The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) annual meeting has been happening, so loads of linguists I know are in New Orleans and I've got FOMO. Some of them are tweeting a lot and those people are heroes.
There seems to be a really strong theme this year focussing on race. At least, that's what I'm seeing on twitter - I don't know if it feels like a strong theme if you're sitting in the sessions on syntax or whatever. And that's actually part of the issue (as noted by Kirby Conrod here): talks on race and linguistics (and other 'social' stuff) are likely programmed as a special session, so you're either in 'proper' linguistics or you're in the talks on race, which is not going to bring those talks to the attention of people who aren't already interested in them, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, lots of really important and interesting stuff has been said at this conference, which I have been able to hear about because of the wonders of twitter and the free labour of the live tweeters (thank you again). For instance, Kendra Calhoun talked about how to encourage Black students to take up linguistics by having a Black-centred intro linguistics class. This is in the US, where linguistics is often a 'discovery major', and where there are Historically Black Colleges, as opposed to the UK where there are no such things and where you pick your subject before you start, but the principles of the talk seem to be pretty universal: ground the subject in things the students will be interested in.
For us, at my university, we have around a quarter to a third of students who are BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic - this is the term standardly used in the UK, and yes it is not ideal but it's the classification we use). The majority of these (in linguistics, at least) are Black British students.
Now, I'm going to try to articulate something and hopefully not make a mess of it. In the UK, people do not like to hear that systems and structures are racist. Stormzy highlighted that one quite nicely recently (more on that another day, maybe, as there are things to say about intensifiers). But they also don't think about race as being an issue here. I don't know if that's just a UK thing, but the default is always to say 'but gender!' or 'but working class!' and highlight gender or class as the relevant issue to whatever has been mentioned. Now, this in itself is a product of a racist society: to position gender or class in opposition to race means that you're talking about white women or the white working class. Including all working class people would include a lot of Black people too. I don't know the statistics nationwide, but among our students, Black students are disproportionately the first in their family to attend university or from a lower socioeconomic background, i.e. the proxy for working class.
So this tweet from Juan Luna Díaz-Durán seemed kind of relevant. He says (possibly quoting a conference speaker?) that when departments say they 'don't do sociolinguistics', they mean they 'don't do Black people'. Most linguistics departments in the UK do do sociolinguistics, I think, but that doesn't necessarily mean they talk about race at all. Traditionally, sociolinguistics focussed on dialect by looking at what are called NORMs, Non-mobile Older Rural Men, who have the most preserved older dialect forms. They're white, of course. Nowadays, there are lots of people who are looking at race/ethnicity and language, but because it's newer as a field, it's slow to find its way into our modules. Many of the best scholars are still doing their PhDs or not yet in full-time teaching jobs. Compounding this problem is the lack of confidence that most people have in talking about race, because it is such a taboo subject - we've been trained 'not to see colour'. So sociolinguistics classes can talk about classic studies of language variation and class and gender all term, and never once mention the literal language that many of our students speak, Multicultural London English, a variety that is absolutely linked to class, region, age, gender and ethnicity (despite the name).
This would be an ideal 'way in' to linguistics for students - their own language is new and emerging and interesting. Our inbuilt racism tells us that this is a minority subject, so it's best to stick to something universal like class - forgetting that just as we all have a 'class' (that doesn't mean much any more) we all have a racialised identity. Not to include discussion of race is to erase that part of our identity and perpetuate the whiteness and racism that exists in the field.
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