Nelson Flores
@nelsonlflores
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Professor in Educational Linguistics @PennGSE researching race, language & bilingual education; he/el;
Philadelphia, PA
Joined February 2011
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#Pump_Up_The_PLAVE
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NuNew x Butterbear
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#ฤดูของเธอนุนิวหมีเนย
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声優さん
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田中さん
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田中敦子さん
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#ZMZM生配信
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ネルフェス
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초코우유
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Leao
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攻殻機動隊
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攻殻機動隊
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ドーピング
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キャスター
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メディアさん
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小泉進次郎氏
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This is your regular reminder that education is not the pathway out of poverty. Ending poverty is.
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The daily Covid symptom check includes “unusual fatigue” and I am not sure what kind of fatigue counts as unusual at this moment in time
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Anybody surprised that educated people can be racist clearly has little experience with academia.
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I encourage my fellow academics to resist a simplistic critique since this is quite similar to attending an overpriced academic conference to talk about critical race theory. Having access to while simultaneously seeking to disrupt elite spaces is messy but can also be important.
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POC: This organization is racist.
Org: Join us and help us be less racist.
POC: (after joining) This organization is still racist.
Org: Become a leader and help us be less racist.
POC: (after becoming a leader): Let’s become an anti-racist org.
Org: You are being divisive.
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Dear Tom Brokaw,
"Hispanics" are learning English just fine. The problem is that white people are doing a crappy job of assimilating into the increasing diversity of the country. The problem isn't Hispanic assimilation. It is white racism.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk!
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This is your regular reminder that most of the work of an “ally” to a marginalized group should go unnoticed. If you feel the need to bring attention to all your supposed allyship you are doing the work to feel better about yourself, not for the community you purport to support.
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Academics: When you justify an all white syllabus because that is the legacy of your field, your racism is showing. POC have always contributed to academic knowledge even as they have been systematically ignored by white scholars. You inherited racism and choose to maintain it.
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Here is your regular reminder that colonialism has always been seen as complicated by the colonizers but not by the colonized. When shifting the locus of enunciation to the colonized it becomes a straightforward case of oppression that must be resisted.
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Straight people wondering what they can do in response to the Colorado Springs shooting can start by calling out the casual homophobia and transphobia that permeate everyday life and inevitably lead to this kind of violence.
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Being a first-gen academic who grew up in poverty means simultaneously believing that grad students should have higher stipends while feeling troubled by claims that “nobody can live on current stipends” knowing that I still have relatives living on significantly less than that.
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If a child is too young to know they are gay, they are too young to know they are straight.
If a child is too young to know they are trans, they are too young to know they are cis.
Stop treating being cishet as the default.
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Tips for avoiding imposter syndrome in academia:
1.) Realize most people’s opinions about you don’t matter.
2.) Have an academic crew who will have your back when these people come for you.
3.) Have a non-academic crew who will remind you academia is not the whole world.
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None of the signers were immigrants. They were all colonizers who signed a document lamenting the presence of “merciless Indian savages.”
A reminder this Fourth of July: it was eight immigrants who signed the Declaration of Independence. Happy Independence Day.
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Here is your regular reminder that the privileging of biological family over other familial kinships is heteronormative and patriarchal and is often used to pressure people into tolerating toxic relationships. But you don’t owe anybody anything simply because you share some DNA.
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1/3 of my newsfeed is saying how realistic
#TheChair
is and calling people criticizing it obnoxious, 1/3 is providing point by point critiques of what it gets wrong and 1/3 is claiming moral superiority for refusing to watch it and now I feel like I am in a faculty meeting 🙃
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Social events in academia designed to “build community” often means having to endure microaggressions & harassment for scholars from marginalized backgrounds. Their absence from these events should not be interpreted as lack of collegiality. It should be understood as self-care.
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In academia it is common to hear discussions of the “invisible labor” of women, POC, LGBT and other marginalized scholars. But their labor is not invisible to themselves or those they support. Calling it invisible centers the privileged gaze these discussions purport to decenter.
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The racial bias loop in academic hiring:
1.) Frame a faculty position in a way that get mostly white applicants
2.) Invite one “diverse candidate” for a campus visit
3.) Hire a white candidate who is a “better fit”
4.) Lament why your faculty is so white
5.) Rinse and repeat
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Self identifying as an ally to a marginalized group you don’t belong to is pretty presumptuous. I don’t think you should be the one that decides that.
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Rather than thinking of communities of color as “codeswitchers” who must switch between codes to accommodate whiteness, I prefer to think of them as “code innovators” who transgress socially constructed linguistic borders in ways that are at the forefront of language change.
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A reminder that doing research focused on a marginalized group does not automatically make you an ally to that group.
Researchers have often been complicit in contributing to rather than dismantling marginalization.
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US policy debates often assume that preparing all students for college is the pathway out of poverty but you shouldn’t need a college degree to receive a living wage. Everybody who works should receive a living wage.
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Academic twitter,
Describe the major argument of your current research project in 5 words or less.
Mine is:
Professionalizing bilingual education was racist
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Trauma-informed teaching isn’t going to do much so long as mainstream institutions continue to be designed in ways that inflict trauma
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One of the plus sides of being a first gen student who ended up with a career in academia is that since I was so unfamiliar with academic norms I had no idea that matter-of-factly stating my truth was supposed to be no-no, which accidentally made me a bad bitch in the field.
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Cis women are cis women. Trans women are trans women. Both are women. It really isn’t that hard to understand.
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Since most of the worlds population is bi/multilingual instead of researching “bilingual brains” we should research the unique characteristics of “monolingual brains.” How exactly do those monolingual brains work? What is the cognitive effect of monolingualism? 🤔
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People often talk about the invisible labor marginalized scholars take on in academia. But in reality it is strategically visible labor. We are expected to be visibly diverse when engaging in DEI work while keeping invisible the stress, trauma and burnout this work produces.
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Calling a marginalized person “passionate” when talking about their oppression and the oppression of their community is not a compliment. It is a way of depicting them as overly emotional in ways that is at best condescending and at worse works to undermine their credibility.
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Me: Here are experiences I have had as a Latino and a teacher that suggest your ideas are racist.
Them: That is not academic.
Me: Here is a robust theoretical and methological framework that connects your ideas to an enduring legacy of colonialism.
Them: That is too academic.
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FYI: If your leadership team is all white you are not doing anti-racist work no matter what you say.
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When I spoke about racism before getting fancy degrees people said I needed to get educated.
When I speak about racism with my fancy degrees people say I am an out of touch intellectual.
I am starting to think these people actually have a problem with me talking about racism.
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The result of professors prioritizing format over substance is that many students become so anxious that they are doing an assignment wrong that they lose focus of what should actually matter—their ideas.
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Nancy Pelosi is like so many white liberals who celebrate “diversity” but feel disrespected when “diverse people” refuse to tow the line.
In the end they don’t want diversity. They want multi-colored conformity.
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Academic language is a raciolinguistic ideology that frames affluent white language practices as inherently academic and low-income racialized language practices as inherently non-academic.
But there's more. The whole idea of academic language is a colonial discourse
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Discussions of a “bilingual brain” presuppose a “monolingual brain” as the norm when in reality a monolingual brain is a colonial invention that erases the many linguistic borders so-called monolinguals cross on a daily basis. Monolingualism is an ideology, not an empirical fact.
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I prefer the term racialized people to POC because it emphasizes an active process of othering that doesn’t imply or necessitate a reliance on biological metaphors.
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Me: This concept is racist.
Reviewer: You should soften your tone so that people don't get defensive and actually reflect on what you are saying.
Me revised: This concept is racist. Please stop using it. Thank you.
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The panic over so-called “learning losses” shows just how much formal schooling has colonized the concept of learning as if we all are not literally learning new things everyday as people living in the world. This will not end well for marginalized communities.
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I am less interested in "giving voice" to marginalized populations and more interested in showing how academic knowledge production is designed to actively exclude these marginalized voices while pretending to listen to them under the banner of "diversity" and "inclusion."
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Instead of spending so much time and effort trying to decolonize disciplines that are fundamentally colonial perhaps we should work on developing new forms of academic knowledge not wedded to these disciplinary boundaries to begin with.
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Be attentive to which scholars are invited to present their research and which scholars are invited to do diversity service work
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Here is your regular reminder that just because you do research in communities of color doesn’t mean you are doing anti-racist research. In fact, much of the research focused on communities of color is quite racist.
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Whiteness is not an individual identity but an ideological position. This means POC can inhabit (or perhaps more accurately approximate) whiteness when given institutional power over other POC.
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The CNN Sesame Street townhall brought back Maria and Gordon who talked about how heartbroken they feel that Sesame Street is still addressing the same issues today as when they first started on the show in the 1960s and I wasn’t prepared 😭
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As people are tweeting about the adding of new words to the dictionary here is your regular reminder that whether a word is or is not in the dictionary has nothing to do with whether a word is real or not. If a community of people use a word it is real. No dictionary needed.
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Academia during this global pandemic will be like “let’s have a zoom meeting about how to ensure we engage in self-care by unplugging from the internet from time to time.”
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Children of color should have their cultural & linguistic practices affirmed in classrooms because it the right thing to do, not based on whether it increases test scores. We cannot call ourselves anti-racist if our sole criteria for determining our success are rooted in racism.
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Them: Latinx is destroying the Spanish language!
Me: Fuck Spanish. Fuck English too. Fuck all bounded notions of language designed to police linguistic borders and maintain colonial logics.
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When I say minoritized children are gifted sociolinguists I am often asked why I don’t just say that all children are. The reason is because it is minoritized children whose linguistic talents are constantly questioned. Until this changes I will keep centering them in my work.
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People often say improving education will end poverty.
But that has it all backwards.
Ending poverty will improve education.
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At this point I use Latinx simply because it pisses off the Brotinos. I support those who prefer Latine but also support pissing off the Brotinos as much as possible so it is Latinx for me.
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Universities overburdening faculty members from marginalized backgrounds with “equity work” without compensating them for this labor or counting it toward their tenure and promotion actually works to further exacerbate the inequities this work purports to challenge.
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CNN keeps calling what is happening in DC “anarchy.” It is NOT anarchy, which is a political tradition that aspires to a non-hierarchical society. It is white supremacy, which aspires to the complete opposite.
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One of the many dangers of doing research in marginalized communities is that we risk making the alternative worlds that they have created for themselves recognizable to the institutions that oppress them in ways that further entrench their marginalization.
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Academia loves making requests for free labor sound like an award.
Requests to review proposals will be like:
"We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected to become part of a pool of talented experts who will be reviewing our proposals for free. Congratulations!"
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If your antiracism doesn’t make eradicating poverty central to its agenda than it is not actually antiracism in the sense that it is working to dismantle racism. It is neoliberal multiculturalism working to maintain the status quo with a few aesthetic changes.
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Life as a POC doing critical race work in academia:
First they ignore you, then they call you divisive, then they claim your contribution is not new, then they whitewash your ideas without citing you.
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It is so weird to me that people are like I can’t relate to a Black elf and that the part they can’t relate to is the Black part rather than the elf part
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Instead of burdening applicants by requiring a general diversity statement, schools should share their diversity action plan with candidates invited for a campus visit and give them time with the search committee to discuss their reactions and where they could support this work.
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My academic work does not seek to “give voice” to racialized people. Instead, it seeks to identify the ways that academic knowledge production has historically and continues to be complicit in marginalizing and coopting these voices in ways that maintain the racial status quo.
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We need to abandon essentialist identity politics.
You can be invested in white supremacy without being white.
You can be invested in patriarchy without being a man.
You can be invested in heteronormativity without being straight.
You can be invested in your own oppression.
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I sometimes hear (mostly) white educators claim that students of color can’t code-switch.
The irony is that white people are probably the least adept at code-switching because they are the least expected to have to do it.
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Fascist: POC are genetically inferior.
Conservative: POC are culturally inferior.
Liberal: POC have rich cultural resources but still need to learn how to act like white people.
Radical: All three of you are racist af.
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In this global pandemic some academics are having a hard time focusing on work. Others use work as a way to distract themselves from the state of the world. Both responses are understandable. There is no need to shame those who are coping differently than us.
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When the first person to speak after a conference presentation has "more of a comment than a question"
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Rather than asking students what “gaps” they are seeking to fill in the literature, I prefer asking them what they hope to contribute to existing debates in the field. I think this opens up new possibilities for how they can position themselves in relation to the field.
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Privileged people will discover the oppression of others and then feel oppressed at the burden of being the “only person” speaking up about it while ignoring the massive amounts of work marginalized people are doing to challenge their own oppression.
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The last Golden Girl passing away has reminded me of just how important that show was. It focused on older women who loved and supported one another while also having vibrant sex lives. It also dealt with gay issues with compassion. It was queer af in the 1980s.
#RIPBettyWhite
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Capitalists will exploit your labor while trying to convince you that you are the one exploiting them
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Preparing students of color to navigate a racist world is not anti-racist unless it is coupled with providing them with tools to challenge (not just accommodate) racism.
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As a first gen Latinx college student from a working class background, something that is obvious to me that is not for many legacy academics is that most marginalized people don’t give a shit about academia and sure as hell don’t want to be “given voice” in academic spaces.
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White supremacist: I want POC to die.
White liberal: I don’t see color so I don’t see all of the POC dying.
White leftist: POC need to ally themselves with white working class racists who want them to die.
POC: I want to live.
White people: Here comes the PC police 🙄
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I propose that we start call people who have been monolingual English speakers for 6 or more years “long term monolinguals” and make them take an annual assessment until they can prove that they can engage in grade level content in a language other than English.
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Trump attacked critical race theory because of claims that it advocated for the overthrow of the US government. He then tried to overthrow the government and got away with it. The irony is that critical race theory predicted all of this.
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Focusing on whether academic job applicants can bring in grant money introduces bias since not all research is equally fundable. Foundations & governments do not typically offer million dollar grants to projects that fundamentally challenge the existing power structure.
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The poverty that most worries me is poverty
Cory Booker is currently reading David Brooks' book, "The Second Mountain," he tells NPR. "The poverty that most worries me is the poverty of empathy, the poverty of compassion," Booker says.
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If you are a marginalized person navigating elite spaces it is sometimes tempting to dismiss your discomfort in them as stemming from personal inadequacies. But you are not the problem. These spaces weren’t designed for people like you. They are the problem, not you.
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Fact 1: Standardized assessments were created by eugenicists to promote white supremacy.
Fact 2: POC engage in complex literacy practices on a daily basis.
Conclusion: Discussions of “literacy gaps” based on standardized assessments continue to promote white supremacy.
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It looks like Santa is white after all
🚨 BREAKING: Santa and his 9 reindeer have been issued a permit to enter the U.S. on
#ChristmasEve
, thus ensuring children across the country will wake up
#Christmas
morning filled with joy & spirit of the season -
🔴🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🛷🎅🎁
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I have met many Latinxs who are reluctant to claim they're bilingual because they feel like their Spanish is not good enough despite using it everyday.
In contrast, I have met many white people who claim they're bilingual because they took a few years of high school Spanish.
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Never let an academic text make you feel less intelligent. Instead of feeling inadequate for not understanding the entire argument focus in on the parts you do understand and reflect on if & how these ideas are helpful to you. I guarantee that you understand more than you think.
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Providing mentorship for Latinx and other marginalized emerging scholars is not a burden, it is a blessing that sustains me. Having this work ignored by institutions when it comes to things like tenure, promotion and compensation is the burden.
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People sometimes critique the blunt rhetorical style and tone of my writing arguing that it alienates people who would otherwise be sympathetic.
But if somebody need me to sugarcoat white supremacy to take my argument seriously, they were never really sympathetic to begin with.
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White academics calling racialized scholars "emotional", "ideological", or "militant" are actually projecting their own deep emotional investment in militantly defending the ideology of whiteness.
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Marginalized people are told that if they master dominant discourses that people in power will be more likely to listen to them.
The problem is that people in power will always ignore them if they say anything that seeks to disrupt the system regardless of what form it takes.
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Ed researchers loves talking about risk factors.
But being POC is only risky in a white supremacist society, queer in a heteronormative, women in a patriarchal, immigrants in a xenophobic & disabled in an ableist.
These are not “risk factors.” They are indicators of oppression.
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Angeli Gomez is a farmworker. The dominant framing of people like her are that they don’t care about their children or their education. Yet she not only attended her children’s graduation in work clothes but returned to protect them from a shooter. Deficit perspectives are racist
The mom that ran in and saved her kids after being handcuffed in Uvalde finally spoke out.
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So much of the research on Spanish in the US is done by people who did not grow up using Spanish in the US, which explains the primary focus on grammar that heritage speakers supposedly lack rather than the ways their experiences of marginalization lead them to transform Spanish.
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The fact that people are fighting over what race mythical creatures truly are shows just how deeply entrenched racial logics are in how people make sense of the world. The idea that mythical creatures might somehow transcend race is seen as too fantastical for fantasy.
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No the X in Latinx is not imperialism. Do you want to know what is imperialism though? The gender binary.
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Language is inherently fun, creative and dynamic and yet somehow schools manage to turn it into something boring, static and dead.
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What this pandemic has clearly shown is that there is an inverse relationship between wages and how essential your work actually is to our survival
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I was not prepared for the Saved By the Bell reboot to come so hard for appropriateness-based approaches to language education for heritage speakers. It is season 2 episode 7 for anybody who wants to see it and includes Aisha making demands to decolonize the Spanish curriculum.
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First they ignore you,
Then they ridicule you,
Then they fight you,
Then they take your ideas without citing you.
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So are universities going to start paying the wifi bills for professors and students they are asking to move their courses online? Asking for a friend and their students.
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Trump: We hate immigrants and will deport them if they come to the border trying to apply for political asylum.
Harris: We love immigrants and will deport them if they come to the border trying to apply for political asylum.
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As a first gen college student who grew up in a poor bilingual Latinx home I quickly learned that access to elite spaces is not the same as acceptance in these spaces. Gatekeepers will throw me out much quicker than what it took for me to get in if I become too inconvenient.
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Be careful to ensure that in your efforts to “center marginalized voices” you don’t place the entire burden on marginalized people to speak out against their oppression. You should be speaking out against it too perhaps even more than them in contexts where it is risky to do so.
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