In Speaking of Race, Jennifer Delfino offers a critical exploration of how Black children in Washington, DC are understood and understand themselves relative to racial and linguistic ideologies. Considering neoliberal education reforms that adversely affect minoritized populations in urban schools, Delfino expertly combines ethnography and discourse analysis to trace how preadolescent students in after-school programs assemble forms of Black personhood and language for social and academic transformation. In this highly reflexive inquiry filled with clear and elegant prose, Delfino draws together the fields of linguistics, anthropology, and education to produce a nuanced study—both timely and necessary—of Black childhood in the US.

Angela Reyes, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center; co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race

Delfino’s book is a challenging and important first, an ethnographic treatment of language, race, identity formation, and agency among African American pre-teens and thirteen-year-olds in the deeply impoverished area of Southeast Washington, DC. Delfino traces their words and actions in after-school programs and in the community to demonstrate their awareness of how language is an integral part of their racialization and how these young students contest and counter the manner in which white-supremacist ideologies attempt to construe and discipline them. An essential work for those interested in African American life and schooling.

Arthur K. Spears, The City University of New York

Speaking of Race carries forward the illustrious tradition of linguistic ethnographies of race, language, and identity in schooling contexts, while making numerous innovative insights in "raciolinguistics" and "culturally sustaining pedagogies" by paying particular attention to how African American children not only enact language and race but transform these processes to disrupt, or at least temporarily redirect, the dominant white gaze--and to challenge uncritical, conformist, assimilationist models of language pedagogy. A must-read for graduate students across these fields, and for anyone hoping to better understand the inextricable linkages between language, race, and power in the U.S.

H. Samy Alim, University of California, Los Angeles; co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race