Bianca brings about interesting criticism in regards to the framework that Taylor employs when investigating the ways and purposes of how women engage with technology and games: we wanna just communicate over tea and donuts. Personally, the gaming community has been a source of self-exploration and an opportunity to shoot things and people and then to write about it.

What I would like to talk about is Gray’s study. I found it interesting that Gray intersected racial profiling and linguistic profiling within the gaming community. Though Gray isn’t a compositionist or a language instructor, I did think, given her experience learning “Spanglish”, that she’d at least highlight the differences between language groups within the gaming community. Linguicism is most prevalent in K-12 education, though, where students are sifted from district to district based on their linguistic backgrounds, where ESL student are not permitted to be in the same classrooms, or schools, as African American students because they don’t speak proper English, where instructors will say how it’s “easier” to teach the “white” ESL students than the students of color. So while Gray thinks that “marginalized communities have a variety of responses to the inequalities they face which since the earliest suffrage movements, some members within these groups have learned to resist”, students at the elementary age aren’t capable of resisting the inequalities they face as a result of linguicism and racism and their parents are likely ill-equipped to do so as well.

I realize my spiel about K-12 education may seem to be a mismatch to Gray’s conversation, so let’s explore what linguiscism and racism means today in a “post-racial” society where the influx of immigrants is at its highest. Imagine that these students matriculate through IN k-12 schools and then take a FYC where they’re expected to take play video games and engage in these online communities: what type of profiling do you think they’ll experience compared to their monolingual peers? What type of resistance are students going to engage in when these situations emerge (as they will)? Can we teach resistance in a classroom? Or do we teach complacency, head burrowing?

I suppose what I’m getting at is that many of these conversations need to be broadened to include other Others, especially when we’re looking from a pedagogical POV.