To be White is to colludein these practices, or to risk censure as "having no sense ofhumor" or being "politically correct." But White practiceis invisible to the monitoring of linguistic disorder. It is notunderstood by Whites as disorder—after all, they are not,literally, "speaking Spanish" (and indeed the phenomenaof public ungrammaticality, orthographical absurdity,and parodic mispronunciations of Spanish are evidencethat they go to some lengths to distance themselves fromsuch an interpretation of their behavior [Hill 1993a]). In-stead, they are simply being "natural": funny, relaxed, col-loquial, authentic.

You know, I've noticed that most of the teachersnever use any Spanish around here unless it's somethingnegative." A Spanish-speaking Chicano businesswomansaid, "When you first hear that stuff, you think, that's nice,they're trying, but then you hear more and more and yourealize that there's something nasty underneath."

Anthropologists share a contradictory heritage: Our in-tellectual ancestors include both founders of scientific ra-cism and important pioneers of the antiracist movement.