The Linguistic Segregation of Racial and Ethnic Groups
Defining race and ethnicity as pigmentation and culture respectively ignores the processes that have naturalized race and ethnicity, a process that is a major theme of Rosa’s and Flores’s Unsettling Race and Language whereby race and language have undergone a process of “co-naturalization”(Rosa and Flores 1), which is the way in which the past and present have embedded mythical notions of race and language into everyday discourse. To understand how race, language, and ethnicity have become naturalized, one must understand what they mean in a linguistic context.
Elaine W. Chun and Adrienne Lo describe race as a “basic dimension of social differentiation.” and racialization as a “semiotic process that naturalizes social difference” (Chun and Lo 220). In other words, racialization is a process that continuously reaffirms the idea that one’s race is determined by the laws of nature, thus feeding into a caste system in which groups that fall outside the parameter of white middle-class male English speaker are forever alien. From the view of those who belong in the majority, racialized people are, “dirty, dangerous, unwilling, or unable to do their part for the nation-state” (Urciuoli 15). See Trump and all his comments about Mexicans.https://time.com/4473972/donald-trump-mexico-meeting-insult/
