ABSTRACT
Race, as an ideological marker of difference, dictates how social exchanges take place and defines how people of color are viewed by others as well as how they view themselves. One such ideology is racial profiling, the act of discrimination based on phenotypical appearance. Racial profiling also involves assumptions and expectations about language. John Baugh (2003) explains that linguistic profiling is the auditory equivalent of visual racial profiling, so that auditory cues, structured by racial, ethnic, and class identifications, lead to linguistic profiling. This chapter uses the term raciolinguistic enregisterment, or what Rosa (forthcoming) describes as “looking like a language, sounding like a race,” to analyze how three high school-aged Latino men participating in the School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society (SKILLS) program described experiences in which they were racially profiled as speaking Spanish. The analysis demonstrates how, enabled by a classroom activity of this form of raciolinguistic profiling, the three young men narrated their experience of profiled by white people and of enacting agency in response to these experiences.
