Arizona State Professor Asao Inoue: grading good grammar in college is white supremacy
Ball State University recently hosted Asao Inoue, a professor and the associate dean of the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University who delivered a presentation to “engage with the question of how English language practices in college classrooms contribute to white supremacy.”
Asao Inoue photo/twitter
“Freeing Our Minds and Innovating Our Pedagogy from White Language Supremacy” was the title of the 75-minute guest lecture which told students that “We are all implicated in white supremacy,” explaining that “This is because white supremacist systems like all systems reproduce themselves as a matter of course,”
Inoue said: “This includes reproduction of dominant, white, middle-class, monolingual standards for literacy and communication.”
The College Fix detailed the lecture details as Inoue explained that white language supremacy is “the condition in classrooms, schools, and society where rewards are given in determined ways to people who can most easily reach them, because those people have more access to the preferred and embodied white language practices, and part of that access is a structural assumption that what is reachable at a given moment for the normative, white, monolingual English user is reachable for all.”
“Your school can be racist and produce racist outcomes,” Inoue said. “Even with expressed values and commitments to anti-racism and social justice.”
In one of his slides, Inoue states that “grading is a great way to protect the white property of literacy in schools and maintain the white supremacist status quo without ever being white supremacist or mentioning race.”
Inoue said that 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.
“We must rethink how we assess writing, if we want to address the racism,” Inoue wrote in his 2015 book “Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future.”
In another paper, “A Grade-less Writing Course that Focuses on Labor and Assessing,” Inoue argued that writing teachers should “calculate course grades by labor completed and dispense almost completely with judgments of quality when producing course grades.”
This is nothing new, Inoue is not the only professor teaching this belief, check out this much older clip:
