FLIng Through Voices: Racial Code-Switching & Belonging for First-Generation Students

Abstract

The conversation on racial code-switching demonstrates how education has ingrained biases against different marginalized dialects, forcing students to adopt “professional” speaking practices. This leads me to ask how racial code-switching poses a barrier to a sense of belonging for first-generation college students. Existing work on racial code-switching primarily addresses educational pedagogy of racial code-switching and its negative impact on the self-perception of students of color. However, there is an unmet gap concerning the impacts of racial code-switching on first-generation students of color navigating new academic spaces. While first-generation students face unique challenges in belonging and adjusting to academic rigor, racial code-switching presents yet another adaptation that first-generation college students must face. In this paper, I argue that racial code-switching produces another barrier to a sense of belonging in higher education for first-generation students of color. First, I review literature on how racial code-switching practices are embedded into classrooms in order to demonstrate how students of color are forced to linguistically assimilate into white standards of English. Next, I look into presentations of racial code-switching within different minority communities and subsequent impacts on self-perception. Then, I review how first-generation college students at Stanford regard the ways they linguistically present themselves in academia. Finally, I conclude my research by proposing recommendations for professors to reframe the ways they regard different dialects and ensure equitable academic access for first-generation college students.