On April 28, Dr. Jonathan Rosa spoke as the final speaker for the semester in the Tufts Anthropology speaker series “Global Racism, State Violence, and Activism.” Rosa is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, and holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature. His talk, titled “American Apprehensions: A Semiotics of Racial and Linguistic Profiling” focused on the institutionalization of racial and linguistic hierarchies. By drawing on techniques from linguistic anthropology and semiotics, Rosa demonstrated how the co-naturalization of language and race, where certain linguistic patterns and usages are perceived to reflect someone’s racial identity, reflect the institutionalization of whiteness as the unmarked ‘normal’ against which all differently racialized communities are compared against, and subsequently marked as ‘other.’

Rosa drew on a variety of media examples and events to highlight the numerous ways non-white-coded bodies, practices, and materialities are racialized and subsequently discriminated against. He also highlighted how a conceptual understanding of racial profiling that is rooted in semiotics demonstrates how instances of racial and linguistic profiling, often treated by the media as isolated events, are part of a larger system and structure of racism and white supremacy. Moments of clear racial and linguistic profiling, such as someone being pulled off a plane and questioned for writing in Arabic, or when the perpetrator of a crime is assumed to be black, are not isolated events but moments of intensification in the continual processes of racialization and the criminalization of non-white bodies. Signs, which included words, clothing, and images, have been overdetermined through processes of racialization. Rosa discussed how racialization has made objects and sounds into fundamentally different things, in which, for example, a hooded sweatshirt worn by a Black man signifies a wholly different meaning than a hooded sweatshirt worn by a white person. Building from a discussion of how media representations and contextualizations of Black people’s personhood contributes to their racialization, Rosa also highlighted the way in which people have used social media platforms to engage with and contest the over-determination and racialization of signs. He pointed to examples of a Twitter trend (also seen on Facebook and Instagram) in which Black people posted two pictures of themselves with the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. People posted two pictures of themselves, one that could be coded as ‘criminal’ or ‘troublemaker’ (due to their clothing, facial expression, posture, and surrounding setting) and another where they were smiling, wearing clothing, and in a setting that would code them as successful and accomplished— and so somehow more worthy of life in the eyes of a white audience.

The concept of the un-markedness, and subsequent privileging of whiteness, is reflected in numerous readings and concepts from this semester’s class that explore processes of racialization, which this response does not have space to wholly consider. In Odd Tribes, Hartigan argues that whiteness is unmarked, and so when white people deviate from the signs and systems coded as white, a new identifier is applied to differentiate them from “unmarked” whiteness: “the name white trash is used to make an example out of the contaminating extremes that undermine the ability of white bodies to stand as unmarked identities” (2005, 136). He writes that this process of differentiation reflects how whiteness is “synonymous with social norms” in the United States, which also contributes to the “faceless” nature of systemic and institutional racism (Ibid.). Hartigan’s work highlights the co-naturalization of race and language that Rosa identifies, as well as the importance of a semiotic approach in understanding how things like clothing and speech patterns function as racial markers.

Ajantha Subramanian’s work around caste and merit in India demonstrates how caste privilege is unmarked, reflecting Rosa’s argument around the co-naturalization of language and race in a different context (2015). In her talk, also part of the Tufts speaker series, she emphasized how upper castes are socially unmarked, and so signs and systems associated with upper-caste Brahmin Indians are also seen an unmarked. She pointed to the example of how Brahmin students at IIT Madras would perceive non-Brahmin students as parochial and disruptive for speaking their local languages instead of Hindi, even though those languages were widely spoken in the local area. Hindi is unmarked through its association with Brahmin identity, while other languages are coded as lower caste and subsequently discouraged. Subramanian’s observation from the IIT was echoed in Rosa’s talk, when he discussed examples of different linguistic patterns and words choices being racially coded and labeled as ‘wrong’ by school systems and language assessors, due to their difference from the ‘standard’ English defined through white and educated contexts. Subramanian, Hartigan, and Rosa draw attention to the systems of racialization and oppression which work to otherize communities and sustain pre-existing power structures. Particularly, Rosa’s focus on semiotics and the co-naturalization of race and language reflects the multiple ways in which whiteness is unmarked and a globalized system of white supremacy continues to provide power and privilege to white bodies and white-coded signs and systems.

Works Cited:

Hartigan, John. 2005. Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People. Duke University Press.

Subramanian, Ajantha. 2015. “Making Merit: The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Social Life of Caste.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57 (2): 291–322. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417515000043.