16 - “Perfect English” and White Supremacy

Summary

Trump’s entire presidential campaign had anti-immigrant and anti-Latinx sentiment at its core, but in August of 2018, at an event honoring the border patrol, Trump praised Latinx Border Patrol agent Adrian Anzaldúa for his role in the arrest of two US citizens who were transporting immigrants across the US Mexico. In a seeming non sequitur, Trump also remarked that Anzaldúa “speaks perfect English.” This back-handed tribute invokes the patronizing assumption that Latinx individuals are not expected by to speak English well; the guise of flattery, then, reinforces the ideological hostility toward people of color Trump has promulgated. This chapter argues the above episode is emblematic of a process termed “raciolinguistic exceptionalism,” a rhetorical strategy that exceptionalizes one individual while racializing and demonizing an entire group. The authors show how this specific incident highlights the White supremacist, colonial relations through which ideologies of language and race are formed, embedded, and maintained. They also argue that raciolinguistic exceptionalism is a bipartisan process that sometimes easily flies under the radar because the connections it relies on are not obviously racist to hegemonic White speakers, who constantly have to be reminded not to infantilize people of color for speaking “such good English.”