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Rejecting Abyssal Thinking In The Language And Education Of Racialized Bilinguals: A Manifesto, Ofelia Garcia, Nelson Flores, Kate Seltzer, Li Wei, Ricardo Otheguy, Jonathan Rosa

College of Education Departmental Research

Following Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the authors of this article reject the type of “abyssal thinking” that erases the existence of counter-hegemonic knowledges and lifeways, adopting instead the “from the inside out” perspective that is required for thinking constructively about the language and education of racialized bilinguals. On the basis of deep personal experience and extensive field-work research, we challenge prevailing assumptions about language, bilingualism, and education that are based on raciolinguistic ideologies with roots in colonialism. Adopting a translanguaging perspective that rejects rigid colonial boundaries of named languages, we argue that racialized bilingual learners, like all students, draw from …