Enslaved Africans’ linguistic loss was itself a source of terror

Evidence

Cervantes leads us into a moment of instability, where the poet is unplaceable and “childlike.” Cervantes acknowledges the infantilizing effects of racialization, colonization, and marginalization, and how language bears these marks in its syllables - or scars she must recite to survive. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2498 (#expands, via linked claim)

To recognize that we touch one an other in language seems particularly difficult in a society that would have us believe that there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language. To heal the splitting of mind and body, we marginalized and oppressed people attempt to recover ourselves and our experiences in language. We seek to make a place for intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular. When I need to say words that do more than simply mirror or address the dominant reality, I speak black vernacular. There, in that location, we make English do what we want it to do. We take the oppressor’s language and turn it against itself. We make our words a counter-hegemonic speech, liberating our selves in language. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 349 (#builds-on, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Marginalized people reclaim themselves in language by turning the oppressor’s tongue against itself — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 349; Racialization infantilizes the colonized and scars their language — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2498

Broader Connections

• Racialization infantilizes the colonized and scars their language #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2498