Alim, Rickford and Ball have assembled an excellent set of essays that challenge the way we construct social reality. The combined force of the book is more than academic. It is a call for action in the political realm and in our personal interactions. There does not appear to be a specific audience for this book (scholars, undergraduates, general public, etc.), but rather the book seems to be intended for anyone who is interested in thinking more deeply about the
interplay of race and language. The chapters are nearly uniformly coherent, well written, and pleasurable to read; they are scholarly, yet accessible. It is not hard to imagine this as a text supporting general courses in sociolinguistics or more specialized courses related to race and language. The
book admirably introduces readers to a new field of inquiry and opens up vistas for potential future research on the questions it raises.
H. Samy Alim is Professor of Education and, by courtesy, Anthropology and Linguistics at Stanford University, where he directs the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL), the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA), and African & African American Studies (AAAS). His most recent book, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. (2012, with Geneva Smitherman), addresses language and racial politics
through an examination of President Barack Obama's language use-and America's response to it. Other books include Street Conscious Rap (1999), You Know My Steez (2004), Roc the Mic Right (2006), Tha Global Cipha (2006), Talkin Black Talk (2007), and Global Linguistic Flows (2009). His forthcoming volume, Culturally Sustaining
Pedagogies, will appear in 2017 (with Django Paris, Teachers College Press).
John R. Rickford is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University and the current President of the Linguistic Society of America. His most recent books include Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (co-authored, 2000, winner of an American Book Award), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (co-edited, 2001), Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-First Century (co-edited, 2004), Language, Culture
and Caribbean Identity (co-edited, 2012) and African American, Creole and Other Vernacular Englishes: A Bibliographic Resource (co-authored, 2012).
Arnetha F. Ball is a Professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education and former President of the American Educational Research Association. She is author of Multicultural Strategies for Education and Social Change: Carriers of the Torch in the U.S. and South Africa (2006) and co-editor of several volumes including Bahktinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning (2004), African American Literacies Unleashed: Vernacular English and
Composition Classroom (2005), the NSSE volume With More Deliberate Speed (2006) and Studying Diversity in Teacher Education (2011).