Racial and Linguistic Belonging: The Juxtaposition of Brown, Lau & Plyler

The BU Wheelock Language Education Speakers Series brings well-known scholars in the field of applied linguistics to campus to discuss their work. These talks are open to all members of the BU community, as well as scholars and students of applied linguistics throughout the Greater Boston area.

The seminal Supreme Court language rights case, Lau v. Nichols (1974) found that the San Francisco Unified School District failed to provide adequate and appropriate instructional programming to 1,800 students of Chinese ancestry who did not speak English, which denied them a meaningful opportunity to participate in a public education. In the fields of bilingual education and language policy, Lau is regarded as the national case that changed the legal landscape for bilingual education as an allowable provision in schools for multiple ethnolinguistic groups.

Lau passed just as mandatory busing based on directives from the Brown case for racial integration was being implemented city-wide. Plyler would pass just eight years later, declaring that any child had the right to a free and public education regardless of immigration status. With most large districts absolved of requirements for racial integration and increasing policies to reduce educational provisions for bilingual and immigrant students, we are at an urgent inflection point of de-citzenry.

In this session, the stories of Cantonese-Chinese teachers, administrators, students, lawyers, and social activists’ illuminate how they intersected the aims of racial integration (busing) with language rights, setting stage for arguments made in Plyler, also shaping rationale for representation within voting rights. Using the framing of negative equity, which claims that every child deserves the same education is juxtaposed with positive equity, which asserts that the same education is never an equal education. Implications point to the need for historicizing Chinese language education and to build cross-racial and linguistic coalitions of curious solidarity to transform schools and communities for linguistic and racial equity.

Trish Morita-Mullaney is a Professor in Language and Literacy Education at Purdue University and holds a courtesy appointment in Asian American Studies program. Her research focuses on the intersections between language, gender and race and how this informs the identity acts of educators of multilingual communities. Guided by critical and feminist thought, she examines how these overlapping identities inform the logics of educational decision making for multilingual families. Her newer line of research focuses on how AAPI communities are pathologized as persistently foreign, thereby rationalizing a subtlety of subjugation and erasure. She has studied the Lau case and how it was developed, experienced, and implemented by the Chinese American community of San Francisco, representing the original history and voice of Lau. Her book, Lau v. Nichols and Chinese American Language Rights: The Sunrise and Sunset of Bilingual Education with Multilingual Matters was published in 2024 chronicling the story of Lau’s development and implementation within the Chinese community of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Her next book Asian Americans in Bilingualism and Bilingual Education: The Long Overdue Voice will be published in December 2025.

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