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When thinking about a role for linguists in promoting social justice, it is tempting to focus our attention solely on what we can contribute to the world “out there.” Indeed, in light of the many struggles for justice and liberation throughout the world, it is easy to see the urgency in wanting linguistics to contribute to social transformation. Equally important, however, is to recognize that the study of language has been shaped by the world and that oppression doesn't simply exist “out there” but also in research and practice in higher education. Both of us have been actively engaged in a conversation about these oppressive dynamics for the better part of a decade that has carried Anne across three institutions and her associate professor years into being a full professor and across Nelson's assistant professor years into being an associate professor. We have presented together at the American Education Research Association Conference and prepared work geared to an education audience. We have presented together at the Linguistic Society of America's Annual Meeting and prepared materials for the 2019 LSA Statement on Race. Throughout those experiences and conversations, we have constantly come back to the reality that the agendas of linguistics and applied linguistics were set by white and mostly male scholars long before we were professors, yet their ramifications impact us and disproportionately impact the communities that we belong to and do research with.
One effect of the Western European, colonial white male agenda of linguistics has been gatekeeping what counts as linguistics. This gatekeeping is fueled by a need to serve white male-dominated industrial interests in the study of language and the white supremacy of the State (Hutton, 2019). As generative linguistics became the dominant paradigm in linguistics and questions about language below the level of the sentence became the focus in a rush to frame linguistics as a science, questions of power and oppression were pushed out and to the side of linguistics departments under the guise of wanting to create an objective science of language. The major assumption of this theoretical move has been that language has been described as a disembodied set of linguistic features—an assumption that can only be made by white male scholars whose bodies have been framed...
