American linguist, Columbia University professor, and prolific public intellectual born 1965. Known for his work on creole languages, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and sharp heterodox critiques of progressive racial politics, including his characterization of anti-racism as a quasi-religion.
Challenges both linguistic prescriptivism and ideological orthodoxy in racial discourse; argues AAVE is a fully developed linguistic system, not degraded English; diagnoses performative anti-racism as a new kind of religious thinking.
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