Posted on 06/28/2021 8:31:36 AM PDT by Red Badger
Do you speak the grammatically-correct language of white supremacy, or are you better than that?
At Maryland’s Towson University recently, a virtual conference ripped the racism of “rightful” words.
June 17th’s Antiracist Pedagogy Symposium sought to shed light on selecting syllables.
Associate Professor of Language, Literacy, and English Education April Baker-Bell — of Michigan State University — insisted teachers’ enforcement of standard English rules is an assault on “black language.”
Furthermore, per Campus Reform, she indicated black Americans bear a burden of racist violence.
White language guidelines, from the sound of things, aren’t too dissimilar:
“[It’s apparent that] anti-blackness that is used to diminish black language of black students in classrooms is not separate from the rampant and deliberate anti-black racism and violence inflicted upon black people in society.”
Black people don’t use conventionally “good” grammar, April evidently asserts, and teachers act as if they’re inferior:
“Teacher attitudes include assumptions that black students are somehow linguistically, morally, and intellectually inferior because they communicate in black language.”
Where whiteness is concerned, April’s contention isn’t uncommon.
Folks are fighting Caucasians’ cultural clench:
White Woman Who Lectures on Racism Says All White People Should Shut Up
LSU Event Explores the ‘Religion of White Rage,’ Says ‘Conservatism’ May Be a ‘Euphemism for White Supremacy’
America’s Largest Defense Contractor Fixes Its White Male Executives With Anti-White Privilege Training
Southern School District Tells Teachers to Ignore White Parents’ Complaints Over Critical Race Theory – They’re Benefiting From Whiteness
Department of Education Fights the White Supremacy of Math
Head of the Teachers Union: Going Back to School is ‘White Supremacy,’ Concern Over Suicide is ‘White Privilege’
At Towson, Indiana University of Pennsylvania English Professor Cristina Sanchez-Martin also talked of pummeling paleness:
“The repeated references to ‘correct grammar’ and ‘standard language’ reinforce master narratives of English only as white and monolingualism and a deficit view of multilingualism.”
Back to April Baker-Bell, she wrote the book on the subject — literally.
See Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy.
Earlier this month, she summarized the situation to USA Today:
“[B]lack language is a legitimate language with syntax, grammatical features, phonology and semantics. But when black people speak AAVE (African American Vernacular English), it’s seen as unprofessional, and they can be perceived as ‘intellectually inferior’ for speaking it.”
And black people are told by whites to be bilingual:
“It’s anti-black linguistic racism. It’s truly anti-blackness passing through our language in the ways we’re told we have to code switch.”
But that isn’t all. As USA Today relays, white people not only enact racism on black people with English dictates, they co-opt black people’s language. Particularly on TikTok:
What’s even more problematic is “white people coming up off of our language,” Baker-Bell says, like TikTokers rising to influencer status for videos that appropriate [black phrases] and companies using Black language in their marketing.
So when and how might white people be allowed to use the mode of communication created by black people?
To hear April tell it, we aren’t ready for that:
“When we see black people not being killed, black people not being discriminated against, black kids being able to learn and thrive with their own language, we can have that conversation.”
It’s a sad state of affairs:
“The divorcing of black people from the way that we talk is really just another way of liking what black people do, but not liking black people.”
Towson’s symposium was an effort toward computing our fluke.
And April’s on a quest for justice:
Discover the history of Black language and how it relates to the need for Black Linguistic Justice in classrooms and communities with Dr. April Baker-Bell. This virtual event takes place on Saturday, April 10! 👉 https://t.co/pDQuEDeo5q pic.twitter.com/T8LnNkdzWq
— UCF College of Arts & Humanities (@ucfcah) April 9, 2021
Will doing away with conventional grammar further sock it to whiteness and its colonialist clutches? And to what new rules should language adhere?
Whatever the answers, one thing seems clear: Revolution is immensely upon us.
-ALEX
You get that when black people deliberately mispronounce your name. It’s a “you ain’t the boss of me “ push. Fired my parents cleaning lady after one warning.
Have we reached peak stupidity yet?
Then he should have used quotation marks to emphasize that he was using the word as a pun. 8>)
As a youngster in elementary school in the deep south in the early 60's, I spoke in a hillbilly dialect because my family did. I resisted efforts to speak properly until I was about 11 or 12 or so when I got with the program and started using correct forms of speech and pronunciation. My family never did. They stuck with their Ma & Pa Kettle-like version of English. At some point people need to outgrow traditions that hold them back.
Once again,blacks are stupid,blacks are unable to live in decent society..We must take care of blacks from cradle to grave,etc etc etc........
True story.
My Niece shows up for her Masters Orientation workshop.
There is a Black Female Professor handing out the Paperwork.
While explaining what information needs to be filled out she tells those in attendance, “we needs to know who you are”.
No, it wasn’t an Ivy League School, but I’m sure Princeton and Yale will catch up with the proper Ebonics sooner or later.
It is embarrassing to see a race of people basically claim/admit that they are not intelligent enough to do simple arithmetic, speak recognizable English, or obtain an ID card.
Oops, I messed up.
The proper quote was “we needs to know who you is”.
My English teacher in 7th grade (long ago) was a black, handicapped woman...who’s probably rolling in her grave with these idiots suggestions.
A lot of the students spoke like that and I think THEY thought it made the sound cool or intelligent
It doesn't. It just makes a person sound too lazy or to ignorant to speak properly.
Some Greeks speak their language so well that it's called the ‘the clean tongue’.
Most people (especially young people) have a ‘lazy tongue’ and it shows. When I watch the weather, some of the announcers say ‘metorology’ instead of meteorology and they omit a whole syllable. Duhhhh...they can't even pronounce the name of their profession!! TV new is populated, wall to wall, with people who do not speak like the professionals they insist they are! If you speak like you drank a case of beer, then tied a brick to your tongue ....you are NOT a professional!!
First, they called it "acting white" to justify not paying attention in school.
Now, they call it "white supremacy" and racism to demonstrate higher education proficiencies.
-PJ
Yes, excellent point. African American Vernacular English is not the only nonstandard English in the US. There are plenty of regional Englishes as well that aren’t part of standard English, but somehow don’t seem to factor into the reasoning process of teachers like those in this article who think that standard English is an assault on just black English.
Is it an assault on Ohio English to teach students of all color from there not to write things in formal papers like the following: “The car needs washed,” or “Buckeye cookies are so hard to find anymore.” These are definitely not part of standard English, and students shouldn’t write them in formal papers, but they’re totally fine to use at home or in informal situations. So, white kids from Ohio have to “code switch” similar to the black speakers of AAVE in the article.
The other thing that really gets me here is the assumption that all black people speak the informal “black English” stereotyped from hiphop music. Many do speak that vernacular dialect, but in my opinion it is both classist and racist to assume, as the teachers in this article seem to do, that all black people speak that version of black English. Many black people, for example, speak African American Standard English, which is very different from the stereotyped black English, and which can be read about here: tinyurl.com/a82jy7jd.
Standard English is really just a lingua franca for all speakers of English, no matter what their native dialect is, to use for efficient communication. Plenty of stuff from white nonstandard dialects is excluded, just as plenty of stuff from black nonstandard dialects is. Making it a racist thing like these teachers try to do just doesn’t work.
I worked with grad students from Africa who spoke beautiful English and I don’t mean just the English accent.
They spoke very well and made themselves understood...it went hand in hand with their lovely manners and unfailing courtesy.
“Razes”?
Because they’re so racist that they’re afraid they might act white, we have to lower all standards to their level.
I looked at what you wrote and could not figure out what was wrong. My white supremacist brain, automatically took out the s in needs.
Annnnd they revel in their stupidity
I understand. The “who you is” gives it away though. #;^)
That is what mad3 me go back and look again.
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