alim (2020)

The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race
H. Samy Alim (ed.) et al.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190845995.001.0001
Published: 2020 Online ISBN: 9780190846022 Print ISBN: 9780190845995
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CHAPTER
21 Raciolinguistic Exceptionalism: How Racialized

“Compliments” Reproduce White Supremacy 
H. Samy Alim, Geneva Smitherman
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190845995.013.23 Pages 472–496

Published: 08 October 2020
Abstract
This chapter analyzes the discursive practices that enable Donald Trump and his a liates to
(re)produce immigrant illegality: the idea that violations of immigration law are iconic of an “illegal,”
dangerous personal character that makes undocumented migrants unimaginable as members of the
United States. In its migration discourse, the Trump administration takes up a US policy regime that
con ates the legal category “illegal alien” and the cultural image of “the south-of-the border”
migrant as a criminal outsider. As immigrant illegality disproportionately impacts certain groups,
especially migrants from Mexico and Central America, it is racializing. Although Trumpian migration
discourse builds on enduring racial projects, it is remarkable in making racialization overt: something
that has been taboo in public speech since the Civil Rights movement. The chapter argues that the
administration is able to normalize overt racialization by constructing it as commonsense, a form of
truth posited as inherent and obvious without critical analysis.
Keywords: migration, Trump, racialization, discourse, immigrant illegality, US immigration policy, Mexico,
Central America
Subject: Sociolinguistics, Linguistics
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
IN her chapter, “Exceptionally Yours: Racial Escape Hatches in the Contemporary United States,” from her
book, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States,
leading race theorist Imani Perry (2011: 130-1) explains that “racial exceptionalism is the practice of
creating meaning out of the existence of people of color who don’t t our stereotypic or racial-narrative-
based conceptions.” An individual is placed into a “state of exception,” she argues, only when the “normal”
state of their group “is assumed de cient.” According to Perry, the creation of states of exception through
everyday narratives and practices rei es racist interpretive frames that shape how we evaluate inequality
and legitimate “the practice of inequality toward those who are not in the exceptionalized group.”
Importantly for us, exceptionalizing discourses only serve “to support a general stereotyping of the larger
populace (especially in the case of Blacks and Latinxs) and [to justify] that stereotyping within a social
context in which racial egalitarianism is proclaimed. [emphasis ours].” This context of professed racial
egalitarianism is usually thought of as the favored terrain of white racist conservatives, yet it also serves as
an important context for those of our white liberal allies who claim, ridiculously, not to see color. While so-

called “colorblindness” may serve an important function in the psychology of white liberalism (the desire
to be de ned as “a good person”), it is in fact a hindrance to good policy when it comes to racial inequality.
As Mica Pollock (2005) described in her book, Colormute, the more white liberals attempt to anxiously
suppress talk about race the more they are likely to reproduce racism, since hegemonic racism is often
p. 473 invisible to those occupying privileged positions in the structure. In the case of exceptionalizing
discourses, the more white liberals attempt to “compliment” People of Color on characteristics that would
otherwise be considered unremarkable, the more they reproduce white supremacy, that is, the presumed
superiority of white people vis-à-vis People of Color. To return to Perry, leaning on A. Leon Higginbotham,
exceptionalizing discourses—intentionally or not, and intuitively or not—accept “the precept of
inferiority” as normative (p. 131).
As white race theorist Tim Wise has written, this is not what most Americans think of as your standard,
run-of-the-mill racism, the kind that has plagued the history of this country since its inception, leading to
genocide, enslavement, mass incarceration, police executions, etc. Using the term “racism 2.0,” or
“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
di erent from a less appealing, even pathological black or brown rule.” To Wise 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 “con rms the salience of race and the machinations of white hegemony” (Wise
2009: 8–11). As we will demonstrate, Perry’s and Wise’s theories of exceptionalism capture long-standing
Black folk theories about the racialized “compliments” that white Americans o er in relation to the speech
of Blacks and other People of Color. Explicit colorblind rhetoric (“I don’t see race”) is contradicted by the
implicit presuppositions embedded in such compliments.
Our discussion to come of raciolinguistic exceptionalism builds upon this work in race studies, as well as the
language ideological literature in linguistic anthropology (Schie elin et al. 1998), particularly Paul
Kroskrity’s (2011) outlining of linguistic racisms. Kroskrity (chapter 4, this volume) 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 di erent valences across
di erently racialized groups because they are shaped by varying sociohistorical and sociopolitical processes
of domination, such as enslavement, settler colonialism, and other forms of global, racial capitalist
exploitation. When Reyes (2016) writes about the use of the racializing “compliment,” “you speak English
so well” directed at Asian Americans, for example, it is both similar to and di erent from the way “you
speak so well” (Clemetson, 2007) is directed at African Americans and “you speak good English” can be
used to target particular Latinx populations (Urciuoli, 1996).
As we describe these processes of raciolinguistic exceptionalism—whereby exceptionalism occurs through

white racist evaluations of, and ideologies about, both language and race—we consider how ideas about
People of Color and their speech serve to reinforce racist narratives about Asianness, Blackness, Indigeneity,
Latinidad, etc. We begin with a few concrete examples of raciolinguistic exceptionalism drawn from our
p. 474 earlier work, in which 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). As we argued:
More than any other cultural symbol, Barack Obama’s multifaceted language use allowed
Americans to create linguistic links between him and famous African American male historical
gures. These links served to simultaneously “whiten,” “Blacken,” “Americanize,” and
“Christianize” [and “masculinize”] Barack in the eyes/ears of both Black and white Americans.
From an agentive perspective, we described how Barack Obama’s raciolinguistic practices could be read as

performances of both language and race simultaneously. 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 what Flores and Rosa (2015) have termed raciolinguistic ideologies.
Of course, our analysis of Barack Obama was intended to highlight these processes of linguistic racism as
impacting Black Americans writ large, using Obama both as an example and point of departure in order to
consider broader questions of language, race, class, and education in the United States. Building upon
Alim’s (2005) previous research—“Hearing What’s Not Said and Missing What Is”—we recognized that
white teachers’ beliefs about their Black students, and their language, depended largely upon their hearing
of Black speech through the ideological lens of linguistic supremacy, which served to uphold white
supremacist logics of both language and race. White teachers were hearing “errors” in their Black students’
speech where there were none, even going so far as to invent syntactic structures that are not found in any
variety of English, as well as missing various complex aspects of Black linguistic production. As Flores and
Rosa (2015) 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.
Leaning on Miyako Inoue’s (2006) powerful theorizing about what she refers to as “the listening subject,”
this recent work can be seen as an e ort to critique linguistic anthropology’s focus on speaker agency and to
push the theoretical pendulum back towards hearers, particularly when “the listening subject” is used to
refer to hegemonic systems of power. Inoue’s work on gender has been taken up more recently to focus on
not just how language can transform race but also on how “racialized signs come to transform linguistic
ones” (Rosa and Lo, 2015; see also Rosa and Flores 2017 and chapter 5 this volume). This work is becoming
an increasingly important focus in linguistic anthropology and has much to o er the growing eld of
raciolinguistics, “dedicated to bringing to bear the diverse methods of linguistic analysis to ask and answer
critical questions about the relations between language, race, and power across diverse ethnoracial contexts
and societies” (Alim et al. 2016).
p. 475
Articulate Assaults: Language, race, and class
In this section, we consider the social meanings of the racialized “compliment” of “articulate” and how
they function to reproduce both racist ideologies and inequalities. We argue that the “articulate assault”—
and the violence of other racialized “compliments” (“you speak so well,” “you don’t have an accent,” “you
speak good English”)—is not just cultural and symbolic, but it is also linked to tangible consequences for
those positioned at the racial and linguistic margins of society.
Using the case of Barack Obama as an example, we have noted a particular fascination, obsession if you will,
with his language and communicative behavior. This intense scrutiny is a type of social monitoring that
highlights the fact that his language, and Black Language more generally, are constantly policed by white
and other Americans. Further, this type of language policing also throws into relief the complex and
inextricably linked relationship between language and race in America. Recall, for example, the multiple
media crisis moments that surrounded Barack Obama throughout his campaign and two terms as President
regarding the word, “articulate.”
While “articulate” has a long history, our current narrative begins in 2007 when then Democratic

Presidential hopeful Senator Joseph Biden described Barack Obama in the New York Observer as the “ rst
mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” (Thai and
Barrett, 2007). That same week, in an unrelated assault, former President George W. Bush responded to a
Fox News reporter’s question about Obama by saying, “He’s an attractive guy. He’s articulate,” and “he’s
got a long way to go to be president”; and just two months after that, Republican strategist Karl Rove
referred to Obama as “articulate,” but questioned whether or not he could “live up to the standards”
(Roberts, 2007).
These comments by three white men—one a Democrat, two Republicans, all who now consider themselves
to be allies of People of Color—created a restorm in Black communities nationwide, as their racialized and
classed meanings entered the already troubling racializing discourses of the 2008 Presidential campaign.
Of all the adjectives Biden used to describe Obama, “articulate” stood out for being “so pervasive” and for
being used so “di erently by blacks and whites” that Lynette Clemetson called for a “a national therapy
session” (2007). Writing in The New York Times on “The Racial Politics of Speaking Well”—or what some
Black folks referred to as “Articulate While Black” (Moore, 2007)—Clemetson argued that in attempting to
explain his remarks, Joe Biden just dug his hole deeper, casting Barack Obama as completely out of the
ordinary, describing him as “incredible” and “a phenomenon.” Perry argues that Joseph Biden’s [and
Bush’s] “inartful” comments provide evidence of “a thematic in American culture in which the idea of
Blackness is dissonant to excellence and achievement and in which, in those instances in which excellence
p. 476 and achievement are found in Black bodies, those individuals are cast as necessarily extraordinary and
distinguished.” (p. 127). Further, Michael Eric Dyson noted, “Historically, [articulate] was meant to signal
the exceptional Negro … The implication is that most Black people do not have the capacity to engage in
articulate speech, when white people are automatically assumed to be articulate” (Clemetson, 2007).
Obama himself released a written statement that pointed out the racialized nature of the “compliments,”
stating that they were obviously “historically inaccurate,” pointing to former African American Presidential
candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton who “no one would
call … inarticulate” (Thai and Barrett, 2007). Obama’s statement, in this instance, demonstrated a refusal to
be white America’s “exceptional Negro,” one willing to accept “praise” at the expense of other Black
politicians and Black people in general.
After Biden, Bush, and Rove, a fourth white man committed an “articulate assault,” but in a slightly
di erent way. This time, it was former majority leader Harry Reid, then Democratic Senator from Nevada,
who gave “articulate” new life through a direct linkage between language and race. Reid claimed that,
relative to other Black candidates like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Obama was “light-skinned” and spoke
“with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one” (Preston, 2010). While the media went into another
tailspin, Obama, as he did with Biden, argued that the comments were not intended as Reid’s personal
beliefs. Beyond being out of touch with current nomenclature (“Negro” as a racial term of reference fell out
of favor in the 1960s), Reid’s comments revealed several current realities about racial politics in America. As
Reid’s comments demonstrate, and as has been made clear since white Americans elected President Donald
Trump in 2016, many white leaders continue to hold the belief that America’s dream of postraciality is far
from its racial reality; in fact, the United States is hyper-racial, with white American voting trends based
increasingly on racial resentment and a candidate’s commitment to maintaining white power. Third, if a
Black man was ever going to be elected, he would have to be an “exceptional” Black man, approximating
white, middle class linguistic norms and rejecting stigmatized Black ways of speaking.
The fth and sixth white men in our narrative continued the “articulate assault” well into the 2012
Presidential election season. First, then Republican representative Joe Walsh from Illinois suggested that
Barack Obama’s election was linked to both race and language, as well as “white guilt,” as if Obama were
the Presidential politics version of an “a rmative action baby”:

Why was he elected? Again, it comes down to who he was. He was Black, he was historic. And
there’s nothing racist about this. It is what it is. If he had been a dynamic white state senator
elected to Congress he wouldn’t have gotten in the game this fast… [The media] was in love with
him because he pushed that magical button: a Black man who was articulate, liberal, the whole
white guilt thing, all of that
(Weigel 2011).
White discursive strategies to deny racism (as in Walsh’s “And there’s nothing racist about this”) have been
p. 477 thoroughly documented by social science research on language and race from van Dijk’s Communicating
Racism: Ethnic prejudice in cognition and conversation (1987) to Jane Hill’s The Everyday Language of White
Racism (2008) to sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism without Racists: Color-blind racism and racial
inequality in contemporary America (2010).
Aside from the now classic, almost satirical, white rhetorical script of “I’m not racist, but … ,” followed by
racist commentary, Walsh’s “magical” discourse ties in very neatly with the fth white man to enter the
“articulate assault” narrative, in ammatory talk radio host Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh, perhaps more
directly than any of the other characters in this narrative, demonstrates the theoretical importance of
focusing on “the listening subject.” In the following excerpt, he makes it painfully obvious that many white
Americans vigilantly monitor and police the language of their Black counterparts, hoping to be able to prove
Black inferiority through the use of even “trace” amounts of speech associated with Black speakers.
On his radio show, Limbaugh played a snippet of Barack Obama’s speech repeatedly and urged his fans to
listen really closely because they might “miss” something, the “egregious” Black-associated linguistic
feature. Obama was addressing the National Governors Association when he said, “As a condition of
receiving access to Title I funds, we will ask all states to put in place a plan to adopt and certify standards
that are college and career ready in reading and math.” Limbaugh stops the tape and asks, “D-ahhhh, did
you catch, did you catch that there? Did you catch that? No? You missed it … See, you’re listening to the
substance here. You missed this.” After replaying it, he gives Harry Reid’s comments new life:
This is what Harry Reid was talking about. Obama can turn on that Black dialect when he wants to
and turn it o . The President of the United States just said here, ‘As a condition of receiving’—and
I wonder if this was on the teleprompter … — ‘As a condition of receiving access to Title I funds we
will aks [pause] all states … ’ Who is he trying to reach out here to, the Reverend Jackson, the
Obama criticizer? Now, if I use the word aks for the rest of the day, am I gonna get beat up and
creamed for making fun of this clean, crisp, calm, cool, new, articulate [pause] President? … I’ll aks
my advisors. And I might even aks Governor Cumo, as the Reverend Jackson pronounced his name.
(http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201002220031)
Beyond the obvious, race-baiting mockery, Limbaugh exhibits multiple forms of ignorance here. First,
anyone who has listened to Barack Obama speak knows that “ask” is not rendered “aks” in his speech.
Reviewing the tape as trained linguists, Obama’s articulation of “ask” was actually “aksk,” making it more
likely that Obama made an error given that the word “access” came just before “ask.” Second, those like
Limbaugh, who disparage Black speakers for producing the “aks” variant instead of “ask” are unaware of
the linguistic history of the verb. Rosina Lippi-Green (1997:179) explains the phonological variation
regarding ask historically:
The Oxford English Dictionary establishes this variation between [ask] and [aks] as very old, a result
p. 478 of the Old English metathesis asc-, acs-. From this followed the Middle English variation with
many possible forms: ox, ax, ex, ask, esk, ash, esh, ass, ess. Finally, ax (aks) survived to almost 1600 as

the regular literary form, when ask became the literary preference.
Most Americans, including those who mock African Americans for using the historically “preferred literary
form” of “ask,” are woefully ignorant of its history. Further, as Lippi-Green notes, this variation is also
found in the speech of white Americans in Appalachia, in some urban regions of New York, and in some
regional varieties of British English. Lastly, what makes the language associated with Black Americans
unique has less to do with the “ignorance” of its speakers and more to do with the linguistic restructuring
that occurred when African and British language varieties came into contact in the process of creolization.
These linguistic di erences emerged within the sociopolitical terror of the African slave trade (Winford,
2003). Since both the linguistic complexity of historical creolization and the structural violence of racism
are either unacknowledged or erased, they are placed outside the awareness of members of hegemonic
social strata and their institutions.
As we argued in Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. (Alim and Smitherman,
2012), President Barack Obama’s use of language associated with Black speakers was
very much a conscious racial project, or at the very least, a result of secondary language
socialization (becoming an adult in a Black community). In the same way that the President
selected “Black” on the US Census to mark his racial identity, he also selects particular linguistic
resources to be employed in the multifaceted racial project of “becoming Black” … Rush
Limbaugh’s harping on “ask” versus “aks,” [ensures that] his language is sometimes still
racialized as “Black” even when he doesn’t use features typically associated with Black Language.
Limbaugh’s linguistic sleight of hand here is reminiscent of Alim’s teachers who “hear what’s not said and
miss what is” and exempli es how, if we recall Rosa and Lo (2015), “racialized signs come to transform
linguistic ones.” In revealing the coded meanings of racialized “compliments,” it may be useful to “direct
attention to the semiotic processes through which signs are not simply interpreted or valued in multiple
ways, but also potentially (re)materialized and (trans)formed” (Rosa and Lo 2015)—or in this case, how
“ask” became “aks” right before Limbaugh’s listeners’ very ears.
It was Limbaugh who popularized the use of “magic” to describe Barack Obama amongst Republicans. He
broadcast the song, “Barack the Magic Negro” on his radio show, in which Barack Obama was depicted as
the “magical Negro.” The term “magical Negro” was popularized by Black lmmaker Spike Lee, who
described the “super-duper magical Negro” nearly two decades ago. Since then it has been used to refer to a
stock character who uses special insights or powers to help, not himself, but the white protagonist, and is
more generally about the misrepresentation of Black characters in lm (Gabbard 2004, Hughes 2009). With
p. 479 its usage here, we see yet another way that Barack Obama was framed as the “exceptional Negro,”
standing on call, ready to alleviate white fears and enlighten them on issues of race.
The nal point—and perhaps the most obvious one to linguists—is that when white people give Black
people the “compliment” of being “articulate,” they often collocate it with other adjectives like “clean,”
“good,” “honest,” “handsome,” “nice-looking,” “bright,” “calm,” and “crisp.” This aspect of the use of
“articulate” is why we have been writing the word “compliment” in quotes. Speaking on MSNBC, Al
Sharpton’s comments showed the complexity behind the “compliment” with this concise but loaded one-
liner, which was chosen as one of Time magazine’s “Quotes of the Day” on February 1, 2007: “I take a bath
everyday,” which pointed out the insidiousness (no matter how inadvertent) of these kinds of
juxtapositions (Time 2007). As Tricia Rose noted, pushing us to consider who gets to de ne “articulate” and
based on what criteria, “Al Sharpton is incredibly articulate, but because he speaks with a cadence and style
that is rmly rooted in Black rhetorical tradition you will rarely hear white people refer to him as articulate”
(Clemetson, 2007).

In general, Black folks’ assumption is this: If one needs to consistently point out that an individual Black
person is “good,” “clean,” “bright,” and so on, it suggests that white private opinions, not to mention
larger, public discourses, about Black people in general are usually the opposite—“bad,” “dirty,” “dumb,”
“mean-looking,” “ugly,” “angry,” and “rough.” It is not merely the use of the word “articulate” that is
problematic, nor is it just the expression of surprise or bewilderment that makes it suspect. It is also the fact
that its adjectival neighbors describe qualities that help create raciolinguistic exceptionalism. These
recurring linguistic patterns, and how they are linked across chains of events (Agha, 2007), open
“articulate” up to challenges of covert, subtextual racism, one that speakers may not even intend to
perpetuate.
Obviously, returning to Limbaugh, that passionate plea to his listeners was not about linguistic correctness
per se; it was about the indexical links between language, race, and class. More speci cally, he was keenly
aware that the variant “aks” is often used to stereotype not just Blackness, but rather, at least to many of his
listeners, it highlighted all of the sinister stereotypes about Black, working-class people presumed to lack
“education,” “intelligence,” “competence,” and “ uency” in so-called “standard English.” Even worse
still, as Urciuoli (chapter 6, this volume) states, “Racialized people are historically typi ed as human matter
out of place, at best dirty, at worst dangerous, and always a problem.” In attempting to link Obama to Black
working-classness, Limbaugh was, for all intents and purposes, depicting him as “just another n-word”
without explicitly saying so. In the end, Limbaugh assumed correctly that his listeners’ stereotypical
knowledge would be more relevant to them than the actual speech of the speaker.
This underscores an important point about raciolinguistic exceptionalism: the “state of exception” is
always provisional, always contingent upon one’s latest performance. This dreadful state requires, as Perry
(2011: 131) noted, “consistent validation against the potential ‘reversion to type.’” With Barack Obama—as
with many high-achieving Black folks—white Americans searched for an interpretive frame within which
p. 480 to understand this successful Black politician-professor, a graduate of two Ivy League institutions
(Columbia University and Harvard Law School), the rst African American editor of the Harvard Law Review,
and a law professor at the University of Chicago. This highly educated Black man also became the Senate’s
sole African American. And yet, at any moment, any linguistic sign interpreted through white ears can send
him from the White House to the storied street corners of the poor, Black “ghetto” neighborhoods that
occupy the white imagination.
The truly sinister nature of raciolinguistic exceptionalism, and exceptionalism more generally, is that one is
perpetually trapped between being perceived as “a magic negro” (an exception to the despised group) and a
“working-class stereotype” (an exemplar of the despised group). Many will recognize the parallel here to
gender, where women in a male-dominated, patriarchal society are often asked to “transcend” gender if
they are to “appeal” to male voters (just ask Hillary Clinton) or risk being seen as a “militant feminist,” or
worse, a “b-word,” an unsavory exemplar of the despised group. The dehumanizing e ect of racializing
(and gendering) “compliments” lies in their ability to exceptionalize and homogenize simultaneously.
The Social and Structural Patterning of Racialized “Compliments”
In a recent blog post, a Black woman in her late thirties wrote about the use of “articulate” as a racializing
“compliment.” In her post, she epitomized the Black folk theory about this “very troubling” word’s social
meaning:
To me, whenever someone describes another person as “articulate,” even if I just see this in
written form, I automatically assume that the person doing the describing is white, and the person

being described is Black. Articulateness is never pointed out between other groups of people.
Therefore, I see “articulate” as some sort of negative euphemism about Black people in general. I
see it as saying this as a way to actually negate the Black person’s intelligence. Like they managed
to sound articulate by accident or something.
Recently I was watching the show Snapped, which chronicles true crimes committed by women. The show
interviews relevant parties, including the law enforcement o cials involved in the case. One story was
about a Black woman who had a Ph.D. in chemistry and was an especially successful chemist. The
interviewees couldn’t shut up about how highly educated she was. One detective described with obvious
admiration—an unusual attitude when talking about a murderer—about how despite all the evidence
against her, “She made an excellent witness—she was so articulate on the stand!”
Why was that something to point out? That a woman with a Ph.D. was articulate? Very troubling word.
(www.dap.com; 2012, no longer accessible)
p. 481 This example presents a strong interpretation of the articulate-as-white-racism theory and provokes some
further questions. Is the describer always white, and more importantly, is the described always Black?
“Undercover Black Man” (a blogger who is most probably white) responds to this interpretation of
“articulate” as white racism by saying, “I must say, with all due respect: Buuullshit!”
(http://undercoverblackman.blogspot.com). The white folk theory of “articulate” as non-racist usually
employs a whole battery of tactics to deny the existence of racializing “compliments.” Adherents of this folk
social analysis become enraged at the insinuation that you never hear anyone referring to a white person as
articulate. They are quick to point out that the media has previously referred to white politicians as
“articulate,” and therefore, the adjective cannot possibly be racializing. In its denial of the racially coded
meanings of “articulate,” the argument relies on logic that ignores the social and structural patterning of
events. The argument uses the relatively infrequent examples of “articulate” being used to describe white
politicians in order to “debunk” and deny any possibility of racism. As Undercover Black Man wrote at the
time, “We have the handy example of another well-spoken Democratic candidate in this very presidential
race … John Edwards.”
After displaying several examples of media outlets referring to John Edwards as “articulate,” Undercover
Black Man concludes: “You know what? I don’t think John Edwards or his sympathizers consider it a
freakin’ insult that he keeps being called ‘articulate.’” Of course, among his list of quotations (his so-called
evidence to support a non-racist reading of “articulate”) is this one: “Edwards is a young, smart, articulate,
and a good Southerner with moderate tendencies and a heart for traditional Democratic issues” (December
28, 2006). This folk social analysis of the denial of racism fails on two major points. One, it fails to
contextualize these readings of John Edwards, a southern candidate for president, within the pervasive US
ideologies about “dumb,” “slow,” or “slovenly” southern speech. The argument does not consider that
John Edwards is also being singled out as “articulate” because—as many speakers of Southern varieties of
English can attest—northern folks often “compliment” them because they expect them to sound “country”
(Hall-Lew and Stephens, 2012).
Just as with the racializing hegemony evident in the case of Barack Obama, “regionalizing hegemony” in
the United States marginalizes southern speech varieties in relation to the supposedly non-accented
midwestern varieties of English. So, in fact, both bloggers’ analyses are incomplete, partial readings. Black
people are not the only ones to be “complimented” as articulate in this backhanded way, nor does the use of
the “compliment” towards white people negate the racially discriminatory patterning. In fact, these kinds
of exceptionalizing discourses are not only used against Blacks and southerners, they often target others
who are socially marginalized as well. For example, “articulate” appears in conversations about
immigrants, especially the undocumented. In July 2011, NPR radio host Terry Gross was speaking about

former Washington Post writer and undocumented Filipino immigrant Jose Antonio Vargas. She was making
a case for a pathway to citizenship for him because he was “the kind” of immigrant that “we” should be
p. 482 helping become “American.” Others often point to the “articulate,” “bright,” and “hard-working”
DREAMers, exceptionalizing them compared to their presumed unintelligent and lazy counterparts who
speak varieties of English accented by their primary languages. More recently, on March 23, 2018,
Representative Maxine Waters tweeted her support for the Parkland High School students, who survived a
tragic mass shooting, as they led national e orts for gun control. The large, organized rallies of the Spring
of 2018, according to Waters, “[epitomize] the power of articulate, brilliant & creative young people who are
o ering our country inspired new leadership.” It is not that these youth aren’t all of these things and more;
it’s that, as “young people,” they are not expected to deliver “articulate” speeches on a national stage. In
short, even when delivered by allies like Joseph Biden, Harry Reid, Terri Gross, or Maxine Waters, the use of
“articulate” as a raciolinguistically exceptionalizing “compliment” articulates well with other
discriminatory ideologies of region, class, citizenship, and age, to name a few.
Reading “Articulate” as Raciolinguistic Exceptionalism: White, Black,

and Multiracial Perspectives
As we have already noted, language is socially charged, indexing notions of race, class, citizenship, and
other forms of social identi cation. In the remaining sections of the chapter, we report on our survey of
approximately fty ethnoracially diverse American college undergraduates. We asked them one question:
“If someone referred to you as ‘articulate,’ how would you feel? Explain your answer.” They were asked to
submit information about their age, race, ethnicity, gender, and biographical background. Overall, by
looking across racial and ethnic groups in the United States, the results both con rmed and complicated
theories of “articulate” as raciolinguistic exceptionalism by demonstrating the multiple problematic links
between “articulateness” and “whiteness” and “articulateness” and “intelligence” across these groups.
The survey further revealed that American ideologies of “articulateness” are more complex and nuanced
than they appear. First, it seems that some Asian, Latinx, Middle Eastern and other Americans also view
articulate as problematic but for di erent reasons than those commonly given by Black Americans. To these
groups, being referred to as “articulate” is sometimes chie y about making them the exception to a (racist)
rule, and other times, it is about casting them and their speech behavior as “white,” an identity category
which they resist. While this was implicit in some Black responses as well, and much of the educational
literature focuses on Black youth resisting “acting white” or “sounding white,” these responses allow us to
highlight the nuances of the problematic link between “articulateness” and “whiteness” in other groups.
The rst example comes from a Mexican-American, self-identi ed “Hispanic/Latina.” She writes that
being referred to as “articulate” would be a “compliment,” especially in academic settings. Feeling
p. 483 marginalized in these contexts, she reports that it would allow her “to claim an identity as a student who
‘belongs’ and ‘ ts in’ with the world of academia.” Then she adds another perspective about her home
community in northern California: “Talking as I am writing for this response is asking to be ridiculed where
I grew up … Most of my classmates would be quick to say that both the sound of my voice when I speak
English and the vocabulary I use make me sound like a white girl. In this case, being articulate is an insult
because it gets me the label of sounding white.”
A second example comes from someone who describes herself as racially “Asian” and ethnically “Native
Hawaiian.” Like the Mexican-American respondent mentioned previously, she is able to see both sides of
the “articulate” problem; she also resists being racialized as “white” (and classed as “middle”). She writes:
I think being described as “articulate” is a great thing—to me it means that I can clearly express
my feelings and thoughts to others in words … However, I guess there’s a ip side where being

articulate means speaking clearly and crisply and very prim and proper. This seems very white and
middle class. I wouldn’t necessarily take that as a compliment, especially if someone was referring
to my everyday way of speaking.
These responses and others below show how, in the United States, powerful raciolinguistic ideologies link
“articulateness” with “standard English” with “whiteness.” Because race, class, and educational inequality
overlap in the United States, the language variety that many think of as “standard English” is
straightforwardly (and problematically) constructed as “white English.” For many, these ways of speaking
become associated with white people, especially middle to upper class white people. “Sounding articulate”
or “sounding white” become seen as emblems of dominant white cultural privilege, and as such, are
sometimes rejected by those who have been racialized as “Others” their entire lives.
Western Imperialism and the Marginalization of Bi- and Multilinguals

by Monolingual Americans
Asian, Latinx, Middle Eastern and other Americans complicated our survey results in other unexpected
ways, due to the varying con gurations of race, color, nationality, and—only in America, as Don King used
to say—the marginalization of those who speak more than one language. Alice Ashton Filmer (2007)
described this “race/color/nationality/language” association as acoustic identity in her article, “Bilingual
Belonging and the whiteness of (Standard) English(es).” Looking across racial and ethnic groups and across
p. 484 various national contexts, she noted that: “In every case, the speaker’s acoustic identity and sense of
bilingual belonging are negotiated and de ned within a complex set of historical/sociopolitical/cultural
relations and expectations that ultimately con ate the use of (Standard) English(es) with whiteness and
Western imperialism.” She further critiqued the ideology that frames “Standard Englishes” “as neutral
forms of communication capable of unifying multiracial/ethnic/cultural societies” because it fails as “a
major legacy of Euro-American colonialism,” one that is “unethical and must be challenged on the grounds
of human and civil rights.” (2007:761–762).
In terms of reading the social meanings of “articulate,” some respondents expressed a “split-view” that
depended on their linguistic background as much if not more than their race. In many cases, respondents
did not view “articulate” as problematic in English, but their responses grew increasingly critical when
speaking about 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 honored to be referred to as “articulate” since it meant that they had fully
mastered English (and, we might add, had been symbolically dominated into believing that anything less
than “articulate” English was a de ciency since hegemonic culture only values “the standard” and
disparages all other varieties). 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.
This example comes from a respondent who describes herself as “Filipino by culture (little blood) and
Lebanese by blood (no culture),” but as having grown up “in a predominantly Mexican community” in
Texas: “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 order to mean
a clear presentation of complex ideas. Therefore, I view articulate as a compliment.” And then, in what she
described as “a complete side-note,” she o ered further information about her mother’s language:
I called my mother at her work today. As she works in an o ce 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. Di erent 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.
In this next example, from a self-identi ed “biracial (Hispanic and white)” respondent, we see how the
“split-view” of those in between linguistic worlds gives “articulate” di erent meanings. She does not view
“articulate” as problematic in English, but draws some complex connections in relation to “color” when
speaking of Spanish:
p. 485 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” (see Spears, chapter 3 this volume). 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 higher melanin
counts lead to higher degrees of Spanish uency. 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 ignoring lighter-skinned
Latinxs’ lack of uency. These language ideologies insist that darker-skinned Latinxs (especially those who
look, “mas indio,” or more indigenous) who do not speak Spanish are only “pretending” not to do so, or
that they must be speakers of a stigmatized indigenous “dialecto.” This raciolinguistic ideology is expressed
quite often among Mexicans in California, usually accompanied by a hand gesture touching the forehead,
Como que no puede hablar español cuando trae el nopal en la frente?! (Loosely, “How come he/she can’t speak
Spanish when he looks unmistakably/stereotypically Mexican?!”).
The following insight comes from someone who self-identi es as “½ Korean, ½ mixed white” and
represents a great case of the “split-view.” She perceives herself as not “articulate” and often feels like
“she can’t gather her thoughts to be expressed in an articulate manner.” So, her rst 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 are consistently faced with 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 U.S. is not new, the U.S. 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 United States about Asian Americans are discussed in Reyes
p. 486 (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 unassimable due to innate East-West di erences that cannot be
resolved” (2007:7–8).
The nal response, from an indigenous speaker of Hawai’i Creole English, reveals further complexity.
Recalling Filmer’s (2007) arguments, these comments reveal that the underlying cause of o ense to
articulate as a racializing “compliment” is due to broader, on-going social processes that have as much to
do with racism as they do with linguistic marginalization and Western imperialism:
Answering this question is di cult. I spent the majority of my childhood trying to prove my
intelligence. Growing up in an alternative school was di cult. I didn’t learn to read or write in
English until the 6th grade and even though I was di erent 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 [which linguists refer
to as Hawai’i Creole English]. 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 t into a western system that would only patronize us for our e orts. 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
o ended 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 e ectively
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.
We can see clearly 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 “intelligence” and with “whiteness.” Speaking from a particular vantage point of the linguistically
colonized in Hawai’i, this young woman expresses the emotional pain of trying “to force our tongues to t
into a western system that would only patronize us for our e orts.” However, rather than continue to feel
shame, she expresses an alternative ideology that privileges the skills of bilingual and multilingual
speakers’ abilities to command multiple languages. Lastly, she frames “articulate” as a political term. Far
from neutral, the term reproduces raciolinguistic ideologies of white supremacy and relations of
imperialism that punish people for speaking their own language while praising them for “covering it up.”
p. 487
Paternalism, Empathy, and Intentionality in Raciolinguistic Meaning
Like the narrative from the Hawai’i Creole English speaker, the assumption is that Black Americans should
want to leave their language behind in favor of upward mobility. “Articulate,” then, reveals a particular
paternalism, where Black people feel similarly “rewarded” for being socialized into white ways of speaking,
or as one respondent put it, “as someone who talks like an upper-class white boy.” These language and
racial politics are heightened for Black Americans in comparison to many immigrant populations because
they do not consider themselves learners of English as a second language. Further, the racist paternalism

vis-à-vis Black Language has a long history in the United States and is incredibly enduring. In fact, early
scholarship on the language of Black Americans theorized Black Language as “baby-talk” (Harrison 1884).
Blinded by a “scienti c” understanding of the biological inferiority of “the Black race,” another linguist
“explained” the di erences in Black speech not as caused by the learning of English and in uences from
African languages, but as caused by “intellectual indolence, or laziness, mental and physical, which shows
itself in the shortening of words, the elision of syllables, and modi cation of every di cult enunciation. It is
the indolence, mental and physical … that is its most characteristic feature” (Bennett, 1908, 1909; See
Smitherman, 2000, for more on discriminatory discourse on African American speech).
Not surprisingly, the history of linguistic research on Black speech produces, in part, Black suspicion of and
contempt towards white “compliments” of their “articulateness.” We can historicize this linguistic
monitoring within the American institution of slavery where we nd ample evidence that the policing of
Black Language serves the function of policing Black bodies. In their public notices to capture runaway
enslaved Africans, whites often described the enslaved in terms of their ability to speak English
(Smitherman, 1977:10–15). An ad in the New York Evening Post in 1774 read: “Ran away … a new Negro
Fellow named Prince, he can’t Scarce speak a Word of English.” And take this ad from the North Carolina
Gazette in 1760: “Ran away from the Subscriber, living near Salisbury, North Carolina … a negro fellow
named JACK … He is about 30 years of age, and about 5 feet high, speaks bad English.” Contrast these last
two announcements with this last one from Philadelphia’s American Weekly Mercury in 1734: “Run away … A
Negro Man named Jo Cu y, about 20 Years of age … he’s Pennsylvania born and speaks good English.” Thus,
we can see that the white practice of distinguishing between “good” and “bad” Black speakers of English is
an enduring legacy of the African slave trade. Whites made use of exceptionalizing discourses to refer to
their “runaway slaves” as speaking “good” or “exceptional” English.
Despite this horrid history, survey results showed that at least one or two Black speakers express a sense of
p. 488 empathy towards whites. Rather than automatically reading “articulate” as part of a system of racist,
white paternalism towards Blacks, this respondent acknowledges the very distinct possibility of a racist
subtext and then expresses his internal con ict at length:
The hard part about reacting to being called articulate is that I don’t want my judgment of the
speaker’s views to be based on a double standard. I am in danger of making an assumption about
the speaker’s awareness, or lack thereof, of the issues that a ect many urban minority areas so
that many kids that live there don’t get complimented as articulate … I try hard to approach people,
especially people I am just meeting, without bias. This situation is even more di cult because
being called articulate is often something that happens to me when speaking to someone I’m just
meeting for the rst time. Although I am using things like context clues and body language, my
reaction in these circumstances is almost impossible to do without assumptions about the person I
am talking to that have not had time to be con rmed or denied. Therefore, this situation shows its
complexity because of its potential for unfair assumptions to be made on both parts.
This respondent recognizes that white “compliments” about his “articulateness” are probably “linked to
[his] being Black,” yet does not want to fall prey to making similar kinds of racist assumptions about the
white person giving the racializing “compliment.” He does not want to prejudge people, even as “being
called articulate is often something that happens to [him] when speaking to someone [he’s] just meeting for
the rst time.”
While this respondent’s heartfelt narrative displays an empathetic, honest struggle about how to read
“articulate,” it lacks a critical perspective on racism in at least four di erent ways. First, in terms of reading
racializing “compliments” as part of processes of raciolinguistic exceptionalism, what many of the
o ended are responding to is how utterances are structured socially so that particular patterns appear far
more frequently than others. From our previous examples, for instance, it’s important to remember that

“articulate” is used hegemonically to describe the speech of those on the social and linguistic margins, such
as children, Southerners, immigrants, second language learners, etc. So, there is a salient link between
those characterized as “articulate” and social marginality.
Second, as we argued earlier, it is not helpful analytically to look at a particular utterance of “articulate” in
isolation and attempt to guess the speaker’s intention. What is useful, though, is looking across utterances
and noticing, for example, patterns in other juxtaposed adjectives. These other neighboring adjectives
simultaneously frame the speaker and the group to which the speaker belongs in opposition to each other.
The exceptional “peaceful, patriotic, moderate Muslim,” for example, versus her “violent, anti-American
extremist Muslim community,” is one such opposition heard frequently in post 9/11 American public
discourse (see Khan, chapter 18 in this volume; and Durrani, chapter 16 in this volume). So in addition to the
broader, interactional patterns of who utters what to whom, we must also consider the more micro
linguistic patterns used to construct “articulate” exceptions to the racist rule.
Thirdly, within the empathetic frame, racism becomes the property of individuals, something that lives
p. 489 inside of one person’s head or heart. Racism is constructed as something that can be denied or refuted
given someone’s “real” intentions. In fact, when Joseph Biden defended himself for referring to Barack
Obama as “articulate” (and “bright,” “clean” and “nice-looking,” lol), he stated that it was not his
“intent” to o end anyone. Obama quickly forgave him by saying he “didn’t take the comments personally,”
and Jesse Jackson also came to Biden’s defense: “It was a ga e. It was not an intentional racially pejorative
statement. It could be interpreted that way, but that’s not what he meant” (see David Gregory, 2007,
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16911044/ns/nbc_nightly_news_with_brian_williams/t/sen-biden-
apologizes-remarks-obama/#.W0tJ3BT-15g).
Putting “Uncle Joe” aside for a minute, the problem with this logic, of course, is that racism is perpetually
deniable because no one can ever really know if someone else harbors racist thoughts or feelings—and
especially, if those thoughts or feelings will lead to racist actions. As noted by Perry (2011:22), intentionality
is no longer a good measure for racism. People can—and often do—“promulgate racist imagery and ideas
without having any interest in identifying oneself as racist.” Further, language ideological critique (Hill
2008; Kroskrity, chapter 4 in this volume) argues that locating racism in the speaker’s self-analysis of his
or her intentions erases the hearer as well as the harm done in racist interactions; it is a hallmark of Western
European and US language ideologies.
Moreover, as critical race theorists have long argued, racism is more productively viewed not as an
individual, emotional problem, but as an institutional, systemic one. In other words, the question worth
asking is not “Does that particular person harbor racist beliefs when they call me “articulate”?” but rather
“How does the repeated, patterned use of “articulate” draw on racist ideologies and (re)produce racial
inequalities?” The repeated use of particular words by particular people in particular contexts over time is
how words come to take on socially charged meanings. So, in a “post-intent” era, whether racializing
“compliments” are “intentional” or even “conscious” becomes far less relevant than how these
“compliments” are patterned over time and space and how they perpetuate racist ideas. Black speakers, for
example, interpret whites’ use of “articulate” within a body of sociohistorical discourses regarding white
ideologies of language and race as well as contemporary experiences with white racism and linguistic
discrimination. So, when it comes to racializing “compliments,” we must attend to interactional patterns,
yes, but we must also consider how they articulate with sociohistorical discourses that inform responses to
those “compliments.”
How Racializing “Compliments” Reproduce Racial Inequalities

As an example of the policing of language—speci cally, the white policing of Black Language—our analysis
raises questions about the workings of multiple forms of linguistic racisms in the United States. In what
p. 490 follows we conclude by demonstrating how the use of “articulate” as a racializing “compliment” is
linked to and helps produce enduring sociostructural, racial inequalities. Speci cally, we discuss how
“articulate” brings to the fore a set of related issues from racial segregation to cultural assimilation and
linguistic policing (from everyday social monitoring to patterned language-based racial discrimination).
One of our survey respondents stated that she would interpret “articulate” as a compliment if she was ve
years old. But now that she’s twenty-two, it should be an expectation, and is therefore read as an insult. She
added, “As an African-American, I am even more sensitive and defensive about how people perceive my
linguistic abilities.” To us, the critical phrase here is, “As an African-American” because it suggests that
being “complimented” as “articulate” evokes long-standing white discourses of Black speech (and people)
as “de cient.” Previously, we mentioned another respondent who believed that he was being “praised” for
assimilating to white linguistic norms. For this respondent, the use of “articulate” as a racializing
“compliment” reproduces not only discourses of Black de ciency but it also resonates with hypocritical
discourses of racial assimilation and integration. The combination of these two discourses—Black
de ciency and racial assimilation and integration—suggests that in order for a Black person to succeed in
America, they must be an exception to the racist rule of Black de ciency. White America has long insisted
upon linguistic assimilation as the price of admission into its economic and social mainstream. Even many
otherwise liberal whites remain rigid and in exible when it comes to linguistic diversity. While some may
deny their complicity in this kind of linguistic hegemony, others earnestly work towards convincing
linguistic minorities that the journey to upward mobility will be easier for them once they drop their
cultural-linguistic baggage and acquire what they uncritically refer to as “standard English.” Despite
America’s expressed egalitarian values, linguistic hegemony is framed as bene cial to linguistic minorities
rather than harmful, and linguistic homogenization is presented as preferable to linguistic diversity. Thus,
when white people praise “articulate” Black speakers, they are also celebrating Black movement towards
the white mainstream and its “standard” language and away from a threatening cultural separatism and
counterhegemonic subversion. As Lippi-Green (1997: 78) once put it:
The real trouble with Black English is not the verbal aspect system which distinguishes it from
other varieties of US English, or the rhetorical strategies which draw such a vivid contrast, it is
simply this: [Black English] is tangible and irrefutable evidence that there is a distinct, healthy,
functioning African American culture which is not white, and which does not want to be white.
This is a state of a airs that is unacceptable to many.
Given America’s national discourses of “one nation, indivisible,” and the legal “end” of racial segregation in
“schooling, housing, public places, and the workplace,” Lippi-Green asks: “What does it mean then to say
that there is an African American culture distinct enough from other American cultures to have its own
variety of English, a variety that persists in the face of overt stigmatization?” (1997:178).
p. 491 In addition, there are some disconcerting facts about racial integration as well. While most white Americans
claim to support racial integration, it is still far from reality, in part, because of the ways that speci c forms
of racial capitalism (Robinson 1983) in the United States are embedded systemically. Further, there is a
critical disjuncture between self-reported white beliefs and empirically observable white behaviors with
respect to racial integration and equity. As Prudence Carter (2012) pointed out, while many middle-class
whites, in particular, have absorbed the discourse of racial integration, their actions militate against it.
Since overt racial discrimination is now illegal (though still widely practiced), language has become an even
more important means to deny Black Americans access to resources, particularly with regards to housing.
When “articulate” functions as raciolinguistic exceptionalism, it separates the “exceptional” speaker from
all other Black people, who are largely working-class, that is, the kind of Black people that white

gatekeepers want to keep far away from their children—and their property values. They are also typically
people who can be identi ed as “sounding Black”—and due, in part, to racial segregation and in part to
Black cultural priorities—have not assimilated to the linguistic norms associated with white Americans.
Over the last several decades, we have documented the growth of a new form of racism in housing that relies
on linguistic cues as indices of someone’s race, ethnicity, class, nationality, sexuality, region, etc.—what
Baugh (2003) has termed linguistic pro ling. As scholars, our rst experience with this kind of linguistic
racism occurred three decades ago. In 1989, Geneva Smitherman was invited to be an expert witness in a
housing discrimination case in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights. The chief plainti in the case, Young
v. Riverland Woods Apartments, et al., was Carole Young, a Black woman who had appeared at the apartment
manager’s o ce and was informed that there were “no vacancies.” Carole Young had led her complaint
with the Fair Housing Commission (FHC) in December of 1988, stating that the Riverland Woods agents told
her over the phone that units were available (aurally presuming she was “white”), but when her daughter
went there to pick up an application, they informed her that there were no units available and refused to
give her or her mother an application (visually identifying her as “Black”).
According to many, Carole Young’s speech was perceived as “white sounding.” Smitherman’s role was to
establish that people could and did make accurate racial assessments based on the sound of someone’s voice
over the phone. To accomplish this, she conducted a linguistic perception study with both white and Black
listeners from the Detroit metropolitan area. Consistently, listeners identi ed the “Black sounding” voices
as Black and the “white sounding” voices as white. Further, both the plainti and another Black woman
who “sounded white” were also consistently identi ed as “white.” On June 25, 1990, the defendants
(apparently shook) led a motion “to exclude the expert testimony of Dr. Geneva Smitherman,” which was
denied. One day later, the trial was held and concluded. With that kind of linguistic evidence, and the Black
and white testers who visited the apartment complex—in pairs, an hour apart—the jury was soundly
convinced that Riverland Woods was guilty of racial discrimination in housing.
p. 492 The example of “articulate” is directly relevant to this form of linguistic racism. Importantly, Smitherman’s
results showed the potential for racial misidenti cation, yet what is relevant here is that only the Black
women who were pre-identi ed as “sounding white” were likely to receive return calls and/or to be told on
the phone that there were available apartments. And further, when the FHC sent white testers out, not only
did they get applications, but they were also informed of promotional rental specials, which were apparently
available because Riverland had a surplus of units for rent! In other words, whites rewarded individual
“white sounding” speakers in much the same way that “articulate” speakers are praised, and punished the
collective “Black sounding” community in much the same way that the general Black population is
negatively framed through these racializing “compliments”—even at their own expense.
A decade after Smitherman’s work for the Young v. Riverland Woods Apartments case in the Detroit suburbs,
Massey and Lundy (2001) documented this type of linguistic racism in the housing market in the
Philadelphia area. Similar to Smitherman’s experiments, the research team designed a study with male and
female speakers of “White Middle-Class English, Black Accented English, and Black English Vernacular.”
They found that “rental agents now use linguistic cues over the phone to assign prospective renters to racial
categories and then vary their behavior systematically to discriminate on the basis of inferred race.” Black
Americans were “less likely to get through and speak to a rental agent, less likely to be told of a unit’s
availability, more likely to pay application fees, and more likely to have credit worthiness mentioned as a
potential problem for qualifying for a lease.” These e ects were “generally exacerbated by gender and
class” with “the most disadvantaged group” being “lower-class Black females” (p. 456).
As we discuss in our conclusion, these processes, such as raciolinguistic pro ling and exceptionalism, are
global. The image in Figure 21.1, collected during our recent research in Cape Town, South Africa, could very
well have been describing the Detroit and Philadelphia cases that we related.
Figure 21.1 “Rental Racism” from City Press, January 12, 2014 depicts raciolinguistic profiling in South Africa.
http://www.citypress.co.za/news/non-whites-house/
Much like the US examples, the white South African landlord is shown here denying housing to tenants with
“non-white”-sounding voices only to turn around and o er it to those with “white”-sounding voices. One
of the most troubling aspects of this investigative report in South Africa was that, even in areas where
research shows Blacks pay rent more promptly, “Some of the owners would rather have a house stand open
for months than rent it to a non-white family.” Again, as was the case in the United States with Riverland
Woods apartments, white racism is an illogical, costly enterprise, ourishing even at the expense of racists
themselves.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we demonstrated how a microcultural practice that is overtly attering actually

(re)produces racist meanings and (re)enforces racializing regimes. In particular, we revealed how
p. 493 racializing “compliments” are central to processes of raciolinguistic
p. 494
exceptionalism, whereby white racist evaluations of, and ideologies about, both language and race celebrate
individual members of racialized groups while necessarily pathologizing and oppressing all other group
members. Situating our discussion within race studies (Perry, 2011) and the linguistic anthropological
literature on linguistic racisms (Kroskrity, 2011 and chapter 4 this volume), our analysis showed that
raciolinguistic exceptionalism is sinister in that it is simultaneously exceptionalizing and homogenizing,
while remaining provisional, that is, dependent upon one’s most recent performance. Lastly, we showed
how, when considering racializing “compliments,” these processes take shape di erently across racialized
groups (Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Middle Eastern Americans) because they are shaped by
varying sociohistorical and sociopolitical processes of domination, such as enslavement, settler
colonialism, racial segregation, and other forms of global, racial capitalist exploitation.
While our analysis here has focused solely on the United States, our current research in Cape Town, South
Africa has shown that Black and Coloured speakers are often assaulted by “articulate” in much the same
way that we have described earlier. Further, some Coloured, Afrikaans speakers describe a raciolinguistic
exceptionalism that praises them for speaking “suiver Afrikaans” (“pure Afrikaans”), a phrase that both
racializes Afrikaans as “belonging” to white Afrikaners and ideologically positions “Coloured” speakers as
impure, an enduring apartheid-era construction of racial “mixedness.” Black isiXhosa-speakers experience
individualized “articulate” assaults (separating them from others in their group), as well as the
raciolinguistic exceptionalizing of African, immigrant groups by their white colleagues. Some Black, African
immigrants in South Africa (from Zimbabwe, for example) have acknowledged bene tting from this white-
imposed raciolinguistic “model minority” status. In this context, the phrase, “You speak English so well,”
when delivered by their white colleagues, is often understood by implicature to mean, “not like our Black
South Africans here.”
While a full analysis of the Capetonian context is outside of the scope of this chapter, our research has
shown that raciolinguistic exceptionalism takes shape in varying ways across racialized groups and across
varying systems of racial categorization in widely divergent contexts. In the US context, we have
demonstrated how the symbolic violence of raciolinguistic exceptionalism—even by well-intentioned
whites—reproduces both racist ideologies of white supremacy and racial inequalities that can have
devastating impacts on the lives of People of Color.
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Reading “Articulate” as Raciolinguistic Exceptionalism: White, Black,

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Western Imperialism and the Marginalization of Bi- and Multilinguals

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How Racializing “Compliments” Reproduce Racial Inequalities

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Bennett, J. 1908. Gullah: A negro patios. South Atlantic Quarterly, 7:332–347.

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