Thread by @michaelharriot

Let me show you why this white-centric hyperbolic fear is mired in white supremacy.

First of all, the notion that being more inclusive renders black people as “other” fails to recognize that academic institutions teach whiteness as the default (and therefore, “correct”) culture.

https://twitter.com/thomaschattwill/status/1285910253788372992

What else does Mark Twain’s writings represent besides white people’s version of Ebonics? He is considered a master of AMERICAN literature but he was really ghetto as fuck.

He was a great storyteller whose literary faults made him “accessible to the common man”... white people

Or look at Walt Whitman, who dropped out of school at 11 years old.

His poetry was without form and lacked classical style. Yet, he is considered one of the greatest American poets... And he is, partly because he wasn’t criticized for having a lack of classical training.

He was just an AMERICAN original.

Contrast that with Phyllis Wheatley, an enslaved black woman who wrote poetry and ...that’s it.

That’s all you know about Phyllis Wheatley. Name two poems by Phyllis Wheatley without Googling them. Stop lying. You can’t

That’s because you know about her STORY, her blackness and not her work. A literary academic, in a blind “taste test” would say Wheatley’s poetry would wipe the floor with Whitman’s scratch

And here’s the thing:

Phyllis Wheatley didn’t write about being enslaved.

She combined mythology, Christianity and classical themes. She wrote in the style of Old England using iambic pentameter and the transfer with New World rhyme patterns. even though she was born in AFRICA.

She was, by any measure, a better poet than almost anyone in her era

But if you leaned about her in school, she was taught as an anomaly or a curiosity while Whitman just made shit up and became an American classic.

Because whiteness is the default, she epitomizes an “other” when Whitman is really the “other”

AND here is the thing:

Education, like everything else evolves. Basing your idea of what qualifies as education is mired in privilege.

You sound like the people who lament that schools no longer teach cursive writing while reading comprehension scores continue to decline nationwide.

Who the fuck writes in cursive?

Well, the same privilege holds for what qualifies as grammar. I can’t tell you how many we’ll-educated white people I’ve met who can’t compose a sentence. But it was never an impediment for them because they write how they talk.

It might not be grammatically correct but is SOUNDS correct because they talk like everyone around them talks, so they write like everyone writes.

So because of whiteness, they aren’t penalized for their inability to write.

That is privilege.

Because,living around black people, if I talked and wrote how everyone around me talked and wrote, it wouldn’t be any less correct than the white person, it would just stand out more.

So, as a black person in academia, I’m not required to even be grammatically correct, I’m required to be AT LEAST as grammatically incorrect in the acceptable way that the white people are incorrect.

privilege makes white people assume that their default way is the correct way

It’s not.

It’s just the default. And diversifying the default is only harmful if your intention is to exclude more people.

After all, what is the point of language and grammar?

Communication.

So why not broaden the scope of cultural inclusion instead of narrowing it?

Having read the outline of this school’s plan, the school is not saying they’re going to LOWER the standards, which is what this alarmist racist yahoo would have you believe.

They just said they’re going to decolonize language and literature by making more representative

People should read Chinua Achebe as mich as they read Dostoyevsky. Toni Morrison is not a great black writer, she’s one of the greatest writers in American History PERIOD and is as influential and American as Hemingway.

We don’t mention Richard Wright James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison, who writes the classic American tales, until we get to “black writers,” meanwhile, Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Steinbeck are staples of our education system.

Moby Dick is considered the “Great American Novel” (excuse me while I switch to all Caps)

HOW IS MOBY DICK BETTER THAN NATIVE SON??

In fact, I’d argue that Native Son is essentially the same book as Moby Dick but, in Native Son, Bigger is Ahab and social equality is the whale

Chester Himes is TEN TIMES the writer that Mark Twain is and his technicolor writing captures Harlem and NY better than Twain captured the American South

“A Raisin in the Sun” is essentially “The Grapes of Wrath” but...You know...interesting.

Now I have thought this and could have written all this in HS, college or grad school but you know why I didn’t?

Because I had to find all these black writers on my own!!!

The version of America I was taught was white people and I sweatergawd...

If I have to hear one more mediocre white boy wax rhapsodic about how they were really Holden Caufiled and how Catcher in the Rye changed their lives, I will vomit.

Last thing: When I was in college, I took Chinese. The way you learn Mandarin Chinese is through a system called Pinyin, which is basically a system of phonetics and accents.

Someone asked her if we’d be able to communicate in China if we learned Pin Yin, shesaid “probably not”

She had a hard time explaining the variations in dialect and eventually settled on explaining it this way:

“It’s how white people talk in your country.”

Some people were offended until she elaborated:

“I know how to speak American English,” she said. “

“Before I came here, I read newspapers and watched the news. But no one talks like that. Then one day, I was in a math class taking a test. It was very difficult because it was all word problems. It was so hard even though I am very good at English and math.

“After the class, someone asked me ‘how I think I did.’ I didn’t know what he meant. How I did what? What did I do?”

That’s when I realized that everyone around me was talking JUST LIKE THE PERSON WHO WROTE THE TEST. They were all White people. “

“It’s not that I didn’t know correct English, I didn’t know how to speak like the people who wrote the test!”

Because there are so many local & regional dialects, China tried to romanticize the written language for hundreds of years.

But instead of restricting, Pinyin combined other systems into one written system. So you won’t be able to understand everyone but if you know pinyin, most ppl will understand your.

“In America, most people understand correct English but they speak ‘white English’” she said.

Then she made a joke that offended some people but, as the only black person in the room, I knew exactly what she meant.

It was a throwaway line but I remembered it for the rest of my life.

“Learning ‘white’ should really be a prerequisite,” she said...

“For ALL the classes.”