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Old October 24th, 2020 #23
Stewart Meadows
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Rebecca Walkowitz wants to dumb down English classes at Rutgers University to accommodate negroes and third-world immigrants:

Quote:
What would Shakespeare say? Rutgers takes a knee to Black Lives Matter, declares English grammar ‘racist’


Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of the book, 'Midnight in the American Empire,' How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream.

27 Jul, 2020 19:12

The English Department at Rutgers University said it would ‘stand with’ BLM by focusing on ‘racism in the classroom,’ evidenced by the emphasis on grammar. Will colleges prove more destructive than the riots just witnessed?

It appears that the fallout from the BLM and Antifa riots following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white cop were not only the torched and looted city center of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Today, the ‘violence’ continues to spread like wildfire from the manicured lawns of one of America’s oldest colleges.

Last month, in an effort to demonstrate camaraderie with the BLM/Antifa movement, Rebecca Walkowitz, Chair of the English Department at Rutgers, sent a 3,000+ word email to her colleagues that addresses, among other things, “racism in the classroom.” Never mind that no proof is provided that such a thing even exists. In addition to mentioning compulsory workshops for faculty and students “who do not live the experience of anti-black racism every day,” as well as new hiring standards that give advantage to “people of color,” the email touched upon a part of the English language that one would not normally associate with “systemic racism.”

Under the heading entitled ‘Incorporating critical grammar into our pedagogy,’ Walkowitz said 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.”

“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 professor continued.

In other words, students whose first language is not English, or who come from “non-standard ‘academic English backgrounds” (i.e. Black Americans) should not be unduly ‘punished’ in the classroom for their sub-par writing skills. Instead, they should fall back on a “variety of choices” that empowers them despite their haphazard work. The part where Walkowitz mentions the “biases based on ‘written’ accents” suggests that those “biases” are the failing grades, while the “written accents” is a polite euphemism for ‘mistakes,’ which, in these days of political correctness, nobody is allowed to make. Actually, they are free to make mistakes; it’s just that nobody, not even the teacher, is permitted to draw attention to them.

The not-so-subtle argument being pushed is that since English is not the original lingua franca of Black Americans, and other minorities, who have a different native origin and therefore different comprehension of such nuances and should not be expected to suffer. Their grammatical and writing errors are more the fault of the historic colonizer, the dreaded White man, as opposed to their own failings to grasp the rules of the English language.

For anyone who thinks that may be reading too much into the message, Walkowitz’s email specifically mentions the creation of workshops that focus on “diversity and equity” in an effort to make the Rutgers writing programs “linguistically diverse and decolonized spaces.” There is only one way to interpret that line – sheer madness.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/496008-rutg...e-blm-english/

Rebecca Walkowitz: