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Teaching
Linguistic Anthropology
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Unit 6

Language and Race

Two young people sit facing each other with paper on their laps. Behind them are large photos and a large grey storyboard.

Around the world, language functions as much more than a technical means of communication. Conversing with others in a specific language with certain rhythms, styles, registers, forms, and dialects can prompt different modes—sometimes, even categories—of citizenship, connection, and belonging. In this unit, students will learn about language as it relates not only to race relations and constructions of racial identities but also to the maintenance of or challenge to wider discriminatory systems. Through examples from across time and space, students will also gain an understanding of how languages thrive, clash, broaden, or limit people’s access to different groups and spaces.

Sapiens articles
Black and Indigenous Futures in Archaeology
video / Standpoints

Black and Indigenous Storytelling as Counter-History

This webinar panel explores how for BIPOC heritage professionals and community members, storytelling taps into historically marginalized ways of knowing.
A person in a blue shirt and white, wide-brimmed hat holds a child in one arm. In the background, a person in a pink shirt sits behind a crate.
essay / Identities

Confronting Anti-Blackness in “Colorblind” Cuba

Elizabeth Obregón
In the 1960s, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Communist government claimed to have eradicated racism in Cuba. An anthropologist explores how racial hierarchies persist despite these official narratives, shaping family dynamics and significantly limiting opportunities for Afro-Cubans.
Keywords
View All in Language
Dark gray clouds hang in a pale blue sky. With orange light shining from behind them, these clouds seem to touch dark rolling hills scattered with trees and buildings.
poem / In Flux

Speaking in Tongues

Beni Sumer Yanthan
A scholar from Nagaland in India offers visceral, familial insights on language and culture loss in her Indigenous tribal community.
A close-up image features a circular street sign with random black symbols such as an exclamation mark and hashtag and a red circle and strikethrough over them.
essay / Expressions

Why I Ask My Students to Swear in Class

Marnie Thomson and Kyle Hunteman
An anthropologist uses explicit insults to get students thinking about gender and power in everyday language. Plus, a brief explainer on the slang term “sus.”
A picture features a sky with a large, slightly orange, billowing cloud at its center that morphs on its left side to look like the side profile of dark-skinned woman’s face. To the left of her is a bright-blue sky with clouds.
essay / Reflections

Indigenizing What It Means to be Human

Margaret Noodin, Christine Weeber, and Jason Vasser-Elong
SAPIENS offers a curated collection of poems and stories that center Indigenous values, worldviews, and insights, creatively reimagining anthropology and the human experience.
From an aerial perspective, a photograph features a large circular garden with green shrubs crisply pruned into arc shapes oriented to form a maze. A gazebo topped with similar greenery sits at the maze’s center.
essay / Letters

Best of SAPIENS 2022

In a year of continuing global conflagrations, anthropologists investigated a wide range of pressing and curious questions about humanity’s past, present, and future. Here are the editors’ picks for this year's most compelling contributions.
A photograph features five people in colorful clothing standing on cement tiles in front of tall trees and green grass.
essay / Expressions

How a Song Bridged Diné and Ndebele Worlds

Kristina Jacobsen
An anthropologist recounts a magical moment of songwriting collaboration between Diné (Navajo) and Ndebele artists gathered for the WOMAD Festival in South Africa.
A crowd faces a large outdoor screen showing video of a nuclear missile launching into a blue sky. Several buses are visible in the background.
column / Conflicted

What Commentators Get Wrong (and Right) About North Korea

Hugh Gusterson
An anthropologist argues that unfair portrayals of North Korea as a hopelessly irrational hermit state has huge implications for policy and security.
View All in Race
A person wearing a black baseball cap and a shirt covered in a collage of different images of a man’s face walks down a presentation hall. A screen showing many people elsewhere is to their right and a poster with a graphic of a gun hangs over a booth in front.
essay / Viewpoint

Among Gun Rights Activists, Fears About Survival Reign

Morwari Zafar
An anthropologist delves into what the rising ranks of local firearm-touting militias in Virginia reveal about intensifying political polarization in the U.S.—and what these shifts might mean for the 2024 presidential election.
On a wood-paneled floor, four barefoot people wearing different outfits in shades of red, yellow, and blue dance in front of a gray wall. Captured in motion, and therefore blurry, each has several of their dance moves overlapping and visible at once.
poem / Reflections

Making Anthropological Poetry Reel

Esteban M. Gómez
In featuring three SAPIENS poems, students in a digital anthropology seminar infused video reels for Instagram with vivid history and powerful emotions.
Three people stand on a grassy field holding signs with pictures of young people’s faces pasted on them. Also on the signs, in colorful text, are two phrases: “Invest in Us” and “End the War on Drugs” with the word “Drugs” crossed out and the word “Blacks” added before it.
interview / Viewpoint

How Racism Shapes the U.S. Opioid Epidemic

Marlaina Martin
Public health officials say opioid use and related deaths have reached a crisis point in the U.S. An interview with anthropologist and psychiatrist Helena Hansen unpacks the racial disparities in how drug addiction is interpreted, portrayed, and treated.
A person wearing a sleeveless shirt with a white paper attached that reads “Assefa” holds up a white sneaker with three black stripes in front of a blue structure with a digital time clock on it.
essay / Material World

Why Shoes Do Not Make the Runner

Hannah Borenstein
East African runners wearing “super shoes” have outpaced global marathon records. But the shoe fervor—alongside older stereotypes about African runners’ “natural” abilities—means athletes’ hard work often gets sidelined.
Two people hug in a bathroom, with one seated on a closed toilet and the other kneeling on a tan-and-brown tiled floor. Two standing onlookers flank the image’s foreground.
op-ed / Standpoints

How Eugenics Shaped the U.S. Prenatal Care System

Dána-Ain Davis and Kelley Akhiemokhali
Black women in the U.S. are far more likely to die from complications related to pregnancy and birth than White women. Two scholars explore how the discrediting of Black midwives helped create these racial disparities—and call for alternative models of prenatal care.
A person wearing a white dress whose skirt is made of ribbons, each with a name written on it, leans back with their eyes closed. They are on grass with a Black Lives Matter banner on the ground beside them and a circle of drummers and bystanders around them.
op-ed / Standpoints

The Urgency of Envisioning a World Without Police

Brendane A. Tynes
An anthropologist working in Baltimore argues that safety for Black communities requires an end to policing. That also means taking a hard look at how policing intersects with patriarchy and intimate partner violence.
View All in Communication
In a pitch-black environment, a person with black smudges on their face wears a fur pelt and holds a lit torch.
essay / Creative Nonfiction

How Accurate Is the Stone Age Thriller Out of Darkness?

Penny Spikins
An archaeologist with expertise in human origins assesses the accuracy of a 2022 film about Homo sapiens who encounter Neanderthals.
On a wood-paneled floor, four barefoot people wearing different outfits in shades of red, yellow, and blue dance in front of a gray wall. Captured in motion, and therefore blurry, each has several of their dance moves overlapping and visible at once.
poem / Reflections

Making Anthropological Poetry Reel

Esteban M. Gómez
In featuring three SAPIENS poems, students in a digital anthropology seminar infused video reels for Instagram with vivid history and powerful emotions.
Two black-haired chimpanzees lie on the dirt ground in front of a blurred background of brown rocks and green, leafy trees.
essay / Field Notes

Spend a Day Tracking Chimpanzees

Kirsty Graham
A series of short videos captures a rare view into the lives of wild chimps through the eyes of a researcher.
Four people, one wearing a red baseball cap and another a blue shirt, ride a boat on a khaki-colored river surrounded by dense forest.
essay / In Flux

Writing Indigenous Oral Tradition to Fight a Dam

Karminn C.D. Daytec Yañgot
In the northern Philippines, the Isnag are documenting their Traditional Stories to sustain their culture and fight a legal battle against dams that would inundate their homelands.
A close-up image features a circular street sign with random black symbols such as an exclamation mark and hashtag and a red circle and strikethrough over them.
essay / Expressions

Why I Ask My Students to Swear in Class

Marnie Thomson and Kyle Hunteman
An anthropologist uses explicit insults to get students thinking about gender and power in everyday language. Plus, a brief explainer on the slang term “sus.”
A colorful mosaic shows several people wearing helmets and holding metal shields in front of a pillared building.
essay / Decoded

The Rebellion Recorded on the Rosetta Stone

Jay Silverstein
An archaeologist explains how recent archaeological finds in Egypt expand our knowledge of a violent revolt discussed on the now-famous Rosetta Stone.
Professor Talking Points
  • Never fixed, language varies not only in terms of the many spoken around the world but also across the different regional, age-related, gendered, and racialized styles that shape and emerge within individual languages.
  • Many racialized communities have developed stylistic spins on language for reasons ranging from community-building and identification to convenience to resistance.
  • Many mainstream institutions—schools, corporate businesses, formal political organizations—assume, treat, and even demean racialized linguistic variations as inferior, deficient, and inappropriate.
  • “Code-switching” specifically refers to when a person incorporates more than one language or dialect in a social exchange. It happens when people assess and adapt their spoken and behavioral practices to fit the expectations of others. Usually this is done in pursuit of specific outcomes including but not limited to leaving a good impression on an audience, getting promoted at work, garnering respect in systems that tend to underestimate one’s racial or other social group, or acting in ways that stand to minimize racial harm that one may face in social spaces that can range from apathetic to hostile.
  • Several linguistic anthropologists argue that ethnographic studies of “language” should go beyond the patterns and inflections of verbal expression to include both the contexts (short- and long-term) in which they are used, and the wider array of signals (gestures and movements, attire) and forms (digital media, body language) that people use to communicate and connect with others.
  • Language supremacy exists within and between countries and nations, situating some languages and/or dialects as more legitimate, “civilized,” or proper than others. Particularly in political and educational domains, there have been notable recent pushes—through both research and pedagogy—to overturn assumptions that “standard English” is a prerequisite for intellectual prowess, social contribution, and consequently, systemic recognition.
Academic Articles

  1. Garza, Joyhanna Yoo. 2021. “‘Where All My Bad Girls At?’: Cosmopolitan Femininity Through Racialized Appropriations in K-pop.” Gender and Language 15 (1): 11–41.

  2. Hill, Jane H. 1998. “Language, Race, and White Public Space.” American Anthropologist 100 (3): 680–689.

  3. Rosa, Jonathan, and Nelson Flores. 2017. “Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a Raciolinguistic Perspective.” Language in Society 46 (5): 621–647.

  4. Smalls, Krystal A. 2018. “Fighting Words: Anti-Blackness and Discursive Violence in an American High School.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 28 (3): 356–383.

Student Discussion Questions
  1. How does your use of language help shape and affirm your social identities? How do you engage language differently at school, work, or home, or with friends?
  2. When was the last time you thought about how others might interpret words or unfairly judge you because of them? What pushed you to think about this consciously, and how did that shape your language choices going forward?
  3. What does language capture or enable in the human experience, and what does it obscure, derail, or otherwise fail to capture?
  4. How is language used to serve different social and political interests in Obregón’s SAPIENS post?
  5. Why is it important to pay attention to how people interpret and deploy language, and to how their decisions are informed by their racial realities?
  6. According to the “Black and Indigenous Storytelling as Counter-History” transcript, what were the cultural powers of storytelling, and how did different speakers see storytelling as resistance?
Activities
  • Have students define and discuss code-switching in class, and then write—as an individual assignment and follow-up thought exercise—about a time they remember doing so. Ask them to detail not just the incident, time, and people around them, but also their feelings and thought process (both in that moment and retrospectively).
Additional Resources

  1. Article: Signithia Fordham’s “Dissin’ ‘the Standard’: Ebonics as Guerrilla Warfare at Capital High”

  2. Article: Arthur Spears’ “White Supremacy and Anti-Blackness: Theory and Lived Experience”

  3. Blog: H. Samy Alim and Imani Perry’s “DEA and Ebonics”

  4. Book: Norma Mendoza-Denton’s Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice Among Latina Youth Gangs

  5. Book: Jennifer Roth-Gordon’s Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro

  6. Interview: Alex Shashkevich’s “Stanford Experts Highlight Link Between Language and Race in New Book,” featuring anthropologist H. Samy Alim

  7. Podcast: Benjamin Bean, AnthroPod “Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Decolonizing Anthropology: A Conversation With Jonathan Rosa”

  8. Video: Stuart Hall’s “Race: The Floating Signifier”

  9. Video: Kritika Sharma’s “The Linguistics of Racism: Examining Our Language and Its Power”

Unit By

Marlaina Martin (2022)

Teaching
Cultural Anthropology
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Unit 1

Power and Hierarchies

In the center of the photo, a statue of a man in a long coat stands on a block embossed with a placard reading “Benjamin Ryan Tillman.” In the foreground, a protest sign reads, “No Justice, No Peace, No Racist Police.”