described as being a “potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances”, demonstrating the manner in which imagery is a powerful force in perpetuating ideas of “everyday racism”.[35]

 

However, it has been asserted that the utilization of “semantic somersaults”, with the substitution of the terms “race” for “racism”, was crucial into the  transformation of the “act of a subject into an attribute of an object”, with “the neutral shibboleths of difference and diversity” replacing terms such as “slavery, injustice, oppression, and exploitation.” In this context, the “scientifically incoherent concept of race” becomes real through “speech acts” which serve to stabilize race as a reality rather than denaturalize it as a social construction.[36] Glickman points out that:

 

“Something similar is at work in the use of euphemisms which suggest that race is a fact—something that can be highlighted in a neutral way—rather than an ideology, a tool of oppression”.[37]

 

This ensures that we are confronted with “dysfunctional racial discourse” that doesn’t always mean what it says and seldom says what it means.[38] This underscores the assertion that contemporary discourse is “littered” with “confused and contradictory” meanings regarding race and racism.[39] In this regard, Omi points out that, while rejecting biological notions of race, we need to “vigorously assert” the importance of social constructs of race in individual and institutional life. He indicates that this does not mean that we can have an “accurate, precise, or scientific form of racial classification”, as racial categories dramatically change over time and are the result of “distinct political claims for recognition”, resulting from a “complex negotiation between the state and group/individual identities”.[40]

 

He indicates that the problems of “conceptual inflation and its political consequences” are of real concern, with the term "racism" in popular

political discourse being increasingly subject to “conceptual deflation” and that what is considered racist is being narrowly defined in ways that

“obscure rather than reveal the pervasiveness of racialized power” in the

social order.[41] In this regard, he points out that the reduction of racism to hate, both conceptually and politically, limits our understanding of racism and the ways we can challenge it and that racism has been silently transformed in the “popular consciousness” into acts that are “abnormal, unusual, and irrational – crimes of passion”. He asserts that missing from all this are the “ideologies and practices” in a variety of sites in our society that reproduce racial inequality and domination.[42]

 

In this frame of reference, the White western academic world has primacy in creating and engaging the language of race, with non-White European peoples being defined rather than defining themselves, which emphasizes the reality that the phenomena of race and racisms are exclusively the constructs of the White western world.[43]  In this context, “bottom up social relations” are mirrored in “top down systems of categorization”.[44] 

 

Rosa points out that any racialized group can be “linguistically stigmatized” with ideologies of “language standardization and languagelessness”. Even if a group is not yet racialized, it could become racialized through these ideological and institutional processes.[45] This demonstrates the reality that racism is more than structure and ideology but is a process that is “routinely created and reinforced through everyday practices” as indicated in Philomena Essed's formulation of the concept of everyday racism, which connects “structural forces of racism” with routine situations in everyday life, linking “ideological dimensions of racism” with “daily attitudes” and interpreting the “reproduction of racism in terms of the experience in everyday life”.[46]

 

In this socio-cultural landscape, driven by cognitive dissonance, race discourse is constrained by many in the White western cosmos because many are afraid to be accused of racism.[47] This is a natural consequence of a “pathology of imperial guilt” which is an “intellectual paralysis” which accompanies a historical process of “earnest critical reflection” on “collective sins of the past”. This historical amnesia[48] perpetuates a “series of false binaries”, which prevents the “lessons of human destruction within the colonial West” from informing a broader understanding of of the “causal relationship” between the depravation of rights and genocide.[49] In this regard it has been indicated that:

 

“The recognition of collective responsibility for the historical tragedies of colonialism, slavery, capitalist exploitation, and imperial war makes it difficult for Western critics of human rights to acknowledge the full implications of a simultaneous legacy of “liberalism, social democracy, labor agitation, feminism, gay rights advocacy, and anti-racism that [also] characterize much of the social history of the West in the last two centuries”.[50]

 

In this sea of obfuscation engendered by Western cognitive dissonance and historical amnesia, racism thrives deeply entrenched in the structural and institutional fabric of Western polity impacting on the daily lived experiences of Black peoples placing them on the margins of social existence. This confirms Amilcar Cabral's indication that in combating racism we do not make progress if we combat the people themselves and that we have to “combat the causes of racism”. He points out that If a bandit comes to a house and you have a gun, “you cannot shoot the shadow of the bandit but have to shoot the bandit”. This results in many people losing energy and effort, and making sacrifices combating shadows. He concludes that we have to “combat the material reality that produces the shadow”.[51] In this regard, Toni Morrison contends that:

 

“Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language ― all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas”.[52]

 

Ryuoko Kubota argues that the ethics promoted by black feminism emphasizes a “personal ethical commitment” to anti-racism and that  “Epistemological anti-racism” invites scholars to validate alternative theories, rethink citation practices, and develop “critical reflexivity and accountability”.[53] In this context, it has been pointed out that there is a need for more “critical and sophisticated” reading of the “so called post racial world” to reassert very strongly the central place of race and anti-racist practice in “contemporary social formations”.[54] In this respect, working within an “anti-racism framework” involves the use of language that does not “stigmatize or reproduce oppressive forms of power”.[55] This emphasizes the “centrality of language” in the discourse of anti-racism and the need for meaningful change through the “poetics of words and action” giving voice to the “possibilities of change”.[56]

 

Further, Rosa contends that:

 

“In order to disrupt the linguistic reproduction of radicalization and socio-economic stratification, we must move beyond asserting the legitimacy of stigmatized language practices,”....focusing instead on interrogating the societal reproduction of listening subject positions that continually perceive deficiency. By changing our analytical strategy in this way, we can gain new insights into how the joint ideological construction of race, class and language perpetuates inequality.”[57] 

 

As Helen Chapman points out, in the same way that the impact of art and design was used in the Victorian era to promote racial prejudice, “artistic outputs” can be used to counter racial prejudice, with imagery having a strong impact on “the way we see and think about things”, underscoring the need to keep producing positive imagery to “make racial prejudice history”.[58] In the battle against racism, oppression and discrimination, words are indeed potent weapons for social change and in the linguistic contestation with the racialist discourse inherent in the English language and in personal, structural and institutional manifestations of racism which permeate Western society. The critical importance of the transformative essence of language in the arsenal of anti-racist pedagogy cannot be overemphasized. Paramahansa Yogananda asserts that:

 

“Words saturated with sincerity, conviction, faith, and intuition are like highly explosive vibration bombs, which, when set off, shatter the rocks of difficulties and create the change desired”.[59]

 

In this regard,  Yehuda Berg states that:

 

“Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble”.[60]

 

As intoned by Ptah Hotep (Imhotep) in ancient Kemet (Egypt):

 

“Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting”.[61]

 

There can be no doubt that there is a profound urgent need to grasp this concept of “word, sound and power” in the ongoing struggle for justice and equality. Left to its own devices, race and racism will continue to be embellished in linguistic oblivion and to remain a source of inequality, disempowerment and underdevelopment. This is a crucial concern. Indeed it is imperative that those engaged in anti-racism utilize language as a weapon in this battle against the unholy alliance of racism and linguistics which have been central to the invention and persistence of the phenomenon of racism and prejudice in all its manifestations. To paraphrase Nelson Mandela and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King jr, this anti-racist struggle has reached a “decisive moment”. We no longer have the luxury of waiting to begin to more effectively confront racism at every level. “Now is the time to intensify the struggle on all fronts”, hewing out of the “mountain  of despair”, rooted in over 500 years of disempowerment, underdevelopment and marginalization, “a stone of hope” for a society built on a bedrock or equality of opportunity and social justice for all.[62] This is an essential imperative, given the pervasive and invasive nature of  the ethos of “othering” of non-White peoples in Western societies, because, in the words of Ossie Davis, “struggle is strengthening” and “battling with evil gives us power to battle evil even more”.[63] Fanon anticipates this struggle when he advised us not to imitate Europe but to “combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction”, creating the whole man, whom Europe has been “incapable of bringing to triumphant birth”.[64] This was echoed by Malcolm X at the founding rally of the Organization of African American Unity some time ago:

 

“A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfil itself”.[65]

 

In this regard, Angela Davis contends that “as our struggles mature”, they produce “new ideas, new issues,and new terrains” on which we engage in the quest for freedom and that like Nelson Mandela, “we must be willing to embrace the long walk toward freedom”.[66] Shoffner points out that it is insufficient to only tell your children that “racism and racists are bad” and that, in a “world filled with empty rhetoric”, our children don’t need to hear words from us without action.
They need to see us “embody the beliefs we claim to hold dear”.[67]

 

As declared by His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie:

 

“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained”.[68]

 

Word Sound and Power!

A Luta Continua!

Free the Land!

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References

[1] T. S. Eliot (197): Four Quartets Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston

2] George Orwell (2000): Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell. Penguin Books, London

[3] Lewis Carroll and Hugh Haughton (2012): Alice in Wonderland; and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. Penguin Classics, London

[4] Malcolm X (1965): Speech at Ford Auditorium. Available online <https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1965-malcolm-x-speech-ford-auditorium/>

[5] James Baldwin (1979): On Language, Race and the Black Writer. Los Angeles Times. Available online < http://marktwainstudies.com/brutal-things-must-be-said-james-baldwin-on-huckleberry-finn/>

[6] Christine Mallinson (2018): “Sociolinguistics” In Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Linguistics. Available online

<http://linguistics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-22 >                  

[7] T. P. Bonfiglio (2002):  Race and the Rise of Standard American. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin; (2012): “The Invention of the Native Speaker – Thomas Paul Bonfligio” In Multilingual 2.07

[8] Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson and Mary Buckholtz et. Al. (2018): “Linguistics and Race: An Interdisciplinary Approach Towards an LSA Statement on Race” In Proc. Ling. Soc. Amer. 3.8:1-14

[9] K. Anthony Appiah (1994): “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections”. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values Delivered at University of California at San Diego, October 27 and 28

[10] Lidija Hass (2017): “The Origin of the Other by Toni Morrison Review – The Language of Race and Racism” In The Guardian 18 October

[11] Anne H. Charity Hudley (2017): “Language and Racialization” In Ofelia Garcia, Nelson Flores and Massimiliano Spotti (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society. Oxford University Press, New York; Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson and Mary Buckholtz et. Al. (2018) supra.

[12] Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson and Mary Buckholtz et. Al. (2018) supra.

[13] Samy Alim, John R. Rickford and Arnetha F. Ball (2016): Raciolinguistics. Oxford University Press, New York

[14] Alex Shashkevich (2016): “Stanford Experts Highlight the Link Between Language and Race in New Book” In the Stanford News December 27

[15] Samy Alim, John R. Rickford and Arnetha F. Ball (2016) supra.; Alex Shashkevich (2016) supra.

[16] Arthur Dion Hanna jr (2011): Land and Freedom: Sabbatical Essays From a Legal Aid Lawyer. Karadira Blackstar, Nassau Bahamas;

[17] Judith Baxter (2016): “Positioning Language and Identity” In Sian Preece (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Race and Identity. Available online <https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315669816.ch2>

[18] M. Foucault (1984): “What is Enlightenment?” In P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader. Penguin, London

[19] Ibid.

[20] Michael Omi (2001): “Rethinking the Language of Race and Racism” In Asian American Law Journal, Vol. 8 (7)

[21] H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford and Arnetha F. Ball (eds.) (2016) supra.; Jennifer Roth-Gordon and Jessica Ray (2018): “Language and Race” In Oxford Bibliographies February 22. Available online <https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0183.xml>

[22] Elaine W. Chun and Adrienne Lo (2016): “Language and Racialization” In The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, Volume 21 (1); Jennifer Roth-Gordon and Jessica Ray (2018) supra.

[23] Hillary Parsons Dick and Kristina Wirtz (2011): “Racializing Discourses” In Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Volume 21 (1); Jennifer Roth-Gordon and Jessica Ray (2018) supra.

[24] Jane H. Hill (2008): The Everyday Language of White Racism. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden MA; Jennifer Roth-Gordon and Jessica Ray (2018) supra.

[25] Anna-Lena Halloun (2017): “No, You're Just Half: The Impact of Everyday Racism on Mixed Race Identities in Belgium” In the Matheo WebBlog. Available online: <https://matheo.uliege.be/handle/2268.2/2546 >

[26] Erin  (2018): “The Link Between Race and Language: Looking Like a Language – Sounding Like a Race” In the West Georgian, March 30. Available online <thewestgeorgian.com/the-link-between-race-and-language-looking-like-a-language-sounding-like-a-race/>

[27] Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores (2019): “Unsettling Race and language: Toward Raciolinguistic Perspective” In Language in Society, Vol. 46, 621-647

[28] Gabriela A. Veronelli (2015): “The Coloniality of Language: Race, Expressivity, Power and the Darker Side of Modernity” In Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies, Summer, Volume 13

[29] Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores (2019) supra.

[30] Ann Laura Stoller (1995): Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C.; Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores (2019) supra.

[31] Nelson Flores (2013): “Silencing the Subaltern: Nation State Colonial Govermentality and Bilingual Education in the United States”. In Critical Inquiry in Language Studies Volume 10; Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores (2019) supra.

[32] Barnor Hesse (2007): “Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies” In Ethnic and racial Studies, Volume 30; Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores (2019) supra.

[33] Stuart Hall (1997): “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity” In  Anthony D. King (ed.) Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. University of Minnesota Press

[34] Stuart Hall (1988): “New Ethnicities” In Kobena Mercer (ed.) Black Film, British Cinema. ICA Documents, Volume 7. ICA Publications, London

[35] Helen Chapman (2014): “Everyday Racism” In Manchester Historian, May 20. Available online <http://manchesterhistorian.com/2014/everyday-racism/ >

[36] Lawrence B. Glickman (2018): “The Racist Politics of the English Language” In The Boston Review, November 26. Available online <http://bostonreview.net/race/lawrence-glickman-racially-tinged> 

[37] Ibid.

[38] Keith Woods (2002): “The Language of Race” In the Poynter WebBlog, August 25. Available online <https://www.poynter.org/archive/2002/the-language-of-race/>

[39] Michael Omi (2001): “Rethinking the Language of Race and Racism” In Asian Law Journal, Volume 8

[40] Michael Omi (1997): “Racial Identity and the State: The Dilemmas of Classification” In The Law and Inequality Journal, Volume 15; (2001) supra.

[41]  Michael Omi (2001) supra.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Robert V. Guthrie (2004): Even the Rat Was White: A Historical View of Psychology. Boston, Allyn Bacon; John R. Rickford (2014): Increasing the Representation of Under-Represented Ethnic Minorities in Linguistics. Paper Presented as part of the Symposium : Diversity in Linguistics at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, Minnesota, January 2014; Linguistic Society of America (2015): Annual Report: The State of Linguistics in Higher Education. Available Online: <https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/state-linguistics-higher-education-annualreport>; Dion Hanna (2018): “Cognitive Dissonance and Historical Amnesia: Racism and Race in a Bahamian Context” In Journal of Revolution and Liberation, Volume 1 (3), October. Available online: <https://www.jrevlib.org/vol-1-issue-3-2018>

[44] Jennifer S. Horschild and V. Weaver  (2007): “Policies of Racial Classification and the Politics of Racial Inequality”. In Joe Soss, Jacob Hacker and Suzanne Mettler (eds.)  Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality. Russell Sage Foundation, New York

[45] Jonathan Rosa (2018): Looking Like a Language – Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. Oxford University Press, New York

[46] Philomena Essed (1991): Everyday Racism. Sage Publications, London

[47] Ben Pitcher (2014): Consuming Race. Routledge, London and New York; Dion Hanna (2018) supra.

[48] Matt Broomfield (2017): “Britons Suffer Historical Amnesia Over Atrocities of Their Former Empire”. In the Independent Sunday March 5

[49] Rhonda E. Howard-Hassman: “Historical Amnesia, Genocide and the Rejection of Universal Human Rights”. In Mark Goodale (2014): Human Rights at the Crossroads. In Oxford Scholarship Online. Available online: <https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199376414.001.0001/acprof-9780199376414-chapter-13 >

[50] Ibid.

[51] Amilcar Cabral (1973): Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral. Monthly Review Press, New York

[52] Toni Morrison (1993): “Nobel Lecture”. On the Nobel Prize Website. Available online: <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/ >

[53] Ryuoko Kubota (2019): “Confronting Epistemological Racism, Decolonizing Scholarly Knowledge: Race and Gender in Applied Linguistics”.  In Applied Linguistics amz033. Available online: <https://academic.oup.com/applij/article/doi/10.1093/applin/amz033/5519375/>

[54] George J. Sefa Dei (2013): “Chapter One: Reframing Critical Anti-racist Theory (CART) for Contemporary Times”. In Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity: A Critical Reader. Volume 445

[55] J. Hopton (1997): “Anti-Discriminatory Practice and Anti-Oppressive Practice”. In Critical Social Policy, Volume 17; G. Larson (2008): “Anti-Oppressive Practice in Mental Health”. In Journal of Progressive Human Services, Volume 19 (1); Simon Corneau and Vicky Stergioppoulos (2012): “More Than Being Against it: Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression in Mental Health Services”. In Transcultural Psychiatry, Volume 49 (2)

[56] Nuzhat Amin, George Dei and Meredith Lordon (eds.) (2006): The Poetics of Anti-Racism. Fernonwood  Pub., Halifax, Nova Scotia

[57] Jonathan Rosa (2018) supra.

[58] Helen Chapman (2014) supra.

[59] Paramahansa Yogananda (2012): “Paramahansa Yogananda on the Power of Affirmation”. In the Self Realization Fellowship E-Newsletter, July-August

[60] Yehuda Berg (2011): “The Power of Words”. On the HuffPost Web Blog, November 17. Available online: <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-power-of-words_1_b_716183>

[61] Brian Brown (ed.) (2005): The Wisdom of the Egyptians: The Story of the Egyptians, the Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, the Ptahhotep and the Ke'gemini, the Book of the Dead, the Wisdom of Hermes Trismagistos, Egyptian Music, the Book of Toth. University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan

[62] Martin Luther King jr. (1963): I Have a Dream: Speech by the Reverend Martin Luther King jr. at the March on Washington. Available online <https://www.archives.gov/files/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf> ; Nelson Mandela (1990): “On Release From Prison, Cape Town, South Africa, 11 February”. In Nelson Mandela Foundation, Speaking Out for Justice: Key Statements and Speeches by Nelson Mandela, 1961-2008. Available online <https://www.un.org/en/events/mandeladay/legacy.shtml>

[63] Ossie Davis (2013): “Quote of the Week” In the Austin Daily News, July 16. Available online: <https://www.austinweeklynews.com/News/Articles/7-16-2013/Quote-of-the-week/ >

[64] Franz Fanon (1967): The Wretched of the Earth. Penguin, Harmondsworth

[65] Malcolm X (1964): Malcolm X's Speech at the Founding Rally of the Organization of African American Unity. Available online <https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1964-malcolm-x-s-speech-founding-rally-organization-afro-american-unity/>

[66] Angela Davis (2016): Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books, Chicago

[67] Bellamy Shoffner (2018): “If We Don't Hold the Line, Who will?” In Alexa Bigwarfe , Nancy Cavillones and Maria Desmondi (eds.) Lose the Cape: The Mom's Guide to Becoming Socially and Politically Engaged (& Raising Tiny Activists. Kate Biggie Press, USA (Kindle Edition)

[68] His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I (1963): Selassie's Address to the United Nations, 1963. Available online: <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Haile_Selassie%27s_address_to_the_United_Nations,_1963>

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