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A reminder for junior scholars: When engaging with media about your work, consider answering the questions you want to be asked regardless of what you’re actually asked—a central part of scholarly expertise is the ability to reframe a dialogue [1/5]
Lately I’ve been asked by multiple media outlets to identify & discuss words whose etymologies are linked to histories of racism—instead of answering this question, I ask why we’re inclined to locate racism in words, & what (infinite) aspects of racism we ignore by doing so [2/5]
The notion of “racist words” leads people to reductively define anti-racism as not using those words, but that’s not how racism works; why are we talking about racist words instead of policies, infrastructures, institutions, capital, labor, land, etc.? [3/5]
“Language experts” often answer journalists’ questions about communication at face value, as though using or not using particular language forms were the fundamental problem or solution—this completely misconstrues relationships between linguistic & social structures [4/5]
FWIW, linguistic anthropologists refer to the tendency to reduce arbitrary relationships between linguistic & social structures to causal or iconic relationships as indexical downshifting; this is, of course, the great irony of “critical language awareness” 
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[Side note: there’s also an ironic meta-analysis of this entire thread that’s making me laugh right now, but I’ll stop being annoying & pretend it’s a weekend]
