THE PROBLEM WITH STANDARD WRITTEN ENGLISH
A BRIEF HISTORICAL OVERVIEW of LINGUISTIC RACISM IN THE UNITED STATES
Language supremacy has always been a problem in the college composition classroom because the prescriptive instruction of Standard Written English (SWE) contributes to the ongoing oppression of students of color. By neglecting the efficacy and authenticity of diverse dialects and linguistic registers, college writing programs play a significant role in the perpetuation of systemic racism. When writing instructors emphasize “learning to write” in Standard Written English (SWE) over “writing to learn” (the more expressionist, cognitive mode of writing advocated by progressive scholars and practitioners), they propagate linguistic supremacy. In justifying Standard Written English as an inherently superior language and teaching only SWE across the writing curriculum, instructors “implicitly privilege a racist view of history rather than an intellectually sound understanding of linguistic phenomena” (Greenfield, 2011, p. 38).
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This section offers a brief historical overview of the racist history of Standard Written English.
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All spoken language changes over time.
All spoken languages are equal in linguistic terms.
Grammaticality and communicative effectiveness are distinct and interdependent issues. Written language and spoken language are historically, structurally, and functionally fundamentally different creatures.
Variation is intrinsic to all spoken language at every level.
(as quoted in Greenfield, 2011, p. 33; Lippi-Green, 1997, p. 10)
"Just as the assumption of whiteness as the colorless norm has rendered some students of color invisible in the discourse of composition studies (Prendergast 51), theoretical practices that do not recognize and challenge other inaccurate images reinforce the marginal status of those students by rendering them invisible in the professional discourse. At the same time, pedagogical practices based on an inaccurate image of students continue to alienate students who do not fit the image" (p. 639).
Parks (2000) sees these racialized judgments of intelligence as inherited from 18th- and 19th-century scientific theories of race which “had been used to define the ‘white’ man as the preeminent example of ‘mankind’” (p. 92). This biological model, advanced by scholars of the day and persisted into the early 1900’s, viewed African Americans as unable to learn standard English. In Negro English (1884), J. A. Harrison argued that African Americans were incapable of learning more sophisticated and higher forms of English: “The humor and naiveté of the Negor are features which must not be overlooked in gauging his intellectual caliber and timbre; much of his talk is baby-talk…the slang which is an ingrained part of his being as deep-dyed as his skin” (qtd. in Parks, 2000, p. 92). Similarly, John Bennet in “Gullah: A Negro Patois” (1908) claimed the African American dialect a consequence of “negro ignorance…the quite logical wreck of once tolerable English, obsolete in pronunciation, dialectical in its usage, yet the natural result of a savage and primitive people’s endeavor to acquire for themselves the highly orgnaized language of a very highly civilized race” (qtd. in Parks, 2002, p. 92).
According to Parks (2000), the “ethnicity paradigm” introduced in the early twentieth century was intended to redress these issues by shifting discussion of race towards social, rather than biological factors. Directly tied to European immigration, the evolving role of ethnicity in the U.S. in the early twentieth century, and the “bootstraps” model, the ethnicity paradigm centralized the experiences of specific ethnic groups by erasing “difference between immigrant groups…in the popular imagination” (Parks, 2000, p. 92-3). The assumption, then, would be that various immigrant groups would no longer be competing against each other, or white Europeans, but rather against themselves, mediated through the norms and cultures internal to their “group” (Parks, 2000). Thus, culture, not biology, would be the indicator of group’s ability to succeed. |
"During the 1920s, the ethnic paradigm thus created the possibility of a shift within language studies from a biological to a cultural explanation of differences…however, it did so through a traditionally conceptualized image of the United States. Unfortunately, Black English was not recast as representing the culture from which slaves initially came, the diverse community and social structure on the African continent. Instead, Black English became the place where eighteenth-century English still existed, although imperfectly learned." (Parks, 2000, p. 93). Inevitably, the paradigm had a conservative bent, “for the test of ‘being American’” was tied up in capitalism and a group's ability to succeed economically (Parks, 2000). If the language of capitalism—power and success through the accumulation of wealth—was always already linked to one’s ability to master and wield “standard English,” then immigrant populations and speakers of “non-standard” English (African Americans) were given an impossible task: acquire the language of their oppressors and accept that language as “correct,” “proper,” and “superior,” or fail to achieve “the American Dream.” From this angle, it is easy to see how a deficit model for understanding linguistic difference in the U.S. educational system came to be. It comes as no surprise that Black English Vernacular (BEV), other “non-standard” varieties of English, and the English of non-native speakers have been historically marginalized, devalued, and degraded in the United States. These raciolinguistic prejudices persist in the nation at large and in college composition classrooms today: instructors of writing continue to privilege students who have been socialized into dominant language practices while disadvantaging speakers of non-privileged varieties of English. |