Remember, students. You are not an individual, but a mascot of a notional group. 

From Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, By Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo.

It occurs to me that when these clowns bang on about analysing events through a racial or identitarian lens, as for instance here and here, what they mean is shoehorning people through an identitarian keyhole, then pretending that the subsequent cartoonery and narrow contrivance, with its phantom evils and funhouse-mirror bigotry, is some universal profundity and proof of the speaker’s personal sophistication. The possible results of such “social justice education,” in which group affiliations, however contrived or incidental, are foregrounded and categorised, and their acknowledgement made habitual and a matter of great importance, are not hard to fathom. 

Update, via the comments:

Not that spelling matters, apparently:

American University trains faculty not to judge quality of writing when grading.

It’s the world of the woke, where inversions abound.

Earlier this year, American University invited an outside professor [Dr Asao Inoue] to teach its faculty how to pursue “antiracist ends” through writing assessments… The training has now moved in-house, according to a faculty workshop taking place Thursday morning. Neisha-Anne Green of the Academic Support and Access Centre and Marnie Twigg of the Writing Studies Programme will lead the session, titled “How to Incorporate Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Your Classroom.”

Participants will be shown how to “revise course materials so they don’t accidentally promote or reinforce racist practices,” though the particulars are somehow both emphatic and opaque. We are, for instance, told that, “single standards” for language “kill our students,” which sounds just a tad breathless. There will, it seems, be lots of “redesigning assessment ecologies,” and quite a few “dimension-based rubrics,” which, via an as yet unspecified process, will upend “white racial habits of language,” resulting in some kind of righteous emancipation. In short, grading a student’s ability to convey their thoughts in writing – and to formulate thoughts by writing – is a manifestation of “white language supremacy,” an apparently murderous phenomenon, and therefore to be abandoned in the name of “inclusive excellence.”

Asao Inoue of the University of Washington-Tacoma is known for advocating that students should be graded based on the “labour” they put into their work, not the “quality” of the finished product.

According to Dr Inoue, teachers should “calculate course grades by labour completed and dispense almost completely with judgements of quality when producing course grades.” And so “critical information literacy” – a term deployed with an air of satisfaction – actually entails not being critical, or indeed literate. Dr Inoue, who denounces grammar as “racist” and “an unjust language structure,” has been mentioned here before, when boasting that a simple 495-word press release for his own “racial justice” Writing Centre took “over a year” to write. As if this reflected some profundity of thought, and not a more prosaic explanation.

At Ballou High School, Washington, DC, it would appear that miracles happen:

Teachers… say they often had students on their rosters they barely knew because the students almost never attended class.

And yet, this year, every student of suitable age, including those who were absent more often than in class, has somehow graduated and been accepted by a college or university. At a school were only 3% of students were deemed proficient in reading, where the average SAT score is 782 out of 1600, and where, according to one teacher, those who do attend, in the loosest possible sense, “roam the halls with impunity.”

Of course I use the word graduated in the same entirely bogus way favoured by the school’s administrators.

Via Rafi. 

I’ve previously mentioned the taxpayer-funded race hustler Dr Caprice Hollins, whose efforts to empower black Seattle school pupils included dismissing grammar and foresight as “white values” and expectations thereof as “cultural racism.” Rather than encouraging “students of colour” to articulate their thoughts, to be responsible and plan ahead, like everyone else, we must, said Dr Hollins, see people as “racial beings” and “teach [children] to view the world through a racial lens.” But we mustn’t correct their grammar and spelling, or expect them to turn up on time.

Similar sentiments were voiced, in a somewhat boggling way, by Dr Riyad A Shahjahan, a professional educator at Michigan State University and a “social justice theorist,” who wants us to believe that people with brown skin are mystical and exotic, akin to leprechauns, and, unlike white people, “inhabit [their] bodies fully.” Dr Shahjahan also denounces expectations of attentiveness and academic competence, and even punctuality, as racist and oppressive. We should, he says, embrace “embodied pedagogy” and “disrupt Eurocentric notions of time.”

With such deep and incontestable thinking in mind, it may not be surprising to learn that the Writing Centre at the University of Washington, Tacoma is exploring similar avenues. The Centre, the stated goal of which is to “help writers write and succeed in a racist society,” aims to improve the life chances of brown-skinned students by encouraging them to give employers the impression that they’re incapable of mastering even rudimentary grammar:  

An “antiracist” poster in a college writing centre insists American grammar is “racist” and an “unjust language structure,” promising to prioritise rhetoric over “grammatical ‘correctness.’” The poster, written by the director, staff, and tutors of the Writing Centre, states, “racism is the normal condition of things,” declaring that it permeates rules, systems, expectations, in courses, school and society… The Centre pledges to “listen and look carefully and compassionately for ways we may unintentionally perpetuate racism or social injustice, actively engaging in antiracist practices.” “We promise to emphasise the importance of rhetorical situations… in the production of texts,” announces the poster. “We promise to challenge conventional word choices and writing explanations.”

The Writing Centre press release - which, according to one of its authors, Dr Asao Inoue, took “over a year” to write, despite its brevity – tells us that language is “constantly changing” and it is therefore, allegedly, “difficult to justify placing people in hierarchies or restricting opportunities and privileges because of the way people communicate.” Instead of becoming proficient in the structure and expressive possibilities of the national tongue, students – brown ones – should “become more critical” of “unjust language structures.” Apparently, the way for minority students to flourish as writers is to dismiss any criticism of their prose, and any attempt to improve it, as a racially motivated “microaggression” and an “oppressive practice,” and thus proof of “an inherently racist society.”

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.

Thank goodness these enlightened people are here to help.

Meanwhile, in other twenty-first century news, 

A family in Bangladesh has been arrested after using a fake penis to trick villagers into believing a genie had performed a sex change on their teenage daughter. “The girl and her parents have set up a profitable business promising to heal people with a genie,” Monzur Murshed, the local police chief, said. As news spread that the girl had not only been transformed but undergone a mystical circumcision, villagers flocked to seek the genie’s intervention with their own medical woes.

Via sk60.