This chapter argues that disciplining of bilingual education as a scholarly field served to divorce discussions of bilingual education from broader political and economic struggles in favor of the seemingly objective pursuit of the benefits of bilingual education. This disciplining of bilingual education was part of a larger discursive shift that reframed discussions of racial inequality from a focus on unequal access and the need for structural change to a focus on the deficiencies of racialized communities and the need for modifying these deficiencies. The chapter ends with a call for bilingual education scholars to situate issues of language inequality within the broader white supremacist and capitalist relations of power. This will offer bilingual education scholars tools for rejecting deficit perspectives of language-minoritized children and pointing to the broader racial stratification that makes these deficit perspectives possible to begin with.

Since their widespread adoption in the nineteenth century, censuses have played both bureaucratic and ideological roles, as the classification of the population according to social and cultural characteristics facilitated the development of the administrative infrastructure required by emergent nation-states and the definition of national and group identity categories officialized particular ways of understanding difference. This chapter critically analyzes the questions about language asked by Statistics Canada and the US Census Bureau. I examine the relationship of language data to various policies in the two countries, as well as the ways that those policies, and specific ways of asking about language, reflect and reproduce particular ideologies of language. In addition to revealing differing perspectives on individual and societal multilingualism, this analysis demonstrates that census language statistics do not simply serve as "facts" undergirding policy, but instead produce particular representations of linguistic diversity and, thus, constitute official discourses on multilingualism.