A guest lecturer at Ball State University recently made the case that using proper grammar is a symptom of America’s “white supremacist” culture.
According to a report by the College Fix, Arizona State University Associate Dean and Professor Asao Inoue made the case that using proper grammar is racist during a recent speech at Ball State University.
Inoue argued that all Americans are responsible for our culture of “white supremacy.” He argued that “white supremacists” use English language standards to oppress those with poor lingual skills.
“We are all implicated in white supremacy,” Inoue said during the lecture. “This is because white supremacist systems like all systems reproduce themselves as a matter of course,” he said. “This includes reproduction of dominant, white, middle-class, monolingual standards for literacy and communication.”
“The condition in classrooms, schools, and society where rewards are given in determined ways to people who can most easily reach them, because those people have more access to the preferred and embodied white language practices, and part of that access is a structural assumption that what is reachable at a given moment for the normative, white, monolingual English user is reachable for all,” Inoue continued.
In one slide from the presentation, Inoue argued that grading students based on their performance is an extension of America’s racism. “Grading is a great way to protect the white property of literacy in schools and maintain the white supremacist status quo without ever being white supremacist or mentioning race,” Inoue said.
Breitbart News reported in 2017 that the writing center at the University of Washington, Tacoma, declared that proper grammar is “racist.” The writing center published a press release in which they argued that there is “no inherent standard of English.”