A recent conversation about grammar, spelling and such — where one us us (that would be me) was accused of being “racist and classist” for insisting on, um, rules for writing — reminded me of the far too many white instructors (including faculty and adjuncts) who have said to me, with great pride, that they would not hold the same standards for their Black and brown students as they did for their white ones because, somethingsomething privilege. This led me to always remind my own students, “Don’t bother with instructors who lower their standards for you: you won’t learn a damn thing from them.”
I’m also reminded of a Somewhat Famous White Leftist who proudly told a group of us that he had insisted, to a Chicago Public Schools Principal, that CPS students shouldn’t be learning Shakespeare but simply be encouraged to do more — excuse me while I vomit — Spoken Word. This person has literally never been to anything but a private institution from kindergarten onwards, and his kids are all graduates of the very exclusive and expensive Lab School here in Hyde Park. If any one of their teachers had suggested suspending the teaching of Shakespeare or if they stopped teaching grammar, he would have been among the first to storm into THAT institution’s offices and demand that the curriculum be changed back.
Here in Chicago, I once attended a City Hall meeting where people celebrated the creation of a new trade school-focused public school, targeted towards Black and Latina/o students. Supporters’ eyes brimmed with tears at the thought that, at last, “our children would have a place that trained them for the world.”
When you tell Black and brown and also poor students of any colour that they shouldn’t have to worry their little heads about silly things like grammar and when you then send them out into a world unprepared to write well or to hold their own in discussions of literature and art, you are — let me be blunt — exercising the eugenecist logic that youth of colour and/or poorer youth are inherently incapable of little more than keeping the world running for much wealthier and often white people (I won’t go into all the complications regarding Asians, who are not as uniformly classed as some might think).
Education should be designed to teach everyone to access worlds of information and expertise in everything that is both “useful,” like computer science and “useless,” like art and literature. In an ideal world, you should be able to debate the value of that Žižek essay with your car mechanic, without hesitation on either side. Your mechanic should also be able to take a summer off to just go lounge on a beach somewhere while someone else takes over his clients. But as long as people think that they’re doing mostly poorer and often POC students a favour by not holding them to the same standards as their (often) white and higher class classmates, we will always be mired not just in a system of inequality but in a system of thinking that replicates that inequality for generations to come.
I’ve written about this often, but here are just a couple of my pieces on the subject and some related matters:
“On Blackness In The Arts.”
“We Were There, We Are Here, Where Are We? Notes Toward a Study of Queer Theory in the Neoliberal University.”
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Image: Édouard Manet, The Fifer, 1866.
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