Limited capital: a genealogy of culturelessness in (language) teacher education

3.1 Culture as property

According to Senghor, culture can be succinctly defined as the way humans orient and respond to their environment (Wynter 1976, p. 6). Still, within teacher education, having cultural capital is represented differently depending on the reference. Zwiers’ definition of cultural capital is, “the useful set of experiences and knowledge that are shaped by family and community” (2007), yet Yosso challenges that notion. Through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT), she argues for community cultural wealth (Yosso 2005) including sub-categories such as navigational, linguistic, familial, inspirational, and resistant capitals. The latter reflects a framing of racialized epistemic sovereignty expanding what is considered ‘useful’ to include experiential knowledge beyond white middle-class norms. I am theorizing culturelessness as a spectrum wherein cultural capital cannot coexist with race (Black or white). On one end, it would be redundant in that whiteness is analogous to humanness (Wynter 1992), and thereby culture is an assumed possession (Harris 1993), invisible and dangerous to the state to name. The danger in naming culture alongside racial whiteness is its necessary fracturing along precolonial designations inclusive of ethnic and linguistic dynamics that disrupt dichotomous racial logics. At the other extreme of this spectrum of erasure, Blackness and cultural capital cannot coexist because Blackness as a form of social exclusion (Burden-Stelly 2017) represents the absence or poverty of culture. Positioning culture and language as commodities reifies the propertied status of Black bodies rendering them incapable of possessing anything including intangible practices (Harris 1993) that constitute one’s humanness. The need to acknowledge an historical shaping of how Black communities orient to a world that distinctly others them, becomes moot if culture and language are understood as entities rather than environmentally-informed practices.

Wynter’s theory of the overrepresentation of man as white, male and Christian, has effectively been ignored in the social sciences through a focus on culture rather than racial logics and racism (Burden-Stelly 2017; Lentin 2005). This is evidenced in policy by the War on Poverty (Sung and Allen-Hardy 2019) and the associated word gap discourse (Avineri et al. 2015) which disembodies (Smalls 2020) and measures dominant and acceptable ways of being irrespective of sociopolitical context and inclusive of languaging practices. Communities racialized as black are barred from consideration as fully human through their historic inability to own property (Harris 1993) continuing from the colonial afterlife of slavery (Sharpe 2016) and domination (Aggarwal 2016). Language as an ideologically exclusive byproduct of political whiteness further legitimizes white worldviews (Keller and Levi 2017) as articulated from the position of assumed ownership even within academic settings. Those perceived as failing to subscribe to white western patriarchal perspectives are deemed subhuman, and further, marked as languageless (Rosa 2016b), rendering their ways of knowing as without institutional value. The inequitable distribution of resources, as a result of assumed unequal measures of human attributes, is managed through the surveillance and policing of material resources towards those presumed to possess language and culture – or linguistic and cultural capitals.

3.2 Conceptualizations of black cultural and linguistic poverty

Even as culture represents the distinctly human ways of conceiving of and moving through the world, CRT brings multidimensionality to Bordieuan (Yosso 2005) notions of capital shifting its center to race as it intersects with class (Leonardo 2012) and language (Flores and Rosa 2019) to produce unique forms of discrimination. Similar to Oscar Lewis’ poverty culture theory, Blackness is equated to ‘not belonging’ and an absence of history compounded by a passive depiction of that historical severing with Black American populations. Culturally-sustaining pedagogies (Paris and Alim 2017) contextualize the colonial violence that ruptured Black Americans (and some Black diasporic communities) from their histories during chattel slavery and insist that these communities are not without language or culture. Still, critique of the unique mistreatment of groups considered racially Black particularly as enacted through governmental structures in the years leading up to the Civil Rights movement, was demonized through ideologies of culturalism (Burden-Stelly 2017) – or acceptable antiradical displays of culture. To thwart Soviet influence and preserve the international favor of the U.S., the critique against an antiBlack nation was subsumed under an assimilationist multiculturalism (Melamed 2006) which has since remained both the standard and the extent of ‘cultural capital’ for Black peoples.

To mobilize critique against the national housing, employment, justice or educational apparatuses became tantamount to unAmericanness, thus positioning schools as “an instrument of governmentality [in which] antiBlackness confiscates the body of the Black, distorts it for the purpose of accumulation and exploitation, and returns that distortion to the Black as reality” (Burden-Stelly 2017, p. 215). This distortion of the cultureless Black then becomes the site of exploitation for the ills of society (Kynard 2013) as well as schooling which can only be remedied by depositing the missing human traits into Black students. When taken up through asset-based culture-centric approaches to teaching and learning, the invisible authority of whiteness can determine not only whose culture is ‘useful,’ but can position efforts to sustain (Paris and Alim 2017) Black culture as simultaneously threatening and futile – a waste of resources. When linguistic and cultural practices reflect a non-threatening and assimilationist standard, they are hailed as progressive, but to the extent that they force historical and political contextualization into pedagogical discourse, they are pathologized (Baugh 1983; Melamed 2006).

Since race-evasiveness permeates language teaching (Baker-Bell 2020; Von Esch et al. 2020) and teacher preparation (Chang-Bacon 2021) by euphemizing colonial issues of power as ‘cultural’ in nature, the examples of sociopolitical consciousness that emerge can reinforce dominant orientations to social hierarchies derived from the identities of predominantly white language teachers, teacher educators and education researchers presenting a raciodemographic (Milner 2012) issue in teacher preparation. This issue is one of ‘culturalism’ (Burden-Stelly 2017), which frames Blackness as a flattened and abstracted choice of expression rather than as a societal positioning deserving of material and economic resources. The type of internal validation which institutionally endows language (teacher) educators as equipped to evaluate the utility of student linguistic and cultural practices without sociopolitical contextualization encourages antiBlackness in language teacher preparation.

I have demonstrated how culture is framed as property which disembodies (Smalls 2020) it from Black populations and assigns it as an inherently white possession removing the need to discuss race altogether. In what follows, I will apply a raciolinguistic lens (Flores and Rosa 2019) to genealogically trace the ways in which normative language practices are qualified in teacher education through policy and academic texts which delimit what constitutes cultural and linguistic capital.

5.1 Language must be defended

Central to the 1983 policy report, A Nation at Risk, was the optimization of U.S. resources with education being framed as the commodity in question. In order to control the increasingly diverse population of schoolchildren, the document politicizes the bodies (Foucault 2006) of students as a threat to “American prosperity, security and civility” (NCEE 1983, p. 1). It cautions that “our nation is at risk” (NCEE 1983, p. 1), and that the “rising tide of mediocrity” (NCEE 1983, p. 1) is partially to blame. The watery metaphor relays a sense of being overwhelmed by something with a diluting quality leaving readers to imagine the types of bodies in this rising tide. “In the wake” (Sharpe 2016) of federal funds being redistributed from perceived users of white mainstream English (Alim et al. 2016; Baker-Bell 2017, 2020; Keller and Levi 2017; Smitherman 1998) and becoming accessible to Black and racially minoritized linguistically diverse students, this strategic use of language overtly targeted “the American people” in the form of “an open letter” (NCEE 1983, p. 1), casting negative light on the overall progress of the nation’s schoolchildren within a mere generation of some of the aforementioned landmark judicial decisions. The term “white mainstream English” (Baker-Bell 2017) is meant to specifically attend to a widely accepted yet mythical standard (Lippi-Green 2012) of acceptable languaging that connotes homogeneity and superiority (Haddix 2015) based on social identity markers inclusive of race. In fact, the NCEE’s (1983) report accurately asserts that at the time of its publication, “the average citizen today [was] better educated and more knowledgeable than the average citizen of a generation ago-more literate, and exposed to more mathematics, literature, and science” (p. 4). Such facts underscore the impetus behind the committee of twelve’s (re)casting of particular U.S. schoolchildren as “internal enemies” (Stoler 1995, p. 96) in partial fulfillment of the imperative to maintain a racialized caste structure, one with white middle-class monolingual mainstream English users situated at the top.

In both the Lau v Nichols^[5] and King v Ann Arbor^[6] cases, it was determined illegal to use students’ languaging practices as justification for tracking or special education classifications, respectively (Douglas 1973; Joiner 1979). The Lau case specifically cited the use of language as a proxy for “national origin” as a key determinant of the case having violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and called for “taxpayers of all races” (Douglas 1973, p. 569) to contribute to the education of said students. Nine years later, A Nation at Risk would conjure fear surrounding this attempt at equitable distribution of federal resources by citing secondary school curricula as having been “homogenized, diluted and diffused to the point that they no longer have a central purpose […] a cafeteria style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main courses” (NCEE 1983, p. 9). Fifteen years after the Third World Liberation Front successfully protested for ethnic studies in California in 1968, this rejection of cultural and linguistic pluralism would subject Black and minoritized children to the othering logics of Orientalism (Smith 2006) once more. Despite their citizenry, the report suggests an equitable and responsive disbursement of instructional and curricular resources would place the country at the mercy of “an unfriendly foreign power” (p. 1). Even with a 30-year gap in publishing, Zwiers (2013) continues these logics in his hypothetical case studies of “diverse students who can become casualties of invisible criteria in schools” (p. 9), including:

Sara, who immigrated to the United States four years ago from Mexico and “asks very few questions even when she does not understand the assignment” (p. 5)

United States-born Armando whose “social English is fluent, but his academic English is weak according to his teachers [and who] complains that he is not interested in any of the topics that are taught in his classes” (p. 5)

Kim who arrived from Vietnam two years ago and whose “oral language has errors, but she can make herself understood in most situations” (p. 5), and

African-American David, who, per Zwiers, speaks African-American Vernacular English, and “likes school but does not like to use mainstream English in front of peers in his classes […] he knows there is a difference but does not want ‘to sound white’” (p. 6)

It is arguable whether law or policy had challenged the perception of Kim, Armando or Sara as threats to the assimilation of distinct cultures into a nationalized educational agenda. They may very well be the embodiment of the “emerging sense of national frustration” (NCEE 1983, p. 7) that the 1983 commissioned report suggested was creating a “fear of losing a shared vision for America” (NCEE 1983, p. 7). Ironically, the shared vision constitutes what Rosa explains as a chronotope (2016a, 2016b) in that linguistic homogeny in the formation of the U.S. has never existed (Wiley 2014) and the racialism of western Europe as expressed through linguistic and religious discrimination (Robinson 2000) traveled to the western hemisphere with white settlers. Nonetheless, what is undoubtedly invisibilized is not the criteria for success as Zwiers (2013) would suggest, but rather a privatized white monocultural understanding of language and who can rightfully use it – an understanding which had been “developed by its members over time” (p. 8) and which had “define[d] what is intellectual, logical and linguistically appropriate” (p. 12) in various institutions including schools.

David, the hypothetical African-American student is, of course, the foremost “internal enemy” as he is described as willfully rejecting white mainstream English, although his hypothetical rationale is not explored. The inconvenient conundrum that David represents is the privilege that alleged native speakers of English (Kubota and Lin 2006) only experience when it intersects with whiteness in that Zwiers’ other examples are cast as being in transit from one language to another while David is locked into his languagelessness (Rosa 2016b). English both is and yet cannot be David’s native language based on his description as lacking linguistic capital (Zwiers 2013, p. 6). As a gesture of othering (Bonfiglio 2013), David is depicted as both languageless and cultureless – a nod to the familial pathology referenced in the Moynihan Report (1965) – based on Zwiers’ (2013) explanation that linguistic capital is derived from “quality and quantity” (p. 7) conversations with parents. African Americans, having been separated from their ethnic languaging through language planning (Baker-Bell 2020; Baugh 1997; Debose 2005) are considered as lacking both cultural capital due to their race (Zwiers 2013, p. 7) and linguistic capital, since “you can’t speak African” (Shange 2018). David is portrayed as resistant to white mainstream English, which offers an opportunity for becoming an echo (Woodson 1933; Wynter 2003) of humanity through assimilation (Melamed 2006). This simultaneously opens an opportunity for a neoliberal solution whereby marketable efforts on behalf of well-meaning educators to fill in for the failure of David’s parents (Dumas 2013) would elevate him from his “jungle status” (Fanon 1967). Whereas A Nation at Risk conveys students who fail to excel on standardized tests as threats to the U.S., Zwiers’ (2013) academic text reflects a neoliberal turn (Flores 2013b) that marks the rapid acceleration of the commodification (Kynard 2013) of language and the transmutation of language into “capital,” along with the aforementioned forms of intellectual and social capitals posited 30 years prior.

In keeping with the legacies of antiBlack dehumanization, A Nation at Risk warns that students benefiting from this recent access to free and presumably equal public education were “coasting through life” (p. 9), forever at odds with the common good of the nation(-state) (Wynter 2003) which had previously enjoyed a “thirst for education” (p. 8). The comparison drawn juxtaposes eras only one generation apart, but it carefully avoids invoking Native histories to reinforce the indigenous erasure in the foundation upon which “this country was built” (NCEE 1983, p. 4) through its “relative isolation from the malignant problems of older civilizations” (NCEE 1983, p. 4). This chronotypic (Rosa 2016a) depiction once more fictionalizes conceptions of the past based on language users’ racial positionings. Furthermore, in the report’s attempt to demonize the pluralistic backgrounds of the nation’s children now being served in schools, it draws on biopolitical logics that call into question the ability of U.S. schools to regularize the supposed superiority from which the country had previously derived great pride “generations ago” (NCEE 1983), in the era of the “Sputnik” (NCEE 1983, p. 1) –years immediately preceding the Civil Rights Act.

As a direct influence of A Nation at Risk and similar policies, standardization was determined to be the best means of controlling racially minoritized populations by reducing them to numeric codes (Deleuze 1992). This dehumanization represents an attempt to discredit the educational attainment of those most recently awarded access to public schooling, racially minoritized students. The counterargument to the educational improvement relayed in the policy report from one generation to the next was that those who graduated were not enjoying the same gains (NCEE 1983, p. 5) as the general population at large. Indicators of risk ^[7] cited standardized testing results to validate claims that the nation’s students were underperforming. While labeling alone cannot alter the performance of students, Foucault (2008) cautions us that by changing the access to resources through categorical naming practices, we in turn modify the population by determining who to “let die” (p. 241) as a projection of the market economy onto government. To ensure clarity in the dichotomous framing of who threatens the United States versus who belongs, the NCEE (1983) reestablishes that despite widened access to education for the linguistically diverse,

citizens know and believe that the meaning of America to the rest of the world must be something better than it seems to many today [and that] Americans like to think of this Nation as the preeminent country for generating great ideas (p. 11) [emphasis mine].

In other words, critiquing the United States to compel improvement in its treatment of Black, Indigenous and newcomer populations was tantamount to relinquishing one’s citizenship and thusly called for heightened vigilance in schools. The “ample” (p. 3) documentation from which the commission derives this conclusion is rooted in surveillance and management such that nine of thirteen bulleted indicators are based on standardized testing, an evidential schema which works to legitimize the borders of whiteness (Stoler 1995) and retard the impacts of the Civil Rights Act.

5.2 A limited supply of capital

The NCEE (1983) laments students’ lack of “higher order intellectual skills” (p. 1) and, as a result, calls for intervention and regulation. The echoes of these calls reverberate through the adoption of the Common Core State Standards in 2010 as a fiscally incentivized (García and Flores 2013) standardizing tool for U.S. public schools that determines which populations fail to enact the “language of the American bourgeoisie” (Flores 2013a, p. 277). It is important to recall that prior to both the Lau v. Nichols and Ann Arbor cases, special education environments were (and arguably still remain) de facto settings for students whose languaging practices differ from the expectations of the predominantly white teaching force. Zwiers would agree that these differences are more than linguistic, and that “academic English” is a reflection of more complex ideas than “non-mainstream” language practices can provide—furthering a logic that would facilitate segregating (Kynard 2013) and managing racialized populations (Foucault 2006). Zwiers (2013) posits that the “narrow range of accents, vocabulary, and grammar typically valued by those in power” (p. 2) constitute the linguistic capital that “[f]amilies pass on […] to their children who ‘invest them’ in school” (p. 8). He then argues that the school-sanctioned, hierarchical order of knowledge reflected in this narrow language production is somehow “the most complicated tool set in the world to learn how to use” (p. 1), as it devalues “lack of clarity, lack of evidence, lack of focus and extraneous language” (p. 15). This line of logic associates white middle-class monolingual English speakers with the exclusive capacity for clear, evidence-based and focused uses of language. To ground this claim, Zwiers (2013: 10) cites a 1986 study by Sarah Michaels to further argue that the storytelling on behalf of Black girls is inferior in nature as reported by their white middle-class teachers:

According to “standard” English-speaking middle-class teachers, children did not follow linear lines of thought, assumed too much shared background knowledge with the audience, and signaled importance with prosodic cues. Working-class African American students, especially girls, tended to tell more episodic accounts that shifted between scenes, whereas the European American students tended to tell topic-centered stories that focused on one event.

The likelihood of expressive agency, rhetorical strategy or cultural communicative choice on behalf of these Black girls is not considered in this evaluation, and despite Zwiers insisting that “diverse” thinking and its linguistic expression be acknowledged as equally valuable in the classroom, the remainder of the text outlines strategies on reducing occurrences of Black languaging in the classroom through teacher-directed techniques. The conflation between thinking and standardized expression is then contrasted with the language practices from students deemed as non-mainstream, namely “ELs, children of speakers of AAVE and children from poor families” (Zwiers 2013, p. 2). While the CCSS were widely challenged in their adoption, language education research responded to such “robust language demands” (Zwiers 2013, p. 2) through the investment in and teaching of academic English. Zwiers’ (2013) text is aptly subtitled, Meeting Common Core Standards Across Disciplines, and his empirical work is cited in the central expectation for the use of ‘academic’ language (Stanford Center for Assessment Learning and Equity 2018) required by the edTPA (Educative Teacher Preparation Assessment).

In many ways, the 1983 policy report demanded the theorizing of supports and approaches, like those offered in Zwiers’ (2013) work, whereby learners “expand their linguistic capital” (p. 12) and teachers “work alongside students to develop and add new forms of cultural and linguistic capital” (p. 18). Building from the work of Jim Cummins, Zwiers (2013) encourages language education practitioners that all students have linguistic capital, but of varying “qualities and quantities” (p. 7). Similarly, Cummins warns that there are separate systems of language, basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP), which require different types of input to acquire. Zwiers (2013) extends this language as entity logic to conclude that, “[j]ust as money and things are unequally distributed in society, so are the less visible words, skills and knowledge that give people advantages” (Bourdieu 1986) (p. 7).

What is invisibilized in this common-sense logic of capital is the construction of whiteness as cultural property. That is, the worth of what would otherwise be neutral practices comes to reside in their disembodiment and exclusivity. The value of whiteness is reinforced through an artificial demand, as articulated in this case through the institutional call for academic language. This deficit orientation parallels popular word gap discourses which promote racially minoritized children as languageless (Rosa 2016b) and thereby ineligible for personhood, since the exclusive academic register is not, as Scarecella proclaimed, something non-mainstream students can “just naturally pick up” (as cited in Zwiers 2013, p. 2). Perversely, while limiting conceptions of language to exclusively those of white possession solidifies language into an ever-ready resource for white students, these same raciolinguistic logics construe the presence of “English learners” and users of “AAVE” (Zwiers 2013) as constituting additional burdens on white students, school budgets and personnel. The language of the Lau v Nichols and Castañeda v Pickard (Martínez et al. 2021) cases, which preceded the commissioned A Nation at Risk report, both discuss the need for what we now know as bilingual education to remove “language barriers” of Asian and Latinx children respectively. While federal funding did follow these cases, it is important to note the lamentation within the Lau decision that “earlier generations overcame the language barrier by earnest parental endeavor or by the hard fact of being pushed out of the family or community nest and into the realities of broader experience” (Douglas 1973, p. 572). In locating a lack of effort in the homes and communities of these groups, A Nation at Risk took up the same discourse in depicting an already overwhelmed institution of schooling and warning that it cannot “provide solutions to personal, social, and political problems that the home and other institutions either will not or cannot resolve” (NCEE 1983, p. 1). Conversely, the barriers cited in the Ann Arbor and Oakland cases refer to “Black English” as “casual,” “informal,” (Smitherman 1998, p. 104) and “nonstandard,” (HRG. 105–20, 1997) reinforcing the diminished status of Black communities and their cultural practices. The discourse solidifying Black languaging as subhuman largely resulted from the backlash against the Oakland case, which ensured funding from the Bilingual Education Act would seldom reach Black schoolchildren (Sung and Allen-Handy 2019). Not only have the erasures of the Bilingual Education Act propagandized Native people as not having existed (Wynter 1992) or engaged in cultural or linguistic practices prior to white settler arrival, but the erasures in question have portrayed investment in Black communities as illegitimate, while further depicting language users of Black communities as expendable – as not worth the scant resources already expended (or wasted) on them. Since mothers and middle and upper-class families are framed as passing on an exclusive linguistic capital that non-mainstream students can only access through school, Zwiers’ suggestion that “the rich get richer” (p. 8) in terms of capitals, directly reflects the warning in A Nation at Risk that providing access to this limited linguistic capital creates “demands on our schools and colleges” (NCEE 1983, p. 1). causing an “educational cost as well as a financial one” (NCEE 1983, p. 1). Taken together, bilingual resources were framed as wasted on Black students who were entering schools both without language (linguistic capital) or the desire or familial encouragement (social and cultural capitals) to succeed.

Bourdieu’s conception of social capital highlights the restrictive nature of this ‘entity’-based understanding, and the misapplication thereof exposes the contradiction of any capital (linguistic or otherwise) as something that one might earn through individual effort or that one might help another accumulate as an expression of a teaching competency. Both Zwiers and Cummins encourage teachers to consider the environment it takes to produce a particular register of language, but in disembodying the practice of languaging from the students who enact them (Austin 2022a) they reify biological conceptions of who might benefit from these settings based on race alone. The NCEE (1983) similarly warns that access to civic participation should be based on “a shared education [and] common culture” (1983, p. 4) or else social actors risk “disenfranchisement” and restricted access to full participation in “our national life” (p. 4). The report further embeds a raciolinguistic ideology (Flores and Rosa 2015) in suggesting that “the progress of society” (NCEE 1983, p. 3) hinges upon Black and minoritized students’ “own efforts, competently guided” (NCEE 1983, p. 3) which can provide them more “quality and quantity” (NCEE 1983, p. 3) language (Zwiers 2013) – a logic analogous to the antiBlack suggestion that they “be taught how to be properly human and cleansed of [their] bad habits through education” (Flores 2013a, p. 266).

A Nation at Risk (1983) warns of impending national disunity through the changes enacted in education during the years following the Civil Rights Act. This “disunity” serves as an indirect gesture towards the standardization of language implicated in what it means to be academically successful through testing as a nationalizing technology. Falling short of these restrictive measures was framed as a loss of “intellectual capital” (NCEE 1983, p. 9) and gave way to calls for curricula to maintain a “central purpose” in accordance with said measures as opposed to “cafeteria style” (NCEE 1983, p. 13) curricula reflecting the diversity of classrooms. Contrary to the allusions from Zwiers, the policy report warns us not to “scapegoat” teachers who are already “beleaguered” (NCEE 1983, p. 7) due to the “shoddiness” of unnamed citizens exacerbating a supposed national “fear of losing a shared vision for America” (NCEE 1983, p. 13). Still, Zwiers (2013) also reinforces the conception of language learners as takers of limited resources and suggests that with linguistic capital, “[i]f a lot is already there then learning is much less work, with much less likelihood of failure” (p. 8). This linguistic and cultural devaluation proceeds from an ideology historically rooted in colonial domination in which subjugated knowledge is “rearranged,” “possessed and assimilated” (Mignolo 1992, p. 305) by the dominating class to reconstitute what counts as civilized. To determine what counts as language only to then restrict who has access to it not only dehumanizes racially minoritized students, it maintains the Bourdieuan notion of capital in its true essence – a resource to be wielded for social stratification, rather than within communal practice.

5.3 Culturelessness in (language) teacher preparation

Possessing language and culture within an antiBlack neoliberal context is paradigmatically a state of whiteness rendering the dichotomous opposing state of Blackness as abnormal and without culture or language. One cannot augment the quality or quantity of something assumed altogether absent, and the framing of teachers as having to consciously teach their languaging practices to those unable to inherit them from their families is one that points to a subhuman starting point for those who have been conceived as naturally dysselected (Wynter 2003). The mere presence of non-white, linguistically diverse students in U.S. public schools triggered a securitization (Khan 2014) reflex of the Reagan administration which called for more surveillance and management of suspicious bodies. According to the NCEE (1983), the threat of “common culture” (p. 4) being rejected and the proliferation of the nation’s sudden “confusion of vision” (p. 9) is a call to secure the borders of whiteness (Stoler 1995) that blur as a result of the enforcement of policies like title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which provided racially minoritized students access to education (Civil Rights Act 1964). According to Kubota et al. (2003), “foreign language study should enable students to critically understand their native culture and its underlying ideologies [and] about how sociopolitical issues of race, gender, class, domination, and power influence the organization of a particular culture” (p. 13). But language teacher preparation contradicts this suggestion by adhering to the logic of hierarchical cultural ‘capitals’ that simply cast Black students as lacking by virtue of the ranking of racialized norms articulated ahistorically and in opposition to white U.S. monoculturalism.

Social and other forms of capital are defined by Zwiers—as they are rather ubiquitously within the field of education – in terms of quantity and quality without mention of who is charged with making those determinations of value. What is useful for Black communities, for instance, would undoubtedly seem less so for others based on the ways in which they navigate an antiBlack world. Deciding on hierarchical notions of language through testing mechanisms does not negate the undeniable effectiveness of folks like Christian Smalls and his far-reaching linguistic and intellectual impact. Declaring that he is “inarticulate” and “not smart” does not reduce his influence, but it does obscure the histories that shaped his languaging and that of many Black communities. Alternatively, the various ways in which white mainstream English is euphemized, including “school-like conversations, school-aligned varieties of English, language used by those in power, teacher-like language, language expected in academic settings, language of mainstream teachers & curricula” and “English valued by school,” (Zwiers 2013, ch. 1) all demonstrate immense effort in unmarking academic English as a common sense (Wynter 2003) entity as opposed to a proxy for whiteness. According to the CCSS created in 2010 and adopted in 41 states in the nation, determinations about language in the form of English Language Arts and through its use in other academic disciplines, are meant to ensure students are prepared for college, career and life (Common Core State Standards 2021). Thus, standardized expectations of language across disciplines extends the implications of language teacher preparation to future civic engagement (Banks 2017) and citizenry of students (Ladson-Billings 1995) through the perceived use of particular linguistic conventions. While overtly pathologizing Black language users through speech and language therapy (Smitherman 1998) for not conforming to dominant language practices is seemingly less common than it was sixty years ago, the enduring logics embedded in teacher education through assessment and curricular technologies promote a similar result of redirecting resources away from Black students. Thus, the fundamental impact of linguistic and cultural capitals is a central concern for language education researchers and practitioners who are charged with discerning between linguistic innovation and error (Flores and Rosa 2019) despite the subjective and racialized nature of such determinations.