Increasing commodification of progressive language in public discourse over the past four decades has resulted in users’ indexical alignment with anti-racist politics becoming unmoored from expectations of legitimate action toward dismantling white supremacy. In this essay, we describe how this process is enacted through virtue signaling—highlighting one’s morality through the use of language and other signs that invoke progressive sociopolitical values—and the ways it mobilizes the linguistic repertoire of anti-Blackness. Theorizing this behavior provides a framework to locate and confront the mechanisms that maintain white supremacy and the actors who align themselves with it.

中文翻译：

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美德信号和反黑人的语言曲目：或者，“我会投票支持奥巴马第三个任期”

在过去的四年里，公共话语中进步语言的日益商品化导致用户与反种族主义政治的索引一致从对消除白人至上的合法行动的期望中解脱出来。在本文中，我们描述了这一过程是如何通过美德信号来实现的——通过使用语言和其他唤起进步社会政治价值观的符号来强调一个人的道德——以及它动员反黑人的语言曲目的方式。将这种行为理论化提供了一个框架来定位和应对维护白人至上的机制以及与之结盟的行为者。