Language and Racism

This chapter, which looks at some of many tangled and layered connections between language and racism, begins with the introduction of “modern race, " by which researchers mean race and racism within the context of European modernity. Modern race takes form via colonialism and racial slavery, two structural processes animated by capitalism. Together, these structural processes serve as the cognates of what Barnor Hesse described as “racialized modernity” to name the ways in which modernity was always already a racial project. Much of the work of Indigenous approaches to language and racism has focused on the often taken for granted narratives about Native American and Indigenous peoples, especially as they are mediated by or channeled through ideologies about language. First introduced in Jane Hill’s research on Mock Spanish, mock language is the use of appropriated semiotic resources from languages or varieties associated with racialized populations to display covert racism through the reproduction of negative stereotypes.