Meaning, Modernity, and Ideology in Anti-Racist Glossaries

In this talk, I discuss the genre of the Anti-Racist Glossary, a list of lexical entries that guide language users on how to refer to racial groups. The genre has been presented as resolving referential and indexical ambiguities when professionals write and talk about race, and it has circulated in publicly oriented professional spaces in the United States since as early as 1960, when theAssociated Press Stylebook proscribed the use of the word colored. It continues today in varied forms, including the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association and inclusive language guides.

I analyze how the metalanguage found within lexical entries (e.g., Asiatic, Asian, Oriental, Black, African American) of the two glossaries mentioned above have oriented to two language ideologies over the past fifty years. The first is an underlying set of ideas about relation between the sociolinguistic meanings of “professionalism,” “anti-racism,” and “modernity”; these meanings may not be inherently related but have become increasingly contextualized as such in U.S. public space (cf. Eckert 2008, Moore & Podesva 2009). The second kind of language ideology is specifically a “semiotic ideology” (Keane 2018), or a taken-for-granted set of ideas about how linguistic signs mean what they do. I argue that while the glossaries decontextualize words in ways that presuppose that linguistic forms “contain” (im)moral content, they also ground the indexical meaning of language in “persons,” both the specific participants of the discourse event (speaker/writer, audience, referent) and the models of personhood that these participants become linked to (e.g., professionals, racists, laggards). Considering these two ideologies, I close with a brief discussion of what glossaries may, and may not, offer as anti-racist strategies.