The answer to that question gets to the heart of the matter: as an English
speaker, the student who complained about being excluded believed she or
he was reasonable in expecting everyone to accommodate to her/him.
It can certainly feel uncomfortable to not understand languages being
spoken in one’s presence, and yet: “Discomfort is not oppression. It is a
sign of privilege when white students believe they should be able to
understand everything going on around them or never have their racial
embodiment questioned publicly” (ibid.: 126–127; emphasis added).
This mindset is at the very heart of long-standing conflicts between the
U.S. and Mexico. Our common history is very old and checkered, and
most of it is unknown to those people who are most adamant about halting
immigration from Mexico. This might be seen as a failure of our
education system, but that kind of policy is not made in a vacuum; the
impetus was born out of a communal agreement that may have been
founded in apathy or jingoism. Grand narratives (also called meta
narratives) may be flawed, but many feel a strong allegiance to the stories
which provide a comforting cultural buffer zone.
The everyday language of white racism^9
The importance of language to identity and to ethnicity has been well
established by sociolinguists and anthropological linguists. For people of
Mexican heritage living in California, there is a lot of data to suggest that
for these Latinos/as, language is perhaps the primary marker of allegiance
(Arellano 2007; Fought 2002a; Gómez 2007; Hidalgo 1986; Mendoza-
Denton 1999; 2008; Salazar 1970; Santa Ana 1993).
In studying the connection between language and ethnicity, Fought
interviewed adolescent Latinos/as to explore how language choices reflect
life choices (Fought 2002a, 2006). The relationship between language
choice and assimilation/solidarity may seem like simple common sense,
but as we have seen, many common-sense beliefs about language are not
factual. In this case, the use of language features to signal solidarity with
one community over another was only theory until Labov’s