"We identify ourselves more with the Blacks of America. But, this is normal, this is genetic. We can't, since we live in Canada, we can't identify ourselves with Whites or country music, you know. We are going to identify ourselves on the contrary with people of our color, who have our lifestyle, you know,"an African teen who has recently immigranted to Canada tells the researcher in the six-month critical ethnographic study asking how different raced, gendered, sexualized, abled, and classed social identities enter the process of learning an L2 (361).
What is interesting about this study is that here, these twelve students chose to have a marginalized linguistic norm as the target rather than the one spoken by the majority--and by nearly all of their new peers in Canada. They chose a norm that they saw in popular culture, that they seemed to find some sort of reflection in. "Becoming Black [my notes added here: they were not seen as such in Africa], I have argued, was an identity signifier produced by and producing the very process of BESL. [....] In becoming Black, the African youths were interpellated by Black popular cultureal forms, rap and hip-hop, as sites of identifiication" (365)
Within this interesting study of why and how these Blacks chose their "new" identities were some suggestions made by the author/researcher on how to include transformative pedagogy in the classroom in order for these students to see themselves reflected in the curriculum somewhere. He places rap and hip-hop as sites of hope and possibility, with that hope that all learners can see multiple ways of speaking, being and learning through these genres. "To put it more broadly," Ibrahim writes, "maybe the time has come to close the split between minority students' identities and the school curriculum and between those identities and classroom pedagogies, subjects and materials" (367).
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