Rutgers University’s attempts to appear “woke” has officially backfired on the school, as it is now being accused of racism for assuming that minorities can’t write correctly.
The English Department at Rutgers reportedly just announced that it will be changing its standards of English instruction because proper grammar is part of white supremacy.
The department argues that this is the case because students of “multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds” are allegedly disadvantaged, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
Rebecca Walkowitz, the chair of the department, explained in an email that the new Graduate Writing Program will emphasize “social justice” and “critical grammar.”
“This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds at a disadvantage,” Walkowitz said.
“Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them [with] regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents,” she continued.
Walkowitz added that the English department will add “workshops on social justice and writing,” “increasing focus on graduate student life,” and “incorporating ‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy.”
Unfortunately for Rutgers, however, this is already coming back to bite the school. Speech pathologist and libertarian activist Leonydus Johnson spoke out to call the school’s new approach to grammar “insulting, patronizing, and in itself, extremely racist.”
“The idea that expecting a student to write in grammatically correct sentences is indicative of racial bias is asinine,” Johnson said.
“It’s like these people believe that being non-white is an inherent handicap or learning disability… That’s racism,” he explained. “It has become very clear to me that those who claim to be ‘anti-racist’ are often the most racist people in this country.”
Unfortunately, the Left has been trying to attack grammar as being “racist” for years. Back in 2016, columnist Mona Chalabi argued that grammar was racist in an article for The Guardian, according to Daily Wire.
“It doesn’t take much to see the power imbalance when it comes to grammar snobbery,” she argued. “The people pointing out the mistakes are more likely to be older, wealthier, whiter, or just plain academic than the people they’re treating with condescension.”
“All too often, it’s a way to silence people, and that’s particularly offensive when it’s someone who might already be struggling to speak up,” Chalabi added.
Given how much disdain Democrats have for the First Amendment, you can expect this conversation to escalate in the years to come.
This piece was written by PoliZette Staff on July 28, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.
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