This article was first published in Complete Colorado.
White supremacists got some rare good news recently when the Writing Center at Metropolitan State University (MSU-Denver) announced it would no longer be teaching standard American English to its students, most of whom are people of color.
This is good news for white supremacists because learning to speak standard English traditionally has helped minorities move up the economic and social ladder. The Writing Center decision helps assure that people of color stay at the bottom. Perhaps part of the explanation for the announcement is that the Writing Center staff is overwhelmingly white.
We should retain some perspective, however. The Writing Center is not the same as the English Department. Nor, as far as I can tell, is it connected to that department, which sponsors its own creative writing program.
Presumably, students still will be able to acquire good English skills at MSU-Denver. Just not from the Writing Center.
The Writing Center’s ‘reasons’
On its website, the Writing Center explains why it made the decision to banish standard American English. Its explanations are infused with cultural Marxism.
Here is one of the lowlights: “Racism and white supremacy exist within every facet of our society, including writing, grading, teaching, and University life.”
No empirical support is enlisted for this proposition. And none could be, because “institutional racism” claims really are not statements of fact but political weapons.
Like many fact-free political slogans, institutional racism claims are self-proving: If you admit that there is institutional racism, that’s because it exists. If you deny that there is institutional racism, that just shows how deeply institutionalized racism is.
Institutional racism claims are used to inflame and bully: Among minorities, they foster hatred for Caucasians. Among modern Caucasians, they provoke guilt that can never be absolved, because it has no rational basis.
The Writing Center continues: “We are firmly anti-racist, stand with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and will continue to dismantle systems that promote racism, sexism, and ableism.”
You would think that the Writing Center staff would know by now that Black Lives Matter has been discredited by widespread reports of grifting and corruption. But the people at the Writing Center claim only to write. No one claims they can read.
Notice that the Writing Center also rejects “ableism.” In other words, it doesn’t reward people who perform well over people who perform badly. Why am I not surprised?
The Writing Center says one reason against teaching standard English is that “English is a living language that regularly changes.”
So, because something changes over time, that’s a reason not to learn it? That’s like a driving school announcing it will no longer teach anyone how to drive current model cars because eventually there will be new model cars.
The Writing Center explanation then proceeds on its dreary way. It claims standard American English “makes the assumption that there is a ‘correct’ and ‘standard’ way to write and speak in American English.”
You would think that people who teach writing would write better. “Standard American English” does not “make assumptions.” People make assumptions.
More importantly, that there is a correct and standard American way of using English is not a mere “assumption.” It’s a fact.
Standard American English is standard because it’s the common currency of educated communication in America—just as Hanover dialect is the German standard, Florentine dialect is the Italian standard, and until a few centuries ago Latin was the European standard. Anyone seeking to communicate beyond his own geographic and cultural group has to learn the standard.
The standard also is such for another reason: It is more precise than colloquial English or slang. When, for example, the Writing Center announces its support for the “singular they,” the Center thereby announces that its staff favors ambiguity and confusion over precision.
Finally, the Writing Center claims standard English “privileges white communities and maintains social and racial hierarchies” and “privileges white populations and creates a destructive binary between [standard American English] and Black or Hispanic Englishes [sic]. . . .”
But as noted above, the truth is quite the opposite: Knowledge of the standard traditionally enables minority groups to rise within a society. Keeping them ignorant keeps them down.
The Indian experience
Experience in India has been instructive: India has hundreds of native languages. English was a bequest from the country’s British colonizers, but is the only common tongue that the population of India has ever had. Nationalists in India once discouraged their countrymen from learning English, because of its colonial roots. But Indians who failed to learn English found that they were forever handicapped, socially and economically. On the other hand, Indians who learned English found the world open to them.
Given such experiences, why would the Writing Center inveigh against standard English?
One answer may be simple ignorance: As I learned from my own long university career, many modern academics live in a left-wing bubble and have very little knowledge of the world.
But there is also a more sinister answer: The “progressive” and, especially, the cultural Marxist, agenda is not to unite people, but to fragment them—and then win and hold political power by inciting the fragments against each other. Divide et impera.
Whatever the reasons, the Writing Center has announced its commitment to institutional malpractice—providing yet more support for my view that it’s time to toss Colorado’s public universities off the taxpayer-funded gravy train.
But even if we don’t go that far, MSU-Denver really needs to make some staffing changes at the Writing Center.