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A Voice That Could Stir an Army
A sharecropper, a warrior, and a truth-telling prophet, Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) stands as a powerful symbol not only of the 1960s black freedom movement, but also of the enduring human struggle against oppression.A Voice That Could Stir an Armyis a rhetorical biography that tells the story of Hamer's life by focusing on how she employed symbols-- images, words, and even material objects such as the ballot, food, and clothing--to construct persuasive public personae, to influence audiences, and to effect social change.
Drawing upon dozens of newly recovered Hamer texts and recent interviews with Hamer's friends, family, and fellow activists, Maegan Parker Brooks moves chronologically through Hamer's life. Brooks recounts Hamer's early influences, her intersection with the black freedom movement, and her rise to prominence at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Brooks also considers Hamer's lesser-known contributions to the fight against poverty and to feminist politics before analyzing how Hamer is remembered posthumously. The book concludes by emphasizing what remains rhetorical about Hamer's biography, using the 2012 statue and museum dedication in Hamer's hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi, to examine the larger social, political, and historiographical implications of her legacy.
The sustained consideration of Hamer's wide-ranging use of symbols and the reconstruction of her legacy provided within the pages ofA Voice That Could Stir an Armyenrich understanding of this key historical figure. This book also demonstrates how rhetorical analysis complements historical reconstruction to explain the dynamics of how social movements actually operate.
eBook
Language Rights and the Law in the United States
This book is provides a comprehensive review of the legal status of minority languages in the U.S. It also provides the historical and political context for the legal manoeuvring that culminated in landmark civil rights victories. All of the major cases in the U.S. concerning language rights are discussed in detail and in an easily accessible manner to the non-legal audience. The topics range from the English-only movement to consumer law, employment discrimination to international law.
eBook
Double-consciousness and the rhetoric of Barack Obama : the price and promise of citizenship
\"Robert E. Terrill argues that, in order to invent a robust manner of addressing one another as citizens, Americans must learn to draw on the delicate indignities of racial exclusion that have stained citizenship since its inception. In Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama, Terrill demonstrates how President Barack Obama's public address models such a discourse. Terrill contends that Obama's most effective oratory invites his audiences to experience a form of \"double-consciousness,\" which was famously described by W. E. B. Du Bois as a feeling of \"two-ness\" resulting from the African American experience of \"always looking at one's self through the eyes of others.\" It is described as an effect of cruel alienation that can also bring a gift of \"second-sight\" in the form of perspectives on practices of citizenship not available to those in positions of privilege. When addressing fellow citizens, Obama is asking each to share in the \"peculiar sensation\" that Du Bois described. The racial history of U.S. citizenship is a resource for inventing contemporary ways of speaking about race. Joining with other work that suggests that double-consciousness may be a vital democratic attitude, Terrill extends those insights to consider it as a mode of address. Through close analyses of selected speeches from Obama's 2008 campaign and first presidential term, this book argues that Obama does not present double-consciousness merely as a point of view but rather as an idiom with which we might speak to one another. Of course, as Du Bois's work reminds us, double-consciousness results from imposition and encumbrance, so that Obama's oratory presents a mode of address that emphasizes the burdens of citizenship together with the benefits, the price as well as the promise\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
How Many Languages Do We Need?
In the global economy, linguistic diversity influences economic and political development as well as public policies in positive and negative ways. It leads to financial costs, communication barriers, divisions in national unity, and, in some extreme cases, conflicts and war--but it also produces benefits related to group and individual identity. What are the specific advantages and disadvantages of linguistic diversity and how does it influence social and economic progress? This book examines linguistic diversity as a global social phenomenon and considers what degree of linguistic variety might result in the greatest economic good. Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber look at linguistic proximity between groups and between languages. They describe and use simple economic, linguistic, and statistical tools to measure diversity's impact on growth, development, trade, the quality of institutions, translation issues, voting patterns in multinational competitions, and the likelihood and intensity of civil conflicts. They address the choosing of core languages in a multilingual community, such as the European Union, and argue that although too many official languages might harm cohesiveness, efficiency, and communication, reducing their number brings about alienation and disenfranchisement of groups. Demonstrating that the value and drawbacks of linguistic diversity are universal, How Many Languages Do We Need? suggests ways for designing appropriate linguistic policies for today's multilingual world.
eBook
Ātikka cātikaḷukku maṭṭumē avar Periyārā?
Counter discourse on branding Periyar as a leader of dominant communities in Tamil Nadu.
Rethinking the Term “Limited English Proficiency” to Improve Language-Appropriate Healthcare for All
The concept of limited English proficiency (LEP) presents significant challenges when applied to the healthcare needs of the diverse and growing multilingual population in the U.S. We expound on the following ways in which the concept of LEP is problematic: the ethnocentric notion of a “primary language,” the ambiguous idea of “limited ability,” and the deficit-oriented construct of “language assistance.” We provide examples that illustrate the negative healthcare impact of LEP terminology, including the unaccounted-for complexities of health communication within the concept of “primary language,” the “limited abilities” of health professionals whose language skills are often unassessed, and the ignored role of “language assistance” resources such as interpreters as essential collaborators. Finally, we propose rethinking LEP by (a) reframing patient language using the term non-English language preference and (b) assessing health professional non-English language skills. These actionable strategies have the potential to improve language-appropriate healthcare for diverse populations.
Journal Article
Bilingual education rejected: English-only despite Lau
To commemorate
Lau v. Nichols
, this paper reports on findings from archival data revealing its micro- and macro-level genesis, successive activities, and that despite its historic role in language policy development and critical importance for codifying language rights, the vision for educational equity by the Cantonese-speaking, Chinese-origin activists at its center was never realized and remains elusive (Wang, 1975/1995). Our research is conceptually informed by a Critical Language Policy theoretical approach (Tollefson, 1991, 2006) that highlights the roles of power in language policymaking. Methods employed utilized Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) (Moore & Wiley, 2015; Yanow, 1996, 2000) to identify five key policy artifacts and three central interpretive communities. These approaches to prior scholarship regarding Language Policy and Planning (LPP), led to findings that document the hegemonic nature of language policymaking. A critical historical oversight is that in the aftermath of
Lau
, district leadership refused to create the bilingual programs delineated in
The Master Plan for Bilingual Bicultural Education in SFUSD
(1975). Although contemporaneously considered a victory for multilingual students, the real-world consequences in San Francisco for Chinese-origin students—predominantly Cantonese-speaking—reflected the majoritarian maintenance of English-only dominant power structures facilitated at the meso-level by SFUSD. We argue that despite its success in recognizing language as a qualifier for educational discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, because the Court in
Lau v. Nichols
did not specify a priority program model and remedy for instruction of multilingual students, its true legacy is the historical and contemporary rejection of bilingual education and maintenance of schools as English-only, and therefore linguistically oppressive sites.
Journal Article
AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect
Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from help with writing
1
,
2
to informing hiring decisions
3
. However, these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgements biased in problematic ways about groups such as African Americans
4
–
7
. Although previous research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time, particularly in the United States after the civil rights movement
8
,
9
. It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models. Here, we demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice, exhibiting raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English (AAE) that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded. By contrast, the language models’ overt stereotypes about African Americans are more positive. Dialect prejudice has the potential for harmful consequences: language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of AAE be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death. Finally, we show that current practices of alleviating racial bias in language models, such as human preference alignment, exacerbate the discrepancy between covert and overt stereotypes, by superficially obscuring the racism that language models maintain on a deeper level. Our findings have far-reaching implications for the fair and safe use of language technology.
Despite efforts to remove overt racial prejudice, language models using artificial intelligence still show covert racism against speakers of African American English that is triggered by features of the dialect.
Journal Article