Race, Culture, and Identities in Second Language Education

Exploring Critically Engaged Practice

Ryuko Kubota, Angel M.Y. Lin, Ryuko Kubota, Angel M.Y. Lin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135845681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The concept and construct of race is often implicitly yet profoundly connected to issues of culture and identity. Meeting an urgent need for empirical and conceptual research that specifically explores critical issues of race, culture, and identities in second language education, the key questions addressed in this groundbreaking volume are these:

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• How are issues of race relevant to second language education?

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• How does whiteness influence students' and teachers' sense of self and instructional practices?

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• How do discourses of racialization influence the construction of student identities and subjectivities?

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• How do discourses on race, such as colorblindness, influence classroom practices, educational interventions, and parental involvement?

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• How can teachers transform the status quo?

Each chapter is grounded in theory and provides implications for engaged practice. Topics cover a wide range of themes that emerge from various pedagogical contexts. Authors from diverse racial/ethnic/cultural backgrounds and geopolitical locations include both established and beginning scholars in the field, making the content vibrant and stimulating. Pre-reading Questions and Discussion Questions in each chapter facilitate comprehension and encourage dialogue.

1
Race, Culture, and Identities in Second Language Education

Introduction to Research and Practice¹

Ryuko Kubota and Angel Lin

Pre-reading Questions

This introductory chapter presents basic concepts such as race, ethnicity, culture, racialization, and racism. It also introduces theoretical and pedagogical frameworks that can be used to address issues of race. Some possible inquiry themes are discussed to stimulate further explorations of race, culture, and identities. Before reading this chapter, think about the following questions:

• How would you define race?

• Why are explorations of race, culture, and identities important in second language education?

• What kind of research projects on race, culture, and identities can be developed?

Introduction

Second language education, including teaching the host society’s majority language to immigrants, bilingual education, and teaching foreign languages involves direct and virtual interactions among many groups of people who are often perceived as racially and culturally distinct. Through teaching and learning a second language, racialized images of the teacher, students, and people that appear in teaching materials get produced and reproduced. Nonetheless, inquiry into ideas of race has not yet earned significant visibility in second language scholarship, unlike other related fields such as sociology, anthropology, education, and composition studies (see Amin, 1997; Ibrahim, 2000; Willett, 1996). The lack of discussion could stem from the stigma attached to the term race. It evokes racism which is often interpreted as overt forms of bigotry, rather than structural or institutional inequalities, and this undertone tends to prevent open dialogs. However, issues of race have recently begun to be addressed especially in the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), as seen in a collection of essays by racial-minority scholars in TESOL (Curtis & Romney, 2006) and a special-topic issue of TESOL Quarterly (Kubota & Lin, 2006). Together with the recent inquiries into critical issues in second language education, such as gender (Davis & Skilton-Sylvester, 2004; Langman, 2004), sexual identities (Nelson, 1999, 2006, 2008), and class (Vandrick, 1995, 2007), issues of race address power, identity, subjectivity, and social (in)justice, which are vital to all aspects of second language education. At the same time, racial difference is often discussed as equivalent to cultural difference in the contemporary discourse of racism. In this sense, critical investigations of cultural differences could contribute to revealing the mechanism of racialization and racism.

This book presents scholarly investigations of the intersection between race, culture, and identities in second language education. We consider this inquiry essential, as our field creates numerous contact zones for diverse groups of people from all over the world, zones in which questions and tensions related to the idea of race are inescapable and constitute valid topics for critical exploration. In this introduction, we survey some of the concepts and theories about the idea of race as defined and debated in various fields and make connections between them and second language education. The amount of scholarly discussion on race is immense in the fields outside second language studies, such as sociology, anthropology, and education. To provide a comprehensive summary of theories, views, and research methodologies is beyond our scope here. Rather, the main purpose of this introduction is to provide second language professionals with a springboard for future exploration of the topic.

Race, Ethnicity, and Culture

Race

In everyday discourse, the word race invokes phenotypical features such as skin color, eye shape, hair texture, facial features, and so on. However, scientists generally agree that race is not a concept determined by biological evidence. In other words, categorization of different races cannot be verified by biological constructs such as genetic characteristics. Arguing that any differentiation of races, if they exist at all, depends on relative, rather than absolute, constancy of genes and raising a problem of classifying the human species in racial terms, Goldberg (1993) states:

Human beings possess a far larger proportion of genes in common than they do genes that are supposed to differentiate them racially. Not surprisingly, we are much more like each other than we are different. It has been estimated that, genetically speaking, the difference in difference—the percentage of our genes that determines our purportedly racial or primarily morphological difference—is 0.5 percent.

(p. 67)

More recently, the Human Genome Project has shown that 99.9% of human genes are shared in common, leaving only 0.1% for potential racial difference in a biological sense (Hutchinson, 2005).

In the sense that racial categories are not biologically determined, races do not exist. However, the recent approval of BiDil in the United States, a cardiovascular drug targeted for African Americans or the first racial drug (Duster, 2005), represents sustained scientific interest in grouping people according to race in investigating the relationship between genetics and diseases. In such explorations, the category of race has been replaced by the concept of population identified by genetic characteristics (St. Louis, 2005). According to St. Louis, particular populations are identified through certain objective genetic distinctions which may only partially correspond to socially conceived racial categories. He argues that, nonetheless, the concept of population tends to slide back into the existing social category of race, making biological racialization, for instance, in the discourse that supports the relationship between a racial group, identified as special or target population, and greater health risks.²

The above slippage signifies the conceptual basis of race as a socially constructed discursive category and the pervasiveness of the idea of race used for legitimating divisions of human beings and forming our judgment of where people belong based on phenotypical characteristics. According to Omi and Winant (1994), “race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (p. 55). As a social construct, racial representations are always in flux and situated in social and historical processes. Race is socially and historically constructed and shaped by discourses that give specific meanings to the ways we see the world, rather than reflecting the illusive notion of objective, stable, and transcendent truths. Put differently, race parallels the nation as “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983). Miles (1987) argues:

Like “nations,” “races” too are imagined, in the dual sense that they have no real biological foundation and that all those included by the signification can never know each other, and are imagined as communities in the sense of a common feeling of fellowship. Moreover, they are also imagined as limited in the sense that a boundary is perceived, beyond which lie other “races.”

(pp. 26–27)

Furthermore, that race is a social construction raises the question of whether the term race can be used as an analytical category for scholarly investigation and discussion. Some sociologists with neo-Marxist perspectives, especially those in the United Kingdom, have argued that using race as a descriptive and/or analytical category assumes its existence as a reality that divides groups of people into different races, contradicting the notion that race is a social construct rather than an ontologically determined category. It further legitimates the process of racialization, which leads to racism when a negative view of the Other as inferior is attached (see Miles, 1993; Darder & Torres, 2004). These scholars advocate abandoning race as an analytical category and focusing instead on racialization and racism (see more discussion below). Yet others argue that while race is a historical, cultural, and political construction rather than a homogeneous, unitary, and static category, it can politically and strategically mobilize racially oppressed groups to create solidarity and resistance (see Solomos, 2003). These contested meanings of race indicate the need for us to continue theorizing and clarifying our focus of investigation.

Ethnicity

A concept related to race is ethnicity, which is sometimes used as a politically correct code word for race (Miles & Brown, 2003). It is often used as a category to distinguish groups based on sociocultural characteristics, such as ancestry, language, religion, custom, and lifestyle (Thompson & Hickey, 1994). However, like race, ethnicity is an equally contentious term with definition and boundary problems (Miles & Brown, 2003). If it denotes sociocultural characteristics, how do we, for instance, define culture? Where can cultural boundaries be drawn in order to distinguish unique ethnic groups? How are diasporic groups categorized? Take, for instance, Asians who immigrated to Peru and other Latin American countries generations ago but have recently moved to Los Angeles (see Darder & Torres, 2004). Which ethnic group do they belong to? If they enroll in ESL classes, will they be perceived as Asian or Latin American? What assumptions would their teachers and peers have in interacting with them? Thus, although the notion of ethnicity appears to be concrete and easy to conceptualize because it is closely connected to a familiar and ordinary notion of culture, the concept is as elusive as race given the tremendous variability within a group and similarity among groups. Just as race is not a biologically determined construct, ethnicity does not denote innate or inherent attributes of human beings. Rather, it is a relational concept that sets one group of people apart from another—a process of constructing differences. In discussing ethnicization and racialization, Lewis and Phoenix (2004) argue:

“Ethnicity” and “race” are about the process of marking differences between people on the basis of assumptions about human physical or cultural variations and the meanings of these variations. This is what we mean when we say that individuals and groups are racialized or ethnicised…[such] identities are about setting and maintaining boundaries between groups.

(p. 125)

Culture

The above discussions underscore the importance of scrutinizing the notion of culture in relation to race and ethnicity. One significant question to be posed is this: Is exploring or examining issues of culture in English-language teaching and learning (e.g., cultural difference in linguistic and non-linguistic practices, construction and performance of cultural identities) equivalent to or part of scholarly inquiry into the idea of race? We grappled with this important question at...