“Dark-Skinned White Girls”: Linguistic and Ideological Variation Among White Women with African American Ties in the Urban Midwest by Sonya Fix A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics, New York University September, 2011 _______________________________ Renée A. Blake Sonya Fix All Rights Reserved, 2011. ii Dedication To my brother Eric Byron Fix. You shone brilliantly in your life and expected me to also. When I lost you, I realized I wanted to finish for you. iii Acknowledgements I first and foremost would like to thank my dissertation chair and advisor, Renée Blake. Renée, you constantly challenged me in the best of ways by making me consider what was at stake in the research questions that I chose to pursue. You supported me and my ideas and had confidence in me as a scholar when I was lacking it. You showed me how one can be an academic, educator, and mentor with a unique and authentic style and voice. I also would like to thank John Singler—John, you always were there to offer guidance in times of crisis, share a Midwesternism, and nosh with. You helped me to think through issues of language with regard to region, race, and place. You showed me the import of careful scholarship, and modeled how to be a historian as well as a sociolinguist. To the rest of my dissertation committee— thank you Greg Guy for all your quantitative guidance, your support along the way, and your wonderfully optimistic spirit; thank you Rudi Gaudio for your keen social insights into and enthusiasm for my topic, and for your always productive feedback; I am thrilled to have been able to have you on my committee. Maria Gouskova—thank you for your patience, time, and attention to the big picture. A huge thanks also to Aura Hougin, our department administrator, for her amazing kindness, patience, and organization. Many thanks to the scholars beyond my committee at NYU and at other universities who offered guidance and insight in large and small ways, iv often though casual conversations at conferences and talks. Thank you Mary Bucholtz, Lisa Davidson, Robin Dodsworth, Penelope Eckert, Kirk Hazen, Scott Kiesling, Don Kulick, Galey Modan, Dennis Preston, Elaine Richardson, Amy Shuman, and Anna Szabolcsi. A special thanks to Cecilia Cutler and Julie Sweetland—your scholarship builds the foundation for this inquiry. Thank you Cara Shousterman, my wonderful friend and NYU colleague. Without you and all your tireless help, your hospitality, and your knowledge and care, I could not have finished. Thank you to my kindred cohort and dear friend, Simanique Moody. We began this journey together, and shared laughs and pain and adventures; how joyous to be joining you other side of this process! Maryam Bakht, Amy Wong, Jen Nycz, Marcos Rohena-Madrozo, Tricia Irwin, Amanda Dye and the rest of the fabulous NYU linguistics crew, past and present—thank you for all your help along the way! I’m so happy to have shared these years of friendship and scholarship with you; I’ve learned so much from all of you, and I look forward to our times (and meals!) together in the future. To Kyle Major, thank you for your humor, intelligence, commitment to social justice, and love of the unusual and awesome. Thank you for being you—we miss you greatly. To Lauren Hall-Lew, thank you for your friendship and collaboration in our work on /l/; you are truly a role model to me. To Anna Marie Trester and the rest of my awesome sociolinguistics friends and colleagues beyond NYU—thank you for the moral support, sociolinguistic insights, and the wonderful times at conferences, past and future. v Thank you to the women who are the subjects of this study. You shared your time, your lives, and your stories with me. I hope this work does justice to your experiences and faithfully recounts who you are. A huge thanks to all my Columbus friends and colleagues who helped me to locate subjects through your own social and professional networks, and thank you to the South Side Settlement House for providing me space to conduct interviews over the years, and for allowing me to make contact with the community through volunteer work; you kept me grounded when I was sometimes feeling very lonely in the field. To my amazing friends Merrari McKinney, Eleanor Gease, and Tarra Collins—not only did you offer me deep and abiding empathy and support through this lengthy process, but you also provided me with countless social and scholarly insights that are woven throughout this work. To all my other wonderful friends old and new, in Columbus, New York, and everywhere else—you are my hearts. You were always there when I emerged from my work cave and wanted to experience levity and creativity, and helped push me back into my work cave when I had trouble getting there. To my mother, Charlene Fix—you are half tiger, half elephant, all dog. You never let me quit and showed me through your own scholarship and work ethic how it could be done. To my father, Patrick Fix—you have always modeled deep intellectualism, cautious scholarship, and a close eye to detail. From the beginning, you acknowledged the challenge of the work that I vi chose to pursue, and you took on the dirty job of helping me with final proofing. To my sister Madeleine Fix-Hansen and my brother Daniel Fix, thank you for your understanding and your comradery and for both being exceptional in ways that stirred me to be the same. To my partner, Daniel Gray—you are the catalyst, the magic. You have covered me in love and support, and have had utter confidence in me even when I when I lacked confidence in myself. You helped me to finish this final step in ways you can’t imagine. Thank you. vii Abstract This dissertation is a sociolinguistic study of fourteen white women with significant social, romantic, and familial ties with African Americans, a type of subject rooted both in demographic reality and in the popular imagination. A qualitative and quantitative consideration of subjects’ linguistic behaviors and discourses on race and persona is provided, as well an examination of the social stereotypes and media representations attributed to subjects. Subjects, who range from young adults to middle aged and live in Columbus, Ohio, are shown to exhibit a wide range of linguistic behavior with regarding use of unique morphosyntactic and phonological features of African American English (AAE). Variation also exists between subjects with regard to their life-long trajectories of contact and ties with African Americans and their participation in material style practices aligned with popular African American culture. This variation is quantified with the use of a combined, multi- life stage index score—the African American Network Strength Score (AANSS). A descriptive qualitative analysis of subjects’ use of AAE features— morphosyntactic, phonological, and paralinguistic—is provided. Also included is an in-depth quantitative analysis of two phonological features—/l/ vocalization and coronal stop deletion—that, while not unique to AAE, have been shown to be used African Americans at significantly higher rates than whites in the U.S. A correlation is shown between subjects’ linguistic practices viii and their AANSS scores. Subjects with the greatest amounts of contact with African Americans during their youth and early adolescence—subjects with high Youth and Adolescent AANSSs— show some of the widest ranges of AAE morphosyntactic features. However, the current social lives of the women in this sample—lives that have been shaped by personal agency in addition to circumstance—are shown to impact their linguistic behaviors as well, as high current AANSSs correlate with use of phonological features, especially vocalized /l/. We see from the adult women in this sample that language style continues to be an act of identity, an act of belonging, and a potent signifier of one’s personal ideologies about the boundaries of racial identification far past adolescence. ix Contents Dedication iii Acknowledgments iv Abstract viii List of Figures xv List of Figures xix List of Appendices Chapter 1/ Introduction and Overview 1 1.0 Introduction 1 1.1 Rationale: Why white women? 9 1.2 Methodological approach 16 1.3 Socio-theoretical concerns 18 1.3.1 Accommodation, indexicality, and persona 18 1.3.2 Language Ideologies 19 1.3.3 Stance and counter/racism 20 1.4 Dissertation Overview 22 Chapter 2/ Literature Review: Whiteness, African American English, 24 and the Linguistic Boundaries of Racialized Identity 2.0 Chapter overview 24 2.1 Social constructions of race and the study of whiteness 25 2.2 African American English and white vernacular English in 28 contiguous communities 2.3 Use of African American English by the ethnic other 32 x 2.3.1 Whites with limited African American contact 32 2.3.2 Whites with significant contact with African 36 Americans and theories of second dialect acquisition 2.3.3 Styling the self, voicing the other, and inter-ethnic 42 contact 2.4 African American English and white vernaculars in 45 Columbus, Ohio: Linguistic variables 2.4.1 Morphosyntactic variables 46 2.4.2 Phonological variables 51 2.4.2.1 /l/ vocalization and deletion 54 2.4.2.2 Coronal stop deletion 62 Chapter 3/ Methodology: Race, Place and Subject Sample 68 3.0 Chapter overview 68 3.1 Locating subjects 69 3.1.1 Sociolinguistic subjects 69 3.1.2 Social stereotypes and demographic realities 73 3.2 Focusing the lens on the urban Midwest 78 3.2.1 The urban Midlands and racial diversity 79 3.2.2 Columbus