Interview with John Baugh

The following interview was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2021. By that time, I had known John Baugh for about eighteen years after having taken my first class on Black English with him at Stanford. I have always been fascinated by John’s ability to merge innovative and culturally relevant, justice-focused research with liberatory outcomes for Black people and Black language. It was a rare treat for me to talk with my long-time mentor now as a faculty member. In the wake of finally having a critical mass of Black scholars in linguistics and after George Floyd’s murder and a new push to decolonize linguistics, it only seemed fitting to hear the experiences that shaped John’s life, the life of a Black man in linguistics, and how that life has given rise to his groundbreaking scholarship. There is nothing linear about his path. And as the field pushes to admit more Black graduate students and hire more Black faculty, it dawned on me that many in the field might not recognize the exceptional journey of navigating academia as a Black person. Please enjoy this candid snapshot of the life that birthed such a storied career from the upcoming president of the Linguistic Society of America: a unique opportunity to learn how to do better. Consider this a one-time invitation to the cookout.

An open letter to the editors of the Journal of Language and Sexuality

In this open letter, I ask the editors of the Journal and its readers, to reflect on the Journal’s relationship to studies of language and Black sexuality, and consider new ways to reach scholars of Black life, culture, and language. Studies of Black language practices rarely deal with the ways that Black language practices are often complicated by gender/sexuality. And yet, there are scholars doing this work, but like Queer Linguistics, it often doesn’t “look” that way that typical studies of language are supposed to look. This is because linguistics and linguistic anthropology as disciplines have often failed to capture the imagination and attention of these scholars; it is not because studies of Black sexuality and language do not exist. I encourage the Journal then to seek out these studies and to do so with a sense of urgency.

Unspoken Grammar of Place: Anti-Blackness as a Spatial Imaginary in Education

This article builds from scholarship on anti-Blackness in education and spatial imaginaries in geography to theorize an anti-Black spatial imaginary as the prevailing spatial logic that has shaped the configuration and character of American social intuitions, including K-12 schools. As a spatial imaginary, anti-Blackness is circulated through discourses, images, and texts that tell a story of Blackness as a problem, non-human, and placeless. Anchored by the assumption that Black populations are spatially illegitimate, the anti-Black spatial imaginary marks Black bodies as undesirable and therefore extractable from spaces and places that have been envisioned for their exclusion. I consider schools as sites spatialized terror where the exhibitions of terror consist of forcing students to observe other Black bodies being forcibly removed from the classroom and school community; constant rejection of Black language, traditions, music preferences, and other cultural forms of expression; the obliteration of Black names and identities. I offer ways that school leaders can unsettle the anti-Black spatial imaginary to transform schools as sites of holistic healing and possibilities.

Learning Black Language Matters

How can and must critical qualitative inquiry be part of ongoing struggles for cultural and educational justice with the communities of our work? We explore this question by reflecting on our collaborative research on culturally sustaining pedagogy centered in the study of Black Language (BL). Building on the core humanizing research notion of dialogic consciousness-raising between researchers and participants, we describe the ways the three of us came to deepened knowledge about the role of BL in our lives and in the lives of the high school students we worked with through a humanizing research as culturally sustaining pedagogy framework. In this framework, the ability to participate in BL, research-based knowledge about BL, and critical collaborative research on BL joined reciprocal inquiry with teaching and learning to center the value of our Black language and Black lives within a schooling and research enterprise that often devalues both.