Inventing “the White Voice”: - 麻省理工学院人工智能研究专业

Inventing “the White Voice”:
Racial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics &
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

H. Samy Alim

在这篇文章中, I explore how paradigms like raciolinguistics and culturally sustain-
ing pedagogies can offer substantive breaks from mainstream thought and provide
us with new, 只是, and equitable ways of living together in the world. I begin with
a deep engagement with Boots Riley and his critically acclaimed, anticapitalist,
absurdist comedy Sorry to Bother You, in hopes of demonstrating how artists,
activists, creatives, and scholars might: 1) cotheorize the complex relationships be-
tween language and racial capitalism and 2) think through the political, econom-
我知道了, and pedagogical implications of this new theorizing for Communities of Color.
In our current sociopolitical situation, we need to continue making pedagogical
moves toward freedom that center and sustain Communities of Color in the face
of the myriad ways that white settler capitalist terror manifests. As we continue to
theorize the relationships between language and racial capitalism, frameworks like
raciolinguistics and culturally sustaining pedagogies provide fundamentally criti-
卡尔, antiracist, anticolonial approaches that reject the capitalist white settler gaze
and its kindred cisheteropatriarchal, English-monolingual, ableist, classist, xeno-
phobic, and other hegemonic gazes. What they offer us, 反而, is a break from
the assimilationist politics of the past and a move toward abolitionist frameworks
of the future.

U CLA’s Center for Race, 种族, and Language and the Ralph J. Bunche

Center for African American Studies’ Hip Hop Initiative invited Boots
Riley to campus. Riley, the director of the critically acclaimed, anticapi-
talist, absurdist comedy Sorry to Bother You, and winner of the Sundance Institute’s
highly coveted Vanguard Award, had produced a provocative work of art with
far-reaching implications related to the theme of this volume: 语言, 种族, 和
社会正义. Every scholar of race on campus was discussing the film. 因此,
I invited Robin D. G. Kelley, Gaye Theresa Johnson, and Kelly Lytle Hernández, 全部
historians and scholars of the Black radical tradition, to join me in conversation
with Riley so that we might: 1) cotheorize the complex relationships between lan-

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guage and racial capitalism and 2) think through the political, 经济的, and ped-
agogical implications of this new theorizing for Communities of Color.1

Boots spent the entire day with us. Sporting a tan corduroy jacket and rockin
the classic afro and sideburns he has come to be known for, he lectured masterful-
莱, without notes, for over an hour to over three hundred undergraduate students in
my course on “Culture and Communication” and fielded their questions long after
the class session had ended. Then he engaged in a lively discussion with C-BLAAC, A
Black graduate student group in the department of anthropology, as well as Bunche
Center faculty. Later that evening, we hosted a screening of Sorry to Bother You to a
standing-room-only crowd in the Fowler Museum, which was followed by a rich,
extended dialogue with Riley. 它是, quite simply, a beautiful thing to witness.2

Throughout his career, Riley has created immensely powerful works of art–
from music to film–all while being in the movement struggle as an activist and or-
ganizer, taking incredible risks to both his person and his career. Sorry to Bother You
was an instant classic, but I first became acquainted with Boots Riley through his
innovative music with Oakland-based Hip Hop group The Coup back when I was
a graduate student at Stanford University immersing myself in Bay-Area Hip Hop
to survive the racial absurdity of life for People of Color at that elite, overwhelm-
ingly white institution. I would meet Boots again in 2002 at Harvard University’s
Hiphop Archive at the invitation of Dr. Marcyliena Morgan. Years later, after seeing
how deeply involved Boots was in the Occupy Movement as a constant and vocal
presence in #OccupyOakland in 2011, I invited him to speak to our students about
how artists were engaging in anticapitalist resistance and helping us to imagine new
futures.

I’ve learned so much from each of our engagements. When I picked him up from
the hotel, I thanked him, and he said, “For what?” I told him, “For communicating
better in just two hours what it has taken linguists decades to try to say–and we still
haven’t said it nearly as well. That’s what you’ve done in Sorry to Bother You.” As we
wound our way west on LA’s storied Sunset Boulevard, we talked about how art can
be a much more powerful medium “to communicate revolutionary ideas to the peo-
ple” than the academy. And yet scholars owe it to themselves and others to reach
far beyond the walls of their hallowed institutions and dusty journals. Reflecting on
that conversation, I think Riley was trying to make sure that, even as he acknowl-
edged the important role of the academy, I was also acknowledging its limits, par-
ticularly with respect to its often exclusionary discourses, unimaginative means of
communicating with the public, and frequent lip-service given to social impact, 全部
of which belie a questionable theory of, and suspect commitment to, 改变.

W ithin the academy, we talked about the emerging area of raciolinguis-

抽动症, our establishment of the Oxford University Press book series Ox-
ford Studies in Language and Race, and the field of language and race

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesRacial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics & Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

writ large, in particular how scholars of color are increasingly rejecting analyses of
language that ignore race, 种族主义, and racialization. We were shocked that, 甚至
among our more progressive white allies, many linguists who watched Sorry to
Bother You reported being caught off guard, even disappointed, because they ex-
pected a film about “language” and instead “got a film about race and capitalism,”
as if these things were mutually exclusive. When I shared this with Boots, he re-
sponded, “I guess it depends on what your definition of language is,” highlighting
how most academic training in linguistics has historically preferred to deal with
language as an abstract system severed from its social context, and even when that
context is considered, it is a raceless one or one aligned with white normativity.3
然而, as I wrote in the introduction to Raciolinguistics, one of our goals is to
“better understand the role of language in maintaining and challenging racism as
a global system of capitalist oppression.”4 And we can do this by “taking intersec-
tional approaches that understand race as always produced jointly with class, gen-
这, 性欲, religion, (反式)national, and other axes of social differentiation”
used in complex vectors of oppression.5

T his is why Sorry to Bother You is such an important film: It not only uses

a linguistic device (“the white voice”) as its central metaphor, 但它也
throws into sharp relief the links between language, patriarchy, racial cap-
italism, colonialism, and imperialism. 更远, the film helps viewers take a crit-
伊卡尔, social constructionist view of language and race, showing both to be social
processes invented for particular purposes. In Boots’s own words, as he explained
to my linguistic anthropology students, the white voice represents a “performance
of whiteness that is at once in juxtaposition to what white people are told Black-
ness is,” as well as “racist tropes of People of Color, 哪个. . . have a utility” in that
they serve the interests of the capitalist elite. 最后的, 也许最重要的是,
the film highlights that anticapitalist, antipatriarchal, and anticolonial resistance
necessitates the deconstruction of these social categories in order to imagine new
ways of existing together in the world.

The protagonist of the film, Cassius Green (sound it out, “cash is green;”
played by Lakeith Stanfield), is a Black telemarketer living in a rapidly gentrifying
Oakland. Cassius is not only struggling to make ends meet, but he is also strug-
gling to live a life that has meaning above and beyond the crushing weight of capi-
talism and its daily, routinized grind. In perhaps the most iconic scene of the film,
Cassius’s more senior coworker Langston (played by Danny Glover) observes his
poor performance and offers him some advice. It’s at this moment that Langston
introduces “the white voice”:

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Langston: [laughing at Cassius’s failure to secure a sale as a customer hangs up on him]
嘿, youngblood.

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152 (3) Summer 2023H. Samy Alim

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Cassius: What up?
Langston: Let me give you a tip. Use your white voice.
Cassius: My white voice?
Langston: Yeah.
Cassius: Maaan, I ain’t got no white voice.
Langston: 哦, come on. You know what I mean, youngblood. You have a
white voice in there. You can use it. It’s like being pulled over by the police.
Cassius: [sarcastically] Ohhh, nooo. I just use my regular voice when that hap-
pens. I just say, “Back the fuck up off the car, and don’t nobody get hurt.”
Langston: Alright, 男人, I’m just tryna give you some game. You wanna
make some money here? Then read your script with a white voice.
Cassius: People say I talk with a white voice anyway, so why ain’t it helpin
me out?
Langston: 出色地, you don’t talk white enough. I’m not talkin about Will
Smith white. That ain’t white, that’s just proper.
Cassius: Mm-hmm.
Langston: I’m talkin about the real deal.
Cassius: 所以, 喜欢 [plugging his nose with his fingers to give his voice an exaggerated
nasal quality], “你好, 先生. Everett, Cassius Green here. Sooorry to boooother
you.” [mocking white speech through ritualized performance]
Langston: 现在, 看, 看, you got that wrong. I’m not talkin about soundin
all nasal. It’s like sounding like you don’t have a care. You got your bills paid.
You’re happy about your future. You’re about ready to jump into your Ferrari
out there after you get off this call. Put some real [voice gets breathy] breath in
那里, breezy like, “I don’t really need this money.” You’ve never been fired,
only laid off. It’s not really a white voice. It’s what they wish they sounded
喜欢. 所以, it’s like, what they think they’re supposed to sound like. Like this,
youngblood, [Langston performs the magical white voice] “Heyyy, 先生. 克莱默,
this is Langston from Regal View. I didn’t catch you at the wrong time,
did I?”
Cassius: [looking back at Langston, stunned into silence as the scene fades]6

The dialogue between Cassius and Langston makes it clear that the white
voice is not merely what some folks refer to as “sounding white.” In lines 016–
017, Langston states that he is not referring to Black people who speak “standard
英语,” or even those that speak in ways that are palatable to white folks (“我是
not talkin about Will Smith white. That ain’t white, that’s just proper”). 之后,
we also see that the white voice that Langston is referring to is not to be mistaken
with ritualized, comedic mockeries of white speech, which have been performed
by Black comedians and others for decades.7 So the white voice, 然后, is not what
Cassius performs in lines 020–022 when he plugs his nose and speaks with an ex-
aggerated nasal quality.

If the white voice doesn’t refer to these common speech events, then what does
it refer to? As Langston explained to Cassius in line 009, it’s the voice that many

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesRacial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics & Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

People of Color use when being “pulled over by the police,” that everyday (然而
soul-murdering) transformation of bodily comportment, facial expressions, 和
language that some of us perform to “help” white police officers see us as human.
We draw on every ounce of our accumulated cultural capital and perform a ver-
sion of whiteness that most white officers themselves do not even possess. 我们
develop additional routines as well. 为我, it was “accidentally” pulling out my
Stanford University ID card instead of my driver’s license, which helped me on
some occasions (I did it every single time I was pulled over–sometimes they got
mad, sometimes they softened a bit, but I know enough to know that it was nev-
er a guarantee of safety or equitable treatment under the law). I wasn’t mocking
whiteness, nor was I performing “whiteness” as verbal artistic realism. 反而,
I was creating abstract verbal art, giving them what they themselves thought they
sounded like, or perhaps aspired to sound like. Langston explains this brilliantly,
and quite humorously, in the key passage of the excerpt (lines 023–029):

现在, 看, 看, you got that wrong. I’m not talkin about soundin all nasal. It’s like
sounding like you don’t have a care. You got your bills paid. You’re happy about your
未来. You’re about ready to jump into your Ferrari out there after you get off this call.
Put some real [voice gets breathy] breath in there, breezy like, “I don’t really need this
money.” You’ve never been fired, only laid off. It’s not really a white voice. It’s what
they wish they sounded like. 所以, it’s like, what they think they’re supposed to sound like.

I’ll return to this aspirational whiteness below. 之后, we see that Cassius be-
gins using the white voice and experiencing some serious success. 实际上, his em-
ployers at Regal View are ecstatic with his improved job performance. 然而,
Cassius goes above and beyond simply using the white voice. He references ste-
reotypically white cultural touchstones and uses intonation associated with white
美国人, while using slang associated with Black Americans or at least hav-
ing originated with Black speakers [“holla, holla, holla, hollaaaaaa!”]. 幽默-
乌斯, he sometimes juxtaposes this slang while describing himself engaging in
stereotypically white activities (“Tim, I wanna chop it up more, but I gotta get to
my squash game. [Then rapidly follows with] Was that Visa or MasterCard?”),
increasing his sales numbers.

In the film, we see that his white customers also use slang associated with Black
folks, even if outdated, 喜欢, “Booyah!” In one scene, Cassius Green and his white
customer jointly construct hypermasculinity through use of Black slang in dis-
cussing how the customer’s acquisition of the merchandise that Cassius is selling
will lead to sexual intercourse with a desirable woman. 但, 重要的是, it’s not
only his white voice that’s helping him achieve success. Cassius is also employing
slang associated with Black folks in ways that might confirm stereotypical ideas
about Blackness in the white imagination: 那是, Black men and Black sexual
prowess. 最终, the use of the white voice has such success because it simul-

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152 (3) Summer 2023H. Samy Alim

taneously alleviates white fears about Blackness (Cassius is later introduced to the
CEO, “It’s OK, he’s friendly”) and confirms white stereotypes about Black peo-
ple–in this case, providing a patriarchal “bonding moment” for these two men.

C assius’s “success” earns him a promotion to “power caller,” but he’s no

longer selling magazine subscriptions. He’s now selling arms and human
beings into slavery through a company named WorryFree. When Cassius
meets WorryFree CEO Steve Lift, he “praises” Cassius as a “cunning racoon.” In-
side Lift’s mansion, Lift is surrounded by his party guests (mostly his “groupies,”
women hanging all over him), telling a story about how he killed a rhinoceros
during one of his hunting trips and turned it into a trophy. He then turns to Cas-
sius and asks, “What about you, 现金? Have you ever had to bust a cap in any-
body’s ass?” As he invites Cassius to come sit down in front of him on the floor, 他
添加, “I wanna hear about some of that Oakland gangster shit, 男人. Oak Town!”8
As the CEO continues the litany of racist stereotypes, Cassius apologizes be-

cause he doesn’t have any “cool stories,” but the CEO insists aggressively:

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CEO: Alright, 出色地, I mean, give us something, 正确的? These boring cunts are at
every single one of my parties. You’re different, 男人. Make an impression. 在
least take off the white voice. And I know you can bust a rap, 正确的?
Cassius: [in his regular voice] 不, actually, I can’t, umm. . . .
CEO: Bullshit! Come on, bullshit.
Cassius: I can’t, 男人. I mean, I can listen to rap well, but I just can’t rap. 它是
actually embarrassing.
CEO: I don’t know, I think he’s lying. I think you can rap. I think you should
rap. Rap! Rap! Rap! [The CEO’s chant is now echoed by everyone in the room.] Rap!
Rap! Rap! Rap! Rap! Rap! Rap! Rap! [repeated approximately 25 次, creating an
overwhelming sense of discomfort for Cassius and even the least racially literate members
of the movie audience].9

In response to the deafening chant, Cassius attempts to rap on what is now a
makeshift concert stage. It turns out that he was telling the truth–he has zero rap
技能. As he flounders in front of the guests, he tries to rhyme a lame line about
药物, which fails miserably. He looks around anxiously at his now bored white
audience and comes up with a strategy. He starts chanting: “N*gga shit, n*gga
shit, n*gga n*gga n*gga shit!” The crowd loves it, chants along enthusiastically,
throwing their hands up in the air as if they just don’t care (the scene is now an ab-
surd Hip Hop club concert). And so there it is. Cassius has given the CEO and his
party guests exactly what they wanted, some real life “n*gga shit”: 那是, 一些-
thing profoundly and stereotypically Black that would confirm all of their essen-
tialist, racist ideas about Black people, including the profoundly reductive (和
fetishizing) notion that every Black person has a “real n*gga” inside of them who

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesRacial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics & Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

only comes out when white people aren’t looking (“Bullshit. I think he’s lying”).
He has also given them the much-desired access to Black cultural space for their
enjoyment.

Cassius has both exploited and been exploited by white desires to come into
contact with the exotic masculine Black man, the gangsta Black man, the vio-
四旬斋 (“bust a cap”), Black talking (“at least drop the white voice”), Hip Hopping
(“bust a rap”) Black man. As the scene fades with surreal white cheers of “n*gga
shit,” Cassius seems to know that he has both saved his career and sold his soul to
the devil. He has allowed himself to fall prey to the ultimate form of racial reduc-
tionism. Cassius is caught between performing “the white voice” and performing
“n*gga shit” for white folks, both figures of the white raciolinguistic imagination.
He must display his “true” Blackness, but only when it is appropriate, only when
问, and only when given permission by whites. They don’t want the complexi-
ty of his Blackness, his humanity. They want what they think Blackness is, 和他们
want Cassius to cosign it for them. 到底, Cassius is left with a choice that’s
not really a choice at all. What kinds of decisions do we make when our art is com-
修改的, when we are commodified, and when our ability to supply basic necessi-
领带, such as food and housing, hangs in the balance?

As Robin Kelley would later point out in our discussion with Boots, the use of
the white voice in the film carries deep, if not absurd, historical significance as
出色地, particularly if we recall Langston’s advice to Cassius:

Langston’s deconstruction of the white voice slyly breaks down the principles of min-
strelsy: white men in blackface adopted a black voice not as it was but as white folks
imagined it to be. I do not mean the plantation dialect or the corruption of words but
the intonations that come from imagining that slaves don’t have a care in the world.
As we have learned from the historians Eric Lott and David Roediger, minstrelsy was a
product not only of hatred and fear, but also of envy. It wasn’t just black bodies white
men envied, but the association of blackness with sexual abandon and the rhythms of
preindustrial life–with the performing rather than the laboring body, as it danced and
sang. 讽刺地, the enslaved African–who often worked in gangs from sun up to sun
down under the supervision of a driver–came to represent freedom from industrial
time and discipline.10

By engaging in Black linguistic practice–that is, language use associated with
Black people, such as rap or the use of certain slang–white customers and party-
goers are elevated from “corny” to “cool.” Meanwhile, Black users of the white
voice remain in a form of suspended animation, winning limited material suc-
cess but suffering severe cultural and linguistic deprecation, while staying exclud-
ed from the elite class, always in performance, forever in service to them. 他们的
成功, as demonstrated by Mr. _______ (the Black guardian of Lift’s golden el-
evator), depends on their ability to suppress the absurdity of this state of affairs

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152 (3) Summer 2023H. Samy Alim

and to ignore how their individual success depends upon the oppression of the
collective.11 Throughout, women remain sexual objects to be purchased by men,
nothing more than adornment, degraded, humiliated, and happy about it. No re-
sistance is shown to the CEO’s misogynist comment, “These boring cunts are at
every single one of my parties.”

A s Riley lays out his raciolinguistic vision, we come to see that all of this

degradation is central to white supremacist, patriarchal, racial capital-
ism.12 As Boots himself reminded me that day, “Culture comes from how
we survive, and how we survive is determined by the economic system that we’re
在, and so you need to have a class analysis. Having a class analysis means also
to understand that race and class are tied together inextricably” (and of course
gender and sexuality as well). If we revisit Langston’s advice to Cassius–about
the white voice being aspirational–we can see more clearly that the white voice
isn’t merely about some performance to convince customers that he’s white. 为了
Boots, that performance highlights the links between whiteness, 种族主义, 首都-
主义, 和 (settler) colonialism. 实际上, he described the function of the white voice
as a voice

that maybe white people don’t even have but they wish they had, think they’re sup-
posed to have. 所以, it’s just talking about the idea of whiteness as this idea that ac-
tually is juxtaposed with and against racist tropes of People of Color. . . . [There’s] a util-
ity there. They say, “Look, look how savage Black folks are!” “Look how their family
structure’s broken!” You know, “They just don’t have the drive. They don’t have the
tools they need to win in society. And that is something to do with them.” And so, it’s a
way of explaining poverty as the bad mistakes of the impoverished.

He continued:

But the truth is this. It’s that under capitalism you must have a certain amount of un-
employed people. . . . Because if you did have full employment, then every worker could
demand whatever wage they wanted, because there’s nobody to replace them. . . . 他们
need an army of unemployed people, to threaten people with jobs, with losing their
工作, to say, “We can replace you.” So poverty is built into capitalism, and capitalism
must have poverty. But how do you explain that to the largest section of the work-
ing class in the United States, which are white people? . . . You don’t. . . . You create an
其他, and you point at them, and you say, “You don’t want to be like them.” And so
you end up having this performance of whiteness, 那是, at once in juxtaposition to
what white people are told Blackness is. And at the same time, this allows some white
guy making $22,000 a year in the Midwest to think that they are the middle class and
identify more with the ruling class than with other people who are suffering. 所以,
all these racist ideas have a utility. And that’s the reason they exist. . . . They’re useful.

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesRacial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics & Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

For Boots, the idea of race was created and manipulated to serve European capi-
talist and colonial interests: “The whole reason that there is capitalism, as we have
it today, was a big part of stealing labor and stealing land, and the idea of race was
created to assuage the white working class in Europe, with the idea that you’re not
going to be enslaved. ‘Don’t worry . . . ’ Because at the time race meant species. . . .
There wasn’t this idea that people in France were the same as the people in Ireland
because they were white.” As Kelley pointed out in his brilliant Boston Review piece
about the film, Riley uses the white voice to:

interrogate the privileges and poverty of whiteness. . . . Like whiteness itself, the white
voice is a chimera, masking a specific class position and conveying a sense of being
genuinely worry free, with no bills to pay, money in the bank, not a care in the world.
This is the expectation of whiteness–an expectation many white people never, 实际上,
realize.13

Riley’s use of the white voice points to whiteness–and race–as an invention.
As we see in the film, particularly when characters debate the status of Italians as
白色的, understanding whiteness as an invention points to its inherent instability.
The white voice as it’s used in the film also underscores Blackness as a figment of
the white imagination. The white voice is not only what white people think they
sound like, or think they are supposed to sound like, but the whole abstraction,
as with whiteness itself, is set in opposition to white ideas about what they think
Blackness is and what Black people are supposed to sound like.

But the real brilliance of the white voice is that it is disembodied. It should be
clear by now that the white voice is not an actual representation of “white speech.”
Boots’s white voice is not just a linguistic performance but a device that draws at-
tention to the crushing system of racial capitalism. This is why the actors them-
selves don’t perform the white voice. To Boots, when Cassius speaks in the white
嗓音, it’s “supposed to sound like an overdub to the other people around him. . .
a magical voice that is coming from somewhere else.” As he explains, the reason
for that is twofold:

一, often when writers have someone like a superhero have magic powers. . . it’s usu-
ally their way of saying what they think the problem is in the world, 正确的? So we have
all these superheroes whose power is that they’re strong enough to beat people up,
正确的? And usually, that’s because apparently, the problem is poor people who are do-
ing crimes. And that’s the big picture, that this person develops this superpower and
they can stop crime. Stop people physically. 和 . . . if they thought that the problem
was more systemic, then–and I don’t know how you just show this in a superpower–
but they’d be trying to change the economic system that we’re in, 正确的. But so, 那
power’s often a comment on what the problem is. 所以, I wanted him to have a pow-
er that dealt with the problems . . . that you have to deal with when you have the identi-

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152 (3) Summer 2023H. Samy Alim

fiers of race and being Black. 所以, I wanted that to not just be something that he figured
出去, but to have it be a magic power to say that that is a problem that people have to
deal with. But I also wanted it to not be his voice. I needed it to be something that was
separate from his body, something that was an idea on its own. Because as Langston,
Danny Glover’s character explains, it’s not something connected genetically, even to
white people.

In these remarks, Boots appeals to audiences to complicate the oft-heard inad-
equate readings of the white voice that don’t explain the political-economic theo-
ry of race behind its use. As Kelley and others have pointed out, WorryFree is not
only the name of the corporation selling human beings into slavery. 在此之下
surreal scenario, human beings willingly give up life in the capitalist “rat race”
to live in what are essentially prison cells with multiple bunks to a room, eating
slop for sustenance, and achieving “worry-free” status with no more bills to pay
or outside responsibilities. But the company’s name also points to the worry-free
quality of the white voice (how whites think they sound, or should sound), 还有
as the imagined worry-free existence of enslaved Africans. 更远, if we recall
Boots’s comments about the invention of race to serve capitalist ends, WorryFree
also points to the suggestion by imperial powers for the white European poor to
remain worry-free because they wouldn’t be enslaved like the “darker peoples of
the earth.”

T he links between language, 种族, 资本主义, and colonialism are brought

sharply into focus by the character of Cassius’s girlfriend, 底特律 (played
by Tessa Thompson), an activist and visual and performance artist and
one of only two other characters in the film that uses a “white voice.” The differ-
ence here is that Detroit’s overdubbed white voice represents a prestigious, 甚至
exaggerated, British variety, as well as the “ideal” of white femininity. In the film,
we notice immediately that she’s talking to prospective art buyers in a voice that
sounds radically different from her usual voice, including using gasps to display
interest among other affectations. Later during her stunning stage performance,
she appears virtually nude and encourages audience members to throw “broken
cell phones, used bullet casings, and water balloons filled with sheep’s blood” at
her body while she continues to perform–and the movie audience either looks
away or watches the grotesque scene as Detroit’s patrons begin to violently hurl
the items at her body.14

As Boots explained, Detroit’s white voice was meant to sound more presti-
gious than the American white voice in order to convey the so-called sophistica-
tion of “the art world.” To me, the British white voice might also function as a
raciolinguistic symbol of the economic exploitation of Africa by European, capi-
talist, imperialist powers. It’s not lost on the audience that the brutality of the Eu-
ropean exploitation–the theft of humans and natural resources, the destruction

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesRacial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics & Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

of lands and ways of life, the ongoing neocolonial, extractive practices by the tech
industry and others–is visited upon the bodies of Black women, as represented
by the physical pain endured by Detroit during her performance. Detroit’s per-
formance conveys the idea that the destruction of Black women–from the un-
speakable horrors of enslavement and genocide to the precarity of contemporary
life–is the ultimate price of the white supremacist, patriarchal, racial capitalist,
imperial ticket. The white voice, as a cinematic device, provokes these and other
serious ideas and questions.

然而, not only do oft-heard descriptions of the white voice not adequately
represent the theory of race that informs Riley’s film, they also fall short in com-
municating the complexity of his theory of language–and, 当然, that lan-
guage and race are being theorized together throughout.15 As I shared in “Hearing
What’s Not Said and Missing What Is,” white folks can and often do invent the lin-
guistic practices of People of Color in ways that track neatly with the stereotypes
they hold about them.16 White racial and linguistic hegemony shapes how speech
is heard and interpreted through what Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa have
termed raciolinguistic ideologies. As they point out, the “raciolinguistic ideologies of
the white listening subject can stigmatize language use regardless of one’s empiri-
cal linguistic practices.”17 Just as Riley urges us to focus on the system that the ab-
stract, disembodied white voice is meant to critique, these scholars have similarly
urged us to look beyond “empirical linguistic practices” of People of Color and to
the perceiving practices of whites.

Building upon research on language ideologies, and leaning on linguistic an-
thropologist Miyako Inoue’s powerful theorizing of what she refers to as “the
listening subject,” this recent work can be seen as an effort to critique language
scholarship’s focus on speaker agency and to push the theoretical pendulum back
toward hearers, particularly when “the listening subject” is used to refer to hege-
monic systems of power.18 Inoue’s work on gender has been taken up to consid-
er not just how language can transform race but also how “racialized signs come
to transform linguistic ones.”19 Riley’s separation of the white voice from any
physical body highlights hegemonic perceiving practices as crucial to theorizing
language and race. How whites hear themselves–and in relation to how they hear
Black folks–creates both language and race in the white raciolinguistic imagina-
tion in ways that have material consequences for People of Color and, as Boots
points out, poor whites.

T he process of racialization–whereby race is an enduring yet evolving so-

cial process steeped in centuries of colonialism and capitalism–is central
to recent linguistic anthropological approaches to language and race.20
But Boots’s analysis of the white voice also echoes studies of race that have long
shown race to be inextricable from histories of genocide, enslavement, apartheid,

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152 (3) Summer 2023H. Samy Alim

occupation, dispossession, nationalism, 资本主义, and various forms of colonial-
主义, as well as their contemporary manifestations. Anthropologist Arthur Spears,
例如, argues for studies of race and language that amplify “the macro con-
texts” in which they are produced, what he refers to as the “political-economic
pentad”:

(1) the global system; (2) 国家; (3) ideology-coercion (在实践中, two sides of the
same coin), for the purposes of social and resource control via regime maintenance;
(4) social stratification, not simply as regards socioeconomic class but also other hier-
archies of oppression [I stress the hierarchical and also the authoritarian and patriar-
chal nature of oppressive systems]; 和 (5) oppression-exploitation (also two sides of
the same coin).21

If we read Spears together with Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, what becomes evident
is that the terror, 暴力, and brutality of these systems are not only the macro
contexts in which race and language are produced, but white supremacy comes
to depend on the idea of race and, 所以, processes of racialization for its con-
tinued propagation. As anthropologist Bonnie Urciuoli summarizes, racialization
processes not only measure everyone else against a hegemonic norm, but analysis
of racialization is “productively approached by examining not merely the emer-
gence but the active construction of that norm as whiteness in relation to labor
and economic structures and reinforced by social policies, as shown by [瓦. 乙. B.]
DuBois (1947), [大卫] Roediger (1991), [Theodore W.] 艾伦 (1994), [马修
Frye] Jacobson (1998), 和 [乔治] Lipsitz (1998) among others.”22

因此, another point of brilliance in Riley’s use of the white voice is that lan-
guage–in addition to race–is also an invention. Language is a category that con-
tinues to be taken for granted by race theorists and even some linguists and an-
thropologists. As with race, linguists Cristine Severo and Sinfree Makoni urge us
to take a critical perspective that shows how “languages are historically and po-
litically invented by a complex colonial apparatus that [overlays] 语言, 种族,
力量, and religion in specific ways,” and that our “concepts of language should
be submitted to continuous revision so that we avoid using colonial frameworks
to describe and problematize historical power relations.”23

This call for continued revision is also, 部分地, the power of Sorry to Bother You.
It helps explain why I couldn’t find the words to thank Boots Riley when I picked
him up at the hotel. With his artistic vision, he has not only helped us theorize the
political economy of language and race more clearly, but he has given us a man-
date to think more creatively about how to express those ideas. Like the path-
breaking work of Geneva Smitherman in Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black
美国, Riley has also urged us to think about language and race more broadly, 作为
processes that are interconnected with political-economic systems and histories
of colonial relations, yet remain unstable, and thus worth fighting against.24

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesRacial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics & Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

T o illustrate the above ideas, I share this one interaction between Boots Ri-

ley and my undergraduate students that highlights the ways Sorry to Bother
You can help us rethink the more traditional concerns of linguistics. 的-
ter Boots explained that performance is inherent in how we live–“we can’t get
away from performing”–one of my students asked him: “Do you believe that
code-switching is inherently necessary for Black people to survive in this society?”
Boots quickly replied by entirely reframing the question:

I don’t. I think that what’s inherently necessary is for us to have a movement that gets
rid of the capitalist system. . . . 为我, that’s not the question, 喜欢, “How do we survive
in a terrible system?” You know, I’m like, “出色地, how do we get rid of the system?”
What if somebody came up with a book for how slaves can endorse slavery each day
without getting killed? We’d be like, “Why are you writing that book? You need to be
writing a whole different book or not writing a book, 时期, actually.”

Boots brilliantly shifted the object of critique away from Black people, 和他们的
linguistic practices, and toward the oppressive systems that, in one way or anoth-
是, enslave or incarcerate them (the link to the abolition of the prison industrial
complex is obvious). He further reframed the question in ways that point out the
absurdity of assimilationist approaches, and nudged students toward the aboli-
tionist leanings of more radical approaches. As I wrote with Geneva Smitherman,
not only are conventional approaches assimilationist, they are also insidious be-
cause they require the impossible.25 White hegemonic power doesn’t just demand
that Black people learn some grammatical rules; 相当, it requires that Black
Americans act, talk, and sound like whites if they are to experience “success,”
which is framed as readily available to them if they would just make some mor-
phosyntactic changes (John Baugh’s 2003 research on “linguistic profiling” pro-
vides ample evidence of that fallacy).26

The impossibility of the demand comes into clearer focus when we flip the
question on its racist head: how many white people could pass the test of sound-
ing “authentically” Black in order to ensure their upward mobility? Chances are
that most would sound like straight-up posers unless they grew up in Black com-
munities and/or have intimate Black friendship networks. There is little, 如果有的话,
chance that a white person can “let go” of the markers of their whiteness, 和
even less chance of successfully securing employment, 例如, if landing the
job depended on one’s mastery of code-switching into Black linguistic norms. 但
whether or not whites can perform “Black linguistic norms” is beside the point,
isn’t it? Hegemonic whiteness bolsters itself by requiring ideologies that “pro-
duce racialized speaking subjects who are constructed as linguistically deviant
even when engaging in linguistic practices positioned as normative or innovative when pro-
duced by privileged white subjects.”27 Given the above discussion of the linkages be-
tween language, 种族, 资本主义, and colonialism, we would never, or more accu-

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152 (3) Summer 2023H. Samy Alim

rately could never, ask this of whites. Given the machinations of power, 它会
appear nonsensical.

As Smitherman’s work has reminded us for decades, with respect to “the
oppressive ways of white folks,” the problem has never been that Black people
“sound” Black (a result of Black people’s inventing a new language for themselves
through linguistic creolization in the context of the terror of the African Slave
Trade); it’s that they were Black (that white people needed to perceive all signs of
Blackness as inferior in order to justify their slavocracy).28 “Suddenly, after more
than three centuries on this continent, the educational and societal consensus is
that Blacks have a ‘language problem,’” Smitherman writes. “But wasn’t nobody
complainin bout Black speech in 1619 when the first cargo of Africans was brought
here on the Good Ship Jesus. Yeah, that’s right. Not in 1719, 1819, wasn’t till bout
the 1950s when it became evident that Afros was really beginning to make some
economic headway in America that everybody and they Momma started talkin
bout we didn talk right.”29

相似地, James Baldwin wrote over forty years ago that debates about Black
Language had “absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument sup-
poses itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with the language it-
self but with the role of language. 语言, incontestably, reveals the speaker.”
He then dropped the hammer: “The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people
in America never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could
serve white purposes. It is not the black child’s language that is in question, 这是
not his language that is despised: It is his experience.”30 To Baldwin, the sounds
that came to reference the Black linguistic history of creolization were audible re-
minders of a fact that most white Americans refused (and still refuse) to face: 它
is not the presence of the sounds, 反而, the presence of the speakers–the
Black descendants of people who would have otherwise been born on the African
continent were it not for the terror of enslavement–that reveals their complicity
with the imperialist, white settler colonial-capitalist system that they continue to
benefit from. 换句话说, the question was never one about Black people but
about a culture and system of white greed.

Rooted in a broader political-economic analysis, Boots’s raciolinguistic peda-
gogy is based on a linguistics of refusal that bucks the notion of “bidialectalism”
(what white linguist James Sledd referred to as “the linguistics of white suprem-
acy” as far back as the 1960s), in which white people insist on Black children’s
“code-switching” as a precondition for their success while white kids get to remain
blissfully, if not woefully, monolingual.31 Boots’s raciolinguistic pedagogy is not the
linguistics of reform, but rather an abolitionist linguistics that might finally throw
a wrench in the “push-pull” dynamics that have haunted Black folks for too long.32
Rather than viewing questions about code-switching as an end point, Riley
takes them as the starting point for new raciolinguistic futures. As Geneva Smith-

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesRacial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics & Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

erman and I wrote, “By asking different kinds of questions, we can stop silently
legitimizing ‘standardized English’ and tacitly standardizing ‘whiteness.’”33 Sorry
to Bother You pushes us in a different direction. Rather than promoting uncritical,
conformist, and assimilationist models of schooling and survival, we should in-
vest our intellectual energies in imagining and creating more egalitarian societies.
As Boots explained to my students, “the best way to be engaged with the world is
to change the world.” We simply cannot continue to produce future generations
who believe that the only pathway to success, or even just survival, is to S.T.T.S.
(“stick to the script,” the omnipresent motto of the telemarketing call center
where Cassius Green was employed).

I n our current sociopolitical situation, we need to continue making pedagog-

ical moves toward freedom that center and sustain Communities of Color
in the face of the myriad ways that white settler capitalist terror manifests:
culturally, racially, linguistically, 政治上, geographically, economically, epis-
temically, and otherwise. As we continue to theorize the relationships between
language and racial capitalism, frameworks like culturally sustaining pedagogies
(CSP) provide fundamentally critical, antiracist, anticolonial approaches that re-
ject the capitalist white settler gaze and its kindred cisheteropatriarchal, 英语-
monolingual, ableist, classist, xenophobic, and other hegemonic gazes.34 Like
Riley, these frameworks are not interested in relegating learners’ cultural and lin-
guistic resources as tools for advancing the learning of an “acceptable” curricular
canon, a “standard” variety of language, or other so-called academic skills.

相当, extending my approach of critical language awareness, we are interest-
ed in producing young people who can interrogate what counts as “acceptable”
or “canonical,” what language varieties are heard as “standard,” and what ways
of knowing are viewed as “academic.”35 As I’ve been arguing for twenty years,
our pedagogies must do much more than simply take students’ language into ac-
数数; they must also “account for the interconnectedness of language with the
larger sociopolitical and sociohistorical systems that help to maintain unequal
power relations in a still-segregated society.”36 Our students should be able to ask
questions like: How did these perspectives come to be the dominant ones? Whose
purposes do they serve? And how do they uphold white supremacist systems of
racial capitalism and its efforts to produce not critically thinking human beings,
but cheap sources of labor?37

Our critical approaches are not concerned with the study of decontextualized
语言 (recall my opening car ride conversation with Boots), but rather with
the analysis of “opaque and transparent structural relationships of dominance,
歧视, 力量, and control as manifested in language.”38 Norman Fair-
clough argues that the job of sociolinguists should be to do more than ask, “什么
language varieties are stigmatized?”39 Rather, we should be asking, “How–

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152 (3) Summer 2023H. Samy Alim

in terms of the development of social relationships to power–was the existing
sociolinguistic order brought into being? How is it sustained? And how might it
be changed to the advantage of those who are dominated by it?” If educational
institutions are designed to teach citizens about the current sociolinguistic order
of things, without challenging that order, then our pedagogies must continue to
pull away from the generally noncritical American sociolinguistic tradition. 甚至
in our more critical traditions, we often stop at asking how language is used to
维持, reinforce, and perpetuate existing power relations. In the interest of
freedom, we need pedagogies that also ask how language–in conjunction with all
available other means–can be used to resist, redefine, and possibly reverse these
关系. This approach engages in the process of consciousness-raising: 那是,
the process of actively becoming aware of one’s own position in the world and,
重要的是, what to do about it.

This process begins with mining history. Returning to my opening conversa-
tion with Boots about the academy, a critical CSP framework requires us to the-
orize from the “ground-up” and from the “past-forward” by recovering and re-
working the suppressed pedagogies that enabled Communities of Color to survive
even the most brutal of contexts. As literacy scholar Carol Lee has argued, 在里面
contexts of genocide and enslavement–the foundational, settler colonial experi-
ences of Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans–acts of historic and cultur-
al resistance and “survivance” have allowed Indigenous and African-descended
communities to sustain practices and belief systems (and their very lives) 在里面
face of racialized white terror.40 Sustaining those practices is one way we can go
beyond reformist pedagogies that ask, to quote Boots, “how slaves can endorse
slavery each day without being killed,” and move toward abolitionist ones that
seek to change the conditions under which we live and create new, emancipatory
futures. Our goal is to reimagine education not only within the context of centu-
ries of oppression and domination, but critically, also to draw strength and wis-
dom from centuries of intergenerational revitalization, resistance, and the revo-
lutionary spirit of our communities in the face of such brutality.

As I hope to have shown, following Boots’s lead, scholars should work with
artists, activists, community organizations, 教师, and various “folks on the
ground” (particularly those doing revolutionary work who risk both their person
and their livelihoods) in order to understand the more nuanced perspectives that
arise directly from the histories and experiences of marginalized and oppressed
团体. Our theorizing should be led by our interactions at the grassroots level.
Artists, activists, community organizers, and other social actors have much to of-
fer academic theorists of racial capitalism, raciolinguistics, and culturally sustain-
ing pedagogies moving forward. Like Riley’s film, our collective work is meant to
disrupt, to provoke, to bother you, and like the best art, to inspire all of us to imag-
ine–and fight for–new, 只是, and equitable ways of living together in the world.

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesRacial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics & Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

关于作者

H. Samy Alim is the Presidential Endowed Chair in the Social Sciences and Pro-
fessor of Anthropology at UCLA. He is Associate Director of the Ralph J. Bunche
Center for African American Studies and Faculty Director of the UCLA Hip Hop Ini-
tiative. He has written extensively about Black Language and Hip Hop Culture glob-
ally–across the United States, 西班牙, and South Africa. His publications include Roc
the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture (2006), Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop
Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language (with Awad Ibrahim and Alastair
Pennycook, 2009), Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race (with John
右. Rickford and Arnetha F. Ball, 2016), Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and
Learning for Justice in a Changing World (with Django Paris, 2017), The Oxford Handbook of
Language and Race (with Angela Reyes and Paul Kroskrity, 2020), and Freedom Moves:
Hip Hop Knowledges, Pedagogies, and Futures (with Jeff Chang and Casey Wong, 2023).

尾注

1 Historian Robin D. G. Kelley writes that Cedric Robinson, the scholar most associated
with the term “racial capitalism”–see Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of a Black
Radical Tradition (伦敦: 泽德图书, 1983)–first encountered the term as it was used
by European intellectuals to describe South Africa’s apartheid economics. 罗宾逊
not only critiqued Marx for his inability to account for the nature of radical movements
outside of Europe, but he argued that Marx also “failed to account for the racial charac-
ter of capitalism.” Kelley further explains that “Robinson challenged the Marxist idea
that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism. 反而, capitalism emerged
within the feudal order and flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization al-
ready thoroughly infused with racialism.” Capitalism and racism according to Robin-
儿子, as Kelley makes clear, “did not break from the old order, but rather evolved from it
to produce a modern world system of ‘racial capitalism’ dependent on slavery, 暴力,
帝国主义, and genocide.” Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean
by Racial Capitalism?” Boston Review, 一月 12, 2017, https://www.bostonreview.net
/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-introduction-race-capitalism-justice. See also Gaye Theresa
Johnson and Alex Lubin’s 2017 edited collection Futures of Black Radicalism, which takes
Robinson’s work as a point of entry to “consider the history and ongoing struggle
against racial capitalism, from the roots of Black radical thought to a shared episte-
mology of the present political moment.” Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, 编辑。,
Futures of Black Radicalism (New York and London: Verso Books, 2017), 3.

2 I am eternally grateful to Boots Riley and everyone, especially Stephanie Keeney Parks and
Casey Philip Wong, who helped make these events happen. All quotes from Boots Riley
come from our engagement with him on November 6, 2018.

3 Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, Mary Bucholtz, 等人。, “Linguistics and
种族: An Interdisciplinary Approach towards an LSA Statement on Race,” Proceedings of
the Linguistic Society of America 3 (2018): 1–14 , https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v3i1.4303.
4 H. Samy Alim, “Introducing Raciolinguistics: Racing Language and Languaging Race in
Hyperracial Times,” in Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race, 编辑. H.
Samy Alim, 约翰·R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball (伦敦: 牛津大学出版社,
2016), 6.

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152 (3) Summer 2023H. Samy Alim

5 Arthur K. Spears, “Racism, Colorism, and Language within Their Macro Contexts,“ 在
The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race, 编辑. H. Samy Alim, Angela Reyes, and Paul V.
Kroskrity (纽约: 牛津大学出版社, 2020), 47–67; and Imani Perry, Vexy
Thing: On Gender and Liberation (达勒姆, 北卡罗来纳州: 杜克大学出版社, 2018).
6 Boots Riley, writer and director, Sorry to Bother You, Annapurna Pictures, 2018.

7 See Jacqueline Rahman, It’s a Serious Business: The Linguistic Construction of Middle-Class White
Characters by African American Narrative Comedians (博士论文。, 斯坦福大学, 2004).

8 Riley, Sorry to Bother You.
9 同上.
10 Robin D. G. Kelley, “对不起, Not Sorry,” Boston Review, 九月 13, 2018, https://万维网
.bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-sorry-not-sorry. For Eric Lott and David
Roediger on white envy of Blackness and how it relates to minstrelsy, see Eric Lott,
Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (牛津: Oxford Universi-
泰出版社, 1993); and David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the
American Working Class (New York and London: Verso Books, 1991).

11 先生. _______ is one of two other characters who use a “white voice” in the film. Accord-
ing to Kelley, he is a modern-day slave, who is given authority but no real power. 什么时候
先生. _______ informs Cassius that the CEO wants to meet with him, he advises Cassius:
“Don’t fuck it up.” As Kelley notes, “The implication is that Black people about to ride
to the top always do fuck it up–because they are unwilling to sell their souls, to shut
their left eyes to the world, to accept absurdity as an inevitable consequence of the way
things are.” Kelley, “对不起, Not Sorry.”

12 罗宾逊, Black Marxism.
13 Kelley, “对不起, Not Sorry.”
14 Riley, Sorry to Bother You.
15 Awad El Karim M. Ibrahim, “‘Whassup, homeboy?’ Joining the African Diaspora: 黑色的
English as a Symbolic Site of Identification and Language Learning,” in Black Linguistics:
语言, 社会, and Politics in Africa and the Americas, 编辑. Sinfree Makoni, Geneva Smith-
erman, Arnetha F. Ball, and Arthur K. Spears (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: 溃败-
壁架, 2003), 169–185.

16 H. Samy Alim, “Hearing What’s Not Said and Missing What Is: Black Language in White
Public Space,” in Intercultural Discourse and Intercultural Communication: The Essential Read-
英格斯, 编辑. Scott F. Kiesling and Christina Bratt Paulston (Malden, 大量的。: 布莱克威尔,
2004), 180–197.

17 Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa, “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideolo-
gies and Language Diversity in Education,” Harvard Educational Review 85 (2) (2015): 166,
https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149.

18 Miyako Inoue, Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan (伯克利: 大学-
versity of California Press, 2006); and Bambi B. Schieffelin, 凯瑟琳A. Woolard, 和
Paul V. Kroskrity, 编辑。, Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (纽约: Oxford Uni-
大学出版社, 1998).

19 Jonathan Rosa and Adrienne Lo, “Towards a Semiotics of Racialization: Ontologies of
the Sign,” paper presented at the 114th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropo-
logical Association,” Denver, 科罗拉多州, 十一月 2015; Jonathan Rosa, Looking Like

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesRacial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics & Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (新的
约克: Oxford University Press, 2019); Angela Reyes, “Inventing Postcolonial Elites:
种族, 语言, Mix, Excess,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 27 (2) (2017): 210–231,
https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12156; and Krystal Smalls, “Race, 语言, and the Body:
Towards a Theory of Racial Semiotics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race, 编辑.
Alim, Reyes, and Kroskrity, 233–260.

20 Black Linguistics, 编辑. Makoni, Smitherman, Ball, and Spears; Monica Heller and Bonnie
McElhinny, 语言, 资本主义, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History (多伦多: 大学-
sity of Toronto Press, 2017); 和H. Samy Alim, Django Paris, and Casey Philip Wong,
“Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: A Critical Framework for Centering Communi-
领带,” in Handbook of the Cultural Foundations of Learning, 编辑. Na’ilah Suad Nasir, Carol D.
李, Roy Pea, and Maxine McKinney de Royston (Abingdon-on-Thames, England:
劳特利奇, 2020), 261–276.

21 Spears, “Racism, Colorism, and Language within Their Macro Contexts,” in The Oxford

Handbook of Language and Race, 编辑. Alim, Reyes, and Kroskrity.

22 Bonnie Urciuoli, “Racializing, Ethnicizing, and Diversity Discourses: The Forms May
Change But the Pragmatics Stay Remarkably the Same,” in The Oxford Handbook of Lan-
guage and Race, 编辑. Alim, Reyes, and Kroskrity, 110–111. See also W. 乙. 乙. 杜波依斯, 这
World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History (纽约:
维京出版社, 1947); Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Theodore W. 艾伦, The Invention
of the White Race, 卷. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (New York and London: Ver-
so Books, 1994); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immi-
grants and the Alchemy of Race (剑桥, 大量的: 哈佛大学出版社, 1998); 和
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity
政治 (费城: Temple University Press, 1998).

23 Cristine Gorski Severo and Sinfree B. Makoni, “African Languages, 种族, and Colonial-
主义: The Case of Brazil and Angola,” in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race, 编辑.
Alim, Reyes, and Kroskrity, 153–154.

24 Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (底特律: Wayne

州立大学出版社, 1986 [1977]).

25 H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman, Articulate While Black: 巴拉克奥巴马, 语言, 和

Race in the U.S. (纽约: 牛津大学出版社, 2012).

26 John Baugh, “Linguistic Profiling,” in Black Linguistics, 编辑. Makoni, Smitherman, Ball, 和

Spears, 155–168.

27 Flores and Rosa, “Undoing Appropriateness,” 150, emphasis mine.
28 “The oppressive ways of white folks,” in Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin, 10. 也可以看看
Geneva Smitherman, Talkin That Talk: 语言, Culture, and Education in African America
(Abingdon-on-Thames, England: 劳特利奇, 2006).

29 Smitherman, Talkin That Talk, 346.
30 詹姆斯·鲍德温, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?“ 新的
约克时报, 七月 29, 1979, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/
03/29/specials/baldwin-english.html.

31 James Sledd, “Bi-Dialectalism: The Linguistics of White Supremacy,” The English Journal

58 (9) (1969): 1307–1329, https://doi.org/10.2307/811913.

32 Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin.

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33 Alim and Smitherman, Articulate While Black, 191.
34 Django Paris, “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change in Stance, Terminol-
奥吉, and Practice,” Educational Researcher 41 (3) (2012): 93–97, https://doi.org/10.3102/
0013189X12441244; Django Paris and H. Samy Alim, “What Are We Seeking to Sustain
through Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy? A Loving Critique Forward,” Harvard Educa-
tional Review 84 (1) (2014): 85–100, https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.84.1.982l873k2ht16m77;
Django Paris and H. Samy Alim, 编辑。, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learn-
ing for Justice in a Changing World (纽约: Teacher’s College Press, 2017); and Alim,
巴黎, and Wong, “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies.”

35 H. Samy Alim, “Critical Language Awareness in the United States: Revisiting Issues and
Revising Pedagogies in a Resegregated Society,” Educational Researcher 34 (7) (2005):
24–31, https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X034007024; 和H. Samy Alim, “Critical Lan-
guage Awareness,” in Sociolinguistics and Language Education, 编辑. Nancy H. Hornberger
and Sandra Lee McKay (Tonawanda, 纽约: Multilingual Matters, 2010), 205–231.

36 Alim, “Critical Language Awareness in the United States,” 24.
37 Gloria Ladson-Billings, Django Paris, 和H. Samy Alim, “‘Where the Beat Drops’: Cul-
turally Relevant and Culturally Sustaining Hip Hop Pedagogies,” in Freedom Moves: Hip
Hop Knowledges, Pedagogies, and Futures, 编辑. H. Samy Alim, Jeff Chang, and Casey Philip
黄 (伯克利: University of California Press, 2023), 245–268.

38 Ruth Wodak, “Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse,” in Handbook of Pragmatics,
编辑. Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jan Blommaert (费城: John Benja-
mins, 1995), 204.

39 Norman Fairclough, “The Appropriacy of Appropriateness,” in Critical Discourse Awareness,

编辑. Norman Fairclough (伦敦: 朗文, 1992), 233–252.

40 Carol D. 李, “An Ecological Framework for Enacting Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy,”
in Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies, 编辑. Paris and Alim, 261–273. See also Gerald Vizenor,
Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Hanover, 康涅狄格州: Wesleyan University
按, 1994).

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & SciencesRacial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics & Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies
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