Going into our conversation about language equality, I was immediately reminded of my work in Professor Lotier’s class last semester that touched on this concept. While I had never considered the implications of language equality before, I was very quick to understand the concept and realize that systemic change must be made in order to compensate for the decades of academia that rewarded students who grew up in middle-class American white households, and fail to take into account that while other racial backgrounds speak and articulate their points via a different vernacular, that does not make their points any less valid and therefore they should have a place in academia as well.
At its core, the issue that I have identified is as follows. The purpose of higher education institutions is to prepare students for their life and professional endeavors post-graduation. However, the concepts, especially as they pertain to writing a rhetoric, that are drilled into our minds since our earliest days in elementary school, are concepts that don’t typically exist outside the walls of academic institutions. The five-paragraph essay, for example, is something that I have spent nearly a decade refining and perfecting, however all evidence points to the fact that after May 17, 2020 I may never need to write one again. The same can be said for conventional English.
The conventional/academic English that is shoved down students’ throats since we began learning how to read is primarily the language spoken by academics. If academia is intended to prepare students for life after graduation, why does it spend so much time teaching us how to speak to those within academia?
I don’t want to beat around the bush or act as though this systemic problem negatively affects all students equally. Students’ Right to Their Own Language poignantly points out, “We need to ask ourselves whether our rejection of students who do not adopt the dialect most familiar to us is based on any real merit in our dialect or whether we are actually rejecting the students themselves, rejecting them because of their racial, social, and cultural origins.”
Personally, I am a white male college student who was born and raised in Massachusetts and my mother was an English major in college. It should come as no surprise to you that conventional English, both spoken and written, comes fairly naturally to me. For years in high school my peers and instructors commended me on my “strong writing abilities” and my “ability to communicate well”. However, this was more because of my background and had less to do with my actual skills. Black students are unfairly critiqued for the way they speak and write, even though they may be doing the exact same thing that I was doing: speaking and writing in the way that they were accustomed to based on how they grew up. However, while I was praised for my “ability”, these other students now must learn how to speak and write using a set of rules they were not familiar with. This reinforces the point made by SRTOL, that academia is not rejecting writing incompetence, it is systematically rejecting students of diverse racial, social, and cultural origins.
Alex's WSC 119 Blog 