Editors' Preface to the Second Edition

In 1998, Jane H. Hill offered for the first time her “Language and Race” seminar. Inspired by critical race theory and Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, Hill had begun investigating the linguistic landscape of “mock” Spanish in the United States and realized that her own and her Spanish‐speaking interlocutors' insights intersected with this groundbreaking theory. Her seminar challenged her students (including Meek) to examine how linguistic differences appeared in “White” public spaces, such as advertisements, televised (streamed) programs, Hollywood films, Hallmark cards, and newspaper editorials. It was a call to bring a linguistic anthropological lens to everyday language and dislodge the covert racism(s) lurking in (seemingly) benign, ordinary turns of phrase. Her scholarship on “mock” Spanish paved the way for the study of linguistic racism(s) (see also Kroskrity 2011, 2021), and her book remains foundational, a cornerstone of contemporary language and race research (such as Alim et al. 2020; Alim et al. 2016; Dick and Wirtz 2011; Smalls et al. 2021).

In the first edition of The Everyday Language of White Racism, Hill provides an incisive analysis of everyday language to reveal the underlying racist stereotypes that continue to circulate in White American culture and sustain structures of White Supremacy. This singular book provides a detailed background on theories of race and racism, reveals how racializing discourse – talk and text that produces and reproduces ideas about races and assigns people to them – facilitates a victim‐blaming logic, and integrates a broad, interdisciplinary range of literature from sociology, social psychology, justice studies, critical legal studies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines that have studied racism. She deftly synthesizes this range into a linguistic anthropological approach that she uses to analyze language in media. Her unique approach provides a method for unpacking the (“White Supremacist”) racializing and racist logics embedded in language as well as compellingly motivating the need to do so. This book continues to be essential reading for scholars and students of race, language, and media studies.

This new edition supplements Hill's classic yet still very relevant 2008 text with annotations, discussion questions, and essays by some of today's leading scholars in the language of racism. The editors' annotations clarify theoretical concepts presented in the text for undergraduate readers and readers outside of the discipline of linguistics. The annotations also connect concepts presented by Hill to literature on racism published since 2008 as well as relevant events. The essays by John Baugh, Elaine Chun, Adam Hodges, and Norma Mendoza‐Denton further bring Hill's text up‐to‐date with today's critical discussions on language and racism in the United States. These updates offer readers an opportunity for deeper engagement with critical racial issues such as racial profiling, police violence, the Black Lives Matter movement, White nationalism, White fragility, and the various forms of institutional racism that continue to limit and endanger the lives of people of color as well as other minoritized groups in the United States. Discussion questions at the end of each chapter provide guidance for analytical conversations in classrooms.

One goal of these updates is to support readers' continued engagement with this text, which we have been using in our own classes addressing language and social inequality, inviting further classroom discussion and productive debate. As the first edition of Hill's text continues to be used for undergraduate and graduate courses across various disciplines and the need to discuss systemic racism in the United States has become more pressing than ever, the time is ripe for this new edition of the text that helps to clarify and bring Hill's contributions to the study of racism into conversation with the most current literature on American racism. For example, Hill's discussion of the White American preoccupation with “White virtue” predates Robin D'Angelo's work on “white fragility” (2018), but readers should see connections between DiAngelo's and Hill's observations about White American sensitivities and denials regarding racism. At the same time, many readers may be taken aback by Hill's use of certain racial labels or other terminology that would be considered outmoded or even disrespectful in today's discourses about racism and racial identities. During Hill's career and at the time of the first edition's publication, the term “Indian” was commonly used by scholars such as Hill working with Indigenous peoples of the Southwest. We maintain Hill's use of “Indian” in her original writing, but the editors and essay contributors use the terms Indigenous, Native, or First Nations, as these are now considered more appropriate terms of reference. Hill also does not make use of the acronym BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) which appears to have emerged in social media discourse around 2013 (Garcia 2020). While opinions about BIPOC as a representative term differ among people of color, the editors use BIPOC in some annotations and discussion questions for this second edition as it is a broadly used and recognized term for people of color which highlights the distinct experiences of Black and Indigenous peoples under racism. In addition, as stated in her preface to the first edition included in this new edition, Hill believed it important to write out racial slurs under examination in academic studies, so many racial epithets appear fully spelled out in this work. Where appropriate, the editors also address histories and concerns about certain terminology through our annotations.

Each new essay engages with a chapter. Author Norma Mendoza‐Denton draws on televised media and social media in her essay, exploring the ways in which public personalities' code‐switching “gaffes” are forms of White racism. Following Hill's work, this analysis complicates slurs, slips, gaffes, and perception of speaker intentionality, raising up issues of mockery, appropriation, and “racial plagiarism” in relation to the enregisterment of a racialized persona (and its circulation). Elaine Chun's essay interrogates the social work of unmasking the many “mock” linguistic varieties that grew out of Jane Hill's work, rendering them overt, and concludes by discussing the ideologies that underlay Jane's analyses of “mock” Spanish. John Baugh analyzes appropriation of linguistic constructs and their association with racialization, and situations of bigotry and controversies informed by linguistics in legal contexts. Adam Hodges' essay offers an investigation of slurs, place names, and current renaming practices as part of anti‐racist discourse in circulation now, focusing primarily on Indigenous place names and political/governmental uptake. These essays advance the study of discourse and racism within the context of Jane Hill's groundbreaking work.

While there are many generative themes throughout this book and the new essays, we, the editors, would like to draw attention to three developments: the expansion of social media, the racialization of cultural practices (as appropriation), and the discursive shift to White Supremacy (M. Beliso‐De Jesús and Pierre 2020). When Hill first published her book, it launched her into the public's eye. From news broadcasts to televised interviews, Hill's scholarship became controversial, denigrated by those who felt personally attacked, celebrated by others who realized the groundwork the book laid for dismantling covert forms of racism, and everything in between. However, these instantiations/debates remained limited to these public media forums – television, radio, and newspapers – rather than taking on a life of their own on social media. That is, Jane didn't have to deal with the inflammatory potential of the internet. That said, social media, and the internet more generally, provide opportunities to use and expand Jane's approach to interrogate covert, and not‐so‐covert, forms of linguistic racism (see Meek 2013, Mendoza‐Denton this volume, for examples). During a recent collaborative talk with one of Christina Leza's classes at Colorado College, the students emphasized the need for this new edition to reflect the changes in social media and technology that have resulted in the constant production of and exposure to content since Hill's first edition. They and other student readers of Hill's book view social media as a primary site where people engage with issues of race and racism, encountering many instances of cultural appropriation in the video clips, memes, and comments that come across their media feeds on a daily basis, primarily in video and images on (as of the time of publication) TikTok, Instagram, and X/formerly Twitter, and to a lesser degree on Facebook. It is clear that social media is an important site for investigating White racism, racialization, and cultural appropriation of BIPOC language and culture ways (i.e. food, art, fashion). For example, a culinary recipe taken from a BIPOC source and shared by a White person is identified as an act of appropriation (See Norma Mendoza‐Denton's essay for one example of this). Social media users experience...