Sounding dim and uneducated is now, it seems, something to aspire to and encourage, especially at universities:
A sociolinguist from Stanford University claims the way African-Americans speak leads to discrimination across the board — in the court system, interactions with police, education, and employment. Professor John Rickford says, “Black Vernacular English” is viewed as less “trustworthy, intelligent and well-educated” than so-called standard “white” English, and that “dismantling this construction is part of the fight for racial justice.” Rickford, who is the current president of the Linguistic Society of America, said the “modern-day racialisation of language” — which mandates that African-Americans conform to the white norm — has its roots in slavery.
In other words, bad whitey. Because judging people by what falls from their mouths – its comprehensibility, precision and so forth – is racist and oppressive. And if someone sounds barely literate, and uninterested in being understood by anyone outside of their immediate circle, then you should pretend that this is somehow your fault. It’s the way of the woke.
We’ve been here before, of course, when CUNY’s Dr A. W. Strouse – an enthusiast of “social justice” and whose dissertation is titled Literary Theories of the Foreskin – denounced “bourgeois white teachers” and insisted that correcting errors of spelling and basic grammar can “make students feel bewildered, hurt, or angry,” and should therefore be abandoned.
A conceit that prompted the following:
Dr Strouse tells us what it is we need to do. We, he says, “need to think critically about the conventions that govern academic speech.” Well, okay. But what about the teenagers who haven’t mastered even basic standard English and who are excused from even trying, for fear that any correction will upset them? How “critically” will they be thinking – say, about their employment prospects?
While Dr Strouse is revelling in how exotic and ethnic his classroom sounds, and basking in how incredibly woke he’s being, are his students narrowing their options in the job market? Unless it turns out that in the real world every employer wants their company’s memos and public literature, and their customer interactions, to include lots of double negatives, unfinished words, mispronunciation, and mangled tenses. Oh, and aks instead of ask. That always looks professional.
If a common impression given by “African American Vernacular English” is of imprecision and parochialism, and of someone not in full possession of their own thoughts, as Dr Strouse acknowledges, then it seems an odd thing to encourage in class, at a university. Why would someone spend a small fortune on an education that leaves them sounding uneducated? (An impression, incidentally, that Dr Strouse evidently tries hard to avoid regarding his own ostentatiously educated, and therefore statusful, self.) But sounding cartoonishly ghetto is the way to get ahead, apparently. For other, browner people.
And let’s not forget this farce at the Writing Centre at the University of Washington, Tacoma, the stated goal of which is to “help writers write and succeed in a racist society” – a feat to be accomplished by dismissing spelling and grammar as “racist” and “an unjust language structure.” And whose director, Dr Asao Inoue, took over a year to write a simple, 500-word press release.
As I said at the time:
In short, then, students with brown skin needn’t be articulate, verbally self-possessed, or precise in their thoughts. And that ungrammatical job application, the one enlivened with incomprehensible sentences and lots of inventive spelling, will do just fine. And by the time the real-world consequences of this “social justice” posturing become difficult to avoid, Dr Inoue will have been paid – and be merrily exploiting the next batch of suckers.
And so we arrive at a familiar question: If you wanted to harm the prospects of minority students, to diminish their chances in life, while congratulating yourself and being applauded by your peers, what would you do differently?
Update:
In the comments, Mike in Seattle notes,
50 years ago, this bigotry would have been expressed as “well, it’s just not fair to expect them to do better”… The only difference is now we’re supposed to celebrate these “woke” bigots.
Indeed. It’s perverse, almost grimly comical. The students are encouraged to be hyper-critical, indeed delusional, regarding the motives of all white people, even to the point of dismissing the correction of spelling and grammar as some egregious, racially motivated act of oppression. And yet the motives of their educators, the ones who tell them these things, and whose status and careers depend on cultivating tribalism and paranoid resentment, and a kind of pernicious flattery, are spared any similar questioning – or, so far as I can see, any questioning at all.
So much for “critical thinking.”
And so, students who leave university saddled with debt and a worthless Angry Studies pseudo-qualification, and who subsequently repel employers with their chippy attitude, inept spelling and grammatical incompetence, will presumably rationalise any rejection, any hardship, as proof of the evils of “whiteness” and the “racist society” that their lecturers banged on about. Because the more obvious explanation – that they were dupes, taken for a ride by race-hustling parasites – would be much too bruising to their egos.
Update 2:
Again, via the comments, behold the zenith of this mindset:
Uh, man’s sole “jabringing” object disfigure religion trauma and nubs, uh, the, inside the trauma of representation that turns into the black child devouring and identifying with the stories and into the white culture brought up, uh, de de de de de, dink, and add subjectively like a white man, the black man!
Apparently, these are the intellectual fruits of “hacking traditional college debate’s white privilege problem.” Do watch the video. Though I should point out that you may want to bite down on something. But hey, a degrading racial caricature, a cartoonish pantomime of blackness, complete with claims of “nigga authenticity” and actual jabbering, is now the last word in wokeness.
How far we’ve come. 
When I worked for a newspaper in Rock Hill, South Carolina, I worked with black pressmen who shifted their speech depending on whether they were talking to the other pressmen and whities like me.
Professor John Rickford says, “Black Vernacular English” is viewed as less “trustworthy, intelligent and well-educated” than so-called standard “white” English,
And so we’ll encourage black students to sound uneducated and untrustworthy. What could go wrong?
I scarcely need to point out that the proponents of this policy, quoted above, have chosen not to follow their own advice.
A sociolinguist from Stanford University claims the way African-Americans speak leads to discrimination across the board
None of the black Americans I know (all successful, middle class) talk like ghetto kids. Must be a coincidence.
Hi Bill,
Yes, I worked in an office with a lot of black people, and they too switched dialects at need. The ability to do so may have helped them get into that office.
From where originates the conceit that “black English” is the only dialect which elicits disapproval? My extended family hail from deep in the Ozarks and I noticed as a young child, my dad would shift his speech patterns at family gatherings. At home he practiced a very precise, grammatically correct and nondescript Midwestern dialect. I asked him about it once, and he said, for better or worse, people will judge you by the way you speak and write. “If you go to college speaking like a hillbilly, no one will take you seriously.” It’s not about skin color, it’s about class.
It’s not about skin color, it’s about class.
And expecting the rest of the world to not make judgements about you based on what you say and write is pointless, indeed bizarre. Again, it’s like shouting at the rain.
“If you go to college speaking like a hillbilly, no one will take you seriously.”
Funny you should say that. The earliest instance of the use of “axe” for “ask” I’m aware of is by Charles Farrar Browne’s character Artemus Ward, a (white) showman dealing in “feroshus wild beasts and moral wax figgers” from “Baldinsville, Injianny”, starting some time in the 1850s. So it’s not inherently black, but it’s been used to indicate poor education for over 150 years.
Also, that switch of accent and dialect depending on company is being used by nationalists here in Scotland to claim that there’s a distinct “Scots” language (which they can elevate to official status, teach in schools, and drive a wedge between us and our compatriots to the south). Members of the Holyrood assembly stand and speak as if they were addressing a football crowd (and wonder why the place isn’t taken seriously). The arguments are very similar, but lent spurious credence by the fact they’re not only claiming to speak for a minority, but for all of us. There are asshats the world over.
(I highly recommend Artemus Ward, by the way. The complete works are on Project Gutenberg, and there’s not much of them. Browne died in his 30s. He was a contemporary of, and knew, Mark Twain, who considered him his superior. Had he lived as long, I’m convinced he’d have been at least as well known.)
used by nationalists here in Scotland
Sam is so well-spoken that I sometimes forget he’s from the Barren, Godless North.
Perhaps I should throw in a “Hoots, mon!” from time to time. Whatever that means.
Ya know, I suspect the insistence on blacks NOT using proper English has deeper roots in slavery than insistence on proper English does. Easy way to mark the slave class, when there are free (and slave-owning) blacks around…
Stand to! Insta-lanche!.
I worked with black pressmen who shifted their speech depending on whether they were talking to the other pressmen and whities like me.
I think a lot of people do that. Former President Obama, certainly. I do, depending. Trick is, to never talk down to someone.
So basically language is racist…
Pogonip;
Thanks. There was one particular moment that impressed this point on me. There was an open window between the newsroom and the composition room. I needed to talk to a pressman and stuck my head through the window. The black guys were talking to each other (imagine the jive guys in “Airplane!”, only far easier to understand and with a Southern accent).
One of them noticed me, and he and I hashed out the problem before he returned to his friends to finish telling his story back in his original dialect.
Amusing, but very educational at the same time.
Frank Zappa wrestled with the concept in a way that would certainly be considered totally racist today and he should be banned and I probably should go to Hell and hang out with Hitler for posting this (NSFW):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=152&v=ugFTcRh0Q6I
A few random sentences from Joel Chandler Harris could have the professor scratching his head.
“Go ‘long, honey! Swaje ‘er bag. W’en cows don’ get milk’t, der bag swells, en youk’n hear um a moanin’ en a beller’n des like dey wuz gittin’ hurtid.”
Democrats have always hated those people since before the Civil War. This is just their most recent attempts to keep the blacks down.
It’s like when you see British kids write “I would of”.
Stand to! Insta-lanche!.
We need fresh towels, stat.
It’s like when you see British kids write “I would of”.
I see that a lot. In fact, I see it so often I can only assume that it’s not being corrected in class. By the educators paid to do so.
Trick is, to never talk down to someone.
Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry before her, seemingly never figured that out.
(In both cases, though, I think they knew full well they were talking down to people, but assumed their audience was too ignorant (ig’nant?) to realize it.)
Easy way to mark the slave class,
Despite the “social justice” pieties mouthed by these people, you have to look at the likely outcomes of their policies and demands. In light of which, it’s hard to see them as good people doing good deeds. To the contrary, they seem more like saboteurs or self-flattering parasites, feeding their vanities at the expense of the very students they pretend to care about. And so Dr Strouse, mentioned above, advises students to say “fuck you” to potential employers during job interviews – because it makes him look edgy in front of his equally vain and fatuous peers.
And because, you know, saying “fuck you” to a potential employer is always a winning strategy for those seeking work. Say, students saddled with debt.
See also Dr Caprice Hollins.
50 years ago, this bigotry would have been expressed as “well, its just not fair to expect hem to do better”. So the same sad sacks have found a new correct way to express the exact same bullshit; the lowers just can’t be expected to do all that much. The only difference is now we’re supposed to celebrate these “woke” bigots instead of condemn them.
That some serious propaganda skills right there.
Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry before her, seemingly never figured that out.
Hillary had real street cred. She got hot sauce in her bag.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/hillary-clinton-pandering-radio/479004/
By the way, hot sauce is just the thing to take Wild Camel Hump Fat to the next level.
Oops wrong link on the Hump Fat. https://desertfarms.com/products/hump-fat-14oz
Do help yourselves.
If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll rattle the spam filter.
Bill Peschel: “… I worked with black pressmen who shifted their speech depending on whether they were talking to the other pressmen and whities like me.”
Just like Hillary and Obama….
Speaking of food, David just offered me a free pickled “egg.”
I think that is a terrible way to treat me on my birthday.
Congratulations. Goodness, you look, er… ten years younger than whatever age you are.
59.
[ Swipes Spiny Norman’s drink, slides it along bar to Pogonip.]
On the house, madam.
Over Spiny Norman shouting indignantly, I say “Thank you, David! And Norman!”
OT but,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/why_we_are_proud_of_our_fat_bodies
OT.
Woke Al Jazeera.
https://twitter.com/ajplus/status/1042997097073725440?s=19
It is white women who maltreat Indian chambermaids in the Gulf States obvs.
Not entirely unrelated. Video here, and not a parody.
Over Spiny Norman shouting indignantly, I say “Thank you, David! And Norman!”
This place is starting to resemble alt.callahans.
Uh, man’s sole “jabringing” . . .
The whole purpose of that sort of “debate”–I think I just threw up in my mouth dignifying that display as “debate,” even with the scare quotes–is to reduce the process to “I am X. Therefore, I win” or “You are Y. Therefore you lose.” That is, all reference to an objective reality must be purged, except for some set of characteristics which define the speaker’s identity. Except, even those sets of characteristics don’t constitute a “reality” if the speaker varies in the slightest from his/her identity’s approved narrative.
Hey there! What happened to my drink? [indignantly]
I make a simple trip to the gents, and it’s like I was never even here. Harumph.
So, in summary;
1. A minority group chooses to speak in a certain way which is deemed imprecise and unintelligent by the majority.
2. This results in negativity be outcomes for the minority group.
3. Rather than the minority group choosing an alternative way of speaking, the solution is for the entire population of the majority group to change their perception.
Is there an historical precedent or example we could examine to determine how feasible this solution is?
Muphry’s Law there on point 2.
“If you go to college speaking like a hillbilly, no one will take you seriously.”
My father was born in the holler and has less discernible accent than I do. It’s no mystery why, considering the career he chose.
I somehow doubt these enlightened academics would raise my white hide to Special Victim Status were I to use crik or yins in conversation with them. They wouldn’t stand to gain anything.
Just like Hillary and Obama….
More painful than listening to Obama attempt to speak as if he were not a rich white kid from Hawaii was watching the suckers who lapped it up.
It is white women who maltreat Indian chambermaids in the Gulf States obvs.
Useful idiots never want to see themselves as used idiots. That is what makes them useful idiots.
If black parents were able to choose their children’s education Black English would have disappeared seventy years ago, making this the small “r” republican ideal, where the PEOPLE are sovereign, where the people are master and government is the slave, but this was fundamental republican relationship inverted by the advent of America’s socialist monopoly on education which stripped black parents of their choice with the result that their children got stuck with a separate black form of English that their parents would never have chosen for them.
Monopoly is formed by barriers to entry. For Americans to send their children to private school, to schools of their choice, they have to pay twice for their children’s education: once through taxes for the public school system and then a second time for private tuition. That double payment is an extraordinarily high barrier to entry, a full double price. Socialist education IS a monopoly, an EXTREME monopoly, to be precise.
“A republic if you can keep it,” said Benjamin Franklin. In education we are not keeping it. We compromised our republic in the most fundamental of ways. Who parents choose to be the educators of their children is the moral reproductive system of society. We unplugged that choice with socialized education, we unplugged our moral reproductive system and handed our children over to the corruption of politicized government propagandists.
Democrats have few children but through our socialist monopoly on education they have succeeded in grabbing control of the minds of most of our nation’s children. Conservative parents can try to offset this influence but it is not an influence that should ever exist in the first place. It’s a fundamental violation of the fundamental principle of republicanism. It is government assuming the role of master, making our children it’s slaves.
Black English is just one pernicious consequence, establishing a separatism for blacks starting with the very way black children learn to talk that keeps blacks on the Democratic Party plantation, but the evil goes far beyond this and afflicts all races, indoctrinating ALL children into radically illiberal and un-American ideologies based on group identity instead of our nation’s founding principles of liberty and natural right.
Hi Squires, my dad was from Pennsyltucky, a holler-like region. He never learned how to accent-switch, possibly because there was no need. The Army was always wanting him to go to OCS and every civilian job he had wanted him to go into mgmt or at least be foreman. If the professor is trying to make the point that a heavy blackcent will make these things less likely to happen to you, he may be correct, but encouraging that same heavy blackcent seems like a terribly destructive way to make that point.
The smartest person I’ve ever known had a blackcent, and had to leave her organization to get promoted. But women with much heavier accents were far above her in that organization, so maybe, as always, it’s not how you speak but who you know.
As long as we’re discussing accents, I’d much, much rather hear ANY other accent than the nasal drone of the UMC politically correct white American female. Travel writer Fred Reed says these women sound like they’re talking through a kazoo, so now I think of them as the Kazoo Girls. You don’t hear this in the upper-upper class, it seems confined to women of the courtier class. Let’s pray it doesn’t spread.
I’ll just leave this here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/21/oxford-english-dictionary-young-people-slang
“How I speak, as a non-white woman from a working-class background, has been regularly policed throughout my life. To take just one example: the university tutor who marked me down on a poetry assignment because I “miscounted the syllables required”. The word hour is two syllables in my accent, but one syllable in the Queen’s English.”
Oh, the injustice!
50 years ago, this bigotry would have been expressed as “well, it’s just not fair to expect hem to do better”… The only difference is now we’re supposed to celebrate these “woke” bigots…
As noted in the Bad Medicine thread, it’s almost grimly comical. The students are encouraged to be hyper-critical, indeed delusional, regarding the motives of white people, even to the point of dismissing the correction of spelling and grammar as some egregious, racially motivated act of oppression. And yet the motives of their educators, the ones who tell them these things, and whose status and careers depend on cultivating tribalism and paranoid resentment, and a kind of pernicious flattery, are spared any similar questioning, or, so far as I can see, any questioning at all.
So much for “critical thinking.”
And so, students who leave university saddled with debt and a worthless pseudo-qualification, and who subsequently repel employers with their chippy attitude and grammatical incompetence, will presumably rationalise any rejection, any hardship, as proof of the evils of “whiteness” and the “racist society” that their lecturers banged on about. Because the more obvious explanation – that they were dupes, taken for a ride by race-hustling parasites – would be much too bruising to their egos.