“Will this hell never end?”: Substantiating and Resisting Race-Language Policies in a Multilingual High School by Malsbary (2014)

Malsbary, C. (2014). “Will this hell never end?”: Substantiating and resisting race-language policies in a multilingual high school. Anthropology Education Quarterly, 45, 373-390. doi:10.1111/aeq.12076

Building on Critical Race Theory (CRT; p. 374), Malsbary revealed white supremacy and white racial consciousness is destroying academic participation and success of racial and ethnic students (pp. 381-383) in an English Second Language (ESL) program from a top performing high school in California.

The main contentions of the study are (a) exposing discriminating policies in the educational system and (b) fostering civil rights action from youth’s policy-making practices. She argued that in the present context, educational success of young people in the school’s ESL program is defined by their proficiency of English (p. 376) to the extent that this system demands “singular identities at personal cost” (p. 377). Malsbury even indicates that “motivation” reasons of dropping-out or even failing in the program could not be the singular cause (p. 382) even though this is the go-to reason of many teachers under the study. Judgment of language use, mispronunciation, and overall hostility (p. 380) is borne in such system of white racial consciousness (p. 381). Teachers (pp. 378-379), generational racial students (pp. 381-382) in the classroom, and the curriculum (p. 383) can be held accountable for this, as well. The “other” students, i.e. the “emergent bilinguals” (p. 386), tried to resist assimilation but proved to have less success (pp. 383-384) and fewer initiated to adapt individual classroom bi-/multilingual policies, which studies have shown to yield higher academic performance (p. 385).

This study carefully uncovers the discrepancies in the educational system. Also, this research is conceptually challenging the educational status quo and not the governing race. (This should be accentuated since the title can be bias to hate). As for her methodology, her decision to have the high school ESL students as subjects is empirically sound and reasonable (see Mu, 2015). Nevertheless, she could have used Discourse Analysis to account for the near-genuine attitude of the participants towards the subject. I recognize, however, that this would expand the research in its entirety.