White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 12/23/2010
EAN 9780521692045, ISBN10: 0521692040
Paperback, 294 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
In White Kids, Mary Bucholtz investigates how white teenagers use language to display identities based on race and youth culture. Focusing on three youth styles - preppies, hip hop fans, and nerds - Bucholtz shows how white youth use a wealth of linguistic resources, from social labels to slang, from Valley Girl speech to African American English, to position themselves in the school's racialized social order. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a multiracial urban California high school, the book also demonstrates how European American teenagers talk about race when discussing interracial friendship and difference, narrating racialized fear and conflict, and negotiating their own ethnoracial classification. The first book to use techniques of linguistic analysis to examine the construction of diverse white identities, it will be welcomed by researchers and students in linguistics, anthropology, ethnic studies and education.
1. White styles
language, race, and youth identities
2. Listening to whiteness
researching language and race in a California high school
3. Cliques, crowds, and crews
social labels in racial space
4. Say word?
Race and style in white teenage slang
5. I'm like yeah but she's all no
innovative quotative markers and preppy whiteness
6. Pretty fly for a white guy
European American hip hop fans and African American English
7. We're through being cool
white nerds, superstandard English, and the rejection of trendiness
8. 'Not that I'm racist'
strategies of colorblindness in talk about race and friendship
9. White on black
narratives of fear and resentment
10. 'I guess I'm white'
ethnoracial labels and the problem of whiteness
11. Conclusion
audible whiteness.
Advance praise: 'White Kids, poignant, funny, and timely, shows us how adolescents work on identities in a racialized world with immense depth and precision.' Jane H. Hill, Regents' Professor (Emerita), University of Arizona