Rutgers University’s English department declared that proper grammar is racist.
“This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar [and] sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, nonstandard, ‘academic’ English backgrounds at a disadvantage,” department chairwoman Rebecca 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.”
The school’s English department will alter its grammar standards to “stand with and respond” to the Black Lives Matter movement, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The department head said that the program will hold “workshops on social justice and writing,” will increase the “focus on graduate student life,” and incorporate “‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy” in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the resulting calls to end racism and police brutality.
Walkowitz added that the New Jersey school’s graduate writing program will emphasize “social justice” and “critical grammar” in its courses, which will include more reading on subjects related to racism, sexism, homophobia, and “systemic discrimination.”
Some have denounced the move as “insulting” and racist because it assumes minority students can’t understand correct grammar.
“The idea that expecting a student to write in grammatically correct sentences is indicative of racial bias is asinine,” speech pathologist Leonydus 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.”
The public university made headlines recently after a women’s, gender, and sexuality studies professor tweeted, “F— each and every Trump supporter,” while lamenting the disproportionate toll the coronavirus has taken on black lives.
“I feel like most Black people are clear that this utterly absurd to push to re-open the country is all about a gross necropolitical calculation that it is Black people who are dying disproportionately from COVID. Not only do white conservatives not care about Black life, but my most cynical negative read of the white supremacists among them is that they welcome this massive winnowing of Black folks in order to slow demographic shifts and shore up political power,” professor Brittney Cooper wrote in April.
Supporters of President Trump “are literally willing to die from this clusterf—ed COVID response rather than admit that absolutely anybody other than him would have been a better president,” she added.
