(THE COLLEGE FIX) – Black students should not be penalized for using “Black Language” and college courses should critically interrogate “white linguistic hegemony and anti-Black linguistic racism,” said a scholar who gave a presentation recently at Northern Illinois University.
“People’s language experiences are not separate from their racial experiences,” the University of Michigan’s April Baker-Bell told an online audience during a November workshop for faculty and graduate students at Northern Illinois University.
The way black language is “devalued in classrooms reflects how Black lives are devalued in the world,” she told attendees. “Similarly, the way we think about this notion of standard mainstream English is directly connected to the invisible way that White culture is often deemed normal, neutral, and superior in the world.”