Why this text? Why now? A response to Flores and Rosa

Why this text? Why now? These are two questions that Flores and Rosa's article prompted on my mind. The paper sounds like a ‘tune up’, if not a recalibration, of the raciolinguistic perspective (RP) that the two authors see drifting away from its original ambitions, which can be summarized as (1) to account for the co-naturalization of language and race and how the process is achieved semiotically; and (2) ultimately to expose and disrupt the inherited colonial foundations of the field of linguistics.

The fact that intellectual ideas or theoretical paradigms take a life of their own — with misinterpretation being part of the equation — is not new in science. Related to the questions articulated at the outset of this commentary are those of why the RP has been embraced increasingly by several language scholars in some parts of the world and why it has evolved in the way it has. The sophisticated analysis of academia of Bourdieu (1975) as a field — whose social dynamics are analogized to those of a game — helps us understand this evolution. The RP's higher ‘market value’ over the previous scholarship that had also addressed the entanglement of language and race and did not receive as much attention from the wider academic community (see for instance Makoni et al., 2003) appears to be the answer. It adds to the geopolitics of the production of knowledge and the circulation of the latter from the United States modern academic ‘centre’ (which is highly stratified) to the world's ‘peripheries’ (in the terminology of Wallerstein (2004)’s world-system analysis). Although I assume that doing raciolinguistics is part of doing being in the current game of socially-oriented linguistics, I do not intend to undermine in any way Flores and Rosa's (as well as other scholars’) important contributions to our understanding of the intersections of language and race. Unveiling the logics of the heterogeneous academic field in which we position ourselves and are positioned by others not only challenges the positivist idea of ‘true knowledge’ but also helps each of us reflect on what we research, why we do it, and why now. It would be naive to think that language scholars’ increased interest in language and race has been driven only by the current political situations across the world. Contemporary race-based dominance and exclusion have precedents, often distant ones, from which they are not radically different.

Flores and Rosa add their voices to some prominent linguists before them (e.g. Mufwene, 2001, 2008; DeGraff, 2005 in the case of creolistics) who have repeatedly called out some racist underpinning of Western linguistics inherited from its birth in a period when colonization was associated with ‘la mission civilisatrice’, and non-Europeans were considered less evolved than, and their languages as inferior to, Europeans. We should ask ourselves why these previous calls for action have not received the amount of attention they deserve from the broader community of linguists, including those who are more socially oriented. This silence amounts to a process of erasure of alternative approaches that are just as justified if not more solid. It seems that we, linguists, are more prompt and frankly more committed to calling out the racist biases in the historical descriptions of European travellers commenting on the alleged unintelligibility and ‘barbaric nature’ of indigenous languages of especially Africa and the Americas than to also considering other problems in our practice. For instance, why are some research topics considered to be of more global significance for the academic community (read Western community) and therefore worth publishing if not reading than others undervalued as ‘too local’? To me, the issue now is less about the ‘colonial’ history of Western linguistics than about the pervasive and die-hard coloniality in our field, under different names. Professional careers and academic success have been built within this legacy. Unless we engage collectively in deep structural changes, we may end up with a plus-ça-change-plus-c'est-la-même chose kind of situation, as said in French.

By not questioning explicitly the European bias since the beginnings of the discipline and not considering non-Western interpretations of some phenomena, which can shed more adequate light on them, such as in the analyses of fluid, interwoven, and not-identity-based plurilingualism, Flores and Rosa unfortunately appear to reproduce the very colonial gaze that they question. I believe that adopting an RP should not be done without at least questioning the Western epistemological hegemony that has defined our analytical categories. Although the authors caution us not to essentialize race and to contextualize its instantiations in historically informed socio-political contexts, their implicit premise that language cannot be thought of independent of race and vice versa appears not only to be overgeneralizing but also to be a Eurocentric way of understanding race and language dynamics. Some of the biases associated with race are in fact interpreted in terms of ethnicity in some other territories.

I think that the reasons for their unfortunate erasure of other ways of thinking and of being in the world lies in their primary focus on settlement colonies of the Americas, especially the United States, whose race boundaries are not replicated everywhere else in the world. In the former trade and exploitation colonies of sub-Saharan Africa, race was not always a factor historically; and since it became relevant, it has not been constructed in exactly the same way, especially regarding linguistic diversity. I leave aside South Africa where scholars have often (uncritically) adopted the North American RP, although the patterns of exploitation and settlement colonization styles definitely call for different explanations of language and race dynamics. For instance, Mamdani (1996, 2005) explained that in sub-Saharan Africa, the European colonial states divided the populations between those identified by (1) race (viz., the non-Africans, more specifically, Europeans and Asians) and those reconstructed as non-indigenous, including the Arabs, the Coloured in South Africa, and the Tutsis as opposed to the Hutus in Rwanda (Mamdani, 2005: 66); and (2) those identified as ‘ethnic groups’. He highlights how the colonial apparatus legally and politically created and enforced [ethnolinguistic and] political ethnic identities that aimed at fostering divisions and discriminations among Africans. These new politically ethnolinguistic identities based partly on pre-colonial cultural differences were adopted to serve the interests of the Europeans’ colonial ventures. In addition, the privileges associated with Whiteness in the Americas are not the same as in post-colonial Africa, where the most deleterious discriminations applied by Indigenous rulers are based on ethnic differences (see below).

This brief though incomplete historicization shows that race and ethnicity are not coextensive and have not been used to favour some groups in exactly the same way in sub-Saharan African former exploitation colonies as in the settlement colonies of the Americas. It also helps explain why in Africa exclusionary discourses towards targeted groups are informed by claims of instrumentalized and reconstructed autochthony rather than in racial terms. Indeed, political, institutional and societal discrimination against groups or individuals in this part of the world have been directed mainly towards fellow Africans, a phenomenon Fanon (1961) had anticipated as part of the political decolonial process. This is evident from, for example, the recurring violent episodes against transcontinental African foreigners in South Africa (Neocosmos, 2006; Vigouroux, 2019), the exclusionary politics of autochthony applied to Northern Ivoiriens in Côte d'Ivoire (Geschiere, 2009), and the Rwandan genocide against Tutsis in 1994.

My caution against applying racial categories informed by especially the North American settlement-colonization history to dynamics of language practices and dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa should not be interpreted to erase or question the historical impact of ‘racial capitalism’ (Robinson, 1983/2000) on language ideologies there. The ways in which the 19th-century European imperialism was achieved by dismissing Africans’ cultural traditions, beliefs, political and economic organizations, and languages have been well documented. So have its accompanying language ideologies according to which African languages are simple or childlike and iconize the putative ‘mental inferiority’ of their speakers (Mufwene, 2001, 2023).

Note that, in exploitation colonies, unlike in their settlement counterparts, European colonization did not lead to the massive disappearance of indigenous languages. The European languages that a minority of African speakers have added to their respective repertoires have not displaced the traditional egalitarian multilingualism practiced in most societies of the continent (Vigouroux & Mufwene, 2008). It is worth reminding the reader that the colonial languages are spoken by roughly 20%−30% of sub-Saharan African speaking subjects (with variations across countries and a couple of exceptions, Mufwene, 2022) and therefore fulfil well-circumscribed daily communicative functions on the continent. The sub-Saharan ecologies, with all their sociocultural variations that any analyst should bear in mind, underscore the fact that language-based distinctions and societal hierarchies are polity-specific, differing according to varying colonial histories.

Noting that an RP has limited relevance to modern day social and language dynamics of millions of sub-Saharan Africans does not undermine the analytical contributions, it makes to accounts of racially based discriminations in the polities that have informed the research paradigm. Displacing the (colonial and by extension racist) Western linguistic tradition, as Flores and Rosa attempt to, entails also bearing in mind that analytical perspectives elaborated in specific sociocultural contexts of European settlement colonies (especially the United States) may apply only marginally, certainly not literally, to former European exploitation colonies. The ethnolinguistic colonial histories are not identical, owing especially to differences in the population structures set in place by and inherited from the varying colonial regimes (Mufwene, 2001, 2008).

Because race is a ‘floating signifier’ (Hall, 1997/2021), I concur with Flores and Rosa that analysts should always historicize and localize its instantiations in order to account for the following: Why has this form of categorizing and structured social formation been chosen over or in combination with other forms? How is race mobilized and with what effects for both the ‘racializer’ and the racialized? Who does the racializing towards whom? Whose and what interest does it serve and to what gain? I also agree with Flores and Rosa that not ‘exceptionaliz[ing] US racial logics’ (which I interpret as different from universalizing it) makes it possible to chart continuities across time and space. Because these continuities cannot be understood outside capitalism, the RP would greatly benefit from a stronger and historically informed political economic approach. The latter would help shed better light on the logics that inform the persistence of race to divide, exploit and alienate people. Understanding these logics is the necessary step to fight them. The stakes are high, less so for linguistics than for the human race.

No conflict of interest.