This paper tells three stories to consider the necessity, difficulties and vulnerabilities in building solidarity in/through/for language-policy activism.
Story 1: By 1982, a racist backlash against the Heritage Language Program had developed in Toronto schools. This backlash centred on an initiative to integrate heritage-language programs into the school day. At public meetings to discuss this initiative, the media described "explosive confrontations" over a "language battle ready to explode" (Spears, 1982, p. A6), with "voices raised in anger against foreign tongues" (T. Star, 1982, p. G6). Harish Shah, a parent of three, described hecklers at one meeting: "They told me next time they'll bring white sheets" (Maychak, 1982, p. A6). In this first story, I focus on how parents from Black, South Asian, Italian, Portuguese and Francophone communities forged a temporary alliance to combat this backlash and expand racially and linguistically just programs in Toronto schools.
Story 2: The story focuses on the conditions that undermined the very solidarity described earlier, specifically how anti-Blackness circulated in advocacy among advocates for heritage-language education. Italian and Portuguese advocates regularly failed to understand the arguments made by Black parents for an expanded conceptualization of heritage languages that would also include Black language practices. Here, I connect this story to my experience of telling it, specifically being challenged as a queer white person whether it is appropriate for me to explore this history at all. I read these challenges not as personalistic, but rather as the consequence of the past failures this story is about. White advocates for heritage-language education excluded the insights and demands of Black advocates in the past. Why would we not be expected to do so again?
Story 3: The third story considers the (in)commensurability of heritage and Indigenous languages. Today, it is taken for granted in Canada that these two categories refer to different language communities. However, the history of the HLP allows for different ways of thinking about this assumption and what solidarity might look like. Whether or not Indigenous communities considered their languages as "heritage languages" is moot: they organized themselves to benefit from this new provincial policy. In fact, by 1983 the province implemented its first policy in support of "Native Languages." What can we learn from this synergy across language communities while understanding and respecting the distinctions between them?
Literature
Bale, J. (2016). In defence of language rights: Re-thinking the rights-orientation from a political economy perspective. Bilingual Research Journal, 39, 231–237.
Flores, N., & Chaparro, S. (2018). What counts as language education policy? Developing a materialist anti-racist approach to language activism. Language Policy, 17, 365–384.
Gale, T. (2001). Critical policy sociology: Historiography, archaeology, and genealogy as methods of policy analysis. Journal of Education Policy, 16, 379–93.
Garland, D. (2014). What is a "history of the present"? On Foucault's genealogies and their critical preconditions. Punishment & Society, 16, 365–84.
Haque, E. (2012). Multiculturalism within a bilingual framework: Language, race, and belonging in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
(for LPReN 3)
