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April 10, 2026
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"bilingual authors have more tools, perhaps than monolingual authors. Or perhaps not, because monolingual authors maybe have different dialects, right? But, but that we all, as authors should be strategically deploying all of our communicative repertoires, um, in order to create our voice as authors. which is very different than saying, âMake everyone talk like a white person,â right?"
"As an African American clinical psychologist and researcher, it has become evident that we have not been meaningfully included as research participants or researchers in scientific studies, and our voices have not been part of the conversation as these medicines move into mainstream mental health care."
"I think one of the things that could be improved, in school, is that maybe some of those tasks could be less kind of decontextualized vocabulary lists, and more kind of actual authentic interactions."
"I think what language socialization research helps us, then, to think about is, if weâre starting from the perspective that all children are socialized into complex language practices, and there, there isnât an inherent hierarchy in terms of the complexity, then how do we incorporate the language practices of all children into the classroom? How do we stop framing certain language practices as deficient and in need of remediation? and I think that thatâs a more productive beginning of a conversation, and I think there are lots of different ways you can answer that, right?"
"schools should be socializing students to new language practices; the question is how they should be doing that, right? And, and from my perspective, the way they should be doing that is building on the knowledge that the children already have. Now, anyone whoâs taken an education course, ever, knows that the first basic thing that you learn in pedagogy 101 is, if you want students to learn new content, you have to connect it to their prior knowledge, right? Thatâs the first thing you learn. So, why do we think language is any different? Um, if you want students to learn new language practices, you have to connect it to language practices theyâre already familiar with, right? And once you do that, theyâre much more able to then retain it, remember it, feel like itâs part of who they are, and not feel like itâs this thing thatâs completely removed from who they are as people and who they understand themselves to be."
"Morales unveils what was until now, an unaccounted counter- narrative of the Young Lords. Painstakingly, what is historically a common pattern within these movements reveals itself: there is a tendency for women members to be pressured into acquiescing to a male leadership that claims that discussion of any issues related to women's subordination must always be subsumed to the ostensibly "wider" or "more important" class-based liberation struggles of "oppressed peoples.""
"I think that all of the money going into it might give you some indication for why people were so defensive about a response that called it into question, because there is a lot of money thatâs going into it. I mean, remedial compensatory education, which has been funded by government and nongovernment officials since at least the â60s, um, that are designed to fix the so-called cultural and linguistic deficits of racialized communities, have always been, um, a very lucrative industry. Um, thereâs always been tons of money going into it. I mean, I donât even know how much money â probably billions of dollars, at this point, honestly. And I always wonder, like, what would the world look like if we actually, like, invested that money in revitalizing communities, and, like ending poverty, and, like, ensuring that children had access to quality healthcare."
"I actually am one whoâs not particular interested in what oneâs intentions are. Um, and so, itâs, like, Iâm sure they had good intentions, I mean, I donât think people do research with â or, or at least social science research, without wanting to make a difference and help. But it doesnât really matter, in the grand scheme of things-if youâre still producing racism. And, and I think that, even terms like âcovert racism,â oftentimes, I find problematic, because who are they covert to? Um, like, oftentimes, the victim of it. itâs only covert to the one who isnât aware that theyâre being racist, right? so, I think that for me itâs, like, less important what their intentions are, and more about, I think that the framework that theyâre using is fundamentally flaws, and has led to interventions that are quite damaging. Um, and I know that that sounds maybe extreme, in some ways, but I do think that interventions that are coming from a racist deficit perspective are damaging to children."
"I think our society finds fixing racialized communities as a seductive narrative. Because it really leaves the rest of the society off the hook, right? So, we donât have to reflect on the root causes of racial inequalities, because we can just say, âOh, itâs their fault, because theyâre not using â theyâre not asking their children questions.â I donât know how anyone who, who has any experience working in neighborhoods, um, that have experienced multiple generations of racialized poverty, um, could possibly think that changing the way that you ask questions to your child, or increasing the number of words [laughter] that you give them, is really going to be whatâs the make-it or break-it for whether that child is gonna thrive or not, right?"
"All of these structural issues that are much more salient in the lives of these childrens and these, and these family, right? Um, but in education circles, we tend to think that none of that has anything to do with, like, what we should be talking about, right? We should just be talking about fixing the kids. Um, and I think thatâs, that, one, itâs misguided, because of all of these other challenges that I, I think are much more salient. But, two, it then socializes teachers to come from the perspective that the kids are broken and need to be fixed, right? And that is not a productive perspective to begin with, especially when we look at the demographics of teachers versus students, when thereâs already this divide between them, right, the last thing that we wanna do is increase that by teach, telling teachers that their job is to be like these people in that website that you were talking about these benevolent white people who are trying to fix racialized communities."
"schools may like people to memorize vocabulary lists, but thatâs a different argument, right? If, if what youâre saying is that these are the types of decontextualized language practices that theyâre expected to be successful with in school, then thatâs a different conversation. Because then I would argue, well, why are we using these decontextualized language practices in school, when we know that in the real-world thatâs not how people actually use language. Maybe the problem isnât that these particular students havenât mastered a particular list of decontextualized vocabulary words. But rather, the fact that schools have decontextualized language from the practices in which theyâre engaged in. Um, and I think that may be part of, â that would be a more interesting conversation, for me, than to look at these decontextualized vocabulary words."
"anthropology has shown us, for decades, that regardless of how many words people may or may not be hearing, that theyâre being socialized into complex practices."
"that reminds me of the work of Lisa Delpit, right, who, um, kind of looked at the cultural differences in parental communication, and found, in her work with African American parents, that they were more directive, um, than in white middle-class families. And then, what happens when those children get to school is that, the teachers who have been socialized â because most of the teachers are white women, by demographics â theyâve been socialized into this more passive way of making requests, where theyâll say, âDonât you think you should be doing this?â The child, the child may not actually understand that that actually was a directive, right? Because it was a directive-the teacher was making a request, and the child didnât necessarily understand it was a request, and maybe actually thought that they had a choice when you said, âDonât you think you should â â Which gets, again, to the importance of understanding cultural difference, and not assuming that one is more quality than the other. I mean, Lisa Delpit makes it very clear, in her work, that itâs not that black parents care less about their children. They love their children, they are â they have a particular history, um, where maybe there are needs to be more directive. Because if not, um, their child isnât gonna be socialized to deal with an antiblack world, that expects people to â expects black people, in particular, to adhere to directives, right?"
"thereâs no objective basis for determining that being nondirective is more quality, right? That's not an objective statement. Thatâs coming from a particular ideological position. So, if you can own that position, if you can say, âYes, I think that all racialized community should behave just like white people,â I would disagree with you, but at least I would say, âWell, youâre being honest with what your perspective is, and youâre not hiding it behind âthis veil of objectivity.â"
"you can trace these discourses, theyâre consistent throughout history, of putting the onus on racialized communities to undo their own oppression by modifying their behaviors, rather than undoing the structures that actually are the primary challenges that they confront."
"language is not just a series of decontextualized vocabulary words. And more isnât always necessarily better."
"complex from whose perspective, right? Um, richer from whose perspective? Like, these arenât objective designations."
"There are lots of social practices that we engage in, where being concise and using fewer words is actually seen as better than using more words, right?"
"it is part of a much longer history where the language practices of racialized communities, of low-income communities, have always been framed through a deficit lens. Now, if we even go back to the early years of European colonialism, we can see raciolinguistic ideologies being used to dehumanize indigenous communities. Where people would describe the language practices of indigenous peoples as, um, almost animalistic, as a form of dehumanization. Now, nowadays, people wouldnât say things like, âPeople are speaking like animals,â or at least most people wouldnât say that. Um, but the underlying logic of thereâs something somehow deficient about the language practices of racialized communities has remained consistent since the early days of European colonialism. And so, itâs not surprising that the 30 million word gap is so seductive, because it reinforces all of these ideologies that people have been socialized into accepting, for multiple generations."
"the idea that more is inherently better isnât universal and isnât necessarily true. But of course, we actually use language to engage in social practices with other people. So weâre not just listing vocabulary words [laughs] when weâre talking to other people. Weâre engaging in dynamics that weâve been socialized into, that weâve gradually become familiar with as we become more socialized into those practices. Um, and so, to decontextualize language in that way, I think, really shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what the function of language is, which is to communicate, which is to engage in practice. Itâs not to memorize vocabulary lists."
"what Hart and Risley and many people who propose the word gap do is that, they take practices that have typically been associated with middle-class, upper-middle-class affluent white populations, and, surprise, surprise, they decide that those are quality. Um, which, of course, is not an objective statement, um, and, one could argue, is actually a racist statement, to claim that a particular cultural background is higher-quality than the other."
"Iâm not suggesting that white middle-class and upper-class people donât have a rich cultural practices that they engage in. The issue is that all communities have rich cultural and linguistic practices that they engage in, and thatâs something that the word gap discourse completely ignores. It completely ignores decades of anthropological research that documents the rich cultural and linguistic practices of all communities, and supposes that the practices of one is somehow objectively more quality than others."
"This whole idea of a bilingual brain is still, from my opinion, coming from a monolingual perspective in the sense that most of the world is bi- or multilingual. Why are we exceptionalizing the, quote, âbilingualâ brain instead of the quote, âmonolingualâ brain to begin with? Why arenât we saying, âWhat are the unique cognitive traits of monolingual people who are the minority of the population?â Maybe a bilingual brain is just a brain and itâs the monolingual brain thatâs actually this weird thing that we need to study. Of course, I donât actually believe that, but I feel like some of the discourse exceptionalizing bilingualism, when we reverse it and really think about, well, if we describe monolingualism in that way, that would be really strange. Yet, âbilingualâ describes more of the worldâs population than âmonolingual.â What exactly are we doing there?"
"I always say â I own my ideological position. I own where Iâm coming from, and I own my locus of annunciation. I just push other scholars to do the same thing. If youâre using discourses that come from the specter of semilingualism, then just own that ideological position and say what youâre essentially saying is that everyone should speak like a normative white person. Thatâs not progressive and thatâs not liberal, so donât pretend that youâre progressive or liberal if youâre actually promoting an agenda that supports white supremacy. At least donât be disingenuous and try to proport that what youâre saying is some type of objective representation rather than an ideological one."
"I think, empirically, we have the data that shows that all communities have complex, rich language practices that they engage in, but people donât believe it because they donât wanna believe it because they have deep investment in these ideas that certain communities have more rich language practices than other communities. At that point, you canât disprove white supremacy. If people are invested in white supremacy, then theyâre gonna be invested in white supremacy."
"Mayor Pete (Buttigieg), people are like, âWow! He speaks like a gazillion languages. Isnât he so smart?â And Iâm like, âWell, actually, you could go to many places in the world where people speak those gazillion languages, right, and theyâre not positioned as smart in the same way."
"we canât describe language outside of an ideological perspective on what language is, right? And I always try, in my work, to be very explicit in terms of how Iâm thinking about language. And in particular, how Iâm thinking about language and race, and how they co-construct with one another. And so, my ideological position I try to put on the table and say, âThis is my perspective. This is where Iâm coming from. This is kind of my stance.â"
"When referring to the masses, must men always be reminded that women represent slightly more than half of the world's population?"
"Predictably, the pattern of relegating women's issues to a secondary position or viewing them as "detracting" or "divisive" to a "greater" cause is by now a deeply rooted clichĂŠ. Just as achieving some degree of class and race consciousness is a prerequisite to understanding class and racial oppressions, developing a feminist consciousness is also a precondition for both progressive women and men to comprehend women's sources of oppression, unequal treatment, and diminished presence in historical narratives."
"Oppression will always breed different forms of mobilization and organizing, protest and resistance. Building a historical memory of Puerto Rican struggles against different forms of subjugation is an indispensable component of envisioning those new paths and moving forward."
"we can trace the discourses of semilingualism back to the origins of European colonialism. Thatâs something that Jonathan [Rosa] and I wrote about in our 2017 piece, which is essentially one of the primary mechanisms for dehumanizing indigenous populations, African populations, by calling into question their language practices and suggesting that their language practices were somehow illegitimate or subhuman."
"After all, la lucha continĂşa (the struggle continues). It is hard to ignore the fact that the civil rights struggles that we were part of during our younger years to eradicate all kinds of inequalities, are being eroded in the present by unleashed backlashes in a US society still afflicted by a widening gap between the poor and the wealthy, and between the white population and rapidly growing populations of color. A swarm of right wing politicians and the corporate capital that controls their political campaigns want to turn back the clock on the most significant changes and accomplishments that came out of the US civil rights movement-whether by enacting legislation to limit or suppress the electoral power of Latinos/as and African Americans, gerrymandering districts to favor white voters, demonizing immigrants and fostering xenophobic, racist, and undemocratic discourses, infringing upon the reproductive rights of women, weakening unions, opposing increases in the minimum wage, curtailing all the government programs that benefit the most needy sectors of US society, diminishing opportunities to climb the socioeconomic ladder and thus shrinking the middle class, refusing to accept the catastrophic effects of climate change, and favoring laws that facilitate and perpetuate an insatiable accumulation of wealth by the white privileged elites and the corporate sector. A complicitous right-wing media only adds fuel to these ideological crusades by propagandizing similar positions, and fostering demagoguery and fearmongering against culturally and racially diverse populations and immigrants."
"I have been accused of being a bully. I think a lot of that stems from precisely my resistance to feel like I need to do the emotional labor of making people feel comfortable about what Iâm saying. In particular, as a Latino scholar doing work in bilingual education, Iâm particularly resistant to the idea that I need to make white people feel comfortable doing work in bilingual education. I put my work out there. I let it speak for itself. I certainly have never targeted anyone individually and personally insulted them, which is what bullying actually is, right?"
"Whenever we talk about social and academic language today, thatâs really the legacy that weâve inherited â a legacy of semilingualism, of suggesting that thereâs something illegitimate about the language practices of racialized bilingual students."
"The United States can afford to be generous and progressive along the line of peace legislation, even to taking the initiative in a permanent Treaty of Arbitration with a country as highly cultured as Great Britain, for the peace spirit is the cultured one, and the war spirit the savage side of human nature; other nationalities would be sure to follow. This would be the dawning of a new day, an epoch in history ever to be remembered. The present industrial condition of the country, the struggle of labor against the greed of monopolies, of trusts, of vast aggregations of capital, is a far greater menace to the security and prosperity of the State than any foreign foe possibly can be."
"A recital of their wars constitutes the largest portion of the history of Christian nations; while the strides that they have made in commerce, in manufactures, and the arts, constitute the least."
"We have ten statues to the soldier where we have one to the philanthropist."
"The love of home and country are undoubtedly meritorious attributes, and self-sacrifice for country has always been held in high esteem, but it is but another form of self-love, and it is quite possible to make this love not only excessive, but unjust. There is another and a higher love-the great love of humanity, of peace, of justice and equality-that should be taught to our youth as well. To die for one's country has been usually considered"
"Our Congress, without any danger of war unless we provoke one by meddling, are continuously making appropriations for war ships to strengthen our Navy, in order to protect long stretches of sea coast, that no nation has the remotest idea of attacking, or to protect our foreign commerce, which has recently grown so small that one would need a microscope to discover it. These large naval appropriations furnish very good jobs for the young men who graduate at Annapolis; and glory for the Secretary of the Navy, who is usually anxious to magnify himself and his office. So the money of the people is spent for a costly vessel that will usually stand the strain of one peaceful cruise at sea, providing there are no storms, and then go to the dry dock for repairs. These appropriations are not only useless, but positively harmful, for they at once alarm our European friends, and incite them to a greater increase of their military and naval appropriations."
"It is doubtful if a candid person, entirely unacquainted with the facts, who should read English history with an account of the seven years' war of the Revolution, and then read our American history of the same events, could believe that they related to the same events. The same may be said in reference to the historians of the Franco-German war or of our war of the Rebellion."
"Our own civil war cost our nation one million men and three billion dollars, besides the waste of valuable records and countless treasure, and $145,000,000 yearly in pensions. It laid the foundation of the countless financial disasters of 1895, and created sectional prejudices and hatreds that will not entirely die out during the next fifty years."
"The women's movement was very diverse, but the more public positions articulated by the movement didn't include the experiences or concerns of women of color or of poor women."
"We got a lot of flack from White women who had private doctors and wanted to be sterilized,â she said. âThey had been denied their request for sterilization because of their status (unmarried), or the number of their children (usually the doctor thought they had too few). They therefore opposed a waiting period or any other regulation that they interpreted as limiting access . . . While young white middle class women were denied their requests for sterilization, low income women of certain ethnicity were misled or coerced into them"
"APHA has always provided a home for people in public health with a broad view of what public health is. Public health is really about people's life conditions and how these conditions do or do not promote health. APHA is committed to equity and ending all barriers, and has always been committed to civil, human and health rights. It's a wonderful place for women to be."
"The only way to effect change was for more women to go into the professions and instill a different perspectiveâa more human touch and a more respectful relationship with patients."
"A watershed in my life was getting divorced in Puerto Ricoâthat was my second marriageâand leaving Puerto Rico to become part of the womenâs movement. In my formation as a professional, there was always a kind of pressure to deny or not use a lot of your personal experience. The science of medicine, to some degree, negates the human, feeling, experiential part of it. But I was now discovering a whole other world out there through my personal experience of a deceptive marriage. That triggered quite a bit of growth in me toward understanding what happens internally to people, what happens in their lives and what they can do or not doâŚSo I went back to New York and I got very involved in reproductive rights. I began to join in the womenâs movement. At Barnard College there was a conference called the First International Conference on Abortion Rights that was attended by a few thousand womenâŚWe organized one of the first consciousness-raising groups of Latino womenâŚA number of incredible things emerged from women talking about their experiencesâŚWe shared and we became very bonded. That was the beginning of my identification with womenâs issues and reproductive health."
"In Puerto Rico, racism was subtle. There wasn't the kind of separatist racism like in the US. I wasn't used to this."
"My mother was a schoolteacher who fought for reforms such as the right to teach in Spanish, the vernacular,â she explained. âEnglish was imposed upon the Puerto Rican school system when the US military invaded in 1898."
"We still have a system that excludes, underserves, and even misserves all too many people. The latest census tells us that there are over 44 million Americans without health insurance. That is inexcusable. The failed social policies of the past few decades have widened the gaps between rich and poor, well and poorly educated, medically indigent and consumers of elective high-tech surgery, owners of multi-mansions and the homeless. We need health, but above all we need to create a grounding for healthy public policy that redresses and salvages the growing inequities. We cannot achieve a healthier us without achieving a healthier, more equitable health care system, and ultimately, a more equitable society."
"Shall we not then have women school trustees and superintendents? Already they are appointed in the East and in the West, and women are permitted to vote at the school elections. Who has a deeper interest in the schools than the mothers?"