The War at Home: Militarized and Racialized Identities in the University ‘Critical Language’ Classroom

A Primary Symbolic boundary: ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’

Clear boundaries between us and them were quickly established and reproduced among ROTC and heritage students within the first weeks of the initial semester. I first present early evidence of the primary symbolic boundary us/them as it relates to students’ emergent concerns over asynchronic motivations for enrolling in the course. From there, I focus on two supporting and mutually reinforcing locally-constructed binaries – soldiers/civilians and white/non-white – that reinforce the master-level us/them symbolic boundary. Of key note, the largely symbolic identities of ROTC members as soldiers and Iranian heritage learners as non-white accomplish significant boundary work to transform and consecrate what are at best liminal, ascribed identities. While ROTC students have yet to be deployed into military action and Iranian-Americans are in fact white by legal definition, these identities are fixed into clear and immutable local understandings as soldiers/white and civilians/non-white, respectively.

In advance of their arrival, students possessed and expressed an array of motivations for enrolling in the course. Martín, a Mexican-American sophomore and linguistics major and thus neither a heritage nor ROTC learner, describes his own motivations, which involve a growing connection to Iranian people in the USA:

Okay, so I remember I had a friend in middle school that spoke Arabic. Then in high school when I got involved with activist work and anti-war efforts I met someone who was Iranian. I got a ride home from her and heard her speaking on the phone in Persian with her mom … it was one of the coolest things I’d ever heard. When I found there was Persian [at university] I was so stoked. Because even though the syntax threw me off completely, the language is beautiful and I enjoyed the class so much. It didn’t matter that I didn’t come from an Iranian household. I felt like I was accepted as part of the class.

Here, Martín connects his linguistic interest in Persian to his anti-war activist engagements and relationships with Iranians from his home community. He describes feeling accepted in a majority-Iranian classroom despite arriving at the university with little background in Persian language and culture. Martín counterpoises his scholarly and political commitment to learning Persian in contrast to what he later describes as instrumental, career-minded reasons for ROTC enrollment. In the following passage, he relays a sense of nervous excitement in anticipation of meeting Iranian-heritaged classmates, whose presence he expected, and his first encounter with ROTC students, whose enrollment he hadn’t expected:

I was really nervous and really scared to see how I would fit into the classroom because I assumed the majority of students were Iranian. [O]nce I showed up, it took me by surprise to see the ROTC students and to learn they were taking it for ‘requirement’ reasons. I just felt that I was taking [it] for different reasons than they were.

Martín, one of the few non-heritage, non-ROTC students in the course, describes an early anxiety about ‘fitting in’, imagining the major divide to be between heritage learners and second-language learners like himself. Though he did not initially anticipate the presence of ROTC students in the course, after first encounter, he is careful to distinguish their motivations from his own (‘I just felt that I was taking [it] for different reasons than they were’), implying that they were enrolled as a ‘requirement’ of military service and monetary compensation. In this way, the us/them boundary began to take shape even in the earliest days of class.

This was also the first formal Persian class for the 20 ‘heritage’ enrollees. All were, however, experienced in ‘Pinglish’, ⁷ such that they could deliver terse responses to the directives of their first-generation immigrant parents: ‘set the table’, ‘say hello to your grandfather’, ‘be careful!’. Despite these students’ ability to pronounce the more guttural Persian consonants and vowels – a mimeograph of what they had overheard in their childhood homes – their ‘heritage’ reasons for enrollment proved far less uniform. Two were using Persian to fulfill a foreign language requirement for majors like Global Studies and Political Science. Five others were chemistry and biology majors who enrolled for the assumed GPA bump it would add to their otherwise challenging ‘hard science’ transcripts. The other 13 Iranian heritage learners were, plainly put, motivated to enroll by the braided second-generation logics of shame, desire, and responsibility (Kibria, 1997). For them, the Persian classroom offered a promising way out of moments when the right word seemed to rest just outside one’s mouth, and a place where phonetics could finally be brought into grammatically-correct relief. As Pedram, an Iranian-American junior, explained: ‘it just gets embarrassing when you have to interrupt yourself all the time to ask your parents for the right word’. Some heritage learners also felt like they were ‘getting away with something’ by enrolling in the course. Sina, an Iranian-heritaged freshman, articulated two goals for his enrollment in Persian class, which he framed as ‘probably typical for most of the Iranian kids in our class: I took it not only to improve my skills … but I have to be honest here, I thought this might be easy since I grew up hearing Farsi [Persian] around the house.’ Given that Sina had described his motivations for enrollment as ‘typical’ of the other Iranian students in the course, I asked him to describe what he perceived, then, as the ROTC students’ motivations for enrollment in Persian. After a long pause, he said:

I know they get paid and all but … is it supposed to improve their standing in the military? Because, and I don’t mean this in a mean way, but … they did not seem like they were actually trying to learn the language.

Sina’s perception that the ROTC students were enrolled in Persian for reasons different than his own is intriguing because while he ‘admits’ to taking Persian for the expected grade boost to his transcript, he also does not take seriously that the ROTC students were there to ‘actually learn the language’. Instead, Sina frames their enrollment as driven by monetary stipend and career advancement while admitting that his own reasons are complicated, too.

ROTC students were somewhat less forthcoming in explaining their motivations for enrollment. When I asked Justin about his reasons for taking Persian, he responded briskly that ‘it’s either this or Arabic to get ahead’. Other ROTC members demurred when asked, citing ‘personal choice’, making it possible that they were ‘reluctant respondents’ (Adler and Adler, 2001) given their positionality in the classroom (non-heritage, male, ‘soldier’, student) versus my own (heritage, female, ‘civilian’, researcher). However, in the participant observational component of the fieldwork, the ROTC learners made fairly consistent reference to their future careers as military officers, suggesting career advancement as a likely causal factor for enrollment. Furthermore, and as discussed below, the military learners demonstrated disproportionately infrequent attendance and tardiness despite sustained enrollment through all three semesters of the Beginning Persian sequence, whereas heritage learner enrollment decreased by half over the course of the year. Students’ competing motivations for enrollment proved an important and early building block in the construction of an us/them symbolic boundary. Two complementary, secondary binaries, soldiers/civilians and white/non-white, further retrenched the boundaries between ROTC and heritage learners over the course sequence.

‘Soldiers vs. Civilians’: A Secondary Binary

The locally-constructed binary between soldiers and civilians was evident across three main sources of data: styles of dress among students, the spatial arrangement of students and deference to soldiers’ space, and the ‘telling case’ (Mitchell, 1984) of Hamid, a non-ROTC, non-heritage student who initially identified with ROTC students and courted their friendship, only to eventually develop an affinity for his fellow civilian classmates.

All students arrived on the first day of class wearing a mix of visibly branded and non-branded casual clothing. In contrast to most students’ casual dress which, when infrequently branded featured logos of popular mall chain stores (e.g. Abercrombie & Fitch, Old Navy), five of six ROTC students were immediately identifiable by their military-branded casual garb: t-shirts, sweatshirts, and baseball caps emblazoned with ‘Army’ or ‘Marines’ logos. As such, from the first day of class and throughout the year, military and non-military students experienced one another as visibly marked, separate populations. The use of readily identifiable clothing to mark this difference was a significant choice leveraged by ROTC students, as most of their military garb (with the exception of Class C uniforms, as discussed below) was neither issued by the ROTC program nor required to be worn during class or leisure hours.

Though casual military apparel is readily available for purchase in retail stores and seen around campus generally, ROTC students’ garb was initially confusing to non-ROTC classmates in the Persian course. Some of the confusion might be attributed to their initial lack of awareness about the course being offered through Title VI federal funds as a ‘critical language’ in service of military interests. However, the ROTC learners’ continual presentations of self in military branded shirts, sweatshirts, and hats offered a visible reminder of soldier/civilian distinction throughout the year. These distinctions were sharpened when ROTC students occasionally attended class in their ‘Class C Uniforms’ (Figure 1). Whereas casual-military garb hinted at a distinction between would-be soldiers and ascribed civilians, the wearing of official ROTC-issued uniforms cemented the binary. Once again, most non-ROTC students found this hastening of the soldier identity among ROTC students confusing or troubling, although Hamid, a non-ROTC, non-heritage student who initially identified with the ROTC learners, at first loudly exclaimed his opinion that the Class C Uniforms were ‘badass!’

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Figure 1.

ROTC Class C Uniform and ACU Cap.

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Figure 2.

Spatial Map of the Classroom.

The spatial arrangements of the classroom further clarified the locally constructed soldier/civilian binary. Spatial dynamics, and specifically the placement of instructors and learners within a classroom, fundamentally shape the social interactions that follow (Johnson, 1982). Here, daily instruction took place around a ‘distance-reinforcing’ (Hall, 1969) oblong seminar table that held 20 conference room-style chairs in an ‘inner’ circle, with 10 additional chairs arranged in a concentric ‘outer’ circle. Large chalkboards lined three of the four classroom walls and were used often throughout the course of instruction. The seminar table was positioned squarely within the center of the classroom, such that its longest sides were parallel with two of the chalkboards and its shorter ends were parallel to a wall of windows (the ‘back’ of the classroom) and the wall that held the third chalkboard and the entrance to the room (the ‘front’ of the classroom)

Beginning with the first day of class, the instructor sat at the ‘front’, which placed her at one of the shorter ends of the seminar table, closest to the classroom door and the third chalkboard. Accordingly, students arranged themselves around the remaining three sides of the table; those who did not arrive in time to secure one of the 20 chairs at the seminar table were forced to sit in the outer circle and balance their notes and books upon their laps. Just as the instructor always sat at the ‘front’ of the class, a consistent seating pattern quickly materialized among the students: Iranian heritage learners and the few non-heritage, non-ROTC students would sit at the longest sides of the seminar tables and in the outer circle while ROTC learners would sit closest to the windows at the ‘back’ of the classroom, at the end of the table that directly faced the instructor. The effect was such that the soldiers were at once positioned in the farthest possible place from the instructor yet enjoyed the most direct sightlines to her, the classroom door, and the three chalkboards. In contrast, the ascribed civilians, while physically closer to the instructor, found their attention pivoting back and forth between chatting ROTC students at one end of the seminar table and course instruction delivered at the other. As such, the spatial relations within the room took on a tiered hierarchy, with Tier 1 soldier seats providing both table access for workbooks and clear sightlines to the instructor and all three regularly used chalkboards, Tier 2 civilian seats providing table access but only clear sightlines to two of the three chalkboards, and Tier 3 less desirable civilian seats providing neither table access nor clear sightlines to all three chalkboards.

While initial seating arrangements may have emerged out of random chance and continued through new friendships or habits, any later variation to the seating order only occurred within the abovementioned two types of civilian seats. That is, civilian students (seated in Tier 2 and 3 areas) sometimes switched seats with one another but never encroached onto Tier 1 soldier territory. This spatial boundary became particularly clear on occasions in which civilians who sat in the least desirable Tier 3 ‘outer’ seats – forced to balance workbooks on their knees as they wrote out exercises – used other civilian classmates’ tardiness to move into the more desirable Tier 2 seats. These same students, despite ROTC tardiness, did not ever move into Tier 1 seats. Across the totality of the year, the relationship of civilian students to chairs in the Tier 2 and Tier 3 spaces was flexible from day-to-day and shifted regularly. This permeability did not extend, however, into the most desirable Tier 1 soldier seats. This suggests the boundary was between ROTC students (soldiers) and all other students (civilians), regardless of heritage status.

Although ROTC students established an early, informal de facto reservation of what were arguably the most desirable seats in the room, civilian students treated the boundary between these Tier 1 seats and all others as impregnable, even when Tier 1 table seats were left vacant due to ROTC absence or tardiness throughout the session. It became clear that soldier seats were considered off-limits by civilian students who found more comfort in balancing notebooks on their knees than in borrowing a seat within soldiers’ space. Much like the self-selected sartorial distinctions between soldiers and civilians, this tiered and locally immutable binary was reinscribed in the social partitioning of space within the room. Hamid, a non-ROTC, non-HL student who initially expressed affinity with ROTC students, was the closest civilian student to transgress this boundary, without ever fully doing so.

An Afghan-American sophomore, Hamid sat flush against the boundary between soldiers and civilians. Given his initial interest and allegiance with ROTC students, he was the most likely boundary-spanner between the two groups. Jasmine, an Iranian-heritage sophomore who usually sat at the opposite end of the seminar table, took notice of Hamid’s immediate connection to the ROTC students. When I later asked Jasmine if she considered Hamid ‘someone who was good at straddling different groups’, she addressed the initial moment of encounter in her answer: ‘Hamid found commonalities … with the kids who were fully Persian and, well you know, [Persians are] closely related to Afghans and Middle Easterners. But he’s also really interested in ROTC so he bonded with those guys as soon as he saw them on the first day.’ Importantly, as Jasmine describes Hamid’s role in the class, she defines the major cleavage Hamid bridged as the one between ‘fully Persian’ heritage learners and ROTC students.

Hamid also recalls the moment when he first realized the presence of ROTC students in the course:

It was right away. And yeah, at the time, I was kinda surprised. But I think that was because I was young, I guess? Like, after taking more and more political science classes, looking back it makes much more sense. And I was intrigued. When I first found out they were ROTC, I figured, ok, cool people I can relate to. Then when I found out that they were getting paid to take the class, I was still surprised.

Initially unaware of the funding structure for critical language instruction, Hamid was surprised to see ROTC students enrolled, and particularly surprised to see ROTC students who visually signified their allegiance to the military through their sartorial choices on the first day of class. Due to his personal background, interest in geopolitical relations, and curiosity about the military, he first felt a sense of kinship or similarity with the ROTC students. He described the American military to the ROTC students in the moments before the instructor arrived one morning as ‘the people who saved my family from a hellhole’. Continually disappointed that each successive military branch he attempted to join excluded him from service due to health-related conditions, Hamid was ‘intrigued’ by the presence of the ROTC students.

Knowing that Hamid had expressed an interest in working in the counter-terrorism field, I asked if he had enrolled in the course to improve his Persian skills for professional reasons. I was surprised when he replied, ‘Nah … I enrolled because I wanted to speak [Dari] better so I could understand my parents better … I want to be able to speak it fluently and not have any hang ups or anything.’ ⁸ Despite his stated career goals, Hamid describes wanting to forge a more rich connection with the native Dari speakers in his own family, consistent with the same motivations that animated the majority of heritage learners to join the course. Hamid presents an intriguing, liminal case as he identifies with the ROTC students for personal and political reasons while still experiencing dissimilarity from them due to his status as an unpaid student in the course and an aspiring soldier who cannot gain admission to the military for health reasons. In turn, he shares likeness with the heritage learners as he enrolls and remains in the course to forge a deeper cultural connection with his family. Importantly, nowhere in his self-conceptualization as a learner of Persian or Dari does Hamid articulate a connection between his critical language coursework and his goal to work in the defense or counter-terrorism fields.

As an enrollee in all three semesters of the course, Hamid remained the only student to attempt a transgressive position in the soldier/civilian binary within the classroom. Yet according to Hamid, the chasm between these two populations only widened outside of class. Though he hoped to be accepted by the ROTC students as at least a favored civilian ally, this was ultimately not the case. He raised this issue when I had asked if he learned more about the process of becoming an officer following his new connections with the ROTC students:

Oh yeah, especially from Justin. We kinda hung out outside of class, but not very much. I try and keep in contact with the guys from time to time, I’ll see them on campus and say ‘hi,’ stop and chat, I respect the dudes but we didn’t hang out too much outside of the class. I ended up not having as much of a connection [with them]. There are other people [heritage learners] I met through the class that I ended up staying in better touch with. That surprised me.

Hamid expresses surprise and disappointment that his contact with Justin and the other ROTC students faded away in the following academic year. Though he initially experienced a sense of kinship and similarity with the ROTC students, the discrepancy between Hamid’s identity as an aspiring soldier and his identification with his Afghan heritage grows more profound following his experience of acceptance and bonding with the Iranian heritage learners. Despite sharing certain core personal and political interests with the military learners, differences based on phenotype, ethnicity, positionality, and most importantly, consecration of the boundaries between soldier/civilian would go on to define Hamid’s experience of estrangement from the ROTC students both inside and outside the classroom.

As evidenced in the section below, a complementary symbolic boundary of white/non-white may have also played a role in Hamid’s ultimate rejection by ROTC students. Despite the federal, state, and university classification of Afghan and Iranian persons as white, Hamid’s Afghan heritage and sincere engagement with Iranian cultural customs and practices enforce his local categorization as non-white in the critical language classroom. Hamid, occupying a liminal space between these groups due to his perceived identity markers and affiliations, offers a particularly instructive case for the impermeability of symbolic boundaries in the critical language classroom.

‘White vs. Non-white’: Another Secondary Binary

Another secondary-level binary, complementary to soldiers/civilians, was also locally constructed and reinforced in the critical language classroom. This second binary, white/non-white, maps neatly onto the major symbolic cleavage in the room, with ROTC students – irrespective of their ethno-racial backgrounds – locally constructed as white and all other students locally constructed as non-white, contradicting the ‘white’ legal classification of Iranians in the USA. I rely on three sites of evidence for the white/non-white binary. The first example involves a tense moment in which an ROTC student actually verbalized this localized racial coding structure to the support (and embarrassment) of ROTC students and the concern and discomfort of others. Following that, I offer additional illustrative examples of the classroom white/non-white binary in which racialized ‘disrespect’ is felt by non-white students. Significantly, this highly localized racial construction – like the clear construction of a solider/civilian binary out of what is at best a liminal ‘soldier’ identity for ROTC students – is again a particular facet of ascribed student identities in the critical language classroom. Just as ROTC learners are ‘liminal’ soldiers, Iranian heritage learners are ‘liminal’ racial others. Within the nested levels of university, state, and federal classification, Iranians and other Middle Easterners are classified as white (Jamal, 2008) though their immigration histories, profile among law enforcement, and self-understandings suggest a more complicated non-white racial identity (Blake, 2010; Farnia, 2011; Tehranian, 2008, Zia-Ebrahimi, 2011).

The most explicit instance in which a locally constructed racial binary between white and non-white students was verbalized occurred during the second semester of the course. In honor of the approaching spring season, students were asked to write prose for the first time: two paragraphs summarizing the major activities and traditions surrounding Nowruz (New Year), the annual Persian celebration of the Spring Equinox. From the far end of the table where ROTC students sat in their Class C uniforms, anxiety was expressed:

Following this exchange, nearly all of the ‘civilians’ stared downward at the table while the ROTC students’ facial expressions ranged from indignant to sheepish. Under this newly articulated racial logic, Martin – a Mexican-American linguistics major with no special advantage in summarizing two paragraphs from Wikipedia – was cast as non-white while Brandon, a Mexican-American ROTC member, was instead cast as white. This was the most clearly articulated expression of the racial binary particular to this classroom, in which an otherwise ‘non-white’ student is classified as white and a technically ‘white’ majority of Iranian students are classified as non-white. To that end, I asked Ryan, who was involved in the Nowruz exchange, to describe what he recalled about the incident:

The first thing I remember is the surprise, the shock I felt that Justin went there, you know … into a racial thing… but then my next reaction was like, yeah, hey, he has a good point! So I blurted out that I agreed with him. I don’t know if it was because people were pissed we were complaining, or if it was awkward to be talking about it so openly, but the classroom got really quiet.

The ensuing discomfort in the room, expressed verbally by Ryan and other students in later private conversation, did not come merely from the ROTC students’ implicit racial classification structure of the space, but from its having been expressed so overtly. Other instances reinforced the locally constructed white/non-white binary, as ROTC students asserted their white identities by overtly performing for other students a disinterest in non-white Persian culture and language; as demonstrated in other fieldsites, whites at times actualize their ‘whiteness’ through the assertion of the cultural heritages and customs of ‘non-whites’ as inferior (Bonilla-Silva, 2002). In accordance with a micro-interactional approach, the local construction of all ROTC students as white is reinforced when ROTC students overtly perform dismissal of Iranian heritage and language. The symbolic boundary between us/white/soldiers and them/non-white/civilians is thusly cemented.

Martín, who grew interested in Persian when hearing his friend speak the language, recalled an instance in which students were asked to work in pairs to construct and speak sentences aloud:

The ROTC guys would laugh at a lot. They made a joke of it, didn’t take it as seriously. I remember when we’d build sentences with new vocabulary words, they’d make bizarre sentences and laugh among themselves and it didn’t make sense to us. If I could be absolutely blunt with you, from the beginning, they didn’t seem to be interested in learning the language. They were there for their ROTC stuff and it seemed like it was a burden to them. That they had to not only learn a new language but research another culture or another people that they didn’t want to learn about in the first place …

Rather than assert that the ROTC students were reacting to the assignment from their subject-positions as ‘non-heritage’ students, Martín attributes their negative reaction to the fact that they’d been asked for the first time to ‘research another culture that they didn’t want to learn about in the first place’. Martín’s memory of the incident indicates the existence of subtle and overt disrespect such as the performance of boredom or mockery of the language deployed with regularity across the academic year. As a result, the class was bifurcated between white soldiers performing disinterest in the culture and language of locally-constructed civilian non-whites, while enrolled in a course centered on their language and culture. This cultural dismissal was most troubling to heritage learners as it rejects out of hand the component of heritage learning most valuable to them.

Several months after class ended, I asked Nina, an Iranian-heritaged sophomore enrolled in all three semesters of the Persian course, if she recalled any disruptions in class:

The first person I think of was Ryan [an ROTC student] for some reason. There were moments when he or the other ROTC students were being disrespectful. Talking during the lessons. We felt a tension over it, a power struggle. And you have to couple this with the fact that sometimes they would come late and I think, you know, it was like 10 minutes late into class, a few days in a row. It was noticeable. I don’t remember anyone except the ROTC kids being disruptive.

Nina, more than any of the other students with whom I spoke, stressed that she did not ‘mind’ the presence of the military learners. She even mentioned finding Ryan particularly funny and engaging as a classmate. Yet she frames the ‘disrespect’ that the habitually tardy ROTC students showed as a form of ‘tension’ and a ‘power struggle’ that affected others in the class.

In a separate conversation with Hamid, I asked him what he would chat about with the ROTC students he had befriended from Persian class:

Oh, just random stuff. Stuff about the military, training, hitting the gym. Making fun of the class. But not the people in the class, just like certain aspects of it [laughing]. One thing we would always do, the word for twenty [bist], sounds like the English word ‘beast,’ right? So we would always say that to each other and yell it, like ‘BEAAAAAAAST!’

Echoing Martín’s comments regarding the ‘mocking’ of Persian which he noted amongst ROTC students, Hamid recalls with pleasure moments of bonding that ‘making fun’ of Persian vocabulary words engendered. Recalling Sina’s comment about who was really in the class to ‘learn’, the sincerity with which ROTC students came to class each morning was under suspicion by some classmates.

Another regular feature of instruction in which asymmetrical dynamics surfaced was a daily exercise in which the instructor would ask a handful of students to write in Persian on one of three chalkboards in plain view of their classmates. This was done to help students practice handwriting, gain experience using vocabulary words, build complex sentences, and execute grammar drills. In these moments, the racialized public performance of ‘bad handwriting’ found its widest audience. Ali, an Iranian-American junior, recalls:

The ROTC [students] would write on the board and you couldn’t at all tell what they were trying to write, which make me think they weren’t trying or maybe they wanted it to really be obvious that they weren’t trying. They would bust out laughing during the Friday [culture] labs.

Ali recalls these incidents in vivid detail, though he doesn’t attribute the acts to any student in particular. Instead, Ali remembers ‘all’ the ROTC students reacted to the lessons about Iranian culture with laughter. Just as the ROTC students most explicitly expressed their white identities in relation to the cultural Nowruz assignment, Persian vocabulary words and written script were ‘mocked’ too. Matters of Iranian culture and tradition elicited direct and dismissive responses.

I asked Derek why he and some of the other ROTC students would laugh during the culture lessons. Derek assured me that ‘we were definitely not making fun of the Persian kids in the class, or making fun of Iranian culture … we were just trying to be jokesters, you know? Maybe it was shitty of us? We didn’t mean anything by it.’ Derek and the ROTC students with whom I spoke described their presence in class as one of good intentions, though as in the above quote, they exhibited a degree of ambivalence about what else their laughter might ‘mean’. And though Derek perhaps would not frame his performance of ‘bad handwriting’ or his broad reaction to the Friday culture lessons as dismissive, in the critical language classroom, it was perceived as such by others. ⁹ I would suggest that Derek’s own recounting of being a ‘jokester’ holds out the possibility that he was cognizant of the work it did in the class (‘maybe it was shitty of us? We didn’t mean anything by it’). In the least, it seems to have registered in Derek’s recollection that these interactions reinscribed the primary symbolic boundary us/them between those in the ROTC program and all others who were not.

In sum, the fieldsite presents significant evidence of a locally constructed white/non-white binary which contradicts ‘official’ racial classifications: the overt verbal expression of this binary and the lines along which it was delineated; the repeated performance of white racial identity via the expression of racist dismissals of non-white language and writing, and most expressly, white resistance to non-white culture and customs. As discussed below, the two mutually reinforcing binaries of soldier/civilian and white/non-white create an impregnable symbolic boundary between us and them in the critical language classroom – a space at ‘home’ in which ROTC students may intentionally or unintentionally practice militarized soldier-identities for war.