Reading Dr. Baker Bell's chapter on Anti Black Linguistic Racism is really an amazing experience for me to reflect the anti blackness within me myself. One of the features of her writing is to not use hyphen or dash as "usual" (end-of-line hyphenation). Although I did not react too extreme, like the teacher mentioned in the chapter, who "cringe[s] when I hear my students speak like that! It brings out the grammar nazi that lives in me" (Baker Bell, 2020, p.22), my reaction at first was being very confused: Is it by accident, or is it on purposes? After realizing that this is a common practice in Black Language, I started to reflect whether I have also carried some anti blackness with me. I was wondering why I was using the Standard Language Ideology to examine if Dr. Baker Bell's way of speaking English.
Another thing I have noticed is that she does not try to use a third person point of view to be more objective and professional. Instead, she employs first person perspective to tell the story, which is more personal and, in another way, convincing to me compared to the indifferent tone with a list of data. This also shows me that there are many ways to express one's opinions and there is no one particular way of speaking that is inherently superior or inferior to others.
Not until reading this chapter do I really understand what Du Bois called as a "double consciousness," where Black people internalize the oppressions imposed by the White supremacist society and begin to dehumanize themselves using that ideology of White supremacy. The theorization of Anti Black Linguistic Racism is crucial in understanding "double consciousness" in that it provides the Anti Black Linguistic Racism reveals how subtle and ubiquitous racism can permeate into our daily life and perpetuate itself. I think realizing the way language hegemony works and recognizing Black Language as a legit language are important and helpful to combat against the racism linked with seeing Black Language as an inferiority to "standard" English.
The video series vividly illustrates how students in schools are discriminated against based on their race and nationality. This also reminds me of the concept of cultural citizenship, reminding us that citizenship is always not a legal status, but more of a social concept. The linguicism and racism experienced by second-generation immigrants not only create a hostile environment for them to live in, but they also negate their humanity and legitimacy of being in this country.