Overrepresentation of Whiteness Is in Sign Language As Well: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”
Temas
Detalles
is comment spoke to the dichotomy of academic and nonacademic languages that also exists in the signing communities in the educational context. The broader colonial logics rooted in whiteness that Flores and Rosa have presented in their argument against universal linguistic competence also affect the education of racialized disabled minorities that communicate in speech and signed modalities. The two key themes—inferiority and deficiency—in Flores and Rosa's discussion point to the intertwinement of race and disability in the history of colonialism. Race, class, and gender have often been central in theoretical analyses and debates in postcolonial scholarship, but disability has notably been absent from the scholarship (Kliewer & Fitzgerald, 2001; Soldatic, 2015). Disability has been used as a metaphor as a way to protect a democracy against social disorder and as a motivation to establish the notions of normalcy (Frederick & Shifrer, 2019) that underlie whiteness in conceptualizations of linguistic competence and humanness.