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.’
Continue reading