White Kids
Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity

The first book to use techniques of linguistic analysis to examine the construction of diverse white identities.

Mary Bucholtz (Author)

9780521871495, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 December 2010

296 pages, 14 b/w illus. 9 tables
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.8 cm, 0.6 kg

'… Bucholtz's conclusions open up new possibilities for further research and examination of the ways in which white teens choose and display their identity. Highly recommended.' Choice

In White Kids, Mary Bucholtz investigates how white teenagers use language to display identities based on race and youth culture. Focusing on three youth styles - preppies, hip hop fans, and nerds - Bucholtz shows how white youth use a wealth of linguistic resources, from social labels to slang, from Valley Girl speech to African American English, to position themselves in the school's racialized social order. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a multiracial urban California high school, the book also demonstrates how European American teenagers talk about race when discussing interracial friendship and difference, narrating racialized fear and conflict, and negotiating their own ethnoracial classification. The first book to use techniques of linguistic analysis to examine the construction of diverse white identities, it will be welcomed by researchers and students in linguistics, anthropology, ethnic studies and education.

1. White styles: language, race, and youth identities
2. Listening to whiteness: researching language and race in a California high school
3. Cliques, crowds, and crews: social labels in racial space
4. Say word?: Race and style in white teenage slang
5. I'm like yeah but she's all no: innovative quotative markers and preppy whiteness
6. Pretty fly for a white guy: European American hip hop fans and African American English
7. We're through being cool: white nerds, superstandard English, and the rejection of trendiness
8. 'Not that I'm racist': strategies of colorblindness in talk about race and friendship
9. White on black: narratives of fear and resentment
10. 'I guess I'm white': ethnoracial labels and the problem of whiteness
11. Conclusion: audible whiteness.

Subject Areas: Education [JN], Social, group or collective psychology [JMH], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Age groups: adolescents [JFSP2], Ethnic studies [JFSL], Social interaction [JFFP], Dialect, slang & jargon [CFFD], Sociolinguistics [CFB]