Teaching that Grammar is Racist Profile of a leftist white supremacist. by Jason D. Hill
https://www.frontpagemag.com/teaching-that-grammar-is-racist/
If you’ve wondered what the literal face of an evil left-wing Woke Supremacist looks like, look no farther than the face of Marta Schaffer. She seems like an ordinary, nerdy woman, does she not? Do not be beguiled. She is a California English teacher who teaches her students that grammar is part of White Supremacy. Her goal as an educator is to “undermine that B.S.”
According to the news report, Schaffer fights white supremacy by alerting her students to, and teaching them about, the overemphasized importance of grammar usage and writing rules. She uses her social media posts on Tik Tok to sell an even wider audience on the idea that proper grammar and syntax are part of the White supremacy she claims is an entrenched part of our culture. She maintains that she teaches the rules that “we actually use to communicate instead of the made-up rules that White supremacy created for when we write papers and stuff, which is what scholars call the language of power.”
She is a profound advocate of academic essays written by African American students using African American Vernacular English, otherwise known as “AAVE” language.
She worries that standard usage of theses statements in writing assignments, proper citation of sources (which we must remember is a preventative measure against plagiarism), and transition words like “however” and “therefore” are coterminous with misogyny, white supremacy, and colonization.
The non-sequiturs involved in her line of reasoning do nothing to help her case. And yes, she is a tenured high-school teacher.
She wishes to focus more on how students talk in real life, rather than how they ought to write in a manner that is grammatically correct. How students speak at home or with peers, she believes, is more important than forms of communications that can be universally accessed through standard application of grammatical rules. The language of respectability, which is the language of utilizing proper grammar, she teaches her students, is far less important than one’s “natural language.”
Given the sloppy and ungrammatical way in which too many persons communicate; given the fact that several members of certain groups grunt like farm animals in their communicative endeavors, and make unintelligible noises that pass for language, this teacher’s pedagogical advice is more than ill-advised—it is nefarious.
Marta Schaffer thinks she’s a radical provocateur. She is, though, nothing more than a nihilistic, left-wing white supremacist with a profound lack of respect for her students. Her goal is to expropriate—especially—the agency of black students, to create a vast underclass of students who, when they speak, will sound as if English is their third language and who will never be able to achieve any semblance of socio-economic parity with their white counterparts and compatriots at large.
Marta Schaffer does not want black American students to master the English language and achieve facility and fluency with and in it. She has grasped the connection between grammar and cognition, and she aims to keep blacks in a position of cognitive diminution so she can rule over them. She can exercise her managerial class privilege and ensure that her perverse, racist privilege inheres and that said students never escape the cycle of linguistic and socio-economic challenges they face if she ensures that, at a minimum, they speak in sentences where subjects and verbs do not agree, sentence fragments are the norm, misplaced modifiers go unnoticed, and improper punctuation are noticed by future employees who will never hire them.
The irony is that she communicates this evil malarkey in perfect grammatical sentences. She promulgates the evil of grammar to her black students by using perfect grammar. No code-switching on her part. She never allows them to have the luxury of switching between standard English and AAVE, because she realizes that such an option would empower them; it would give them options and choices.
Grammar is not an arbitrary, made-up language game created by racist power brokers. It is a science that deals with the formulation of the proper methods of verbal and written communication. It teaches us how to combine concepts into sentences. It establishes precision and clarity into first thinking and then verbal and then written communication. Grammar rules the use of language. Language is not just a tool of communication. It is a tool of cognition. If one were to dismiss the rules of soccer, one would be left with merely the maneuverings of human bodies on a field. There would be no game. The movements would be unintelligible. One would not be witnessing a codified set of rules that establishes a system that we recognize as soccer. Only a senseless movement of bodies.
The utterance of sounds without rules that govern their orderings, that identify conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs, verbal conjugations, tenses and moods, gerunds and infinitives, metaphors, and establish a method of choosing among synonyms, and a method of defining concepts and words, would reduce us to the level of grunting farm animals. There would be no capacity to develop high-level concepts, abstractions, and to formulate abstractions from abstractions. We would be unable to project a future (as has been the case with certain inferior cultures), and we would live a base and cyclical life, one totally ensconced in biological time. Such is the power of language.
A document or an utterance without punctuation or with improper punctuation is like a rambling mind incapable of producing nothing but unfocused streams of consciousness—incomprehensible to anyone and everyone, even to the writer or speaker himself.
Schaffer is the cognitive equivalent of a Chinese foot binder. The absence of grammar does not result in freedom. It results in abject stultification of the mind. An assemblage of words, and a series of word salads not governed by grammatical rules are indiscernible to a civilized human mind.
And that is what she wants to afflict on blacks: a highly curated silo in which “black talk” remains among blacks, and where blacks are rendered incomprehensible to a broader public. She knows with full malice aforethought, I believe, that this will result in a reduction in the perceived intelligence quotient of blacks in the minds of others.
It is noteworthy that she singles out black vernacular as a treasure trove worth protecting from the evil incursions of white racist grammar, but she seems to have no problem correcting the grammar of white students. What is it about the nature of white students such that, if they commit grammatical infelicities, they stand open to linguistic correction? Why are blacks, on this topic, left outside the pantheon of the human community; one might even say, the domain of the ethical?
We know why. Schaffer is a sadistic leftist who has staked her life on the spectacle of black suffering and, paradoxically, on the pretense of relieving that suffering. We know that there is no such damn thing as “Black English.” It is broken, ungrammatical English. Subject/ verb confusion, the abbreviation of abbreviations –among other infelicities—do not constitute a language unto itself. I don’t care what John McWhorter says to the contrary. I’m not convinced by his scholarship on this matter. The whole world knows that when a black person incapable of speaking standard English opens his or her mouth that he or she is placed at an immediate disadvantage on many levels. Schaffer wants to manufacture this disadvantage because left-wing liberals trade in this type of oppression under the guise of liberating a people from some made-up form of oppression. She is the real white supremacist. If her life is meant to create a false scenario (liberating black people from racist grammar), then she retains the perverted and sick pleasure of needing to see them suffer indefinitely by placing the blame on a racist society that has oppressed them by imposing “white grammar” on them.
This woman is not only evil, she is guilty of dereliction of duty as well. The idea that any instructor leaves her charges to wallow simply in “who they are” is proverbial nonsense. If this were the true goal of educational institutions, we would exist in a state of moral ferality. There would be no one to offer moral instruction when we simply felt like indulging in our homicidal impulses on the playing field; no one to punish us for succumbing to our “natural feelings of laziness” which result in delayed homework assignments; no one to suspend those from school who are endowed with a natural proclivity for cheating on exams.
People like Schaffer must be exposed for the frauds they are. She is not a militant assemblage of mediocrity. She is routinely mediocre. She is attempting to de-sacralize and de-legitimize one of the ways in which we transform ourselves from natural creatures into moral creatures—by means of language that is grammatically structured. She wants to normalize and mainstream the idea that such usage of language is illicit. This is one step in the direction that C.S. Lewis prophetically called The Abolition of Man.
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