Although race discourse has become increasingly encouraged to address educational inequities, racialized speakers are often expected to accommodate white listening subjects in institutional settings. Building upon multidisciplinary scholarship of race and language, I develop place-based raciolinguistics as an explanatory theory and linguistic ethnographic lens through which to analyze how racialized speakers discursively transform locally specific meanings of race and racism while being marked by prevailing ideologies, practices, and structures embedded in whiteness and other systems of power. I apply this framework by investigating the race discourse of justice-oriented K-12 teachers in Los Angeles, California.

Through my analysis, I challenge reductive and essentialized views of social transformation by highlighting the multidimensional conditions of orchestrating critical race talk toward institutional change. Acknowledging the institutional vulnerability and harm that racialized speakers experience, I argue that efforts to sustain critical race action must include refusal of cultural practices that normalize race-evasive listening.

The research question that guided my study was: How do teachers of Color produce critical race talk-in-interaction to advance the educational and humane interests of racially marginalized groups? Applying my place-based raciolinguistic framework, I drew on a two-year longitudinal research project that examined the daily anti-racist practices of six total teachers of Color working in K-12 schooling contexts that served predominantly student of Color populations.