Racist Writing Assessment

Power doesn’t stay where you put it.--Munger


Happy Birthday, Ned!

The Astros look very strong. These games are on too late.

This is an interesting quote. You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty. -Jessica Mitford, author, journalist, and civil rights activist
In this vein, the President of the United States has accused the Democrats of spreading a rumor that there are bedbugs in his Doral Hotel. The President.

Any Chinese person who has gone to elementary school or watched television news can explain the tale of China’s 100 years of humiliation. Starting with the Opium Wars in the 19th century, foreign powers bullied a weak and backward China into turning Hong Kong and Macau into European colonies. Students must memorize the unequal treaties the Qing dynasty signed during that period. There’s even a name for it: “national humiliation education.”

In 1959, Venezuela’s GDP per capita was 10% higher than America’s.
(Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. Even countries that were once more prosperous than their neighbors have found themselves much poorer than their neighbors after just one generation of socialistic policies.--Sowell)

Discussions of income inequality promote — psychologically if not logically — the mistaken notion that the amount of total income is fixed. What someone else earns does not come from you. Another's income would not otherwise be yours.

Concern with income inequality elevates the material and denigrates nonmonetary sources of human happiness and flourishing.

Wind and solar can’t even produce enough energy to manufacture the hardware they are made from. They are a parasite on the larger economy, making a few people wealthy at everyone’s expense. They are wealth-destroying technologies.-- Patrick Moore co- founder of Greenpeace

                            Racist Writing Assessment

This is from Inoue's introduction from his book on antiracist writing assessment and teaching in college, mentioned yesterday:

"...what I address is the fact that students of color, which includes multilingual students, are often hurt by conventional writing assessment that uncritically uses a dominant discourse, which is informed by an unnamed white racial habitus, which we see better when we use analytical tools like postcolonial theory, whiteness studies, and Marxian theory. A theory of writing assessment as ecology adds these theories to our thinking about classroom writing assessments. Thus it doesn’t matter if teachers or readers see or read student writing with prejudice or with a preference for whiteness in their classrooms. It doesn’t matter at all. What matters is that the assessment ecology produces particular results, determines (in the Marxian sense) particular products, reinforcing particular outcomes, which make racist cause and effect difficult (even impossible) to discern. What matters is that writing teachers and students not only have a vocabulary for thinking about writing assessment in its most complete way, but that that vocabulary be informed by other pertinent theories. Having such a vocabulary offers explicit and self-conscious ways to problematize students’ writing assessment situations, a central activity in antiracist writing assessment ecologies." 

There is bad news for minorities in this gibberish.

Professor Noam Chomsky, called the father of modern linguistics, formulated the generative theory of language. According to his theory, the most basic form of language is a set of syntactic rules that is universal for all humans and that underlies the grammar of all human languages. We analyze and interpret our environment with words and sentences in a structured language. Oral and written language provides a set of rules that enables us to organize thoughts and construct logical meaning with our thoughts. There is a relationship between the world and the languages that have arisen to describe it.
That is to say, human language reflects our human background and our human view of the world. And our expression through language mirrors this understanding. 

Not holding students accountable to proper grammar might do them a disservice. Theoretically, they will not be allowed to translate the world as well or express that translation. And while "other theories" might be "pertinent," they may not. Their language applications may be as foolish as their economic ones.
And practically, students are not going to be evaluated in their careers by Inoue's tailored standards, particularly if Chomsky is right. They will be judged as eccentric to basic human development and the ebb and flow of that development with language. 
And if they fail to meet the objective standards they earlier ignored with whatever inpact that might have, those standards themselves will necessarily be labeled as racist.