Michel Anne-Frederic DeGraff
Black Lives Will Not Matter Until our Languages also Matter: The Politics of Linguistics and Education In Post-Colonies
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Michel Anne-Frederic DeGraff
Black Lives Will Not Matter Until our Languages also Matter: The Politics of Linguistics and Education In Post-Colonies
I would love to share and discuss with ABRALIN viewers some key aspects of my theoretical and applied agenda for linguistics and education in Haiti (http://linguistics.mit.edu/linguistic…). I take my native Haiti as a poster case of post-colonies where linguistic discrimination (https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/open…) keeps extracting a heavy human cost, mostly through mis-education (http://lingphil.scripts.mit.edu/paper…). My own agenda promotes a social vision where linguistics and education can contribute to equal opportunity and sustainable development. My agenda also aims at a model for other communities in the Global South that are struggling for their human rights and for social justice. For the past 10 years, the MIT-Haiti Initiative (http://mit-ayiti.net/) has been exploring and advancing the strategic use of digital tools in Kreyòl (http://haiti.mit.edu/) to improve Haitian students’ access to quality education (http://lingphil.scripts.mit.edu/paper…) across social classes and linguistic barriers. The ultimate goal is to help strengthen the foundations of Haiti’s linguistic and cultural identity, promote respect for the human rights of all Haitians, and push the country toward political and economic sovereignty. In this presentation I will consider two important implications of the MIT-Haiti Initiative for linguistics, especially Creole studies, and for education, especially in Haiti where most of the population speaks Kreyòl only. Firstly, Kreyòl is comparable to so called “international” languages, such as English, French and Spanish, in terms of its development, structures and expressive capacity (http://linguistics.mit.edu/wp-content…). Indeed, the success of the MIT-Haiti Initiative (https://www.facebook.com/michel.degra…) to date doubles as proof of concept that Kreyòl is a perfectly normal language with unlimited capacity to express any level of complex thought—thanks to the same cognitive mechanisms available to other languages. Secondly, Kreyòl is an essential tool (https://www.facebook.com/michel.degra…) for the education, socio-economic progress and human rights of Haitians, especially those who have long been impoverished through exclusion and injustice. These processes of impoverishment (http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people…), which started four centuries ago when Haiti was a French colony (then the “richest” colony in the Americas), have been relentless throughout Haiti’s history. Language and education are two main vectors for the entrenchment of these processes of exclusion and impoverishment. Time- and interest-permitting, I will relate the history of the MIT-Haiti Initiative to the intellectual history of Creole studies (https://www.facebook.com/michel.degra… the lens of critical race theory. Indeed, to fully appreciate the rationale and objectives of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, it helps to highlight the links between, on the one hand, certain theoretical claims about Creole languages and, on the other hand, the making and transmission of hierarchies of power with racialized correlates. From that perspective, the MIT-Haiti Initiative is part of an ongoing *GLOBAL* struggle (https://www.facebook.com/mithaiti/pos…) around the use of language and education for human rights and social justice. Yes, Black Lives will not matter until our languages matter as well.