these complaints seemed to be that those who advocate for one
peripheralized group should do the same for other groups who are
discriminated against. In fact, this is another example of the depth and
breadth of language-focused discrimination and standard language
ideology. Even the most liberal people will demonstrate what they believe
to be their right: to use language as a tool to establish and re-establish
social boundaries and privilege.
If nothing else, this episode and others described here make clear how
unaware – and unconcerned – most Americans are when Asians are the
focus of discriminatory policies and practices.
In the Classroom
In educational settings an unwillingness to engage in conversation with
anyone who speaks with an Asian accent has been well documented. Such
refusals could be due to simple laziness, disinterest, animosity, fear of
being socially linked to foreigners, resentment, racism, ethnocentrism, or
any combination of these.
In my own experience teaching at the University of Michigan I
considered this problem at length because it was one I saw personally on a
regular basis. I decided to try a small experiment when I was teaching an
introductory linguistics course to 250 undergraduates in lecture format. In
teaching this course I worked with graduate student teaching assistants
who took over discussion sections, common practice at almost all
universities. A number of my TAs were Asian non-native speakers of
English who had come to the States to work on advanced degrees in
linguistics. They had accents, but their English was fluent and colloquial
and each one of them had been accepted into the graduate program.
The first time I taught this class, I had multiple emails and phone calls
after the first discussion section. Students complained about having a TA
who spoke with an accent; they couldn’t understand the TA and wanted to
be moved to another section. Sometimes these complaints were very harsh
and accusatory in tone, as if by being assigned to an Asian teaching
assistant, they were being denied some basic right. Resolving these
conflicts required that I meet with each of these students individually to
discuss the actual nature of their worries, and to suggest ways to
ameliorate what they perceived as an irresolvable conflict. Not one of