The Psychology Of “Social Justice” Is A Thing To Behold
Want to thwart the life chances of black students? Then hey, become an educator. Say, a professor of Medieval literature at the City University of New York:
In an op-ed for Inside Higher Ed, Dr A W Strouse argues that colleges should support “greater linguistic diversity” and “affirm and embrace” language differences among students, such as the use of slang and African American Vernacular English. Affirming students’ use of non-standard English is important, he says, because students who speak nonstandard English may feel discouraged if called out for it.
Correcting errors of spelling and basic grammar can, we’re told, “make students feel bewildered, hurt, or angry.” Yes, personal growth can do that, especially when overdue.
“Already, scholars of rhetoric believe, as the consensus view, that instructors should not try to change their students’ speech patterns,” Strouse writes. “In the classroom, students shut down in the face of pedantry because they hate when bossy teachers tell them how to talk, especially in cases in which bourgeois white teachers dictate ex cathedra about what speech is ‘correct.’”
Bourgeois white teachers. No prizes for guessing where this is going. And it occurs to me that whether speech patterns are ‘correct’ may depend on whether you’re being understood, or sufficiently precise – say, in class. Or on whether you’re employable.
Further, he declares that the academic norms that privilege standard English should be suspect, because they can justify the judgment of “people’s intelligence based on dubious standards.”
Well, if you’re an employer and trying to thin a pile of job applications, repeated errors of even simple grammar and spelling are, inevitably, going to be a big help, given their tendency to correspond with, and thereby signal, both carelessness and intellectual imprecision. If someone is apparently too distracted to proofread their own job application, that’s unlikely to inspire great confidence. However, Dr Strouse has foreseen this practical problem and proposes a bold, if unorthodox, solution:
When asked why he believes it’s important to embrace and support alternative types of English, especially those that are typically frowned upon in the workplace, Strouse said employers shouldn’t dictate how their employees speak. “The workplace has way too much power and should not be allowed to determine something as fundamental as how we speak,” he declared. “People need to tell their bosses, ‘Fuck you.’”
And a long and satisfying employment history will no doubt follow.
You see, Dr Strouse is – in his mind, at least – “dismantling linguistic racism.” And he’s doing this using minority students as his little foot soldiers. How very brave of him. And that ungrammatical job application, the one enlivened with incomprehensible sentences and lots of inventive spelling, will do just fine. Because by the time any sufficiently credulous students have pinned their hopes upon it, it won’t be his problem.
A few months ago, following this related item on the Writing Centre at the University of Washington, Tacoma, where grammar is dismissed as “racist” and an “unjust language structure,” I said:
It’s strange, to say the least, to see so-called educators, self-styled champions of “social justice,” functioning more as saboteurs. In that, if you were spiteful and wanted to undermine the practical life chances of black students, and leave them resentful, unskilled and racially fixated, and heavily in debt, it’s hard to see what you’d do differently.
Evidently, all this woke posturing requires sacrifice. Specifically, spending money on an education that leaves its supposed beneficiaries sounding uneducated.
Readers with an academic bent will be thrilled to hear that Dr Strouse’s dissertation is titled Literary Theories of the Foreskin. This work of tremendous cultural and intellectual heft “investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organises literary experience.” It also, apparently, “demonstrates that, within the school of preputial poetics, the male anatomy queerly embodies the plasticity and multiplicity of rhetoric.”
And in the notes to which, we find,
Why do San Pellegrino cans come covered in a thin film of aluminium? This superfluous skin is, for me, a preputial stylization. It is the redundant foreskin that ornaments the phallus. The can’s design, with its Mediterranean palette, evokes the zest and the flare that we attribute to Latin culture — the passionate eroticism that we ascribe to Latin men. Pellegrino’s metallic foreskin is the objet petit a of circumcised, Protestant America’s mad desire for uncut, Roman Catholicism fleshiness.
So yes, your children should be seeking out career advice from him.
“People need to tell their bosses, ‘Fuck you.’”
The less time minority kids spend near Dr Strouse the better their prospects will be.
The less time minority kids spend near Dr Strouse the better their prospects will be.
Oh absolutely. But note the parasitic dynamic – one we’ve seen before, many times. Who benefits from all this modish “social justice” posturing? The professor may gain some in-group kudos, at least among idiots; but what of the teenagers who take his advice and then collide with the real world? Brown-skinned students are basically just props in some narcissistic drama, and their practical life-chances are to be sacrificed.
For “social justice.”
“they hate when bossy teachers tell them how to talk, especially in cases in which bourgeois white teachers dictate ex cathedra about what speech is ‘correct’”
…says the bourgeois white teacher dictating ex cathedra about what speech is correct.
Self-awareness isn’t much of a liberal trait, is it?
One postulates how this wondrous revelation should be applied to other spheres of interaction; say when at university and the Snowflake next to you insists on being addressed with zir’s pronouns-de-jour..
Or doesn’t it work like that. Enquiring minds etc.
Professor Strouse’s view is extraordinarily parochial, inasmuch as he seems to presuppose that all linguistic conventions have some sort of racial component. Is he not aware that every language has a “standard variant” which is necessary to facilitate communication among various groups, which after all is the purpose of language to begin with? Further, a white kid from way back in a Kentucky ‘holler’ will experience the same linguistic prejudices as an inner city black kid, if he tries to import his speech patterns to an academic setting or a Fortune 500 boardroom.
“People need to tell their bosses, ‘Fuck you.’”
– Wonder if he’s tried it on his boss? As he’s still employed, I’ll hazard the guess “no”.
Cultural Marxism, Gramsciism, or whatever, exhibits the same failings as actual Marxism.
Neither depicts humanity accurately and neither posits a viable future. Capitalism will not fail and the state will not wither away. Trash-talking illiterates will never be competitive in the jobs market, save for the most menial tasks. Rouse and his ilk can blether away all they like, it just isn’t going to happen.
Why do San Pellegrino cans come covered in a thin film of aluminium? This superfluous skin is, for me, a preputial stylization. It is the redundant foreskin that ornaments the phallus.
I think he’s oversharing.
“Affirming students’ use of non-standard English is important,”
So can we call people of colour niggers again? Asking for a friend.
It also, apparently, “demonstrates that, within the school of preputial poetics, the male anatomy queerly embodies the plasticity and multiplicity of rhetoric.”
*snort*
I think Dr Strouse needs to get laid.
I think Dr Strouse needs to get laid.
It does seem a tad… over-revved.
San Pellegrino is made (bottled?) in Italy within a European market consisting of a mixture of Catholics and Protestants (plus minorities). This market is larger than the US.
It’s notable that Protestants in Europe are rarely circumcised (unlike Americans).
By making the glib assumption that the appeal of San Pellegrino cans lies in the desired to be uncircumcised, he is forgetting the rest of the Protestant world and every other consumer in ROW. In other words our professor is suffering from the delusion that his America is the centre of the universe. God alone knows how he explains why women drink it.
It’s quite sobering to realise how often progressives resort to thinking, that boils down to “it’s all about me”
Strouse seem to be in the market for something.
https://www.amazon.com/My-Gay-Middle-Ages-Strouse/dp/0615830005
Wouldn’t it be nifty if Clarence Thomas wrote his opinions in Gullah?
When I read your posts on academia I never know whether to laugh or despair for the future.
Anyway, I’ve rattled your tip jar.
I did a google search to see this canned water that comes with a foreskin. It’s actually a very thoughtful foil lid that keeps the drinking surface free of grime before you drink it.
As a symbolic foreskin, it’s no banana peel. But I suppose that dissertation has been done already.
Anyway, I’ve rattled your tip jar.
Why, thank you. Much appreciated.
About the Author
At eight years old, A.W. Strouse was so titillated by the Old Testament that he built a sacrificial altar on his parents’ front lawn. He prayed that God would fill him with the Word, but no divine inspiration was forthcoming. Instead, Strouse’s earthly father spanked him heartily for having killed the grass. Ever since, Strouse has been attempting to create a kind of faggy, Christian mysticism through his practice as a poet and through his work as a literary scholar.
It is always daddy issues with these people.
he believes it’s important to embrace and support alternative types of English,
As an employer, I’m not going to go for that, thanks. And any job application with bad spelling goes in the trash.
Wouldn’t it be nifty if Clarence Thomas wrote his opinions in Gullah?
And Thomas Sowell should have spiced his many volumes with random fits of vagueness and urban patois, just to show Dr Strouse how incredibly, authentically black he is.
Somewhat related, brother of the NY Governor who happens to be a CNN talking head, compares the antifa trash to the men who invaded Normandy.
Words fail me.
Air Traffic Controllers should definitely be encouraged to use Ebonics.
I can’t wait to use the line ‘Excuse me. I speak Jive…’ on someone if this takes off!
People need to tell their bosses, ‘Fuck you.’
A heavily-tatted child of an acquaintance was recently arguing with his parents about the fact that his Maori-level “body art” was impeding his job search.
“Dad, my boss will just have to get over it”, said child explained to his father.
Father calmly pointed out that said boss remains theoretical, and is likely to for quite some time, a cause/effect relationship that appears to have eluded his offspring entirely.
*puts can of San Pellegrino Blood Orange back in the fridge*
Ew!
a cause/effect relationship that appears to have eluded his offspring entirely.
See also this.
Correcting errors of spelling and basic grammar can, we’re told, “make students feel bewildered, hurt, or angry.”
Learning differential calculations was hard too. I made embarrassing mistakes.
Then I got over myself.
Then I got over myself.
That does seem to be the tricky part for many people, including the phallically fixated Dr Strouse.
Jesus, I’d (thankfully) forgotten about Minnow. the troll’s troll. A lot was learned from him, especially the sort of slippery, bad faith, psuedo-rational, question begging mentality you relentless chronicle in your posts, David.
A.W. Strouse, PhD:
Darn it, forgot the link:
A W Strouse
He looks exactly as I imagined him.
In the comments to David’s “Repent” link, we find “Steve2: Steveageddon” with this observation directed at Minnow:
Minnow – “Interviewers tend to be looking for people as much as possible like themselves.”
Not true.
I am not a busty blonde, for example.
Posted by: Steve 2: Steveageddon | October 20, 2014 at 15:28
Steve 2: Steveageddon
We haven’t heard from His Steveness in a while.
On the breaking Social Justice News front, Occupy/Resistance is planning nation-wide riots on November 4th, and claim they will continue rioting until the “fascist Trump/Pence regime” is brought down. In exactly the same manner that capitalism was brought down by Occupy Wall Street, I would presume.
They are planning some sort of regional “organizing committee” meetings on August 19, which will undoubtedly devolve into farce.
We haven’t heard from His Steveness in a while.
A damn shame, too. I wonder why.
I have seen “Steve” comments at other blogs, usually sites you’ve linked to, so he’s still out there.
One wonders if he would hold the same view were ‘bosses’ to be replaced in the above by ‘professors.’
Dr Strouse’s attitude reminds me of just how often lefties give truly terrible advice to the people they supposedly care about.
It’s notable how many of the people advocating that people shouldn’t have to learn to use standard English invariably seem to have attained their well-paid and often enviable positions in life mainly through the use of… standard English. A prime British example is former Children’s Laureate and prolific wordsmith Michael Rosen.
I certainly hope that no prospective air traffic controllers, surgeons or nuclear reactor technicians are taking the advice of these clowns.
If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll make an offering to the spam filter.
[…] the school of preputial poetics […]
The decline of poetry explained.
Right, hammock time. Play nicely. Use coasters.
Okay…he’s gone.
Let’s head over to Kickstarter. What Prof. Strouse really needs is a sabbatical at a Nordic research institute; ’twill give him quite a frisson, n’est-ce pas?
http://ki.se/forskning
http://www.gu.se/forskning/var-forskning
http://forskning.ku.dk
http://forskning.no
“Further, a white kid from way back in a Kentucky ‘holler’ will experience the same linguistic prejudices as an inner city black kid, if he tries to import his speech patterns to an academic setting or a Fortune 500 boardroom.”
Well, I’m an Ivy Leaguer attorney out of rural Eastern Kentucky. I have to explain to my big city friends what a “holler” is, when speaking of home. Yet somehow I do not resent that I should use good grammar and appropriate vocabulary in my profession.
More than that: words (and more truly, the concepts standing beneath them) are the working fluid of human consciousness. If you want to have a strong mind, understand words and be able to use them properly.
Prof. Strouse is harming more than just job prospects.
@Hippo
My family is from the Ozarks and my dad was an aerospace engineer. (Graduate work @ M.I.T.) He always told me to speak and write correctly, because otherwise, people would think you’re stupid and you don’t want to give someone a reason to dismiss you out of hand. That said, he was careful to revert to his Ozark roots among family without a problem.
Then I got over myself.
An development I do not anticipate in Dr Strouse’s case, given that he seems to find himself endlessly fascinating.
Somewhat related, you Brits have caused some consternation regarding the First Fleet arriving here. Note the council are made up of 4 Greens members, 3 Labor members and 2 independents if my mail is correct.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/city-of-yarra-votes-to-scrap-australia-day/news-story/e0487cf8964d2efc6605da04c40899d2
Okay…he’s gone.
For some reason I’m reminded of this Eddie Murphy documentary.
Should I ever need to hire someone to communicate only with Strouse’s ex-students, I will eagerly hire one of Strouse’s ex-students.
So they’ve got that going for themselves.