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

Abstract Black youth as ‘struggling students’ is a persistent narrative in the contemporary U.S. psyche, both preceded by and markedly displayed through the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, which reflected coded language encouraging a return to the pre-Civil Rights United States. This framing positioned Black students as culprits for the ills of U.S. schooling – a continuation of a history of educational policy that discursively enforces the need to defend society against ‘subhuman’ populations. Placing the 1983 policy report in conversation with Zwiers’ Building Academic Language: Meeting Common Core Standards Across Disciplines (2013) via raciolinguistic genealogy, I problematize the ways in which texts like these reinforce discourses of Black cultures and languages as subhuman, deviant threats to U.S. society.