In the 1970s, “Ebonics” was the allegedly natural language of Black Americans. My father strongly objected to having Black students in his district taught in Ebonics. The only teacher in his district who supported him was an elderly Black woman who accurately said that Ebonics would permanently relegate Blacks to an economic ghetto. Given how awful Ebonics were, it’s inevitable that they’re back. An associate dean at Arizona State University just wrote a lengthy book saying that proper English writing is inherently racist.
Asao Inoue is the associate dean for Academic Affairs, Equity, and Inclusion in the college of integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. With Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Oregon State University and a Ph.D. from Washington State University, he’s a man steeped in modern American academia. Inoue’s bio establishes that job is to teach young people how to communicate through the written word:
He is the 2019 Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and has been a past member of the CCCC Executive Committee, and the Executive Board of the Council of Writing Program Administrators.
Within that discipline, Inoue is the recipient of multiple honors:
Among his many articles and chapters on writing assessment, race, and racism, his article, “Theorizing Failure in U.S. Writing Assessments” in Research in the Teaching of English, won the 2014 CWPA Outstanding Scholarship Award. His co-edited collection, "Race and Writing Assessment" (2012), won the 2014 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for an edited collection. His book, "Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future" (2015) won the 2017 NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award for a monograph and the 2015 CWPA Outstanding Book Award.
Clearly, Inoue is advancing writing and discipline in academia – or is he?
Chrissy Clark caught up with Inoue’s 2019 book, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. Clark slogged through this academic opus to reveal the mental degradation of academia and the appalling ideas that are oozing out of the academic and infecting – and destroying – America.
Inoue’s central premise can be boiled down to one idea: Teaching students the English language is inherently racist, something magnified when teachers expect non-White students to perform competently in English. In other words, it’s Ebonics all over again.
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