Posted on 05/01/2015 11:16:19 AM PDT by rickmichaels
Now, more than ever, racial tensions are off the charts. While it’s true that the majority of cases hitting the news are concerning the police and minorities – primarily African-Americans – this case has nothing to do with law enforcement of any kind; just rules of grammar, punctuation and capitalization enforcement.
UCLA houses a group called Call 2 Action: Graduate Students of Color, and they’re upset. They allege ‘several incidents,’ but the most notable is a tendency (in their eyes) of professor of education and information, Val Rust, to correct the grammar, punctuation and capitalization of the assignments handed in by minority students. According to this group, correcting a black student is deemed ‘micro-aggression.’
Staging a sit-in during another meeting of the class (only five of the 25 in attendance at the sit-in even being students in the class, which has 10 students), the group penned the following to the college: “A hostile campus climate has been the norm for Students of Color in this class throughout the quarter as our epistemological and methodological commitments have been repeatedly questioned by our classmates and our instructor. [The] barrage of questions by white colleagues and the grammar ‘lessons’ by the professor have contributed to a hostile class climate.”
While the main target of the sit-in was Professor Rust, the students had issues with ‘UCLA’s handling of racial issues that went far beyond just one classroom.’
Rust said in a statement to his colleagues (as he is lecturing out of the country at the moment), “I have attempted to be rather thorough on the papers and am particularly concerned that they do a good job with their bibliographies and citations, and these students apparently don’t feel that is appropriate.” He further stated that he meant no offense to any minorities in his class.
According to Kenjus Watson, the organizer of the sit-in, one such correction was Professor Rust telling a student that she shouldn’t have capitalized ‘indigenous’ in her assignments. Kenjus claims this correction was ‘ideologically-motivated.’
Professor Rust admitted likely making matters worse by not taking the side of a minority student who was in an ‘argument’ with a white student. The minority student had argued with the white female student that she had no right to feel oppressed. Rust hadn’t agreed with either side; simply choosing to stay out of it.
Rust explained, “Two weeks ago, a Student of Color and a white female student got into a big discussion. She wants to use Standpoint Theory [a method of analysis based on the idea that all knowledge is subjective and based on one’s position in society] in her dissertation, and the Student of Color told her she had no business claiming that she was a member of an oppressed group.”
“[The white female student] came back saying there are all kinds of oppression. I likely did not handle the situation well, because I chose not to stop the discussion between them, so it went on for quite a while, and the Students of Color apparently interpreted my silence to mean I wasn’t supporting them,” Rust continued.
UCLA’s minority community, however, reiterates that it’s upset about more than just Rust’s class. There was recently a report claiming that minority professors are consistently the victims of discrimination and racial bias, and urged the university to ‘strengthen its bias incident response procedures and hire a Discrimination Officer.’
“What we’re speaking to is part of a larger, institutionalized culture on campus,” said Kenjus Watson in a statement.
So black people have been in America for 200-400 years, yet second generation Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, Africans, and Europeans can master the English language (plus their native language) without a problem.
Yet, conservatives are ‘racist’ for expecting Blacks to be able to grasp basic English grammar...?
Really?
Why can’t they see that liberals demean them? That low expectations are what society reserves for the disabled and that conservatives don’t see the black community as disabled? That we actually believe that blacks can accomplish everything that *we* do?
The liberals are racist! They see blacks as broken people who can’t even master their own native language. They think that blacks are too stupid to achieve.
I do NOT see black children as any less capable than I do my OWN children. And I’ll hold them to the same standards.
Why?
Because they’re human beings who have the *world* laid out before them. They only need to be pushed into it.
Just as I pushed my own children.
It used to be a crime to teach slaves to read. Helps keep ‘em on the plantation.
Kenjus want to do whatever she wants to do.
“Students got more and better education in one room schoolhouses than in all the huge bricks and mortar universities filled with computer equipment.”
I nominate that the FR comment of the day. You make me think of my grandfather (born 1909) and his older brother (born 1891). Both men grew up in Grey County, ON (northwest of Toronto and near Lake Huron) and went to the same one room rural schoolhouse.
I am sure that if both men were to come back (as they passed within a few months of each other in 1984) and see how being both barely coherent and very rude is so commonly routine and accepted in our society nowadays, they’d be positively shocked.
Why is it “Student of Color”, and “white female student”? Isn’t that a “microaggression”?
Wow! The next thing you know, they won’t be able to read or write cursive...
Oh. Wait...
How is this student writing term papers? Microsoft Word automatically proofreads documents. Unless these are answers on a written test, in which case the professor may not have been able to understand them. I doubt that any hiring staff evil be able to read anything that the student writes either.
Was da ding in cursive? Dats be racist cuz bros don’t cursive!
Instead of being offended, any student should look upon these corrections as a opportunity to improve themselves. Proper grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure is the basis of someone’s marketable job skills. These will serve them well throughout their entire career, regardless of their career choice. (Theft and thuggery notwithstanding.)
By the way, I can't diagram a sentence either and I was in school in the '60s. Not that I didn't learn, I just didn't care.
That is what public education did for blacks for decades; int he past couple of decades they’ve been doing it to/for whites as well. When young Americans meet the young foreigners trafficked here to replace them, they realize they are often outmatched.
All fun & games until employers won’t touch the unemployable unskilled dopes; they lose out to Mexicans because while both lack English, one doesn’t have a chip fastened to their shoulder from the cradle on...
Read articles written by black authors and see how many of them use the upper case “B”, when writing the word “black”. Unfortunately some F.R. members do it too.
It’s hard to know whether the breakdown of society is the reason for the breakdown of education, or, whether the breakdown of education is the cause of the breakdown of society.
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