Though Baker-Bell’s “What’s Anti-Blackness Got to Do Wit It?”, Henner and Robinson’s “Crip Linguistics Goes to School”, and CUNY IIE’s “Supporting Immigrants in Schools” series may seem concerned with different populations and issues, jointly, they illustrate the intersectional nature of race, disability, and immigration particularly through educational and linguistic lenses. This reading response examines how immigration is experienced as a disabling process, how crip linguistics redefines linguistic justice, and why we have to understand anti-Blackness in Latinx and immigrant spaces especially in relation to Afro-Latine dialects and linguistic racism.
In certain instances, education for migrant students itself, for racialized and undocumented youth, is taken as being a radical loss of language, identity, and agency. The CUNY IIE video series exposes the ways in which immigrant children navigate a system of which schools themselves frequently get in the way of their immediate reality of language and culture or ignore it altogether. Many immigrant students experience language oppression analogous to that suffered by disabled and Black students, not on account of their deficiency, but because the institution defines white, ableist monoglot English as what is deemed appropriate in these settings.
The education of migrant students has ableist structures where students are denied knowledge of their mother tongues, deprivation through mislabeling, and are excluded from total participation in academic activities. This is in accord with Henner and Robinson's argument in Crip Linguistics Goes to School as "Negative perceptions of disability create disordered views of language use" (Henner & Robinson, p. 2). For immigrant and deaf students, "fluency" and "proficiency" are often defined through white, ableist, and middle-class understandings that take no account for the rich translanguaging methods many students engage in to survive and incubate." Henner and Robinson employ a framework of Crip Linguistics that is deeply relevant to the intricate languaging practices of immigrants. They assert that "In a just classroom, the language that the students use and their knowledge of it, regardless of any perceived fluency, is valuable" (p. 11). Immigrant students regularly engage in translanguaging, which is more than just switching between languages but, rather, entails calling upon their entire linguistic repertoire to animate communication in disallowing environs. Yet school institutions persist in rendering this as "confusion" or "lack of English proficiency," maps of ableist framing that conceptualize disabled language as broken.
The application of Crip Linguistics into an analysis of immigrant education thus shifts the perspective: the immigrant students are not deficient, but they are experts in negotiating hostile terrains. In this manner, crip linguistics aid in redefining linguistic diversity as an asset rather than a handicap, especially when students’ practices do not match up to standardized forms.
Baker-Bell's "What's Anti-Blackness Got to Do Wit It?" calls for a deeper intervention into more than just general linguistic marginalization, demanding instead a dismantling of specific anti-Black linguistic racism. This author maintains that “Anti-Black Linguistic Racism describes the linguistic violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization that Black Language speakers experience in schools and in everyday life” (Baker-Bell, p. 11). This frame is important when considering Afro-Latine dialects and Black Spanish speakers, who are often policed not just for the "improper" Spanish they speak (because of African linguistic influence) but even in U.S. schools for not conforming to "proper" English. Baker-Bell disapproves of code-switching as an apologetic pedagogy that teaches Black students that their language is only valid either in the private realm or in informal contexts as "Black students understand that while they can switch their language, they cannot switch the color of their skin" (p. 31). This resonates quite strongly with Afro-Latine students expected to code switch after that order, linguistically, between Blackness and Latinidad in ways that affirm white supremacist norms. Likewise, immigrant students who speak African-influenced Spanish and Indigenous languages are frequently rendered invisible in favor of a whitewashed "neutral" Spanish.
Each text demands that we prioritize language justice that is grounded in racial, cultural, and disability justice. As Henner and Robinson argue that "Justice demands that we either ignore or tear down the system. Justice allows us to envision a different way of educating deaf children" (p. 10). Likewise, Baker-Bell affirms that Black Language pedagogy aims for liberation rather than assimilation as "To eradicate Black Language is to eradicate Black people’s ways of knowing, interpreting, surviving, being, and resisting in the world" (p. 25). The immigrant experience also often demands the same kinds of sacrifices, where to shelve one's language and cultural knowledge for the sake of survival in white institutions. The CUNY IIE series gestures toward solutions such as bilingual curricula, immigrant-led advocacy, and collaboration with community organizations. Yet, if we are to make headway, these initiatives have to be supplemented with a deeper interrogation of how anti-Blackness, ableism, and white supremacy structure language ideologies.
Bringing together the experiences of immigrant, disabled, and Black students helps us see how language is anything but neutral as education for migrant students is disabling when it forces students to uproot their languages, their families, and themselves. Crip linguistics tells us that non-standard, multimodal, and translanguaging modes of communication are valid forms of communication and survival. Baker-Bell reminds us, then, that Black language and identity must be central in any language justice discourse, especially in Afro-Latine and immigrant communities where the process of anti-Blackness is considered something to be taken for granted.
There has to be a complete upheaval of notions of fluency, decentering of whiteness, and the application and/or embracing of every kind of languaging, and this should happen not just hypothetically but concretely, within the day-to-day workings of schools that actually recognize the full humanity of every single student.