Constant scrutiny,vigilance,and self-talk: The burdens of linguistic racism for international students at a predominantly white institution

Participants and data collection

This study was conducted at a large research university in the Midwestern United States, where approximately 70% of enrolled students identify as white and about 15% are classified as international students, reflecting the demographic profile of a typical PWI. This context shapes the racialized and linguistic dynamics of campus life, influencing how international students navigate academic and social spaces. The data for this study originate from a broader investigation of international students’ experiences with race, language, and belonging at a large Midwestern research university. The larger project explored how students navigated racialized and linguistic dynamics across academic and social contexts (Xiao et al., under review). The present analysis focuses specifically on experiences of linguistic racism and the forms of racialized emotional labor that emerged as students responded to these encounters. Participants included 24 international students enrolled across undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs.

The sample represented a diverse range of racial backgrounds (see Table 1). Thirteen participants identified as East Asian, six as Latin American, two as South Asian, one as Southeast Asian, one as Central Asian, and one as white European. Seven self-identified as men, 15 self-identified as women, one as non-binary, and one did not report their gender identity. Five of the students came to the U.S. less than 1 year ago, while others have been in the country for a period ranging from one to 9 years. Thirteen participants were pursuing a doctoral degree, three a master’s degree, six a bachelor’s degree, and two a professional degree.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Demographic information.

Participant pseudonyms	Gender	Languages spoken	Country/Region	Years in the U.S.	Type of degree
Yiran	Man	Mandarin, English	Taiwan	2	Doctoral
Tanisha	Woman	Hindi, English	India	9	Doctoral
Meilin	Woman	English	Canada	<1	Doctoral
Jiwon	Woman	Korean	South Korea	3	Doctoral
Qian	Woman	Mandarin, Chinese Wu, English, sometimes Ho-Chunk and Japanese	China	4	Doctoral
Lixin	Prefer not to say	English, Chinese, Japanese	China	4	Bachelor
Dariel	Man	Spanish or English	Puerto Rico	<1	Doctoral
Zihan	Woman	Mandarin and English	China	6	Masters
Leo	Man	Chinese (Mandarin)	China	4	Bachelor
Shreya	Woman	English	India	6	Doctoral
Anran	Woman	Mandarin, English	China	3	Bachelor
Camilo	Man	Spanish, English, Portuguese, French	Colombia	2	Doctoral
Emma	Woman	Chinese, English, or none	China	3	Bachelor
Juliana	Woman	Spanish	Colombia/Spain	4	Professional
Kalisa	Woman	Thai	Thailand	5	Doctoral
Ramiro	Man	Spanish	Mexico	3	Doctoral
Camila	Woman	Spanish and English	Uruguay	8	Doctoral
Yuxin	Woman	Mandarin	China	1	Masters
Minh	Man	Vietnamese and English	Vietnam	<1	Doctoral
Jason	Man	Mandarin	Taiwan	7	Doctoral
Yujie	Woman	Chinese	China	3	Bachelor
Marcos	Man	Spanish, Portuguese, German, English	Chile	4	Doctoral
Haoran	Non-binary	Mandarin, Shanghainese, English	China	<1	Bachelor
Karina	Woman	Russian	Uzbekistan	<1	Masters

We generated data through semi-structured interviews conducted remotely during the 2024–25 academic year. Interviews encouraged participants to reflect on their experiences with race, language, and belonging in university settings. Depending on participants’ preferences, interviews were conducted in English, Mandarin Chinese, or Spanish by members of the research team. Recordings were transcribed verbatim, and excerpts originally produced in Chinese or Spanish were translated into English for analysis. Questions invited participants to discuss moments when language became salient in their interactions with peers, instructors, or university personnel, as well as how these encounters affected their participation, relationships, and sense of belonging on campus.

Data analysis

This study employed reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2022) to examine participants’ experiences with linguistic racism and racialized emotional labor. This approach allowed for a systematic yet flexible process of identifying and interpreting patterns in the data, while remaining grounded in participants’ own words and meanings. Thematic analysis allowed us to explore the nuanced ways in which international students narrated, interpreted, and responded to racialized and language-based encounters within a PWI context.

The analysis began with repeated readings of all interview transcripts to develop a thorough understanding of the data. During this process, analytic memos were recorded to capture emerging insights, possible connections between accounts, and preliminary reflections on how participants described their experiences. Consistent with Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis, our analytic process emphasized interpretation, reflexivity, and researcher subjectivity as resources for knowledge production rather than sources of bias to be eliminated (Braun and Clarke, 2022). Rather than treating themes as objectively “emerging” from the data, we approached themes as interpretive constructions developed through ongoing engagement with participants’ narratives, the broader theoretical frameworks, and our own positionalities as researchers. Drawing on both the literature on linguistic racism and racialized emotional labor and our iterative engagement with the transcripts, we developed preliminary analytic categories to help organize patterns across the dataset. These categories included perceptions of race in the U.S. context, perceptions of language and accent, experiences of linguistic racism such as accent discrimination or language-based stereotyping, emotional responses to these experiences, strategies for managing racialized emotions, and the institutional or interpersonal contexts in which these dynamics occurred. These categories remained flexible and were continuously revised throughout the analytic process as we moved between the data, analytic memos, and theoretical interpretations.

All transcripts were coded in NVivo 15, which facilitated the systematic organization and retrieval of data for deeper interpretive work. Coding was iterative and reflexive rather than linear, with ongoing discussions among the research team shaping how we interpreted participants’ accounts and conceptualized relationships across the dataset. Instead of seeking coding consensus or reliability in a positivist sense, our discussions focused on deepening interpretive engagement with the data and reflecting on how our own experiences and assumptions informed the analytic process. As coding progressed, we moved from descriptive labels to more interpretive categories that captured the relationships between linguistic racism and racialized emotional labor. This process led to the development of broader themes that illuminate how linguistic racism shapes the emotional experiences of international students, the labor involved in managing those emotions, and the ways these intertwined processes influence their academic and social navigation within the university.

Researcher positionality

Given our use of reflexive thematic analysis, we view researcher subjectivity not as a limitation to be minimized but as an integral part of the interpretive process (Braun and Clarke, 2022). Throughout the study, we engaged in ongoing reflexive discussions regarding how our social positions, migration histories, linguistic backgrounds, and institutional experiences shaped both our interactions with participants and our interpretations of the data. The first author is a Chinese international doctoral student at the same university where this study was conducted. As someone who has personally navigated the challenges of living and studying in a PWI, including experiences with linguistic stereotyping and the emotional labor of managing racialized encounters, the first author brings an insider perspective to the research. The second author is a faculty member who was formerly a Chinese international student. Her lived experiences with race and racism, along with observations of fellow international students’ encounters with linguistic racism, have informed a sustained scholarly commitment to this topic. The third author, a Chinese international doctoral student herself with more than 7 years of navigating PWIs in the U.S., uses her training in developmental and psychological frameworks to inform her interpretation of how structural forces and interpersonal dynamics intersect in students’ everyday lives.

At the same time, we recognize that insider and outsider positionalities are neither fixed nor absolute. While we shared certain experiences of internationalization, racialization, and navigating U.S. higher education with many participants, we did not uniformly share their national, linguistic, racial, gendered, or disciplinary identities. Participants also occupied diverse social positions and migration trajectories that differed from our own. Thus, we approached insiderhood and outsiderhood as fluid and relational rather than binary categories.

To support reflexivity throughout the research process, we maintained analytic memos, engaged in ongoing discussions about our assumptions and emotional responses to participants’ narratives, and critically reflected on how our own experiences with language, race, and academia shaped the questions we asked, the interactions we noticed, and the interpretations we foregrounded in the analysis. These reflexive conversations were particularly important given our personal proximity to the topic and helped us remain attentive to both resonances and tensions between our own experiences and those of participants.

“Good English” tests, accent policing, and the everyday performance of linguistic racism

Linguistic racism often takes shape through subtle yet persistent interactional practices, including but not limited to the patronizing comment, the unsolicited “correction,” and the heightened scrutiny of one’s accent. These moments rarely erupt into overt conflict; instead, they quietly position international students as deficient speakers who must constantly prove their worth. Consistent with raciolinguistic perspectives (Rosa and Flores, 2017), participants’ narratives suggest that these encounters were not simply about intelligibility or communication, but about how institutional listening practices racialized accented English as deficient, foreign, or less authoritative. The stories in this theme reveal how such everyday encounters operate as gatekeeping mechanisms, enforcing a hierarchy in which proximity to standardized white English is rewarded and deviation is sanctioned. Participants described an ecology of patronizing speech that began with simplified explanations and culminated in overt judgments about who speaks “proper” English. The narratives presented below illustrate different manifestations of linguistic racism, ranging from patronizing accommodations and assumptions about communicative competence to more explicit evaluations of accents and language practices.

We start with Lixin, an undergraduate student from China. Their story introduces one manifestation of linguistic racism, where seemingly considerate accommodations can nevertheless reinforce assumptions about linguistic deficiency. During office hours, they observed that their professor slowed his speech and avoided humor:

I think when I go to an office hour … when I’m asking the question, the professor tends to expand things in a much slower and, just in general, easier terms to understand. And I don’t really think the professor tells jokes with me that much … he knows that we both don’t want that to happen. That’s considerate, but, like, again, that’s a difference …sometimes, based on my accent, they would just conclude that I’m not good at English … they will just be less playful because they might think I won’t get the joke.

Lixin interprets the professor’s adjustments as well-intentioned yet limiting. Although they appreciate his desire to avoid misunderstandings, they note the loss of camaraderie and humor that native speakers enjoy. This dynamic mirrors Sender Dovchin’s (2020) observation that even well-intentioned corrections can constitute symbolic violence that reduces multilingual speakers to linguistic novices. Their experience reveals the double bind of accommodation that to be included, they must accept a reduced, simplified version of academic discourse. Their account suggests the emotional labor of suppressing irritation while remaining appreciative of institutional support. Their story illustrates a common experience with linguistic racism at the PWI and hints at how such experiences shape their emotional labor.

Camilo, a doctoral student from Colombia, offers a related yet distinct example of how linguistic racism can operate through seemingly well-intentioned accommodations. As an instructor, he observed his American students speaking naturally among themselves, but slowing down and overenunciating when addressing him:

Well, I guess you can think about it in a kind way. They are trying to be kind to you and try to make themselves understood and all that. But …I cannot help but feel that it’s kind of patronizing, like assuming that I don’t speak English fluently enough to understand you. I feel like I am fluent enough to understand the majority of your speech, regardless of your accent and how fast you’re pronouncing things. Having my students speak slower to me is kind of patronizing. It doesn’t feel nice … they are making decisions for me based on assumptions that are probably just racially motivated because there’s very little information they have about me. They just have my brown skin.

Camilo’s narrative resonates with Lixin’s yet adds a racial dimension. He explicitly links students’ speech adjustments to his “brown skin,” showing that what appears as linguistic accommodation can also be read as racial profiling. His description of the interaction as “patronizing” echoes Kubota and colleagues’ (2023) argument that compliments and accommodations often function as microaggressions that reinforce white linguistic norms. The emotional labor here is heightened because he must balance his gratitude for his students’ efforts with the irritation of being infantilized, all while maintaining his authority in the classroom. Camilo’s story highlights how race intersects with language to produce patronizing behavior.

While Camilo’s account highlights the patronizing effects of linguistic accommodation, Marcos, a doctoral student from Chile, describes how accented speech can become a basis for heightened scrutiny and evaluations of competence.

I can see how just because I speak with an accent, I am subjected to a higher standard of what’s correct or not. … If you have a graph there’s kind of a proportional relationship between how thick your accent is and how bad they will try to make the first interpretation of what you’re saying. … Students try to test me a little bit like ‘Oh, this person speaks weird; we will see if it’s good enough to be here.’ It’s super subtle … trying to double check if I do know what I’m supposed to teach and stuff like that.

Marcos’s metaphor of a “proportional relationship” between accent thickness and scrutiny reveals a shift from benevolent accommodation to evaluative surveillance. His narrative exemplifies how accent hierarchy functions as a raciolinguistic measuring stick: the thicker the accent, the more students feel licensed to challenge competence, a pattern consistent with Dovchin’s (2020) analysis of accent-based stereotyping. This interaction demands continuous emotional labor: he must anticipate microaggressions, repeatedly prove his knowledge, and suppress his annoyance. The mere fact of sounding different appears sufficient to trigger doubts about his legitimacy as an academic authority. Marcos’s experience thus deepens our understanding of how linguistic racism manifests in academic hierarchies.

Shreya, a doctoral student from India, illuminates another dimension of linguistic racism by drawing attention to the explicit accent hierarchies that underpin many seemingly innocuous interactions. She received a backhanded compliment from a classmate who praised her “posh” British accent:

I remember once one of my classmates saying, ‘Oh, my gosh! Your accent is so posh … you always speak with a British accent.’ I said my country was colonized; it’s not a point of pride. … I get that a lot like people sound surprised that my English is good … and I see there’s more of a hierarchy in accents of English that are associated with different Englishes being spoken.

Shreya’s story makes explicit the colonial logic behind accent hierarchies. Her “posh” accent elicits admiration precisely because it is associated with British colonization, whereas speakers from Asia or Africa are told their English is “hard to understand.” As Kubota and colleagues (2023) argue, comments that appear complimentary on the surface, such as praising someone’s English proficiency or accent, often function as raciolinguistic microaggressions that reinforce assumptions that racialized speakers are not expected to possess linguistic competence. This praise is double-edged: it reinforces the superiority of European English while positioning other accents as inferior, illustrating what May (2023a) describes as the ongoing devaluation of non-dominant linguistic repertoires. For Shreya, the emotional labor involves responding to raciolinguistic microaggressions while simultaneously challenging the colonial assumptions that underpin them. By reminding her classmate that India’s association with British English is rooted in a history of colonization, she resisted the framing of her accent as an uncomplicated marker of prestige, even as she continued to navigate the emotional burden of such encounters. Her account demonstrates how seemingly innocuous comments reproduce global hierarchies of race and language.

In summary, these narratives illustrate multiple manifestations of raciolinguistic marginalization within everyday university interactions. Participants described experiences ranging from patronizing accommodations and assumptions about communicative competence to heightened scrutiny of accented speech, challenges to professional authority, and explicit accent hierarchies rooted in colonial histories. Rather than representing a fixed progression of experiences, these accounts are presented together to highlight the varied ways linguistic racism operates across academic and social contexts. Across these experiences, international students expended considerable emotional labor to navigate assumptions about their competence, legitimacy, and belonging while asserting their linguistic knowledge and expertise. Together, these findings demonstrate that linguistic racism extends beyond interpersonal discomfort to shape how international students are heard, evaluated, and recognized within a PWI. They also lay the foundation for understanding how these experiences shape racialized emotional labor in subsequent themes.

Racialized emotions and the institutional cost of linguistic racism

The interpersonal slights of the first theme carry consequences that ripple far beyond individual interactions. For many participants, the accumulated weight of these experiences produces racialized emotions such as anxiety, self-doubt, and exhaustion that are inseparable from the institutional contexts in which they unfold. In this theme, participants describe how linguistic racism shapes their academic opportunities, participation patterns, and relationships with instructors and peers. These accounts highlight how emotions are not merely private responses but are themselves shaped by institutional inequities.

We first turn to Qian, a doctoral student from China whose stories illustrate the everyday pain of being unseen and unheard. She recounted how older white men nodded when she told them her name, but never learned to say it correctly. When she asked a question in class, a professor replied, “You are very good,” instead of answering her inquiry. These dismissals left her feeling “exhausted” and “humiliated.” Misnaming and empty praise are common forms of symbolic violence (Wang and Dovchin, 2023), signaling that a person’s language and identity do not warrant the same effort as those of dominant groups. Qian’s sense of exhaustion thus reflects more than personal sensitivity—it highlights how institutional norms condone the erasure of non-English names and the trivialization of multilingual contributions.

Yujie, an undergraduate student from China, described a more acute moment when classroom participation spiraled into public humiliation. In her program, she is often the only non-white student in the classroom. Speaking in front of white peers made her “timid” and self-conscious about her “terrible” English. She recounted an icebreaker in which students stood in a circle, each repeating the names of those before them. As the last person, Yujie struggled to remember and pronounce English names. The teacher noticed her discomfort and moved her closer, but in a later round, the task grew harder: students had to recall both names and hobbies. Again, placed last, Yujie felt the weight of expectation and burst into tears, running out of the room.

You could say it was also because there was no one of the same race around me – everyone else was white – and our cultures are different. Sometimes when they speak English, I honestly can’t understand them, because their language is so colloquial. I’ll admit, that really overwhelmed me. I remember one class at the very beginning, the teacher had us play a game. Here’s what happened: everyone stood in a circle, and, for example, I’d say my name first, then the person next to me would repeat my name and say their own, and so on. I was unlucky – I ended up being the very last person. The first time, I tried my best; I just had to say everyone’s names, and the person next to me quietly reminded me of them. Then we played a second time. After the second round, the teacher probably realized I wasn’t very comfortable, so he put me next to him so I only needed to say his name. Then he played the game a third time, and he increased the difficulty: you had to say the previous person’s name plus what they liked to do, and repeat both. Again, I was the last person in the circle. At that point, I completely broke down. I couldn’t take it anymore and told the teacher I didn’t want to play. The teacher said it was fine, but I started crying and ran out of the room. The thing is, what triggered my crying wasn’t just that activity – I’d already been under a lot of stress, and that game pushed me over the edge and made all my emotions explode.

Yujie’s story exposes how linguistic racism does not always manifest in overt exclusion; it can also surface in the form of well-intentioned icebreaker activities that disregard the racialized and linguistic pressures already shaping a student’s day-to-day reality. What might be a lighthearted memory game for native-English-speaking students becomes, for Yujie, an arena where language anxiety, isolation, and performance pressure converge, culminating in a public emotional rupture.

These narratives demonstrate how emotional labor involves constant vigilance—reading ambiguous cues, monitoring self-presentation, and pre-empting possible embarrassment. This labor is racialized, rooted in the unequal positioning of accented English and racialized bodies in academic spaces. The stories show how linguistic racism infiltrates casual settings and routine classroom practices, steadily undermining students’ sense of belonging and exhausting their emotional reserves.

Moving beyond individual interactions, Kalisa, a doctoral student from Thailand, reveals how linguistic racism structures social networks and classroom dynamics. She described entering classes where “White people just say hi to White people and Asian people just say hi to Asian.” She observed that a Chinese classmate with a strong accent was ridiculed behind her back, and students more readily respected native speakers. She also noted a hierarchy among professors: those with European accents received more respect than those from Indonesia, even when teaching the same material. Such narratives demonstrate that authority is not attached solely to knowledge but to the racialized sound of knowledge. The institutional cost of linguistic racism here includes lost credibility, diminished authority, and the emotional burden of constantly anticipating doubt.

I don't know. It's just like, sometimes, like in a room, there's one class that's like, I'm the only Asian and all the other people are white. And I feel like the way people start to form friendships over the course of [a] semester. You know, I feel like at first it's just like normal that nobody talks to each other, but then people will start to have small talk, and I always feel like white people talking to white people and not to me, kind of stuff. Or like, in my other class, there's like a couple other Asian people and a couple others, like, white students. And I feel like when people come in, like, white people just say hi to white people and Asian people just say hi to Asian.

Kalisa’s account demonstrates that linguistic racism is not only interpersonal but also collective. The emotional labor here involves navigating an environment where friendships and respect are stratified by accent. Kalisa must decide whether to challenge these dynamics or accept them as part of campus life, all while worrying that her own accent might undermine her authority as a TA.

Institutional barriers became most visible in Jiwon’s story. Jiwon is a Korean doctoral student. Hoping to improve her English for teaching, she enrolled in a training course for international TAs. Instead of gaining confidence, she experienced interruption, feigned incomprehension, and shouting from the instructor. Her account underscores that “support” programs can perpetuate deficit ideologies when they frame international students as problems to be corrected rather than multilingual assets.

So I attended that TA class from the second language department. I don't know the program's name. That was not mandatory for me, but I just took it because I thought my English is not [good] enough to teach students, and I was very afraid of meeting them. So I enrolled that course, and then the very 1st week when I visit there the instructor he was speaking very slowly and clearly, and I really respect and appreciate that, how he tried to like understand me, however, participating that class for like second week and 3rd week, I feel like he starts ignoring me because of I'm not saying like English, fluently. Although I consider myself, I'm not a fluent English speaker. I thought I still can communicate with others using English. However, he was trying to interrupt what I'm saying, and he pretend I'm not sure he pretended where he just not don't didn't understand my English. But he kept asking, and he just behaved like he didn't understand me at all, so I was very offended, and I ended up dropping that class cause you know. I mean, you see how I speak English right now. And I even though I don't speak like perfectly like grammatically. Communicate and deliver my feelings or my experience to others, and from my experience in the U., People like easily understand, especially when the one that I was talking to is American, because they use their mother tongue language, and I use ( ) language, and they understand it. It was very surprising moment when I said something very shitty. But they understand very well. Yeah. So I thought that was the natural thing here in the US. And maybe I expected some kind of hospitality from [the] second language teacher, because they are teaching like international students. But it turns out that the instructor reacted, conversely, [in the] very opposite way. So I felt very offended, and actually, his behavior was like saying words very loudly, and almost like shouting at me. It kinda discourages me, speaking in English.

Jiwon’s experience shows how linguistic racism can directly curtail professional development. The emotional labor here is that she had to reconcile her appreciation for the instructor’s initial kindness with the injury of being treated as incompetent. Her decision to drop the course underscores the tangible costs of linguistic racism.

Shreya’s testimony deepens the picture by linking linguistic racism to restricted academic opportunities and mental health.

So I've had to really talk to myself a lot and say, to try and separate it out, and to focus on just continuing to do the work and to try and get published. But it is very challenging. It's very challenging to see sunshine, and to be optimistic, and to see yourself as how you really are, as against somebody else, really shaping you because of these racialized experiences, because it's everywhere. It's in everything. It's inescapable.

She observed that collaboration offers and co-authorships go disproportionately to white students, while her own language and writing were deemed inadequate. This exclusion battered her self-worth. To survive, she said she must separate her sense of self from external judgments and “just take it day by day”. The emotional labor here is relentless: she must constantly reaffirm her value while watching peers with no greater qualifications advance. Her story underscores how linguistic racism shapes career trajectories and mental health.

Finally, Tanisha, a doctoral student from India, highlights the cultural and linguistic erasure that occurs within departments.

Tanisha: But then I'm also like always struggling with like. Oh, am I losing as if I'm mostly speaking in English throughout the day, like, am I losing the part of my brain that is fluent in Hindi, or all of these things? When I'm at work, I don't have opportunities to sort of bring it up. I guess the bigger thing lies in if I don't have people in my department that I can celebrate, you know, whatever ethnic festival with, for example. Then, like, how many times am I gonna… then it like feels weird to like, still organize some sort of celebration, and then be like the only person that's sort of performing it for the rest of the group. So I think it's just like that, there are these like really important things that are valuable to me, that I can't share with people that I spend a lot of time with.

She worried that speaking English all day eroded her fluency in Hindi and lamented that departmental social events never included her cultural festivals. Although she had a community outside of work, she felt she could not be her “full self” at the university. The emotional labor for Tanisha involves grieving the loss of cultural expression, negotiating when and how to share her heritage, and carrying the burden of being the sole organizer when she does. While Tanisha herself framed these experiences primarily in terms of loss and absence, these narratives also point toward broader institutional processes that can contribute to cultural and linguistic erasure. Her story illustrates how linguistic racism intersects with institutional norms to marginalize non-white cultures.

In sum, these narratives show that linguistic racism inflicts multifaceted harm. It renders students invisible, isolates them from networks, blocks access to training, erodes self-worth, and suppresses linguistic and cultural expression. The emotional labor required to endure these harms is immense: participants must constantly interpret ambiguous behaviors, manage humiliation, affirm their worth, and find ways to preserve their identities. This theme thus elucidates how the experiences of linguistic racism accumulate to shape the racialized emotional labor of international students.

Coping and resisting through racialized emotional labor

Having explored the emotional and structural impacts of linguistic racism, we now turn to the strategies students use to navigate and resist these oppressive dynamics. Rather than treating coping and resistance as separate categories, we understand them as intertwined forms of racialized emotional labor (Evans and Moore, 2015). These strategies illustrate both the agency of international students and the profound burden of continually negotiating a raciolinguistic landscape that questions their legitimacy. In this theme, we trace how participants transform their painful experiences into coping and resistance strategies. Students first shield themselves from further injury by withholding aspects of their identity and passing as native; then, they reframe interactions to reduce emotional damage, build supportive communities, and finally repurpose their hurt into practices of care and self-affirmation.

The most immediate response to patronizing and exclusionary encounters is to conceal one’s real identity. Camilo, drawing on his experiences of being spoken to slowly and having his linguistic competence questioned, said he would prefer that strangers assume he grew up in the United States:

I don’t feel like it would be nice to have to explain my entire background, how I learned English, how I achieved fluency, and how many languages I speak. I would rather have their random person on campus assume that I’m a native English speaker … that I’m just a Hispanic person who grew up in the US, maybe. That’s all I need them to know about me, so I don’t get treated differently.

Camilo described feeling patronized when students slowed their speech. His strategy here is to pass as a native to avoid further condescension, which directly responds to those experiences. Concealing his linguistic history shields him from microaggressions but requires constant emotional calculation, meaning he must constantly decide if and when to reveal his background while managing the discomfort of hiding part of himself. Such identity concealment reflects the broader emotional and interpersonal work that racially minoritized individuals undertake to navigate institutional spaces where they anticipate stereotyping, exclusion, or differential treatment (Foste and Johnson, 2021). Rather than freely expressing their linguistic and cultural identities, participants strategically managed what aspects of themselves became visible in particular interactions.

Anran adopts a similar tactic, albeit for safety reasons. She explained why she sometimes hesitates to disclose her nationality:

Interviewer: Do you sometimes feel that you have to hide your identity because you wanna make sure you are safe?

For Anran, non-disclosure functions as a protective shield against anti-Asian violence and discrimination. Her strategy underscores the intersection of linguistic racism with geopolitical tensions and personal safety. Both Camilo and Anran exemplify how students adapt to the harms by controlling access to their identities, thereby reducing the opportunities for patronizing speech or exclusion.

A second set of strategies involves reinterpretation and selective focus. Lixin chooses to reframe their professor’s slowed speech as a sign of kindness. They focus on his intentions rather than the loss of humor. This cognitive reframing allows her to maintain engagement in class without internalizing the message of inferiority.

I think [it] kind of makes sense. Like, because, you know, it would be really awkward if he tried to be funny and I didn't get the joke. And the whole environment is just awkward. And I think, actually, I think he knows that we both don't want that to happen. That's considerate.

Similarly, Kalisa, despite witnessing widespread segregation and accent hierarchies, emphasized that within her own department, she does not feel discriminated against. By concentrating on positive interactions with mentors, she creates a psychological buffer against the microaggressions she knows exist. These reinterpretations are not naïve optimism; they are deliberate strategies to preserve motivation and self-esteem in the face of pervasive linguistic racism. Yet they demand emotional labor: Lixin must suppress irritation, and Kalisa must compartmentalize conflicting realities.

Other students seek solace and strength in the community. For Tanisha, maintaining ties with people from her region is a lifeline. She explains how she responds to the erasure of her culture at work: She travels home frequently and keeps a roommate and partner from the same country. These relationships offer spaces where she can speak Hindi and celebrate cultural events without needing to translate herself. Building community allows Tanisha to replenish emotional reserves and affirm her linguistic identity. It is a form of resistance against the white norms that silence her culture. The emotional labor lies in cultivating and sustaining these relationships amid academic demands and physical distance.

Qian converts her pain into an ethic of care. After repeated experiences of misnaming and dismissal, she responded by learning other people’s names and their meanings.

So if someone’s name isn’t English, I make an effort to pronounce it and ask its meaning. Some people have done this for me and made me feel good, so I want to reciprocate.

This practice extends beyond adaptation; it is a micro-resistance that challenges the implicit message that only English names are worthy of attention. By investing time in pronunciation, she models the inclusive linguistic practices she wishes to receive. This strategy requires emotional work in which she must transform humiliation into empathy and persist even when her efforts are not reciprocated.

Finally, some participants protect themselves through compartmentalization. Shreya, who described her self-worth being eroded by accent hierarchies, chooses not to confront microaggressions directly. Instead, she focuses on her research and reminds herself she is “not less than”:

It's very hard to acknowledge that how you thought about a country is very different from how it actually is, and to keep telling yourself, giving yourself the message of that. You're not less than you know. And to not give in to how other people think of you, and I will never openly fight. I'm not a confrontational person, like I said, but to acknowledge the fact that we put in so much effort, because we need to all the time, it's constant. and to just give myself a little more grace and not be so self-defeating. So it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work outside of being a student or anything, as you know, professionally, all the things that you're supposed to do that you're contracted to do. It's all of these underlying aspects that are exhausting. It is exhausting.

By separating her sense of identity from others’ judgments, she creates an internal boundary that insulates her from harm. However, this boundary maintenance demands constant self-talk and vigilance. Shreya’s strategy illustrates the emotional regulation often required of racially minoritized individuals in PWI (Evans and Moore, 2015). Rather than openly confronting microaggressions, she described engaging in continuous self-talk, restraint, and emotional management in order to protect herself academically and psychologically within unequal power relations.

From their narratives, students draw on a repertoire of coping and resistance strategies that directly respond to the harms detailed in earlier themes. Passing, selective disclosure, and compartmentalization help them avoid patronizing interactions; reinterpretation and selective focus mitigate psychological harm; community building nurtures their linguistic and cultural identities; learning names and cultural practices transforms personal pain into advocacy. These strategies are not isolated behaviors but part of a holistic navigation of the PWI’s linguistic terrain. Nevertheless, they come with significant emotional labor that requires them to continually assess risks, modulate their self-presentation, invest time and energy in community, and sustain self-affirmation. The theme thus illustrates how experiences of linguistic racism not only inflict harm but also shape the forms of agency available to international students.