Studying ‘A Real Thing’

Two new professors at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity offer perspectives on diversity.

Tomás Jiménez, assistant professor of sociology, has been studying Mexican immigration in his work on assimilation, social mobility and ethnic identity. In an interview with STANFORD, he talked about the richness of local communities.

[Regional diversity] is one of the things that attracted me to Stanford. In addition to the University, it's also where it's situated. Santa Clara County in percentage terms is a bigger immigrant gateway than Los Angeles County; it's as big an immigrant [destination] as New York City. About 38 percent of the people who live in Santa Clara County are foreign born. Well over half of the people who live in Santa Clara County are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. [In] L.A. County, about 36 percent of the population is foreign born; New York City, it's about 38 percent. . . .

Silicon Valley is a fascinating place to study these things, because we really do have the spectrum of a contemporary immigration wave. We have a very highly skilled, fairly wealthy immigrant population, and we also have lots of people who are unauthorized, mostly from Latin America, who are very poor with a lack of formal education. We have large refugee populations on the east side of San Jose from Vietnam, and now we have Somali refugees. Diversity here is not something that people kind of talk about, it's not something you just see on brochures—it's a real thing.

H. Samy Alim, associate professor of education, studies the social impact of language, race and ethnicity. He spoke with STANFORD about education, street language and hip-hop culture.

'Check that at the door' is the common teacher lingo [to prohibit street language in the classroom]. And so the work that I've done has been trying to push against these dominant ideologies of language and to help people understand that we all use languages in a variety of ways in our social worlds. And there are particular languages that are constructed as dominant, those that happen to be modeled very closely after white middle class heterosexist norms, and there are other varieties of language that get marginalized across race, across ethnicity, across class, across sexuality, all these things. And so [my work is] sort of resocializing teachers, and society more broadly—at least that's the hope—into an understanding of linguistic diversity that doesn't put people in a situation to then drop out of school in incredible numbers and end up behind bars instead of behind desks. Really, the goal of the research is to re-envision and reimagine the place and the possibilities of language in our world. . . .

[Because of] the very youths who are causing us to rethink what it means to be a part of a speech community—causing us to rethink concepts like language socialization (and) the relation between language and identity—we're having this huge academic conversation about it. But their practices that are leading to this kind of intellectual rethinking are still obviously not allowed to enter the educational system.

There was this great example: The school that I was working at invited this local Shakespearian troupe to come to the school. . . . Well, the performance was based on Shakespeare waking up today and basically meeting a bunch of black youth who couldn't understand Shakespeare. And so, boom, rap was the way to understand Shakespeare and Shakespeare came back from the dead and started rapping like it was nothing. Ironically, by trying to be culturally relevant and using hip-hop to teach Shakespeare, [the players] were actually read [by students] as racist [for] looking at the incredible amount of cultural linguistic production that goes into producing hip-hop as something very easily picked up by Shakespeare—which black American youth could not possibly handle or comprehend. And so that tension was actually picked up by my students. . . . So there is this notion of being incredibly misunderstood and devalued . . . even though the school was trying to do something good. . . .

People talk about [rappers] Foxy Brown and Lil' Kim as scantily clad, hypersexualized, teaching bad values and morals etc. All of that can be critiqued; that is the easy thing to do. Where we need to go with this is to have conversations about the representations of black women by hip-hop culture and media that our students watch every day, and have those conversations within mainstream education, not as something to shy away from. In fact, that's what [Shakespeare's] works were about, tensions of everyday life. And these [hip-hop texts] are what our students are living in now. So we bring these texts in, and what I found was there were different relationships to these texts that could never have been imagined by the assumptions of popular discourses about hip-hop.

I had two young women students, 17 years old. One of them described to me that, in fact, her reading of these texts was within a feminist framework. . . . Feminist in that, through their demonstration of verbal skill, [female rappers] could out-rhyme, out-battle, the men they were competing with. And on another level, they were not just materialistic in the sense of talking about Gucci bags and all this other stuff, but moving black bodies into a space that they had been denied.

Another student read the work of Foxy Brown as being one of the few places that she can actually engage discussions and conversations about sexual abuse and rape. We don't even consider—in terms of wanting to sort of hide hip-hop culture—that this may be one of the few places that young girls can go to and talk among their friends about it. If a hip-hop artist was raped or had sexual abuse and is talking about it on record and all you hear is sex and violence, you're missing the connection that youth are possibly making within their own personal lives. So this is a space that school doesn't want to engage, it's a space that churches try to silence, [so] where else do they go to talk about these very difficult issues that they're going through. . . .

The N word becomes a particular problem in schools that I've worked with. This is not allowed in school, for obvious reasons. [But] teachers run into problems with that kind of policy, because students say it anyway. And the more you try to restrict its use, the more some students use it in your class and in your presence. Now you have racial tension, so you don't avoid the problem. . . . And so one of the things that I actually tried to do in my class when I was teaching in East Palo Alto was to look at the N word the way we scholars would do it here . . . from an ethnographic, anthropological, linguistic perspective. To teach students the field methods of anthropology and of linguistics analysis: to actually teach those methods that we learn in graduate school. And then have them recording examples, talking to friends, interviewing people about it and discovering that it is obviously very problematic, controversial [and] historically hurtful—[but] perhaps liberating when it becomes inverted semantically. . . . [The exercise] is difficult and it is controversial and it is filled with tensions. But it's far better than [practicing] zero-tolerance of the language and culture that youth are actually relating to and bringing to school, and just [hoping] it goes away.