M A RY B U C H O LT Z

——— (1982). Objectivity and commitment in linguistic science: The case of the Black English trial in
Ann Arbor. Language in Society 11(2):165–201.
———, & Bettina Baker (2015). African American Vernacular English and reading. In Lanehart (ed.),
616–36.
Lanehart, Sonja L. (ed.) (2015). The Oxford handbook of African American Language. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Newkirk-Turner, Brandi, & Lisa Green (2016). Third person singular -s and event marking in child
African American English. Linguistic Variation 16(1):103–30.
Reaser, Jeffrey; Carolyn Adger; Walt Wolfram; & Donna Christian (2017). Dialects at school: Educat-
ing linguistically diverse students. New York: Routledge.
Terry, J. Michael; Evangelos Evangelou; Randall Hendrick; & Richard L. Smith (2015). Dialect switching
and mathematical reasoning tests: Implications for early educational achievement. In Lanehart (ed.),
637–58.

(Received 18 January 2018)

Address for correspondence:

William Labov
Department of Linguistics
3401-C Walnut Street Suite 300, C Wing
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228, USA
labov@comcast.net

Language in Society 47 (2018)

doi:10.1017/S0047404518000271

White affects and sociolinguistic activism

MARY BUCHOLTZ*
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

This year, undergraduates in my class ‘Language, race, and ethnicity’ carried out
collaborative sociolinguistic activism projects addressing a range of issues in our
community, such as racist street signs and California’s ban on diacritics in personal
names on official documents. Despite my and my teaching assistants’ explicit in-
structions that the projects should aim to effect some tangible change—the replace-
ment of the street signs, the legalization of diacritics—many students focused
instead on the more amorphous goal of ‘raising awareness’ of these issues on our
campus and in the local community. As we explained, while raising the public
profile of a social injustice is a necessary step toward changing it, this act alone
cannot bring about change.

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 W H I T E A F F E C T S A N D S O C I O L I N G U I S T I C AC T I V I S M

Yet I’ve come to realize that in my eagerness to show students and the general
public the relevance of linguistics to social justice issues, I myself may have missed
the mark. There’s no question that language is a key basis for the perpetuation of
social injustice, and particularly racial injustice, given that race and language are
inextricably bound together (Flores & Rosa 2015; Alim, Rickford, & Ball 2016;
Rosa & Flores 2017). Understanding these processes is therefore an urgent task
confronting sociocultural linguists.1 For example, the Santa Barbara street name
Indio Muerto ‘dead Indian’ not only reflects a history of violence against indige-
nous Californians but also represents a form of ongoing linguistic violence that con-
tinues to harm the local Native community. But redressing linguistic inequality on
its own cannot redress racial inequality. Even in the highly improbable event that
language could be removed from racist projects, racism, ever resourceful, would
simply find a new basis for social differentiation and political subordination.
To put it bluntly, when Californians of Latinx heritage are being deported indis-
criminately, does the name of the street where they used to live really matter, or
whether diacritics were used in their names on the deportation orders?
Sociocultural linguists use the tools of linguistics to intervene in social issues
because that’s what we know how to do, not because those are necessarily the
best tools for the job. We know how to uncover linguistic patterns, we know how
to educate others about linguistic concepts and findings, but few of us received
training in how to dismantle white supremacy or in how academia often unwittingly
participates in the reproduction of racism. Mark Lewis’ nuanced and constructive
critique of William Labov’s (1982) principle of error correction is therefore a
much-needed wake-up call to the field: not just a call to action, but a call to critical
reflection before leaping into action. He also demonstrates the necessity of using the
insights of other fields to improve our own work.
Lewis rightly argues that Labov’s principle is overly optimistic in its assumption
that racism is driven by lack of knowledge and that remedying that lack will there-
fore eliminate racism. As he points out, Labov was by no means the first or only
socially engaged scholar to misjudge Americans’ receptiveness to antiracist argu-
ments, and he was certainly not alone in prematurely celebrating the power of socio-
linguistic expertise to eradicate racist educational policy. The federal legal case over
educational inequality that was the impetus for Labov’s formulation of his principle
is frequently cited as a (rare) victory for sociolinguistics in public conflicts over
racialized language. But Lewis reminds readers of Geneva Smitherman’s (2004)
important historical retrospective of the case, which notes that the victory was
more apparent in the courtroom than in the classroom.
Lewis draws on critical race theory (CRT) in his discussion of the principle of
error correction, a particularly appropriate framing since both CRT and Labov’s
principle emerged from an engagement with the legal system around issues of
racial injustice. CRT calls attention to racism as a system for producing material in-
equality rather than as the result of uninformed or biased beliefs; it thus provides a
crucial lens for understanding the material, structural stakes of raciolinguistic

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 M A RY B U C H O LT Z

ideologies (see also Flores & Chaparro 2017). As Lewis notes, however, the theory
of materiality that CRT espouses excludes the forms of linguistic materiality that
centrally concern sociocultural linguistics (Cavanaugh & Shankar 2017). One
kind of linguistic materiality of particular importance is affect.
Although affect may seem to be simply another manifestation of the idealist view
of racism that Lewis rejects, I would argue, following researchers in multiple fields,
that affects are not mere individual psychological experiences but social, material,
political, and racialized phenomena that can uphold or challenge white supremacy
(Ahmed 2004; Berg & Ramos-Zayas 2015; Ioanide 2015). White affects wield
guns, build walls, segregate cities, defund schools, redraw voting districts, and
create racist educational policies (and racist street signs). Racism is fundamentally
affective rather than rational, and thus it is not simply material self-interest that sup-
ports racism but the affective investment in whiteness (cf. Lipsitz 1998) that
compels white people to cling to white supremacy at all costs.
As linguists we enter the affective battleground of racism equipped with our
training in the weapons of modernity—rationality, empiricism, objectivity—yet
racism resists these scientific logics. The liberal approach to sociolinguistic activism
represented by the principle of error correction therefore fails not because it focuses
on affects (or, more narrowly, ‘attitudes’) but because it tries to change affects with
facts. Rather than coddling white affects and coaxing white people to see the socio-
linguistic light, we need to use our research, teaching, and activism to expose white
affects as the dangers they are to the well-being of people of color (DiAngelo 2011;
Leonardo & Zembylas 2013).
As Lewis rightly argues, in order to foster social justice, sociocultural linguistics
must shift from a liberal perspective of benevolent scientific objectivity to a more
politically engaged stance. However, his three valuable guiding questions to
foster critical reflexivity among researchers, while valuable starting points, may
overestimate the capacity of sociocultural linguists (myself very much included)
to identify and interrogate the assumptions of our own work. A crucial additional
component of this process of self-inquiry is suggested in the penultimate sentence
of Lewis’ article: ‘the spirit of critical AND COLLABORATIVE reflexivity within socio-
linguistics’ (Lewis, this issue, p. 342, emphasis added). Social change requires col-
lective action, and sociocultural linguists must collaborate within and across fields
as well as beyond academia not only in conducting research, but also in the more
difficult effort to critique our own and others’ failures and limitations. It is only
by being receptive and responsive to the critical insights of our colleagues, our stu-
dents, and the communities we work with that we can move from social description
to social critique to social change. And it is only by openly acknowledging the white
supremacy of linguistics as a field and how our own individual racial subjectivities
and affects shape our work that we can recognize and undo the racism that lies at the
basis of our discipline. This is an undertaking in which white linguists have a great
deal to learn from scholars of color, both within and beyond linguistics.

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 W H I T E A F F E C T S A N D S O C I O L I N G U I S T I C AC T I V I S M

In short, there’s only so much we can do to challenge racism in our professional

capacity as linguists, at least as the discipline is currently construed—although we
can and must do much more than we’ve done so far. We need to learn from and
make common cause with scholars, activists, and community members focused
on the racist legacies of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and genocide, including
educational inequality, economic disparities, and state-sponsored violence. In
today’s postfact era, it is more imperative than ever that we go beyond ‘raising
awareness’ to linking our expert knowledge with a deeper, more explicit political
engagement. Our field is in debt to Mark Lewis for reminding us of this fundamen-
tal responsibility and for offering us guidance in how to meet it.

NOTES
*My thanks to my graduate students in my Fall 2017 ‘Topics in sociocultural linguistics’ course for
their insightful comments; any remaining deficiencies are wholly mine.
1
I use the term sociocultural linguistics as a broad cover term for the interdisciplinary field that in-
cludes sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and other approaches (Bucholtz & Hall 2008).

REFERENCES
Ahmed, Sara (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Alim, H. Samy; John R. Rickford; & Arnetha F. Ball (eds.) (2016). Raciolinguistics: How language
shapes our ideas about race. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Berg, Ulla D., & Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas (2015). Racializing affect: A theoretical proposition. Current An-
thropology 56(5):654–77.
Bucholtz, Mary, & Kira Hall (2008). All of the above: New coalitions in sociocultural linguistics.
Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4):401–31.
Cavanaugh, Jillian R., & Shalini Shankar (eds.) (2017). Language and materiality: Ethnographic and
theoretical explorations. New York: Oxford University Press.
DiAngelo, Robin (2011). White fragility. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3(3):54–70.
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1007/s10993-017-9433-7.
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guage diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review 85(2):149–71.
Ioanide, Paula (2015). The emotional politics of racism: How feelings trump facts in an era of colorblind-
ness. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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educational praxis. Equity and Excellence in Education 46(1):150–65.
Lipsitz, George (1998). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity
politics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
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tive. Language in Society 46(5):621–47.

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 MICHEL DeGRAFF

Smitherman, Geneva (2004). Language and African Americans: Movin on up a lil higher. Journal of
English Linguistics 32(3):186–96.

(Received 08 November 2017)

Address for correspondence:

Mary Bucholtz
Department of Linguistics
3432 South Hall
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3100, USA
bucholtz@ucsb.edu

Language in Society 47 (2018)

doi:10.1017/S0047404518000283

Error correction and social transformation in Creole studies and

among Creole speakers: The case of Haiti
MICHEL DeGRAFF
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

FROM ‘ERROR CORRECTION’ TO ‘CRITICAL

REFLEXIVITY’

Mark Lewis asks that socially engaged linguists go beyond Labov’s (1982) princi-
ple of error correction (PEC) so that we can enlist critical race theory (CRT) to
address ‘more difficult and fundamental questions of the sociohistorical conditions
of a representation of language, challenging its premises and showing its connec-
tions to racial, economic, or other forms of violence’ (Lewis, this issue, p. 341).
The ultimate goal is the actual TRANSFORMATION of the socioeconomic structures re-
sponsible for structural violence against speakers of stigmatized languages.
Though heartening, the article fails to acknowledge a long tradition of scholar ac-
tivists, including Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault,
whose work has directly aimed toward ‘actual transformation’ through understanding
of ‘power/knowledge’ systems (à la Foucault) that often include race, class, ethnicity,
gender, sexuality, and other variables underlying various sorts of domination.
Lewis’ call for ‘critical reflexivity’ implicitly echoes my own plea, in this very
journal, that ‘reflexive creolistics’ can help transform the material conditions of
Creole speakers:

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