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The Racist Initiative One English Department Is Taking to Stand in Solidarity with BLM

Leah Barkoukis
Leah Barkoukis  |  July 23, 2020 3:45 PM

We've now entered the part of 2020 where proper English is racist. Sure, we’ve seen the AP opt for prioritizing one race over another through the capitalization of Black, but at Rutgers University in New Jersey, the English Department is going further in an effort to be anti-racist.

In an email obtained by College Fix, the chair of the department wrote to faculty, staff, and students about English Department initiatives that assist in the “eradication of systemic inequities facing black, indigenous, and people of color.”

Among them? “[I]ncorporating ‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy.” In other words, for the benefit of the Black Lives Matter movement, it will be acceptable to dumb down the English language.

It is listed as one of the efforts for Rutgers’ Graduate Writing Program, which “serves graduate students across the Rutgers community. The GWP’s mission is to support graduate students of all disciplines in their current and future writing goals, from coursework papers to scholarly articles and dissertations,” according to its website.

Under a so-called critical grammar pedagogy, “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,” the email states.

“Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them w/ regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents.” (The College Fix)

If this seems...racist, well, that's because it is.