On October 14, Asao Inoue gave a 75-minute lecture entitled “Freeing Our Minds and Innovating Our Pedagogy from White Language Supremacy”. Inoue is a professor and the associate dean of the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University.
Inoue stated that we are all implicated in white supremacy during this talk hosted by the university’s Office of Inclusive Excellence. The reason being that white supremacist systems, like all systems, reproduce themselves as a matter of course and that includes the reproduction of dominant, white, middle-class, monolingual standards for literacy and communication.
Roughly translated that means that accurate spelling, proper sentence construction and good grammar are the tools of white supremacists. Clearly, if you mark papers and assign grades based on such tools of the devil, then you are literally Hitler (or something).
Curiously, the reported quotes from Inoue’s address are all well structured and grammatically correct. Perhaps the editors of the pieces cleaned them all up and sanitised them before publication?
In the spirit of inclusivity and to demonstrate the clear lack of white supremacist thinking here at The BFD, we are abandoning those evil constructs forthwith.
Inoue recconed white guys words and sentunances and stuff upthemselvesness is what goes on in clasroms, sckuls and sosighity cos them prizes and stuff is always stacked, init, for those fullas coz of rich dads like. Itz the systum, init? Neva had no books n storeys red to me dun I? So got no chanc like at the you no prize givins. Alwaz white geys init? Thats wot that Inoue fulla sez like.
Racsist sckuls n stuff, init. No matter waht rubbish they spout about valus n misyun statmunts like theys stull raccist init.
I recon this Inoue fullas strait up like cos wot he sez bout marks an scors like. Just whitys init wot get marks. No marx fo effit or nuffin just nuver year same like last one init.
Hears a book wot he writ bout it.
Parrently book sez gotta think bout marx for writin an stuff to fix racssism. Kwolty don’t matta no more cos jus whitys get stuff init. Shudda get marx like fo tryin init.
More Inoue dribble here.
- Calculate course grades by labor completed and dispense almost completely with judgments of quality when producing course grades.
- In order to succeed in even the most liberal and forward-thinking institutions of higher education today, a person of color has to act, think and sound white to some degree.
- Consider the language used and question how actions in college are another version of society’s long-standing inherited, structured, normalized, eugenic, and white-supremacist project.
- How do we innovate ourselves out of this historical racist project so that we are engineering together, a bigger, more diverse, more equitable braver, more beneficent, tomorrow?