Language 4R and Mix-Placed Roots of Selfhood: Conclusion

One day, during my language justice seminar, a guest speaker came to talk about his work in advocacy for language diversity preservation around the world. Before his presentation officially started, he asked the class an icebreaker question: What are your ancestral languages? As we went around the room to respond, most of my peers not only knew what those languages were, but many of them were also able to speak one of their ancestral languages. This information did not necessarily come as a shock to me since we all shared what languages we knew at the very beginning of the semester. Yet, hearing everyone else respond with such certainty and confidence was still unsettling. When it was my turn, all I did was shrug and explain that the answer to the question was complicated, to say the least, since I am African American. The guest speaker engaged with me in the same affirming way as he did with the rest of my peers. He then went on to give an extremely fascinating presentation. I wanted to respectfully give him my undivided attention, but my thoughts still lingered on the icebreaker. I could not help but feel unsettled, unmoored, and unmistakably different from my peers. I lacked a self-knowledge that they all had. I felt unequivocally out of place.


Everyone grapples with questions of belonging at some point in life. But for me and perhaps other African Americans, these questions are like concrete. They pave manicured and gentrified roads. They make up the walls of overcrowded prisons. They symbolize progress while simultaneously shrouding it with doubt. And to make matters worse, or at least more complex, I struggle to call the very language I use to answer these questions my own, adding yet another layer of uncertainty. I still do not know if African Americans have a true mother tongue. The issue remains unresolved. But I do know that African Americans have roots in both African and American soils and that there is a remnant estrangement from both by distance and pain respectively. It feels wrong to exclusively claim either Africa or America as the African American cultural homeland. The history has become too tangled for that. Yet, I hope language 4R helps in providing a means to consider how different perceptions of African American communication modes can foster continuity throughout elements of the community’s experience. Language reparation seeks to reconcile the worlds of institutional access in the classrooms and cultural acceptance at home. Language reappropriation asserts African Americans’ diasporic identity. Language reclamation demonstrates an explicit intentionality in the maintenance of African roots in American soils. And finally, language restoration poses how genetic connection can incentivize the growth, development, and fortification of African language communities. In turn, new holistic trans-Atlantic relationships can flourish with shared terms and resources. Language 4R is just a small contribution to what I look forward to being an ever-evolving discourse on the links between language and African American identity.


I want to be a rose that grows from concrete. That is how I want to see myself and my community, unapologetically reaching towards the sun. But sometimes, that concrete blocks our ability to evaluate the health and strength of our roots. May we continue to wrestle with how we can reunite language to selfhood in new ways as we grow and break the concrete apart.