ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how tools can be double sided: language as a tool for pedagogy but also as a tool to racialize and marginalize students. Cultural capital lends itself to an analysis of power, by showing how educational institutions contribute to the reproduction of the social structure by welcoming and disseminating the hereditary transmission of cultural capital in ways that are not valued by dominant institutions including schools. Language ideologies serve as a useful tool to fully understand language use and local knowledge. New scholarship, too, has argued that bilingualism as an institution reproduces white hegemony. The raciolinguistic approach refuses to document the empirical linguistic practices of racialized subjects and instead interrogates the interpretive and categorizing practices of racially hegemonic perceiving subjects. The apparently neutral and commonsense descriptions of student language characters, continuously reified in teacher training manuals and other literature, impacts their access to opportunities and resources.
