Antisocial language teaching: English and the pervasive pathology of whitenessBy J. P. B.Gerald. Multilingual Matters. 192 pages. Price USD 89.95 (hardcover), USD 24.95 (paperback), USD 13.00 (e‐book). ISBN 978–180041–326‐9

Abstract

Gerald is a language educator and a theorist. More importantly, Gerald is also a Black and neuro-divergent (cishet) man with professional experience in English language teaching (ELT) (he spent his early career as an English language teacher in South Korea and New York City). Gerald has also spent his entire life immersed in white spaces. Nevertheless, for many years he refused to accept the impact of racism upon his life, ignoring his social discomfort with what he perceived as his own shortfalls. Recently, however, Gerald recognized the impact of racism has had on him. He began to develop a body of work that problematized the whole of the ELT industry.This book is partially an autoethnographic narrative that intersects with his own teaching courses and research projects, in which Gerald revisits his research, practice, writing, and teaching journey in the ELT industry. It is a rhetorical narrative that intertwines together theories, concepts, textual analyses, interviews, and autoethnographic data from the lens of antiracist practices to essentially rearticulate the major issues with the ideologies and institutions behind the discipline of ELT. Gerald diagnoses the ELT industry as in dire need of treatment, with the solution being a full decentering of whiteness (Gerald, 2020). Overall, the book is a powerful, thought-provoking, and engaging work that welcomes readers to think critically about how we understand, accomplish, and discursively construct different aspects of what whiteness means while challenging the very foundations and dominant discourses on which the "teaching of standardized English" is established.For Gerald, discourses on whiteness, language, and ability had increasingly become problematic when he started wrestling with his own experiences with racism. In so doing, Gerald starts tracking the history of whiteness and its chameleonic and self-serving definitions (Part 1). Whiteness is, according to Gerald (p. 14), "the world's greatest example of multilevel marketing, a massive pyramid scheme," as it "feeds upon all of us, including the people who bow before it, and it creates no victors, only a desperate battle to avoid losing." Whiteness has positioned Blackness, dis/ability, and unstandardized English as its opposites, making the self-serving cases that language ideologies and language teaching have been employed as tools of pathologization for members of -Other groups (see also Dovchin, 2022). The ideologies and practices of whiteness are like The Great Pyramid Scheme, as its development has been gradual, systematic, and