In yet another sign of the degradation of our educational system, Rutgers University has declared proper grammar is racist.
Rutgers’s English Department declared proper grammar is part of white supremacy, disadvantaging students of “multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds.”
In an email written by department chairwoman Rebecca Walkowitz, the Graduate Writing Program will emphasize ‘social justice’ and ‘critical grammar.’”
“Critical grammar?”
Now we know those words are English, and we know what they mean separately. But when they are arranged in that order, we have no idea what the hell Walkowitz is talking about.
So we looked it up. And found this on Medium:
[Critical Grammar] assumes that students from multilingual backgrounds will be harmed by a focus on grammar at the expense of broader writing issues. This dogma can leave students without the strong, sentence-level foundation they need to write well.
Rutgers’s “Critical grammar” approach basically means that they need to dumb things down because the administration thinks non-white students no write too good.
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At least, that’s what Leonydus Johnson, a speech pathologist and libertarian activist, thinks. Johnson said that Rutgers’s change assumes that minorities cannot comprehend traditional English – and that’s 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.”
Proper grammar has been under attack as racist for some time. Notably in 2016, Mona Chalabi, then a columnist at The Guardian, claimed grammar is a privilege.
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