Essentialism and Standard English are socially-constructed concepts which stand together in upholding a hierarchy that perpetuates ethnic inequality by privileging a dominant group. This privileged group is the white male, whose culture permeates into all other cultures, subtly altering and eliciting behavior to conform to the white male’s norms. Social scientists acknowledge and personify such influence of and social pressure from this culture with notions such as “white gaze,” which depict a totalitarian view of social relations (Flores & Rosa, 2015, p. 150-151). To challenge the ethnic hierarchy, we must understand that the population cannot be neatly sliced and labeled according to certain differences as asserted by the position of essentialism.
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Both groups accept me as one of their own, and my personality reflects that. So who or what am I really? Am I a genuine member of each group, or neither? The difficulty is that I manifest differences within groups and overlap in similarities between groups. I introduced each group as if it were one homogenous collective entity, but in reality within the groups each individual has traits and experiences that make her incredibly unique whether compared to the rest of the group or those outside of the group. Considering this, people cannot be separated into labeled circles; a more accurate view would be to see people within intersections of infinite circles that weave into an intricate Venn diagram, each intersection representing the unique identity of an individual. This is ethnicity—a fluid identity that changes in accordance with one’s changing associations, values, and traits. It cannot be ignored, however, that some subscribe to essentialism and perceive rigid, unpassable boundaries between people; these individuals are probably more likely to erroneously associate individuals with a predetermined set of traits or …show more content…
Standard English is the language perceived to be appropriate for academic and professional settings, thus being a necessary tool for social and economic mobility (Flores & Rosa, 2015). We go through life trying to obtain this tool and teach children to the do the same. However, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa (2015), in “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education,” explain that no one has been able to objectively define Standard English in terms of “an empirical set of linguistic forms” (p. 164). Flores and Rosa (2015) also explain and provide evidence that “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,” referencing an interview with a teacher who stated that she hoped her African-American students would stop using the terms “he was” and “she was,” which are grammatically correct phrases that correspond to Standard English norms (p. 166). Their research reveals that a speaker’s (often a minority’s) inability to conform to Standard English is not her fault, but instead the listener’s fault for subscribing to a fictional, subjective standard. The racialization of one’s language can only be the fault of the white listening subject, who
Both groups accept me as one of their own, and my personality reflects that. So who or what am I really? Am I a genuine member of each group, or neither? The difficulty is that I manifest differences within groups and overlap in similarities between groups. I introduced each group as if it were one homogenous collective entity, but in reality within the groups each individual has traits and experiences that make her incredibly unique whether compared to the rest of the group or those outside of the group. Considering this, people cannot be separated into labeled circles; a more accurate view would be to see people within intersections of infinite circles that weave into an intricate Venn diagram, each intersection representing the unique identity of an individual. This is ethnicity—a fluid identity that changes in accordance with one’s changing associations, values, and traits. It cannot be ignored, however, that some subscribe to essentialism and perceive rigid, unpassable boundaries between people; these individuals are probably more likely to erroneously associate individuals with a predetermined set of traits or …show more content…
Standard English is the language perceived to be appropriate for academic and professional settings, thus being a necessary tool for social and economic mobility (Flores & Rosa, 2015). We go through life trying to obtain this tool and teach children to the do the same. However, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa (2015), in “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education,” explain that no one has been able to objectively define Standard English in terms of “an empirical set of linguistic forms” (p. 164). Flores and Rosa (2015) also explain and provide evidence that “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,” referencing an interview with a teacher who stated that she hoped her African-American students would stop using the terms “he was” and “she was,” which are grammatically correct phrases that correspond to Standard English norms (p. 166). Their research reveals that a speaker’s (often a minority’s) inability to conform to Standard English is not her fault, but instead the listener’s fault for subscribing to a fictional, subjective standard. The racialization of one’s language can only be the fault of the white listening subject, who