A Raciolinguistic and Racial Realist Critique of Dual Language’s Racial Integration

ABSTRACT

Offering a raciolinguistic and racial realist perspective, this theoretical article critiques using dual-language bilingual education (DL) as a strategy to provide youth, particularly “English-language learners,” the elusive goal of a bilingual and racially integrated education. The author argues this racial desegregation approach – through its assumption that White students will be the English-language models – impedes DL’s potential to provide equity to Latinxs and other students. The author contends this integration strategy inadvertently perpetuates racist ideologies about racialized youths’ bilingualism, White mainstream English’s superiority, and majority-Latinx bilingual education. Furthermore, the strategy tethers justice for Latinxs to Whites’ interest in DL, consequently perpetuating material inequities.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• English-language learners
• Hispanic Americans
• Latinos
• Critical race theory
• Educational policy
• Racial segregation
• Racial integration
• Racism
• Raciolinguistics
• Racial realism

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback. I also thank Dr. Mariana Pacheco and Dr. Jennifer L. McCarthy Foubert for their suggestions on an earlier version of this article. Their comments helped me improve this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ I use racialized group/groups to emphasize the imposition and process of racialization, instead of “a race/races,” which implies an inherent or natural quality to the people of that category. I use racialized people instead of people of color to refer to Asian American, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Muslim/Arab people and those at the intersections. The term racialized signals that racialization happens not only through physical characteristics but also through other constructed ”differences,” such as language, immigration status, and relationship to land, that are used to dehumanize and result in grave material consequences for those Othered. Although White is also a racialized category, I simplify in this text by only referring to people who are racialized as Others as racialized people.

² My use of Latinx includes Latina/Latino/Latinx/Latine and is meant to unsettle gender binaries and patriarchy. I use Latinx to refer to a racialized group of people who reside in the U.S. and who share histories of multiple colonialisms, specifically, Spanish colonialism, American colonialism, and American imperialism (Chávez-Moreno, 2021b).

³ I disagree with the deficit label “English-language learners.” In this article, I use the term EL to refer to students who are subjected to policies and ideologies from the term’s Othering. Furthermore, my study’s secondary-level DL students – regardless of race – self-identified as bilingual, thus using “emergent bilinguals” for ELs is not only inaccurate given they were bilingual, but it would also include White students. Consequently, I use EL to emphasize that the EL label works to Other certain people.

⁴ I have argued elsewhere that Latinx is a racialized group and I have problematized delineating Latinidad as an identity from a common Spanish-language background, see Chávez-Moreno (2021b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura C. Chávez-Moreno

Dr. Laura C. Chávez-Moreno is an assistant professor at UCLA’s César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies. Dr. Chávez-Moreno examines how schooling teaches about race and makes Latinidad. She connects these theorizations with questions about educational equity, particularly in the areas of language and literacy. Her forthcoming book on racialization and equity in education is under contract with Harvard Education Press. Dr. Chávez-Moreno is a 2022 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.