16
H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman
In August of 2018, President Trump honored the men and women of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at a White House event called, “Salute to the Heroes” (White House 2018). By late summer of 2018, Donald Trump had not only run an entire presidential campaign with anti-immigrant and anti-Latinx sentiment at its core – referring to Mexican immigrants as “criminals” and “rapists,” repeatedly referencing international gang MS-13 to engage in racist fear mongering, and claiming that he would “build a wall” on the US–Mexico border and that “Mexico would pay for it!” (Phillips 2017). He was also working overtime to try to avert what many saw as an inevitable “Blue Wave,” whereby Democrats would regain dozens of seats in the House. This was the immediate political context of the “Salute the Heroes” event at the White House.
In a key moment during the event, Trump began telling the story of Latinx Border Patrol agent Adrian Anzaldua, who was being honored for his role in the arrest of two US citizens who were transporting seventy-eight immigrants across the US–Mexico border in April. Dramatically, the immigrants were found locked in the hold of a refrigerated truck in Laredo, Texas, and were all in good health (Dunlap 2018). In what seemed like a spontaneous moment, Trump interrupted his own narration and called Anzaldua up to the podium (Remezcla Estaff 2018; video excerpt starts at the beginning).1
Trump:The Border Patrol agent who caught the accused and likely really saved many lives, he’s here with us. And Adrian – where’s Adrian? ((scanning the audience)) Adrian’s here with us.
Audience:((applause))
Trump:Thank you, Adrian. Great job. Thank you. It’s a lot of lives! That’s great. Adrian, come here, I wanna ask you a question. So, how did you – come here, come here. You’re not nervous, right?
Audience:((laughter and applause)) ((camera scans to show Anzaldua making his way to the podium))
Trump:He speaks perfect English. Come here. I wanna ask you about that. that there were people in that trailer? There’s a lot of trailers around. Please. ((gesturing for Anzaldua to take microphone))
Anzaldua, clearly surprised by the president’s request, recounted the incident, using specific terminology and a style that many in the US would identify as common to law enforcement officials. After his successful narration, he was praised and thanked repeatedly by the president: “Fantastic. ((applause)) What a good job he did! What a good job. Now you know tomorrow he’s going to be – he’s liked that so much, he didn’t know he was gonna do it. ((smiling at the audience)) Tomorrow he will be announcing that he’s running for office. ((audience laughter and cheers)) Good job! Seventy-eight people saved. Thank you very much, Adrian.” The president then grabbed the podium with both arms and shifted quickly from a jocular key to a much more serious one: “Last month under Operation Eagle Shield, right here in the DC area, ICE officers arrested a hundred and thirty-two illegal aliens, including criminal aliens charged or convicted of rape, battery, and strangulation. Among those arrested was a high-ranking MS-13 gang member …” (The video clip ends here, with the entire exchange lasting just under three minutes.)
In the remainder of the chapter, we will show how the above episode is emblematic of a process we have termed raciolinguistic exceptionalism (defined in the following section). We show how this specific incident highlights the White supremacist, colonial relations through which ideologies of language and race are formed, embedded, and maintained. Trump’s all too smooth pivot from “complimenting” Anzaldua’s “perfect English” to his repeated xenophobic racializations of Mexicans as criminals, animals, and monsters functions as a rhetorical strategy to exceptionalize one individual while racializing and demonizing an entire group. As other chapters in this volume show, this form of exceptionalism is not the only form of linguistic racism and discrimination engaged in by Trump – from his repeated mocking of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s accent in English and his use of “Mock Asian” to represent Chinese and Japanese businessmen to his reported disgust with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ “southern accent” from Alabama (Benin 2018), his repeated, exaggerated use of “Mock Spanish” phonology when pronouncing “Puerto Rico” (The Guardian 2017), and his horrid “imitation” of a disabled journalist (Huffington Post 2017; see also Goldstein et al. this volume), which even some Republicans found reprehensible. While most progressives readily identify these linguistic performances as racist and discriminatory, in the case of raciolinguistic exceptionalism, it is a bipartisan process that sometimes easily flies under the radar because the connections that it relies upon are somewhat more tacit and implicit, at least to hegemonic White speakers, who constantly have to be reminded not to infantilize People of Color for speaking “such good English.”
16.1Raciolinguistic Exceptionalism
In the following, we show how President Trump’s “compliment” – “He speaks perfect English” – functions as a form of raciolinguistic exceptionalism, whereby exceptionalism occurs through White racist evaluations of, and ideologies about, both language and race. In our previous collaboration, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the US (2012), we analyzed how then-President Obama was often on the receiving end of such left-handed compliments (“I love Barack Obama. He’s soooo articulate!”). In this current case, we examine how President Trump himself participates in these very same forms of raciolinguistic exceptionalism and what that means for Latinx and other groups in the US.
Leading social theorist Imani Perry (2011: 130–31) argues that “racial exceptionalism is the practice of creating meaning out of the existence of people of color who don’t fit our stereotypic or racial-narrative-based conceptions.” A person of color is placed into a “state of exception,” she argues, only when the “normal” state of their group “is assumed deficient.” Drawing upon the work of A. Leon Higginbotham, Perry argues that exceptionalizing discourses – intentionally or not, and intuitively or not – accept “the precept of inferiority” as normative. According to Perry, the creation of exceptional states through everyday practices reifies racist interpretive frames. These practices shape how we evaluate inequality and legitimate “the practice of inequality toward those who are not in the exceptionalized group” (ibid.: 131).
While exceptionalizing discourses often escape the attention of members of the hegemonic group in question, those on the social margins often understand the underlying ideological meanings and associations embedded in such “compliments.” This is why, in response to President Trump’s exceptionalizing comments about Adrian Anzaldua, attorney and CNN writer Raul A. Reyes (2018) began his scathing column with these words: “Mr. President, brown people speak English.” This simple claim highlights President Trump’s assumptions about the relationships between language, race, and nation. Upon addressing a “brown” person (Anzaldua is readily identifiable by his name and brown skin as non-White), Trump assumes both that most Latinxs in the US do not speak English (or if they do, they don’t speak it correctly and fluently) and that they are perceived as “foreign” and placed “outside of America.”
As White race theorist Tim Wise has written, this is not what most Americans think of as your standard racism, the kind that has plagued the history of this country since its inception. Using the term “enlightened exceptionalism,” Wise describes a “form of racism that allows for and even celebrates the achievements of individual persons of color, but only because those individuals generally are seen as different from a less appealing, even pathological black or brown rule.” To Wise, Perry, and others, the fact that it is only People of Color who are called upon to “transcend” their race not only proves that America is far from being post-racial, but it also “confirms the salience of race and the machinations of white hegemony” (Wise 2009: 8–11). As an illustrative, theoretical exercise, imagine Trump making the same comment to a White American border patrol agent.
Our discussion of raciolinguistic exceptionalism builds upon this previous work, as well as the language-ideological literature in linguistic anthropology (Schieffelin et al. 1998), particularly Paul Kroskrity’s (2011) outlining of linguistic racisms, and the growing area of raciolinguistics (Alim et al. 2016, Rosa 2019). Kroskrity (2020) targets “racist and racializing acts and/or projects that use linguistic resources as a means of discrimination and subordination” in order to “analytically disclose and explicate both overt and covert forms of linguistic racism.” In considering racializing “compliments,” these processes take on different valences across differently racialized groups because they are shaped within varying sociohistorical and sociopolitical processes of domination, such as settler colonialism, enslavement, and global, racial capitalist exploitation. For example, when Reyes (2016) writes about the racializing “compliment” – “You speak English so well” – directed at Asian Americans, it is both similar to and distinct from the way “You speak good English” is used to target particular Latinx populations (Urciuoli 1996) or the way “You speak so well” (Clemetson 2007) is directed at African Americans.
Numerous studies of language and race by linguistic anthropologists have shown how ideas about People of Color and their speech serve to reinforce racist narratives about Asianness, Blackness, Indigeneity, Latinidad, etc. (Alim et al. 2020). In our earlier work on then-President Barack Obama, we not only described how former US President Barack Obama talked, but also how he was heard by various segments of the American public (Alim and Smitherman 2012). Building upon Alim’s (2005) previous research – “Hearing What’s Not Said and Missing What Is” – we recognized that White beliefs about Black people and their language depended largely upon Whites’ hearing Black speech through the ideological lens of linguistic supremacy, which served to uphold White supremacist logics of both language and race. In this case, White teachers were not only missing various complex aspects of Black linguistic production and variation, but they were also hearing “errors” where there were none, even going so far as to invent syntactic structures not found in any variety of English (“we ain’t not,” for example). As Flores and Rosa (2015: 151) concluded about this particular example:
This example demonstrates the powerful ways that raciolinguistic ideologies of the white listening subject can stigmatize language use regardless of one’s empirical linguistic practices. Thus, even when Standard English learners use forms that seem to correspond to Standard English, they can still be construed as using nonstandard forms from the perspectives of the white listening subject.
As we argued, “More than any other cultural symbol, Barack Obama’s multifaceted language use … served to simultaneously ‘Whiten,’ ‘Blacken,’ ‘Americanize,’ and ‘Christianize’ [and ‘Masculinize’] Barack in the eyes and ears of both Black and White Americans” (Alim and Smitherman 2012: 23). Critically, in presenting a metalinguistic analysis of Barack Obama’s language – that is, we talked about the talk about the way Barack Obama talks – we also explored how White racial and linguistic hegemony shaped how his speech was heard and interpreted through ideological processes. These are the same ideological processes – what Flores and Rosa (2015) have termed raciolinguistic ideologies – at work in President Trump’s description of Anzaldua’s speech, the same processes that underlie narratives and practices of raciolinguistic exceptionalism.
16.2Raciolinguistic Exceptionalism, Whiteness, and Coloniality
In our previous work (Alim and Smitherman 2012), we not only considered the cultural meanings of “articulate” in relation to Black folks, but we also complicated the conversation by considering phrases like “articulate” and “good English” in relation to other racial and ethnic groups in the US. As we show below, the results demonstrated multiple problematic links between “articulateness” and “whiteness” and “articulateness” and “intelligence” across groups, and showed how language is often loaded with issues of race, class, citizenship, and other forms of social differentiation. Beyond Trump’s comments about Anzaldua’s “perfect English,” we show below how these comments are productively interpreted as parts of larger socio- and raciolinguistic processes impacting Latinxs and other groups in the US.
In terms of reading the social meanings of “articulate” for Latinx, Middle Eastern, Asian, and other Americans, we posed this question in our survey of Americans of the Obama generation (mostly eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, with some in their early thirties; see Chapters 1 and 2 of Articulate While Black): “If someone referred to you as ‘articulate,’ how would you feel? Explain your answer.” They also submitted information about their age, race, ethnicity, gender, and biographical background. These respondents expressed what we called a “split-view” that depended on their linguistic background as much as, if not more than, their race. In many cases, respondents did not view being complimented as “articulate” as problematic if they were speaking English, but they became more critical when discussing the language of immigrants, their family members, or those with “accents.” Because of these Americans’ location on the linguistic margins – either they or their parents learned English as a second language – some felt a distinct sense of pride to be referred to as “articulate” since it meant that they had been perceived as mastering English. At the same time, however, these Americans were also able to point out the challenges of belonging to communities where “accents” from languages other than English are linguistically marginalized. These speakers also point out why claims that leftists can’t even accept President Trump’s compliment to a Person of Color (as heard in conservative outlets) are woefully simplistic readings of language as social action.
In this first example, from a self-identified “biracial (Hispanic and white)” respondent, we see how the “split-view” of those between linguistic worlds gives practices of raciolinguistic exceptionalism meaning. She does not see “articulate” as problematic in English, for example, but makes some complex connections in relation to “color” when speaking of Spanish:
I speak the English that my parents do, so I’ve never faced the additional challenges of feeling like the only “articulate” person in, for example, an immigrant family that doesn’t speak English or a family without parents who are lawyers … Also, I identify as biracial (Hispanic and white) so I’ve never felt the need to speak the same way as people who look like me. Interestingly, I have felt pressure to speak Spanish because I ended up with the darkest skin of any of my siblings. I have not felt a similar pressure to speak a certain type of English …
For this respondent, the link between language and “race” is not as salient as the link between language and “color.” She does not experience pressure to speak a particular variety of English, but because of her “darker” skin she has felt social pressure to speak Spanish, as if a higher melanin count leads to a higher degree of Spanish fluency. This respondent’s description is similar to existing ideologies of language and race/color expressed by some within Spanish-speaking, Latinx communities, those that assume that darker-skinned Latinxs should or must speak Spanish while giving lighter-skinned Latinxs a “pass.”
This next example comes from someone who describes herself as “Filipino by culture (little blood) and Lebanese by blood (no culture),” but as having been raised “in a predominantly Mexican community” in Texas. She begins, “If someone described me as ‘articulate,’ I would feel like I had received a great compliment … I believe that the term articulate can apply across languages and the situations they are used in to mean a clear presentation of complex ideas. Therefore, I view articulate as a compliment.” And then, in what she describes as “a complete side-note,” she provides further information about her mother’s language:
I called my mother at her work today. As she works in an office and several people could have potentially answered the phone, I was not sure if it was her who picked up. To be quite honest, when I heard the woman’s voice on the other end of the phone, my immediate thought was, Nope, that’s not mom. I asked to speak to Soraya, and she said, “Hi!” I said, “Mom! I didn’t recognize you …” Her response? “I know. Different when I talk right, huh?” … I had never considered my mother’s way of speaking as “not right.” Granted, she has a Filipino accent (so I’ve been told), but her own assertion that her way of speaking is wrong made me realize even more how powerful language really is.
These next two examples provide heavy insights into the complex nature of raciolinguistic exceptionalism. They also help to show that the underlying cause of Black suspicion and offense when it comes to “articulate” is due to broader, ongoing social processes that relate as much to the deprecation of “Blackness” as they do to linguistic marginalization writ large. The following observation comes from someone who self-identifies as “½ Korean, ½ mixed white” and is an exemplary case of the “split-view.” Due to her position on the racial and linguistic margins, she claims that she is not “articulate” and often feels like “she can’t gather her thoughts to be expressed in an articulate manner.” So, her first response to being referred to as articulate “would be surprise, but also pleased that I’d come across that way.” She later complicates her own view by providing an Asian American vantage point to the discussion: “I think, though, that the word contains a bit of surprise in it, as if one is exceeding expectations … if someone told me I was ‘articulate’ after asking where I was from, or if I spoke English, or anything else pointing to my race/ethnicity, then I’d be annoyed.” She then explains why this might be particularly frustrating for Asian Americans, who often have to battle the “forever foreigner” stereotype.
Asian-American speech doesn’t get stereotyped as inarticulate like black and Latino speech does, but it does sometimes get stereotyped as accented. Maybe the person was trying to give me a compliment, but Asian immigration to the US is not new, the US as a multiracial society is not new, and multiracial people aren’t new. I would feel Othered and out of place, even though this is my place.
The various stereotypes that circulate in the US about Asian Americans are discussed at length by Reyes (2007). Drawing on the classic work of Edward Said, Reyes explains that the “forever foreigner” stereotype “draws on discourses of Orientalism, ideologies which shape the image of Asian and Middle Eastern peoples as Other and thus unassimilable due to innate East–West differences that cannot be resolved” (ibid.: 7–8).
The final response in this section is worth quoting in full as it reveals further complexity, and the often-unacknowledged emotional pain of growing up on the linguistic margins of America. This respondent is an indigenous speaker of Hawai’i Creole English, a stigmatized variety of American English:
Answering this question is difficult. I spent the majority of my childhood trying to prove my intelligence. Growing up in an alternative school was difficult. I didn’t learn to read or write in English until the 6th grade and even though I was different from my classmates in that most of the community didn’t expect us to succeed in a mainstream school I knew from a young age that I had the work ethic and even more important the support to be successful outside of our community. At the same time I struggled with … being judged for speaking primarily Pidgin. We were taught that Pidgin would prevent us from being successful, and prevent people from respecting us. So those of us who could, or cared enough, tried to force our tongues to fit into a western system that would only patronize us for our efforts. Because of this, a part of me, the part that so wanted to be successful as a child would feel honored almost at the thought of someone calling me articulate. But the version of me that has learned about the motivations for consolidating communities into a singular language variety makes me feel offended to be placed under that hammer. I know that code switching is a sign of intelligence, even if it’s not recognized as one. I know that I have the ability, because of my background, to effectively communicate with people from a broad range of backgrounds in a way that is meaningful to them. I would call this skill articulate if it weren’t already tainted with expectations of covering up any language variety that doesn’t agree with what some people call ‘Educated English.’ So for now, I can do without such compliments – I don’t need them.
While speaking from a particular vantage point of the linguistically colonized in Hawai’i, this young woman expresses several shared sentiments of those on the linguistic margins in the US. First, we see that Americans on the linguistic margins – whether they speak Arabic, Black Language, Span(gl)ish, Tagalog, or Hawai’i Creole English – learn the dominant ideology that links “articulateness” with “good/perfect English,” with “intelligence” and with “whiteness.” Second, rather than continue to feel shame, she expresses an alternative ideology that privileges the skills of bilingual and multilingual speakers’ abilities to switch in and out of multiple languages. Lastly, she frames “articulate” as a political term. Far from neutral, it is loaded with a cultural-linguistic hegemony that imposes itself upon people and then praises them for “covering up” their own language.
16.3Conclusion: Anzaldua, Language, and Race at the Border
All of these speakers, when taken together, highlight the associations between race, color, citizenship, coloniality, and language that underlie the seemingly innocent and jocular comments by Trump. Alice Ashton Filmer’s “Bilingual Belonging and the Whiteness of (Standard) English(es)” (2007) described these raciolinguistic associations as forming what she referred to as acoustic identity. Looking across racial and ethnic groups and across various national contexts, she concluded by noting that:
In every case, the speaker’s acoustic identity and sense of bilingual belonging are negotiated and defined within a complex set of historical/sociopolitical/cultural relations and expectations that ultimately conflate the use of (Standard) English(es) with Whiteness and Western imperialism. In light of this evidence, to insist that Standard Englishes are neutral forms of communication capable of unifying multiracial/ethnic/cultural societies is to fail to recognize these prevalent, and generally unconscious assumptions and expectations. This brand of linguistic ethnocentrism – a major legacy of Euro-American colonialism – is unethical and must be challenged on the grounds of human and civil rights.
(ibid.: 761–62)
In speaking of the major legacy of Euro-American colonialism, it is certainly not lost on us that Adrian Anzaldua shares the same last name as Chicana Feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, who wrote much about questions of language and identity in the borderlands (1987), and who grew up along the Mexico–Texas border, where Adrian Anzaldua serves as a border patrol agent. President Trump’s comments constitute a particularly insidious form of what Gloria Anzaldúa described as “linguistic terrorism,” the reproduction of White settler colonial violence and colonial relations in and through struggles of language.
Anzaldúa’s ideas are particularly relevant to our discussion of raciolinguistic exceptionalism, because these ideas about race, language, citizenship, nation, etc., always index the colonial relations that produce them. In the particular case of President Trump referring to Adrian Anzaldua’s speech as “perfect English,” we see multiple dimensions of this historical relationship playing out in the short segment that introduced this chapter. Before he started speaking, Anzaldua was already heard as linguistically deficient (incapable of speaking English); he was then later praised for his English-speaking ability through raciolinguistic exceptionalism that separated him from the supposedly unwashed, Spanish-speaking Latinx masses (“He speaks perfect English”). Even beyond that, he was infantilized by the president in the same way a teacher might do to a grammar school student after a public speech (“What a good job he did! What a good job. Now you know tomorrow he’s going to be … he didn’t know he was gonna do it. ((smiling at the audience)) Tomorrow he will be announcing that he’s running for office”).
While all of this is troubling, the President’s verbal comments were perhaps most deeply unnerving because of the optics at play. Politically, President Trump has been squarely anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant, governing by a clear White supremacist or White nationalist imperative. To many, Adrian Anzaldua, intentionally or not, became the brown face of President Trump’s particular brand of “Border Wall” White supremacy, to be used by the President as a shield against accusations of racism and thus allowing him to keep the terms of the debate focused on “legal,” not “racial,” concerns (e.g. “We are a nation of laws,” etc.).
But perhaps the most troubling aspect of this incident of raciolinguistic exceptionalism is how Trump pivots from praise of Anzaldua’s language to continue his fear mongering racialization of Mexican immigrants as monsters. Recall that Trump frequently refers to Mexican immigrants as “criminals,” “rapists,” and “animals.” Recall that just seconds after praising Anzaldua, the President went on to warn Americans that: “Last month under Operation Eagle Shield, right here in the DC area, ICE officers arrested a hundred and thirty-two illegal aliens, including criminal aliens charged or convicted of rape, battery, and strangulation. Among those arrested was a high-ranking MS-13 gang member …” (Remezcla Estaff 2018).
Trump’s comments on Anzaldua’s “perfect English” not only exceptionalize Anzaldua at the expense of Latinxs in the US, whom Trump views as non-English speaking, but the process of racioinguistic exceptionalism at play in this incident positions Latinxs as not having a claim to citizenship and Americanness without use of the English language (and in a manner deemed “perfect,” ironically by even those Whites whose language is at best marginally “standard”). In other words, Trump draws a raciolinguistic border wall around Adrian Anzaldua, separating him from other less-fluent Latinxs, while using Anzaldua’s brownness to help him build a physical border wall, excluding “brown” Latinx immigrants from Trump’s “white country” across the border. This incident of raciolinguistic exceptionalism throws into stark relief the colonial relations that undergird ideologies of language and race and demonstrates how a so-called simple compliment can be imbricated with questions of citizenship and belonging that ultimately serve to reproduce exclusionary White supremacist notions of Latinx undesirability.
Note
1.Since this transcription is of a monologue, we do not use the detailed style of transcription used for conversations found in other chapters.
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