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Toward an Anti‐Racist Linguistic Anthropology: An Indigenous Response to White Supremacy
Author(s) -
Leonard Wesley Y.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1111/jola.12319
Subject(s) - praxis , indigenous , sociology , white supremacy , racism , anthropology , hegemony , normative , epistemology , gender studies , law , politics , political science , philosophy , ecology , biology
Drawing from my lived experiences as an Indigenous linguist, this article exposes and responds to epistemological racism (Kubota 2020) in the discipline of Linguistic Anthropology, which I argue institutionalizes and reproduces white supremacy. I extend Rosa and Flores’s (2017) raciolinguistic perspective, which examines the co‐naturalization of race and language, to the co‐naturalization of race and language scholars. Through a critical analysis of the hegemony of the “white linguistic anthropologist,” I demonstrate how BIPOC linguistic anthropologists are expected to assimilate to a white normative culture of producing, disseminating, and evaluating anthropological knowledge. Employing ideas from Indigenous research methodologies such as the notion of relational accountability and related “R’s” such as respect, responsibility, reciprocity, and rights; the framework of Radical Indigenism (Garroutte 2003), which argues for research praxis based on Indigenous philosophies of knowledge; and Felt Theory (Million 2009), which asserts the validity of knowledge emerging from experiences that are felt; I offer alternatives that are grounded in Indigenous research principles and protocols. I conclude by outlining a reimagined discipline, a linguistic anthropology built from Indigenous epistemologies and norms of relational knowledge production, and discuss the anti‐racist praxis that such a transformation could facilitate.