Diversity of Raciolinguistic Experiences in the Writing Classroom: An Argument for a Transnational Black Language Pedagogy

Esther Milu is an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida. Her scholarship centers on multilingual pedagogies, transnational writing, African immigrants’ language literacies, hip-hop rhetorics and decolonial rhetorics. Previous work has appeared in Research in the Teaching of English, International Multilingual Research Journal, and several edited collections. A couple of years ago, I worked in the writing center with a student on a paper about her identity development. She received high marks for content but lost points for writing. As I read her paper, two things struck me: First, she had grown up in Boston, but her parents were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At home, she spoke Lingala, which she hid from her friends after she was mocked. Second, many of her sentences were indecipherable. She wrote, for example, “I didn’t have an indistinguishable surface hair from different females in my class and they wouldn’t converse with me or simply give me disposition since I didn’t seem as though them.” (Savini)