Rutgers Declares Grammar Racist
Washington Free Beacon | July 24, 2020 | Chrissy ClarkThe English department at a public university declared that proper English grammar is racist.
Rutgers University’s English department will change its standards of English instruction in an effort to “stand with and respond” to the Black Lives Matter movement. In an email written by department chairwoman Rebecca Walkowitz, the Graduate Writing Program will emphasize “social justice” and “critical grammar.”
Walkowitz said the department would respond to recent events with “workshops on social justice and writing,” “increasing focus on graduate student life,” and “incorporating ‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy.”
She keeps using that word, “critical.” I do not think it means what she thinks it means.
The “critical grammar” approach challenges the standard academic form of the English language in favor of a more inclusive writing experience. The curriculum puts an emphasis on the variability of the English language instead of accuracy.
So does the New York Times.
Now, please pay close attention to how, in the next sentence, she says the exact opposite of what she means. She supports “challenges” to what she supports:
“This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds at a disadvantage,” Walkowitz said.
Pxtiription trphoys for all!
“Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them [with] regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents.”
What? You might be the one having trouble communicating a thought, not them.
Leonydus Johnson, a speech pathologist and libertarian activist, said the school’s change makes the racist assumption that minorities cannot comprehend traditional English. Johnson called the change “insulting, patronizing, and in itself, extremely racist.”
“The idea that expecting a student to write in grammatically correct sentences is indicative of racial bias is asinine,” Johnson told the Washington Free Beacon. “It’s like these people believe that being non-white is an inherent handicap or learning disability…. That’s racism. It has become very clear to me that those who claim to be ‘anti-racist’ are often the most racist people in this country.”
Leonydus Johnson [great name, by the way] is right about Rutgers Johnson’s gibberish.
She always did have trouble keeping her opinions to herself, Grammar did…
Remember the time Obama threw his racist grammar under the bus?
Why are blacks even trying to speak English? Isn’t that a major cultural appropriation? Shouldn’t they all be taking DNA tests to see what African tribal language is “Theirs”?
You forgot about the time science was racist. That should be in there somewhere.
Oh, yeah. Sorry.
And Obama taught us that rocket science was Islamophobic.
I suppose geology is racist, somehow. Study of rocks = white privilege = bad.
I grew up in rural North Alabama, farming hogs and collard greens. My accent was that of an Appalachian twang. My vocabulary included words like “wrench” (remove soil by putting something under running water) “spinish” (a green leafy vegetable beloved of Popeye – whose name was pronounce “Pie-Pie,” by the way) and “yawna” (Do you want to…). A typical sentence might be “I ain’t seen no spinish round here. Yawna go see if Piggly Wiggly got any?”
I hold a PhD in British history and have published on four continents. I learned how to speak and write standard English in grade school and had my writing skills honed in university and graduate classes to the point that one of my readers from Australia was astonished to discover that I am not British. I have presented a paper at Oxford University – and was not mocked for my accent.
When I am in my home county, I speak the dialect of my youth. When I am in the classroom, I speak the dialect of an educated man. I do not feel demeaned by being raised with a dialect that was substandard, nor do I feel dishonest switching between the two dialects depending on the environment.
I always thought the whole point of getting an education, any kind of education, was to learn skills that you did not already know, not give you a good grade for not learning anything.
You see? Now, that’s an intelligent reply.
By the way, I don’t think Lincoln would be mocked for his backwoods accent if what he was saying was intelligent.
(And I have no PhD, nor have I been published on even one continent.)
But “wrench” doesn’t seem that unusual a word.
Was one of those continents Antarctica? 🙂
Close. Got published in a military history journal from South Africa with an article about Boer War VCs. My book was published in Britain, the U.S., and Australia by Palgrave MacMillan.
I wasn’t trying to strut my academic stuff so much as make the point that learning standard English is a tool, just like any other learned skill.
I know, just joshing ya. If you post here a lot you get to know we kid.
Newspeak, it’s just around the corner and it’s double plus good.