Jonathan Rosa on Frantz Fanon

“on the one hand, the contemporary societal positioning of US Latinxs demonstrates the familiar always already overdetermined nature of race-perhaps most strikingly articulated by Fanon (1967) as "the fact of Blackness," the disorienting ontological experience of existing as a racialized Other in advance of one's being. On the other hand, Latinxs are positioned in relation to a distinctive social tense of always not yet, or perhaps, never quite yet. If you would just learn English; no, unaccented English; no, the right of English. If you would just enter the country the right way; no, get in verse a pathway to citizenship; no, act like a good citizen. This is a racialized social sense of the always already and never quite yet.”

“A theorization of what it means to look like a language and sound like a race can be found in the opening chapter of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, titled "The Negro and Language": “The problem that we confront in this chapter is this: The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately Whiter-that is, he will come closer to being a real human being-in direct ratio to his mastery of the French Language.... What we are getting at becomes plain: Mastery of language affords remarkable power.... The Black man who has lived in France for a length of time returns radically changed. To express it in genetic terms, his phenotype undergoes a definitive, an absolute mutation.” (1967:18-19) Fanon's evocative description of interactions in the French Caribbean context speaks to the powerful ways that categories of language and race become iconic of one another, such that linguistic practices can shape one's racial ontology.”

“It is crucial to build from Fanon's account to rethink the construction and navigation of boundaries associated with categories of language and identity. The status of French in particular Caribbean contexts in the previous Fanonian example is not entirely unlike English language hegemony in the United States, which relies heavily on schools as flagship institutions for language standardization. This positions standardized English both as an institutional norm and aspiration. While school actors used different varieties of Spanish and English, standardized English was understood as the normative language variety for official business. Most school-wide announcements were made in English, and all formal staff meetings were conducted in English. Meanwhile, the majority of school employees perceived as Spanish-dominant occupied subordinate hierarchical positions as security guards, custodians, and lunchroom workers. This reflects the structural stigmatization of the Spanish language.”