Grafterview 1: Khalab Blagburn

RELATED: Read Khalab's piece

[Transcript of video interview]

Rochelle Lu
Today, we have Khalab here with us for our first Grafterview. He submitted his paper titled “The Gatekeeping of Black Voices: How Standard English Enforcement Perpetuates Educational Racism.” We're very happy to have you here.

Khalab Blagburn
Happy to be here!

Rochelle Lu
Our first question is: why did you choose to submit your piece to Graft, and how does language and linguistics shape your academic and or creative work?

Khalab Blagburn
Yeah, I think language has been a big part of my upbringing and learning that I've done as an individual. I'm very passionate about learning languages. I think it opens doors that otherwise aren't available to you. And so looking at African American Vernacular English as another lens to look at language was very fascinating to me, and I saw Graft as an opportunity to share this research I'd done in an amazing class with the greater population in the Claremont Colleges.

Rochelle Lu
So speaking of your class, we know that you offered this piece in your “Psychology of the Black Experience” class. So could you perhaps talk to us more about why you decided to focus on this topic for your final op-ed paper, and especially focusing on something that extends into linguistics rather than pure psychology? Which your class titles states.

Khalab Blagburn
Well, this course, “the Psych of Black Experience,” the general focus was unraveling the development of myths of black inferiority, particularly in the domain of psychology. And a big focus was language as one of the core parts of cognition. And so we learned a lot about how language is politicized and how certain forms of language are determined to be inferior or superior based on whoever has power. At that time, I looked at African American Vernacular English as being an example of this mythology of an inferiority being deemed or placed on a form of speech, which is equally valuable with laws of grammar that are able to be understood. And so this is how I connected it to linguistics and further to Graft.

Rochelle Lu
Cool! So your class sounds very interesting, and we have one last question for you. When do you feel most connected to your cultural language slash dialect? And when do you feel furthest from it?

Khalab Blagburn
Well, I would say, so my mother's family is from a country in East Africa called Eritrea, and the language there is that spoken predominantly is called Tigrinya. And it's a language, unfortunately, my mom, she didn't teach it and speak it to me growing up, and so I've had this tension when I'm in like Eritrean spaces where I'm not able to understand the language that's being spoken. And so that pressure I felt or inability to understand the speech, kind of instilled this value and appreciation for language in my life. And so I really dedicated myself to, like, learning Spanish in high school, things like that, and having this lens of this perspective, rather of language as something that is more than just a tool that you can use to exchange information, I think it really connects people, and I oddly learned that from not being able to connect with people because I didn't have that experience with my family's native language. And so I think that's where this interest for writing a paper about AAVE came into my focus for the class is paper, the final paper. But yeah, I think that is how that experience of being distant from my cultural language brought me to the work on this paper.

Rochelle Lu
Thank you so much for your time today, and you can find Khalab’s piece in Graft’s Zeroth Issue, so stay tuned for that.

Khalab Blagburn
Thank you.