Toward racial justice in linguistics:Interdisciplinary insights into theorizing race in the discipline and diversifying the profession

Abstract

This article builds on the Linguistic Society of America's Statement on Race to argue that linguistics urgently needs an interdisciplinarily informed theoretical engagement with race and racism. To be adequate, a linguistic theory of race must incorporate the perspectives of linguistic researchers of different methodological approaches and racial backgrounds and must also draw on theories of race in neighboring fields, including anthropology, sociology, and psychology, as well as speech and hearing sciences, composition and literacy studies, education, and critical interdisciplinary race studies. The lack of comprehensive and up-to-date theoretical, analytical, and political understandings of race within linguistics not only weakens research by erasing, marginalizing, and misrepresenting racially minoritized groups, but it also diminishes the impact of the entire field by devaluing and excluding the intellectual contributions of researchers of color, whose work on this topic is rarely welcome within linguistics departments. The article therefore argues for a rethinking of both linguistic scholarship and linguistics as a discipline in more racially inclusive and socially just terms.