Researchers committed to making the case that “academic language” is more complex than “social language” are actually committed to making the case for their own intellectual superiority over people from low-income communities of color that most of them are too scared to enter.
Because these researchers have never been in low income communities of color they describe their homes as “lacking a strong foundation in academic language” not based on any empirical data but just based on what feels right to them.
Researchers who insist that they are not arguing that academic language is more complex than social language are even more disingeneous because they want to be able to maintain a dichotomy while claiming innocence about their complicity in reproducing deficit perspectives.
Then these researchers try to convince marginalized scholars that we are exceptional in our mastery of academic language as a way of depoliticizing us and separating us from the communities we come from. When we refuse this narrative we are called ideological and ungrateful.
The expectation is that we toe the line by becoming complicit in finding deficits in our own communities and developing interventions designed to fix these deficits. This conveniently leaves white supremacy intact.
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