Jennifer Phuong and Maria Cioe-Peña, in their chapter “Perfect or Mocha: Language Policing and Pathologization,” expose what they call the raw reality of how schools pathologize the linguistic lives of students of color, especially those emergent bilinguals labeled as disabled (EBLADs). The authors do not critique just schools but rather indict them as sites of racial and ableist violence, cloaked in discourses of kindness, equity, and “support.” The authors bring a Critical Disabilities Raciolinguistic (CDR) perspective, a hybrid of DisCrit and raciolinguistic theory that draws attention to how schools treat minoritized language practices as not mere difference but bi-dimensional deficiency and disorder (Phuong & Cioe-Peña, 2022, p. 130). Language becomes a proxy for citizenship, intelligence, and humanity. It is through this white normative gaze that language policing operates as a soft weapon of eugenics to decide which students can be seen as “capable,” “normal,” or so-called fully human (p. 133). When Paty internalizes ideologies propagated by the school, she not only becomes a target of language policing but also unwillingly enacts language policing on others (p. 139). The fact that Paty ends up enforcing linguistic dominance of English at home, ostensibly to protect her son Dan, is not evidence of some failure on the part of the parents; rather, it is a grave indictment of an educational system that criminalizes love articulated in Spanish or Spanglish. Dan's blaming his mom for not learning English, in turn, registers the multigenerational depth of linguistic colonization.They force us to side with the fact that “passing” for white, able-bodied, and “citizen” is not empowerment, but survival. And survival under an empire is not liberation, it is slow assimilation into a violent system that erases your language, culture, and identity for the illusion of belonging” (p. 141). If our educational structures produce this kind of harm, then the goal cannot be reform, it must be abolition.
The stakes are no less high in the second text, titled (Re)Positioning in the Englishes and (English) Literacies of a Black Immigrant Youth. Indeed, the story of Jaeda, the Jamaican immigrant, concerns itself with the profound identity violence imposed on multilingual Black youth, not just by white institutions, but by their own communities and families. She breaks down the falsehood that linguistic assimilation offers social inclusion when being told she’s “not Black enough” because of her English (p. 302) does not do so. While Phuong and Cioe-Peña interrogate formally racial and ableist language policing, the article places emotional and psychological consequences at the center for those who are caught between linguistic worlds. The mother’s own colonial linguistic trauma, the desire to speak “proper” British English, becomes generationally inherited (p. 301). Thus Jaeda learns to toggle between linguistic selves, developing double consciousness, but this is no celebration of multilingualism, this is a survival technique used under racial capitalism Offering some hope is the transraciolinguistic approach, which names both Jaeda’s metalinguistic and metaracial flexibility (p. 299). Even this third solution is tinged with tragedy, it is not a solution because it is a reminder that youth like Jaeda must constantly adapt, switch, code, and recode their own voice in order to “function effectively” in school and society.