Why this text? Why now? These are two questions that Flores and Rosa's article prompted on my mind. The paper sounds like a ‘tune up’, if not a recalibration, of the raciolinguistic perspective (RP) that the two authors see drifting away from its original ambitions, which can be summarized as (1) to account for the co-naturalization of language and race and how the process is achieved semiotically; and (2) ultimately to expose and disrupt the inherited colonial foundations of the field of linguistics.

The fact that intellectual ideas or theoretical paradigms take a life of their own — with misinterpretation being part of the equation — is not new in science. Related to the questions articulated at the outset of this commentary are those of why the RP has been embraced increasingly by several language scholars in some parts of the world and why it has evolved in the way it has. The sophisticated analysis of academia of Bourdieu (1975) as a field — whose social dynamics are analogized to those of a game — helps us understand this evolution. The RP's higher ‘market value’ over the previous scholarship that had also addressed the entanglement of language and race and did not receive as much attention from the wider academic community (see for instance Makoni et al., 2003) appears to be the answer. It adds to the geopolitics of the production of knowledge and the circulation of the latter from the United States modern academic ‘centre’ (which is highly stratified) to the world's ‘peripheries’ (in the terminology of Wallerstein (2004)’s world-system analysis). Although I assume that doing raciolinguistics is part of doing being in the current game of socially-oriented linguistics, I do not intend to undermine in any way Flores and Rosa's (as well as other scholars’) important contributions to our understanding of the intersections of language and race. Unveiling the logics of the heterogeneous academic field in which we position ourselves and are positioned by others not only challenges the positivist idea of ‘true knowledge’ but also helps each of us reflect on what we research, why we do it, and why now. It would be naive to think that language scholars’ increased interest in language and race has been driven only by the current political situations across the world. Contemporary race-based dominance and exclusion have precedents, often distant ones, from which they are not radically different.

Flores and Rosa add their voices to some prominent linguists before them (e.g. Mufwene, 2001, 2008; DeGraff, 2005 in the case of creolistics) who have repeatedly called out some racist underpinning of Western linguistics inherited from its birth in a period when colonization was associated with ‘la mission civilisatrice’, and non-Europeans were considered less evolved than, and their languages as inferior to, Europeans. We should ask ourselves why these previous calls for action have not received the amount of attention they deserve from the broader community of linguists, including those who are more socially oriented. This silence amounts to a process of erasure of alternative approaches that are just as justified if not more solid. It seems that we, linguists, are more prompt and frankly more committed to calling out the racist biases in the historical descriptions of European travellers commenting on the alleged unintelligibility and ‘barbaric nature’ of indigenous languages of especially Africa and the Americas than to also considering other problems in our practice. For instance, why are some research topics considered to be of more global significance for the academic community (read Western community) and therefore worth publishing if not reading than others undervalued as ‘too local’? To me, the issue now is less about the ‘colonial’ history of Western linguistics than about the pervasive and die-hard coloniality in our field, under different names. Professional careers and academic success have been built within this legacy. Unless we engage collectively in deep structural changes, we may end up with a plus-ça-change-plus-c'est-la-même chose kind of situation, as said in French.

By not questioning explicitly the European bias since the beginnings of the discipline and not considering non-Western interpretations of some phenomena, which can shed more adequate light on them, such as in the analyses of fluid, interwoven, and not-identity-based plurilingualism, Flores and Rosa unfortunately appear to reproduce the very colonial gaze that they question. I believe that adopting an RP should not be done without at least questioning the Western epistemological hegemony that has defined our analytical categories. Although the authors caution us not to essentialize race and to contextualize its instantiations in historically informed socio-political contexts, their implicit premise that language cannot be thought of independent of race and vice versa appears not only to be overgeneralizing but also to be a Eurocentric way of understanding race and language dynamics. Some of the biases associated with race are in fact interpreted in terms of ethnicity in some other territories.

I think that the reasons for their unfortunate erasure of other ways of thinking and of being in the world lies in their primary focus on settlement colonies of the Americas, especially the United States, whose race boundaries are not replicated everywhere else in the world. In the former trade and exploitation colonies of sub-Saharan Africa, race was not always a factor historically; and since it became relevant, it has not been constructed in exactly the same way, especially regarding linguistic diversity. I leave aside South Africa where scholars have often (uncritically) adopted the North American RP, although the patterns of exploitation and settlement colonization styles definitely call for different explanations of language and race dynamics. For instance, Mamdani (1996, 2005) explained that in sub-Saharan Africa, the European colonial states divided the populations between those identified by (1) race (viz., the non-Africans, more specifically, Europeans and Asians) and those reconstructed as non-indigenous, including the Arabs, the Coloured in South Africa, and the Tutsis as opposed to the Hutus in Rwanda (Mamdani, 2005: 66); and (2) those identified as ‘ethnic groups’. He highlights how the colonial apparatus legally and politically created and enforced [ethnolinguistic and] political ethnic identities that aimed at fostering divisions and discriminations among Africans. These new politically ethnolinguistic identities based partly on pre-colonial cultural differences were adopted to serve the interests of the Europeans’ colonial ventures. In addition, the privileges associated with Whiteness in the Americas are not the same as in post-colonial Africa, where the most deleterious discriminations applied by Indigenous rulers are based on ethnic differences (see below).

This brief though incomplete historicization shows that race and ethnicity are not coextensive and have not been used to favour some groups in exactly the same way in sub-Saharan African former exploitation colonies as in the settlement colonies of the Americas. It also helps explain why in Africa exclusionary discourses towards targeted groups are informed by claims of instrumentalized and reconstructed autochthony rather than in racial terms. Indeed, political, institutional and societal discrimination against groups or individuals in this part of the world have been directed mainly towards fellow Africans, a phenomenon Fanon (1961) had anticipated as part of the political decolonial process. This is evident from, for example, the recurring violent episodes against transcontinental African foreigners in South Africa (Neocosmos, 2006; Vigouroux, 2019), the exclusionary politics of autochthony applied to Northern Ivoiriens in Côte d'Ivoire (Geschiere, 2009), and the Rwandan genocide against Tutsis in 1994.

My caution against applying racial categories informed by especially the North American settlement-colonization history to dynamics of language practices and dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa should not be interpreted to erase or question the historical impact of ‘racial capitalism’ (Robinson, 1983/2000) on language ideologies there. The ways in which the 19th-century European imperialism was achieved by dismissing Africans’ cultural traditions, beliefs, political and economic organizations, and languages have been well documented. So have its accompanying language ideologies according to which African languages are simple or childlike and iconize the putative ‘mental inferiority’ of their speakers (Mufwene, 2001, 2023).

Note that, in exploitation colonies, unlike in their settlement counterparts, European colonization did not lead to the massive disappearance of indigenous languages. The European languages that a minority of African speakers have added to their respective repertoires have not displaced the traditional egalitarian multilingualism practiced in most societies of the continent (Vigouroux & Mufwene, 2008). It is worth reminding the reader that the colonial languages are spoken by roughly 20%−30% of sub-Saharan African speaking subjects (with variations across countries and a couple of exceptions, Mufwene, 2022) and therefore fulfil well-circumscribed daily communicative functions on the continent. The sub-Saharan ecologies, with all their sociocultural variations that any analyst should bear in mind, underscore the fact that language-based distinctions and societal hierarchies are polity-specific, differing according to varying colonial histories.

Noting that an RP has limited relevance to modern day social and language dynamics of millions of sub-Saharan Africans does not undermine the analytical contributions, it makes to accounts of racially based discriminations in the polities that have informed the research paradigm. Displacing the (colonial and by extension racist) Western linguistic tradition, as Flores and Rosa attempt to, entails also bearing in mind that analytical perspectives elaborated in specific sociocultural contexts of European settlement colonies (especially the United States) may apply only marginally, certainly not literally, to former European exploitation colonies. The ethnolinguistic colonial histories are not identical, owing especially to differences in the population structures set in place by and inherited from the varying colonial regimes (Mufwene, 2001, 2008).

Because race is a ‘floating signifier’ (Hall, 1997/2021), I concur with Flores and Rosa that analysts should always historicize and localize its instantiations in order to account for the following: Why has this form of categorizing and structured social formation been chosen over or in combination with other forms? How is race mobilized and with what effects for both the ‘racializer’ and the racialized? Who does the racializing towards whom? Whose and what interest does it serve and to what gain? I also agree with Flores and Rosa that not ‘exceptionaliz[ing] US racial logics’ (which I interpret as different from universalizing it) makes it possible to chart continuities across time and space. Because these continuities cannot be understood outside capitalism, the RP would greatly benefit from a stronger and historically informed political economic approach. The latter would help shed better light on the logics that inform the persistence of race to divide, exploit and alienate people. Understanding these logics is the necessary step to fight them. The stakes are high, less so for linguistics than for the human race.

为什么是这个文字？为什么是现在？这是弗洛雷斯和罗莎的文章在我脑海中引发的两个问题。这篇论文听起来像是对种族语言学观点（RP）的“调整”，如果不是重新校准的话，两位作者认为这种观点正在偏离其最初的抱负，可以概括为（1）来解释种族语言学的共同归化语言和种族以及该过程如何在符号学上实现；（2）最终揭露和破坏语言学领域继承下来的殖民基础。

知识思想或理论范式拥有自己的生命——其中包括误解——这一事实在科学中并不新鲜。与本评论一开始提出的问题相关的是，为什么 RP 越来越受到世界某些地区的语言学者的欢迎，以及为什么它会以现在的方式演变。学术界对布迪厄（Bourdieu，1975）作为一个领域的复杂分析——其社会动态类似于游戏的社会动态——有助于我们理解这种演变。RP 比之前的奖学金更高的“市场价值”似乎就是答案，之前的奖学金也解决了语言和种族的纠葛，但没有受到更广泛的学术界的关注（例如参见 Makoni 等人，2003 年）。它增加了知识生产的地缘政治以及后者从美国现代学术“中心”（高度分层）到世界“外围”（用沃勒斯坦（Wallerstein，2004）的世界术语）的流通。系统分析）。尽管我认为研究种族语言学是当前社会导向语言学游戏的一部分，但我无意以任何方式破坏弗洛雷斯和罗莎（以及其他学者）对我们理解种族语言学交叉点的重要贡献。语言和种族。揭示我们在其中定位自己和他人定位的异质学术领域的逻辑，不仅挑战了“真知识”的实证主义观念，而且有助于我们每个人反思我们的研究内容、我们为什么这样做以及为什么现在。如果认为语言学者对语言和种族的兴趣增加只是由当前世界各地的政治局势驱动，那就太天真了。当代基于种族的统治和排斥有先例，而且往往是遥远的先例，但它们并没有根本不同。

弗洛雷斯和罗莎向他们之前的一些著名语言学家发出了自己的声音（例如，Mufwene，2001，2008；DeGraff，2005，就克里奥尔主义而言），他们一再指出西方语言学在殖民统治时期继承下来的一些种族主义基础。与“la Mission Civilisatrice”相关，非欧洲人被认为不如欧洲人进化，他们的语言也不如欧洲人。我们应该扪心自问，为什么之前的这些行动呼吁没有得到更广泛的语言学家群体（包括那些更注重社会导向的语言学家群体）应有的关注。这种沉默相当于消除替代方法的过程，这些方法即使不是更可靠，也同样合理。看来，我们，语言学家，更迅速、更坦率地致力于指出欧洲旅行者的历史描述中的种族主义偏见，他们评论了特别是非洲和美洲土著语言所谓的难以理解和“野蛮性质”，而不是也考虑我们实践中遇到的其他问题。例如，为什么一些研究主题被认为对学术界（阅读西方社区）更具全球意义，因此即使不阅读也值得发表，而不是其他被低估为“太本地化”的主题？对我来说，现在的问题不是关于西方语言学的“殖民”历史，而是关于我们领域中以不同名义存在的普遍而顽固的殖民性。职业生涯和学术成功都是在这一遗产的基础上建立起来的。除非我们集体参与深刻的结构性变革，否则我们最终可能会陷入一种选择的局面，正如法语所说。

通过不明确质疑自该学科诞生以来的欧洲偏见，也不考虑对某些现象的非西方解释，这可以更充分地阐明这些现象，例如在对流动的、交织的和非基于身份的多语言主义的分析中不幸的是，弗洛雷斯和罗莎似乎再现了他们所质疑的殖民目光。我认为，如果不质疑定义了我们分析范畴的西方认识论霸权，就不应采用RP。尽管作者告诫我们不要将种族本质化，并将其实例化在历史悠久的社会政治背景中，但他们隐含的前提是，语言不能被认为独立于种族，反之亦然，这似乎不仅过于概括，而且是一种以欧洲为中心的方式了解种族和语言动态。事实上，在其他一些地区，一些与种族相关的偏见是根据种族来解释的。

我认为，他们不幸地消除了其他思维方式和世界存在方式的原因在于他们主要关注美洲的定居殖民地，尤其是美国，其种族界限并没有在世界其他地方复制。在撒哈拉以南非洲的前贸易和剥削殖民地，种族在历史上并不总是一个因素；自从它变得相关以来，它并没有以完全相同的方式构建，特别是在语言多样性方面。我把南非放在一边，那里的学者经常（不加批判地）采用北美RP，尽管剥削模式和定居殖民风格肯定需要对语言和种族动态进行不同的解释。例如，Mamdani（1996，2005）解释说，在撒哈拉以南非洲，欧洲殖民国家将人口分为以下两类：（1）种族（即非非洲人，更具体地说，欧洲人和亚洲人）和被重建为非土著人，包括阿拉伯人、南非的有色人种和图西族，而不是卢旺达的胡图族（Mamdani，2005：66）；(2) 被确定为“族裔群体”的人。他强调了殖民机构如何在法律和政治上创造和强化[民族语言和]政治民族身份，以助长非洲人之间的分裂和歧视。这些新的政治民族语言身份在一定程度上基于前殖民时期的文化差异，被采用来服务于欧洲人殖民事业的利益。此外，美洲白人所享有的特权与后殖民时代的非洲不同，在非洲，原住民统治者实施的最有害的歧视是基于种族差异（见下文）。

这种简短但不完整的历史化表明，种族和族裔并不具有共同的范围，并且在撒哈拉以南非洲前剥削殖民地和美洲定居殖民地中，种族和民族并没有以完全相同的方式被用来支持某些群体。它还有助于解释为什么在非洲，针对目标群体的排他性话语是通过工具化和重建的本土主张而不是种族术语来实现的。事实上，世界这一地区针对群体或个人的政治、制度和社会歧视主要针对非洲同胞，法农（Fanon，1961）曾预见到这种现象是政治非殖民化进程的一部分。例如，南非反复发生的针对跨大陆非洲外国人的暴力事件（Neocosmos，2006；Vigouroux，2019）、科特迪瓦对北科特迪瓦人适用的本土排斥政治（Geschiere，2009）以及1994年卢旺达针对图西族的种族灭绝。

我对将特别是北美定居殖民历史所告知的种族类别应用于语言实践的动态和撒哈拉以南非洲的动态的谨慎态度不应被解释为消除或质疑“种族资本主义”的历史影响（Robinson，1983/2000 ））关于那里的语言意识形态。19世纪的欧洲帝国主义是如何通过忽视非洲人的文化传统、信仰、政治和经济组织以及语言来实现的，这一点已有详细记载。随之而来的语言意识形态也是如此，根据这种意识形态，非洲语言简单或幼稚，并象征着其使用者的假定“精神自卑”（Mufwene，2001，2023）。

请注意，与定居点不同，在剥削殖民地，欧洲殖民化并没有导致土著语言的大规模消失。少数非洲使用者将欧洲语言添加到各自的语言库中，并没有取代非洲大陆大多数社会实行的传统平等主义多语言主义（Vigouroux & Mufwene，2008 ）。值得提醒读者的是，大约 20%−30% 的撒哈拉以南非洲语主体使用殖民地语言（各国之间存在差异，也有一些例外，Mufwene, 2022），因此可以满足严格限制的日常交流功能在大陆上。任何分析人士都应该牢记撒哈拉以南生态系统及其所有社会文化差异，它们强调了这样一个事实：基于语言的区别和社会等级制度是特定于政体的，根据不同的殖民历史而有所不同。

注意到RP与数百万撒哈拉以南非洲人的现代社会和语言动态的相关性有限，但这并没有损害分析贡献，它对为研究范式提供信息的政体中基于种族的歧视进行了说明。正如弗洛雷斯和罗莎试图取代（殖民和种族主义）西方语言传统，还需要记住，在欧洲定居殖民地（特别是美国）的特定社会文化背景下阐述的分析观点可能仅适用于边缘，当然不适用于从字面上看，是前欧洲剥削殖民地。民族语言殖民历史并不相同，特别是由于不同殖民政权所建立和继承的人口结构存在差异（Mufwene，2001，2008）。

因为种族是一个“浮动的能指”（Hall，1997 /2021），我同意弗洛雷斯和罗莎的观点，即分析师应该始终将其实例化历史化和本地化，以便解释以下问题：为什么这种形式的分类和结构化社会形态被选择或与其他形式结合？种族是如何被动员起来的，对“种族化者”和被种族化的人有什么影响？谁对谁进行种族歧视？它服务于谁、什么利益以及获得什么收益？我也同意弗洛雷斯和罗莎的观点，即“美国种族逻辑的例外化”（我将其解释为与普遍化不同）使得绘制跨越时间和空间的连续性成为可能。由于这些连续性无法在资本主义之外得到理解，因此，RP 将从更强大且历史悠久的政治经济方法中受益匪浅。后者将有助于更好地阐明种族分裂、剥削和疏远人民的持续存在的逻辑。理解这些逻辑是对抗它们的必要步骤。风险很高，对于语言学来说，比对于人类来说更是如此。