It turns out that writing well is inherently racist
It turns out that writing well is inherently racist
In the 1970s, “Ebonics” was the allegedly natural language of Black Americans. My father strongly objected to having Black students in his district taught in Ebonics. The only teacher in his district who supported him was an elderly Black woman who accurately said that Ebonics would permanently relegate Blacks to an economic ghetto. Given how awful Ebonics were, it’s inevitable that they’re back. An associate dean at Arizona State University just wrote a lengthy book saying that proper English writing is inherently racist.
Asao Inoue is the associate dean for Academic Affairs, Equity, and Inclusion in the college of integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. With Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Oregon State University and a Ph.D. from Washington State University, he’s a man steeped in modern American academia. Inoue’s bio establishes that job is to teach young people how to communicate through the written word:
He is the 2019 Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and has been a past member of the CCCC Executive Committee, and the Executive Board of the Council of Writing Program Administrators.
Within that discipline, Inoue is the recipient of multiple honors:
Among his many articles and chapters on writing assessment, race, and racism, his article, “Theorizing Failure in U.S. Writing Assessments” in Research in the Teaching of English, won the 2014 CWPA Outstanding Scholarship Award. His co-edited collection, "Race and Writing Assessment" (2012), won the 2014 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for an edited collection. His book, "Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future" (2015) won the 2017 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for a monograph and the 2015 CWPA Outstanding Book Award.
Clearly, Inoue is advancing writing and discipline in academia – or is he?
Chrissy Clark caught up with Inoue’s 2019 book, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. Clark slogged through this academic opus to reveal the mental degradation of academia and the appalling ideas that are oozing out of the academic and infecting – and destroying – America.
Inoue’s central premise can be boiled down to one idea: Teaching students the English language is inherently racist, something magnified when teachers expect non-White students to perform competently in English. In other words, it’s Ebonics all over again.
Academic writing has the vaguest relationship to quality English, so one is always reduced to a bit of guesswork when trying to interpret an academic’s meaning. Still, The passages of Inoue’s writing that Clark quotes indicate that Inoue thinks that there are few things worse than imposing the horrors of the English language on students:
“This book focuses on one kind of grading contract, one that calculates final course grades purely by the labor students complete, not by any judgments of the quality of their writing,” Inoue writes. “While the qualities of student writing is still at the center of the classroom and feedback, it has no bearing on the course grade.”
[snip]
Critical race theory contributed to Inoue’s idea that ranking things is a system rooted in racism. Because grading is a form of ranking, grading must also be a racist idea. In his book, Inoue dubbed grading and the education system writ large “racist” for their connections to ranking.
“Ranking is a part of a much longer racist, and White supremacist, tradition in Western intellectual history,” Inoue writes. “Ranking has been deeply embedded in racist thinking, discourses, and logics, mainly because it has been deployed as a way to justify a number of racist, empirical, and colonial projects over the last four hundred years.”
[snip]
The crux of the author’s argument is that grading calls for student uniformity and high-quality completed assignments, both of which are allegedly racist ideas.
Inoue’s disdain for non-White students is apparent, for he assumes that any linguistic competence is beyond them. You have to read Clark’s post in its entirety to grasp the enormity of Inoue’s racism. Reading the post also highlights the irony that, while the book is as badly written as any modern academic treatise, Inoue still wrote it in standard English.
I look forward to the day when all the White people constantly wittering on about systemic racism and white privilege do the right thing and remove themselves entirely from whatever positions they achieved due to their alleged privilege in a systemically racist system. Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, Bezos, Gates, Dorsey, Zuckerberg, Inoue (half Japanese, half White), Robin DiAngelo, and a whole host of other white leftists need to abandon immediately their jobs, their status, and their wealth.
Until they do, we can confidently and reasonably believe that everything they say is pandering garbage. They assert these ridiculous theories, not because they believe them, but to increase interracial hostility, render minorities helpless and dependent on these powerful White people, destroy political opposition from White people who won’t get with the leftist program, and maintain and increase their own political power.
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