White Kids

White Kids Buckholtz

individuals do not passively inhabit identity categories to which they have been assigned; rather, they negotiate and navigate these categories in a variety of ways within social interaction. (1)

identity as the social positioning of self and other. (2) 

    Use this to consider new interpretive possibilities for Paly study

“language brings the social world into being” (2)

Systems of racial labels have been used to classify human beings for the past three centuries and more. These systems are based on ideologies – cultural beliefs that serve the interests of some social groups over those of other groups. Ideologies are so pervasive that it is often difficult for their proponents to view the world in any other way. Yet all ideologies are produced in specific social and historical contexts as resources for gaining or maintaining power, and they are therefore subject to contestation and change. …

Whereas race is ideologically grounded in the notion of biological difference, ethnicity is rooted instead in the notion of cultural difference based on language of heritage, national background, and other factors.  Essentialism treats the characteristics of group members as inherent, fixed qualities that are either biologically or culturally determined (or both).(5)

For many scholars outside of linguistics, however, the notion of discourse is often broader than it is for linguists, referring not simply to particular instances of speech or writing but more generally to the way in which a topic (such as race) is conceptually framed at a particular historical and cultural moment, especially within powerful institutional contexts like government, medicine, law, or education. Such cul- tural discourses are akin to ideologies in that they are culturally shared sets of beliefs that are often understood as simply “the truth” yet in fact bring social reality into being. This understanding of discourse is also shared by a rather different approach to discourse, interactional analysis, which views spontaneous spoken language as the machinery that produces the social world moment by moment. In this approach, the structures of power authorized by institutional discourse are less central, and the agency of social actors instead takes center stage as speakers negotiate meaning within interaction. A fundamental principle of interactional analysis is that through talk, language users orient to the world as socially meaningful and thereby continuously and jointly create social reality, including their own and one another’s identities (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998; Tracy 2002). (7)

Linguistic forms can gain symbolic associations, including racialized asso- ciations, through indexicality. Indexicality is the process of creating a link between a semiotic form, such as a linguistic structure, and a contextually specific meaning, such as an identity, via juxtaposition or co-occurrence in a particular context.  (8)

Language ideologies involve metalinguistics – language about language – and they may be either explicitly articulated or implicitly enacted (Agha 2007). Language ideologies are central to the construction of identity because they are not in fact primarily about language. Rather, they are in the service of other, more basic, ideologies about social groups, which they cloak in linguistic terms (Woolard 1998). Beliefs that certain linguistic forms are the property of specific racialized groups, for example, are used to reinforce social divisions by means of linguistic divisions. (9)

*Question: How can we position journalism with respect to ethnography? Journalism claims to mediate events and construct interpretations on behalf of a public. But an ethnographic perspective suggests that when social groups are ideologically divided, there may not be much space for commonly accepted interpretation. How can journalism construct a legitimate place to stand in such a climate? * *This is the question that my ongoing work with student journalism needs to address. One possible approach will be to use ethnographic design research (through Human-Computer Interaction) to try to understand how technologies mediate news differently for different social groups. I would like my iterative work with student journalism to articulate how awareness of socially-constructed difference can be approached by the learning sciences. One of the primary goals of the learning sciences is to study learning in context, so this is an appropriate goal. * most recent socio- cultural linguistic research views identity as a social and relational construct rather than an inherent, essential quality of individual psychology or demo- graphic background. (10)

Young people organize themselves into a peer-based social order that is to some extent separate from, but also partly reliant on, adult-driven social structures. Contrary to the beliefs of many parents of teenagers, the social practices of youth are not designed or deployed primarily to rebel against adults but to identify with and distinguish themselves from their peers. (12)

Schools are key institutions for the socialization of youth into racial identities and ideologies, as shown by a wealth of educa- tional research on antiracist pedagogical practice as well as the reproduction of white privilege within classrooms and curricula (e.g., McIntyre 1997; Tochluk 2007; Warren 2003). In addition, schools also provide a physical site for the formation of peer cultures and for interaction across categories of social differ- ence. Yet issues of race and style are rarely brought together in a single study. (13)

Pamela Perry Shades of White  F868 .S156 P47 2002 Rampton Language in Late Modernity P40.45 .G7 R36 2006

*The social world is produced through language; talk about language is often really talk about the social world. So when, for example, someone insists on proper English being spoken, they are really insisting on the exclusive legitimacy of a narrow set of interpretative and productive practices.  *

Hegemony is a form of power that operates via ideology rather than through physical coercion or force (although hegemony and violence often work in tandem). Through hegemony, social inequality is discursively framed as taken for granted, natural, and right (Gramsci 1971). Promoting the view that such asymmetries are “just the way things are” and therefore the way they ought to be is fundamental to maintaining white hegemony. (15)

Question: “This book focuses on European American youth language and culture” (18) Buckholtz wants to examine the performance of race, so she must not take these categories as fixed and stable. What is she doing with ethnicity here? Is she willing to take the language of ethnicity as given so she can have some referents with which to consider race?

(27) When making arguments based on anecdotes such as black students yelling “Riot!”, how do we claim the pervasiveness of a phenomenon?

(28) Strong theoretical assertion: “The work of schools is to sort students into different life paths” (Mehan 1991). Rhetorically, this serves as a junction point: If you’re not on board, you may as well stop reading here. 

“Most adult observers attributed students’ racial separation to free and auton- omous choice, another ideological strategy of displacement.” (29) Displacement used as synonym for erasure. 

What is going on with the rhetorical position of being against political correctness? It allows one to criticize a kind of hypocrisy, of being forced to say things one does not feel or to not say things one does feel, without reference to the content. Could someone still be against political correctness if it were framed as a moral obligation to consider the point of view of those who lack the power to command consideration? The discourse of political correctness is a kind of erasure, a common strategy within language ideologies. 

Pay attention to “Stylistic positioning”

Thus even as the school imposed an official classificatory system on its students, young people established a separate categorization scheme that only partly intersected with the school’s concerns. (43)

We’re through being cool: White nerds, superstandard English, and the rejection of trendiness

method: “Show me where you hang out and anything else you think is important” & asked students to comment on lexical items previously collected.      students choose pseudonyms

    see 38 for ethnographic interviews

cool white girls’ clothing: combined sexualization and infantilization (149) “It was often difficult for cool girls to balance the interactional requirements of hegemonic heterosexual femininity with their desire to compete and achieve academically, a double bind that continues into college (Holland and Eisenhart, 1990). By withdrawing from conventional femininity, female nerds were able to display their intellectual ability without apology. (see also Heller 1999: 202-209)” (150) “nerdy teenagers frequently used something akin to “reading style” (Labov 1972d) even in their spontaneous conversations” (153) metalinguistics, linguistic humor (157-161) “The wholehearted, or even halfhearted, appropriation of black cultural forms did not guarantee that trend-conscious white teenagers would also adopt a political perspective that was sensitive to African American concerns.” (163)