Summer writing grading project (Week Fifteen): More on translingualism

This has been the next-to-last week of class, so I've been reading and commenting on paper drafts, conferencing with students, and doing some grading. It's been busy. I haven't had much time to do anything else, although I do have a few things to finish before the end of the month. (And I need to prepare for the fall semester, when I'll be on campus for the first time since February 2020! Not really looking forward to that, but what can you do?)

One quick addition to what I wrote last week about Bruce Horner and the relationship of translingualism to SRTOL. My colleague Cherice Jones steered me to the CCCC Demand for Black Linguistic Justice, which I had seen before. What I hadn't noticed previously, and what seems relevant to Horner's argument in the chapter I referenced last week, is part of Demand #3 ("We Demand that Political Discussions and Praxis Center Black Language as Teacher-Researcher Activism for Classrooms and Communities!"), where there is a "sub-demand" that:

• "researchers, educators, and policymakers stop using problematic, race-neutral umbrella terms like multilingualism, world Englishes, translingualism, linguistic diversity, or any other race-flattened vocabulary when discussing Black Language and thereby Black Lives."

If I understand correctly, the writers aren't saying that those terms like translingualism, etc., are problematic in other situations, but they specifically point to how these terms ignore race when discussing language--specifically, Black Language. This raises an issue that I hadn't considered before, but now seems very obvious: in arguing that "translingualism sees difference in language—located in time as the ever emerging product of language practices—not simply as the norm but as inevitable, arising even in exact repetitions of conventional usage" (Horner 60), there appears to be a validation of the "inevitable" difference in language and language practice at the expense of the very specific experiences of users of particular languages--specifically, users of Black Language. April Baker-Bell, et al. (the authors of the Demand), tie Black Language to Black Lives in a way that "translingualism" as an ideology doesn't seem (able) to account for. 

I'm still thinking about all this and I'm admittedly no expert, so I'm open to input on this....

[Update, 8/16: And now I realize that Keith Gilyard wrote about these very issues back in 2016! h/t again to Cherice.]