Episode 2 Chutes and Ladders, or I am being so American

In this episode I talk about the experience of internalising a judgmental, hierarchical social structure. In my case it was like living by the rules of Chutes and Ladders (Snakes and Ladders). Some arbitrary set of characteristics is graded on a scale of 1 to 100 and you find yourself landed on one of the numbered grids. What if ‘whiteness’ was the thing you were being graded on? (This is the question Cheryl Harris discusses in her article, ‘Whiteness as property’.) What if it you were graded on your level of ‘Americanness’? I talk about my feelings of not measuring up when I lived in France.

What does grammar have to do with any of this? I ask listeners to consider the difference between these three clauses, which come from a story that was told to me by an American student living in Strasbourg:

Clause 1 is an example of what in Systemic Functional Grammar is called a material process, realised by the verb phrase are making.

Clauses 2 and 3 are examples of relational processes, realised by the verb is.

Relational clauses sometimes put people on a Chutes and Ladders-type grid: they situate you, statically, in a particular social structure. (I am white. I am a lecturer. I am American.) In their most ‘normal’ form – that is, their unmarked form, they’re in the simple past or the simple present. What happens if you were to use the present-in-present form (otherwise known as present continuous or present progressive)? I am being American. I am being white. Does that upset the Chutes and Ladders board?

Next week I’ll talk more about these types of ‘grammatical intervention’.

The book I mentioned, cited in Cheryl Harris’s article, is Two Nations by Andrew Hacker.

The type of grammar I’m using is Systemic Functional Grammar, and my reference guide is Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar.