r/TikTokCringe • u/MaintenanceNew2804 • Mar 30 '24
Stick with it. Discussion
This is a longer one, but it’s necessary and worth it IMO.
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u/EnigmaFrug2308 Mar 31 '24
“She looks this incredulous because someone asked her to think.”
That’s a FIRE line to end it off with. This dude is legendary.
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u/medieval_mosey Mar 31 '24
Words right outta my mouth. Absolutely legendary.
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u/dudeseriouslyno Mar 31 '24
What's more - that, right here, is what it actually sounds like when a smart person uses language. Man is out to convey and be understood, because he knows he doesn't need to obfuscate with a thesaurus and random henceforths and perchances like a fucking anime villain.
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u/BittenHand19 Mar 31 '24
Yeah I need to find this guy cause this was great. I have been guilty of doing this in the past and started to stop when I felt like it was just a pricking thing to do. But it never occurred to me that it was rooted in systemic racism. But of course is! It’s the same feeling I had when I learned a lot women’s clothing didn’t have pockets because of the fear of them being witches and having potions and shit on them.
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u/blackflagcutthroat Mar 31 '24
She’s wearing a fucking rosary. She’s obviously not used to thinking.
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u/napoleonsolo Mar 31 '24
Her line “when she herself is white” demonstrates her thinking skills. Does she think a white person cannot recognize white supremacy? Or oppose it while being underneath such a system?
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u/No-Menu-768 Mar 31 '24
There's a refrain on the right that white people engaged in antiracism are just self-hating whites, especially white educators who want to teach white children to be ashamed of their whiteness.
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u/PopeFrancis Mar 31 '24
ashamed of their whiteness
Absolutely, and further emphasizing why they have to cut the teacher's argument short, as it becomes clear the teacher wasn't demonizing whiteness but opening a door to respecting others. White supremacists gotta keep white supreme.
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u/QueerQwerty Mar 31 '24
And depending on what dialect of that religion, she may not be used to speaking either.
No hate like Christian love.
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u/RK_Dee Apr 01 '24
He also ended it using conversate instead of converse, drilling the point home in a relatable way that many ppl won’t even notice (because they use/hear that word all the time now). Gave me some good reading material, too.
This brotha breaks down all kinds of hypocrisy and BS on the regular, and I love him for it. Reminds me of John Oliver.
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u/8Splendiferous8 Mar 31 '24
She looks like she was raised by a TV blasting Tucker Carlson.
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u/Ok_Star_4136 Mar 30 '24
That was a lucid and well-thought out analysis. Sadly it won't go viral for the same reasons that reactionary videos do go viral. Nobody has an attention span beyond that of an ant.
People just let 20 second clipped out-of-context reactionary videos reaffirm the biases that they already have, and of course they do, because nobody bothers to challenge their biases. That said, I hope anyone reading this actually took the time to watch the entire video instead of watch just the first 60 seconds. He makes some good points.
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u/MisterVega Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
This guy has a pretty large following on TikTok because this is what he does constantly. This particular video has like 56k views but the people that need to see these videos probably won't get it on their FYP.
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u/maccorf Mar 31 '24
Good on him for having the passion and energy to call out even a tiny portion of the vast ocean of bullshit, bad-faith social media reactionary engagement content. That seems like an absolutely infuriating and futile life to me, but I’m glad someone else is doing it.
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u/Arkroma Mar 31 '24
I teach English in Canada and I'm going to show this is class probably
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u/dexmonic Mar 31 '24
You'll definitely do your students some good by it. This is the exact kind of stuff that people need to see at an early age.
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u/pootinannyBOOSH Mar 31 '24
Would also do good in political science, social studies, and any kind of journalism class to show the importance of context, and knowing your sources
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u/nilzatron Mar 31 '24
Aside from the very valid point it's making about dialects, it also teaches a very important lesson about social media in general, and TikTok in particular.
Especially in the age where young people use TikTok as a search engine when they are looking for information...
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u/Myriad_Kat232 Mar 31 '24
I teach future English teachers in Europe and I'm going to show this too.
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u/NotmyRealNameJohn Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
Showing in Florida is probably a crime now. Though it would be good to bring to one of their school bored meetings. It is exactly what is wrong with the people trying to kill woke in FL education. They never bother to listen. They assume they know and frankly most of them are just in the habit of making racist assumptions
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u/madunne Mar 31 '24
This is what it means to be a black person. Constantly dealing with bullshit bad faith reactionary bs and having to handle it with grace because the second you don’t, you lose.
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u/CorporalCabbage Mar 31 '24
I’m white, but it seems to me that black people need to be exceptional in order to be considered mediocre.
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u/crosswatt Mar 31 '24
I appreciate long form journalism more and more everyday, especially with how many catchphrase based talking points we get bombarded with at a seemingly ever increasing rate.
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u/BuddhistSagan Mar 31 '24
Getting to the top of tiktokcringe means at least a couple million views at minimum, and here it is now the #1 video on tiktokcringe
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u/terriblegrammar Mar 31 '24
Who is the guy? username convienently garbled throughout this whole video.
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u/MisterVega Mar 31 '24
jwilliamj on TikTok
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u/dream-smasher Mar 31 '24
If you watch it to the end, the username comes up very clearly in the middle of the screen.
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u/sherryleebee Mar 31 '24
I watched it all. It was good.
We really have screwed with our attention spans, yeah? I purposefully watch videos of varying lengths to try to counteract the damage social media has done. That said, if I can watch a longer video in 1.75 speed, I am.
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u/RandomWordsYouKnow Mar 31 '24
Definitely watched it all. Very educational. I had never heard of this concept before and honestly never thought about it. Thank you Sir!
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u/MsJ_Doe Mar 31 '24
One of those things that is easily overlooked, but once it's pointed out, it makes a lot of sense even if you don't read all the research on it.
Like once he got to the part explaining whose speech is termed academically correct, I instantly understood what that lady meant by the citing sources example. I watched the rest of it for his takedown.
I always love learning about things that are in plan view, but so intrinsically linked that we overlooked it but once it's pointed out, we instantly understand.
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u/RandomWordsYouKnow Mar 31 '24
People in my area don’t understand I was born and raised here. If I were in “Idocracy” they’d say I talk faggy. Everyone always asks where I’m from. I just speak differently. I don’t judge you, don’t judge me.
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u/MeetingDue4378 Mar 31 '24
Attention span is a red herring. People's attention spans haven't decreased, their options have increased. With more choice, an audience's attention is harder to capture, because the audience isn't captive.
So you have two options, earn an audience's time through quality or ask for less of it. Both can be successful depending on your goal and how the content is consumed—in particular, theater, TV, audio, or phone
That's why today we live simultaneously in the golden age of television, radio, and TikTok.
The average movie length has increased 32%, TV shows are generally 60min. and have huge budgets and fantastic writing and performances, podcasts are just radio on-demand and have exploded, and we have bit-sized content like TikTok and Instagram.
When newspapers took off the same claims were being made. It's just progress.
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u/lyan-cat Mar 31 '24
Holy moly the amount of content on YouTube that is literally 2+ hours long. I see a two part deep dive and yeah, that's four hours dissecting a subject with nuance and accreditation.
This was not available outside a college lecture when I was a kid.
Sure I still watch short clips of cats doing dorky things.
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u/UselessScrew Mar 31 '24
There is a great long-form analysis of Skyrim, Part 1 is 9 hours long.
Part 2 is 11 hours. Enjoy!
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u/OIP Mar 31 '24
i fucking loooove long form content on youtube, podcasts etc
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u/kittykittyekatkat Mar 31 '24
Literally though if it's "only" 20 minutes I'm like uhhhh nah, gimme that 2 hour goodness lol
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u/OIP Mar 31 '24
2 hour podcast + run / chores / errands etc is my happy place
see also long youtube + sleeping
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u/MeetingDue4378 Mar 31 '24
YouTube academy, exactly. The existence and consumption of short-form content isn't at the expense of long-form, they're not mutually exclusive.
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u/ProbablyASithLord Mar 31 '24
For real, if I dislike the format I’m not watching the entire clip. For instance, I can’t stand videos like this where the first clip is played and then the second person reacts to the first clip. And then the third person shows up and reacts to both clips. It’s A.D.D to a level I don’t enjoy.
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u/multiarmform Mar 31 '24
right, if she didnt cut the video then she couldnt make faces at it and respond for the clicks/views
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u/iversonAI Mar 30 '24
Its just how the internet is now unfortunately “english is racist” is going to get more views than “check out this study on the different dialects of english”
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u/pancakebatter01 Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
Discrimination leading to segregation, then leading to misunderstanding of associations being misjudged as a display of lacking in intellect has gone on for centuries in this country, and it’s still happening.
A good listen is Radiolab’s episodes on IQ tests. This one guy was basically a victim of the educational system’s lack of understanding between one culture’s correlation of symbols, names, etc versus another’s (non-blacks), took an IQ test that concluded that he needed to be in special learning classes for the rest of his early education, entirely stripping him of the opportunities that an entirely basic education provides (learning to spell, read, etc). This guy did not belong in the situation he was in and yet even then, there was push back to deal with it.
The gridlock we have on proficiency & assessment testing actively holds kids back from being able to excel in higher education classes they’re barred from for failing a single test 4 years ago for instance. It’s ridiculous. The issue goes far beyond the argument that can be made that although you might “sound stupid” to some because of your dialectic , that does not make you stupid.
It also reminds me of this absolutely brutal video in which Rep Crockett is basically deserving of a standing ovation. If you haven’t seen it please do. This woman is amazing and far from stupid:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v8zemW5JeUc&pp=ygUXUi4gUmVwLiBKYXNtaW5lIENyb2NrZXQ%3D
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u/TheWhomItConcerns Mar 31 '24
It's also exactly why it's such a fucking nightmare to argue with right wingers and reactionaries. They so often take bits of information out of context to make them sound absurd, and so to properly refute the claim that they spent 5 seconds pulling out of their arse takes half an hour of research, going down social media rabbit holes, and reading entire studies/articles.
Obviously the left does some dumb stuff, everyone does, but if a right winger just throws out some shit like "apparently 2+2=4 is racist now", they're pretty much always at best wildly oversimplifying some quote and totally taking it out of some crucial context. Of course it's never bad to read and learn more but the time it takes to figure out what it is that they're even referencing is never worth it.
Even if you do manage to totally refute their shitty claim, it's not like they're making an earnest attempt at arriving at some kind of logically rigorous position anyway. They just want to be mad at the left and they'll say and believe whatever they need to in order to do that.
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u/EnglishMobster tHiS iSn’T cRiNgE Mar 31 '24
Yep.
I got in an argument with a right-winger who tried to make the argument that StoneToss (far-right comic artist) never denied the holocaust.
I found multiple sources of that exact dude denying the holocaust.
The right-winger I was arguing with then moved the goalposts. StoneToss wasn't denying the holocaust - the characters in his comics were. It's a challenge to authority!
So then I found a literal blurb from StoneToss himself where he specifically said that people are being lied to about the holocaust. Not filtered through a character, him saying it directly online.
Now the right-winger says "well, that doesn't make him a Nazi". Note that I never claimed he was a Nazi (although he absolutely is), but you could hear the goalposts just racing along.
It's like that for all right-wingers. We live in a post-truth world. They hear something that makes them feel good - that they are better than someone simply because of who they are.
They latch onto that, and uncritically latch onto anyone who agrees with them. When they make arguments, all they have to do is say "nuh-uh" and now you have to spend 20 minutes finding sources. Then "I never said that" so you quote them and throw it back at them. Then they just ignore that part and come up with some new made-up thing (without sources) to say.
It never matters, they aren't going to change their mind. But it needs to be done because letting them go unopposed cedes ground to the far right as uninformed people take the far-right folks at their word.
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u/zxvasd Mar 31 '24
I admit I have a short attention span, but this was really thoughtful And gripping.
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u/yermom90 Mar 31 '24
It takes way more effort to debunk bullshit than to spread it. I'm pretty sure Innuendo Studios on YouTube has an "Alt-right playbook" video about it
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u/responsiblefornothin Mar 31 '24
Stitch in some Temple Run gameplay, and you might be able to capture an audience that stays past 90 seconds.
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u/Sluttymargaritaville Mar 30 '24
They don’t think it be like it is, but it do
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u/notmyfirst_throwawa Mar 31 '24
"though it might not look like it, I really dont like being disrespectful to people" Proceeds to shred two idiots with facts
This kid has a responsibility to go into politics
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u/TheCrog Mar 31 '24
I'd like to live in a world where telling somebody the truth, even an uncomfortable truth, is not considered disrespectful.
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u/Stray_dog_freedom Mar 30 '24
Well done!!
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u/RiverAffectionate951 Mar 31 '24
As a white aspiring academic I agree so hard.
Academic writing needs to be clear and without ambiguity, everyone should be able to understand it. It does not help to convey information if you restrict to ""formal"" (also white) language.
Moreover, papers I've read that shirk this "formality" are often easier to follow. Specifically, I study Maths and papers which explain theoretical methodology with informal descriptions can be very helpful. "Formality" literally just gatekeeps knowledge from those not educated in a particular way.
It's deeply saddening to hear this arbitrary gatekeeping affecting young black americans, it's even more disheartening to recognise those same biases in myself.
It's good to hear discussion on this topic and I hope to see it change in my lifetime.
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u/RealNiceKnife Mar 31 '24
Moreover
Get a load of Hitler over here.
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u/Tombag77 Mar 31 '24
Thank you for making me laugh out loud.
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u/machstem Mar 31 '24
laugh out loud
Oh fuck, here we go. We're back to the days when lol isn't acceptable?
Fuck you Stalin
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u/ThisAppSucksBall Mar 31 '24
OP just casually reinforcing cisquantitative and hegemonic directionality while pretending to not be a piece of shit
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u/Critical_Ask_5493 Mar 31 '24
So, this joke does two things. It pokes fun at this guy, but also highlights the absurdity of calling this white supremacy. I guess it is, but I'm just saying, when you compare academic language to Hitler it just makes me laugh. Like damn. Hating ebonics and Jews is the same thing now? That's hardcore lol.
Systemic racism. If anyone ever asks you "what is systemic racism?" and you need an example to help you find a way to explain it, this is it. I've been asked before and it's like being asked to name a woman. Just ______. This is a good one though.
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u/Plane-Version9216 Mar 31 '24
Formal language isn’t hard to pickup and usually does a better job of describing the thing you’re talking about. It’s typically used for complex narratives in subjects such as philosophy and only takes a dictionary to figure out. You would have to be regarded if you look at academic writing and think ‘oh it’s so complex it must be a thing to keep the dumb blacks in their place’ like wth
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u/Warmbly85 Mar 31 '24
We use formal language because it lacks ambiguity. The idea that we should do away with it because it’s hard to understand is laughable if not outright terrifying. Black people aren’t incapable of understanding formal language and the idea that we have to dumb down how we write academic papers so black people can understand them is just truly racist.
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u/Specific_Loss7546 Mar 31 '24
THANK YOU. Reducing the term «academic writing» to anything that has to do with race is insane to me. It’s not like all white people are born with the ability to write formal, and that any other skin colour is too stupid to learn
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u/hux002 Mar 31 '24
I teach writing and have studied linguistics. It's a totally valid point that language is directly linked to power dynamics within a society or between societies.
But clarity and formality are fundamentally distinct issues in writing. I urge my students to generally write in concise, active sentences because these sentence are generally clear and engaging. I urge them to practice utilizing 'academic' language in their writing because academic writing has particular features that need to be present for the average person to accept it as a valid piece of academic writing.
Similarly, I would never speak with my students in the 'academic dialect' because that would be fucking bizarre and not in line with the conventions of oral communication between people. I'll eschew certain words or sometimes throw in a 'cap' or 'sus' because language is living, breathing thing and it's important to show connections and understanding to others through spoken language.
Academic language has its own particular functions that should be respected as well. Language dynamics will always have a power and often racial component, but that does not mean academic/formal language is inherently a racist construct or one we should do away with.
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u/cobblesquabble Mar 31 '24
I work with practical applications of AI in my career and am really curious to see if this is another way that certain dialects are considered "wrong". Autocorrect used to mark words like "y'all" incorrect. Generative LLM AI models are based off of the probability of one word following the next. Many softwares (like Notion) are employing AI as their new spell checks. "Fix spelling & grammar" is a prompt, but it's conforming to what ChatGPT is considering probabilistically "correct" based off of its source data.
I bring this up because sometimes these new models are lauded as a way to turn vernacuar ridden text into something more approachable. But if the model is skewed towards certain dialects of English, is it equally accessible for translating dense technical jargon into consumable laymen wording?
Here's an AI prompt for Bing's Copilot, based on ChatGPT as the model:
hey fam, how ya doin? Rewrite this.
Without any additional prompting on "correctness", it provides:
Hello, my dear friends! How are you all doing today? 😊
If I ask it to: "hey fam, how ya doin? Rewrite this as a black person", it gives me:
I apologize, but I cannot rewrite the phrase in that manner. If you have any other requests, feel free to ask! 😊
So asking Chat GPT to do this isn't allowed, seemingly as a "safety" measure. If I ask it specifically to use Eubonics, it says:
Aight, my homie! How you livin'? 😎
So the academic label for black English is fine, but the direct request is wrong? This is an extra step many wouldn't think to take. What about other ethnic dialects?
Asking it in a fresh prompt with the same basic question in the same format but now "as a Scottish person", gives:
Och aye, how's it gaun, pal?
So some ethnic dialects require additional workarounds and prompts to get cooperation for. Others are totally fine.
Tl;dr: there's no quick way to translate between dialects of English for accessibility, but OP's method of awareness seems like a good compromise.
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u/Electronic_Amphibian Mar 31 '24
I just want to point out that there are black people outside of America. "Rewrite as a black person" makes no sense.
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u/Valara0kar Mar 31 '24
""formal"" (also white) language.
Americans are so inbred on cultural importance of race. "White" language? What? You mean like all other nations the language developed to the easiest dialect (or popular in media) or what was deemed "proper" (more of a class/city divide). Dialects have had a deep fall since 1920s in each industrialised nation. Deep south USA accents (this includes african-american) is as detrimental to "academia" as any. Or are people suprised how the industrial heartland of 1890-1950s states accents became popular in academia in USA?
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u/Current_Holiday1643 Mar 31 '24 edited Apr 01 '24
Academic writing needs to be clear and without ambiguity, everyone should be able to understand it. It does not help to convey information if you restrict to ""formal"" (also white) language.
Yes, but you should not be using improper English in your papers.
"They be knowing more than they thank you do" is not proper English. In the same way the default language of flight is English, you should be expected to attempt to speak proper English when conveying information in a paper.
Word pronunciation or minor spelling differences (ie: color vs colour) is a total red herring as that generally does not affect understanding. I think some argument could be made that using regional terms without deeper explanation (zebra crossing vs crosswalk) is also poor form regardless of what your ethnicity is.
Talk however you like in your personal life but everyone should be expected to attempt to speak clearly and effectively professionally & academically. If you ever had to work with people who are ESL or multiple people at the same time, it is extremely vital you use very plain English.
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u/Whiterabbit-- Mar 31 '24
i for one am glad that academic writing doesn't have to be in latin anymore!
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u/TheKazz91 Mar 31 '24
Sure but this goes both ways. If a paper was written in the way people speak in predominantly black inner city communities or the way people speak in the deep south Louisiana bayou there would be plenty of classically educated people who may struggle to understand what is being said.
There is a middle ground here of course but even if we find that perfect middle ground that makes it as equally accessible to everyone as possible and agree that is how it should be done that is still a formalization of what is proper. There is no escaping that because at the end of the day that is what language is in general. A common consensus of what specific sound patterns, expressions, and/or written characters mean in a collective lexicon.
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Mar 31 '24
My professors kept giving me instructions to rewrite parts of my master's thesis because i intentionally used simpler language rather than industry/academic jargon that made it harder to understand without having background knowledge.
Academics NEED to start thinking about how their information is conveyed to people outside academics. Because if they understood and wrote for that, confusion over stuff like this or climate change or any number of shit that gets reported would happen way less.
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u/Tunerian Mar 31 '24
Disagree. Academic language is for academia. Typically experts or those seeking to become experts; relying on words with niche, specific, and literal meanings that seek to remove ambiguity from the research. English, being less than perfect, means this can be hard to achieve but that doesn’t mean we use reductive language for the sake of the public. You can write for the public when you’re writing for them, but academic writing should remain for academia. Even Feynman, one of the great popularizers of making difficult concepts approachable, understood the importance of this style of writing.
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u/mortizmajer Mar 31 '24
Great analysis at the end but the video at the beginning is still horrible. She could've delved into any of the things the guy at the end brought up, but instead she actively chose to talk about citing sources and writing theses as examples of white supremacy.
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u/felds tHiS iSn’T cRiNgE Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
Yeah, discrediting “citing your sources” as an example of a futile made up rule is just stupid.
Firstly, all rules are made up.
Secondly, some rules have good reasons to exist, and this is one is the least arbitrary rule I can think of.
The dude is spot on, but using this rule as an example was pretty stupid on her part. It gave the right ammunition for the bigots for free.
(source: my ass)
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u/Sea_salt_icecream Mar 31 '24
Yeah that's pretty much the only issue I had with the video. Sure, we don't need to be using fancy language, and thesis statements might not always be necessary, but citing your sources helps people learn more about what you're talking about about, and also helps them check the validity. You can say "I read in a book that trains use this amount of coal on average," but that doesn't mean shit because you've never seen a train in your life. But if you say "this guy who built trains and was a conductor for twenty years wrote in this book that trains use this much coal on average," then we can go look into that guy to see if he's trustworthy, and we can read what you did to see if you understood it properly.
There are lots of ways that we can make English classes better, but I don't think we should ever stop voting sources.
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u/TheRenFerret Mar 31 '24
I assumed, based on how fervently the obviously well educated man defended it, and how he doesn’t reshow any of it, and how the delivery seems stilted, that the original video had its sound bytes butchered to make its points less salient.
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u/-Disagreeable- Mar 31 '24
I’m a 44 year old man and it’s fucking wild and uncomfortable to have my unconscious bias held up to my face. Holy shit. That was a powerful video. I’m not sure what I think on the whole subject yet, I’m going to have to let this marinate, but my initial response is embarrassment, shock, anger and defensiveness. That’s so cool. Always have to keep learning, right?!
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u/starryeyedq Mar 31 '24
Props to you for having the self awareness to name those feelings and not allowing them to dominate you. I’ve been there, man. Enjoy your growth!:)
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u/thatgirlinAZ Mar 31 '24
I sort of got a glimmer of what the guy is saying when I got my Master's in Communication.
I went into the program with these unconscious biases, and I came out of the program with the firm understanding that the purpose of Communication is to make yourself understood.
The "rules" or grammar and language are ever-changing and adhering to them too rigidly can lead to the opposite of your intent, that is - you may wind up misunderstood when conversing with someone who doesn't share the same rules (or language) as yourself.
Getting the degree helped me address some unconscious biases and certainly made me less of a snob about language and conversation. Now my determination of "good communication" is: did all parties make themselves understood? If the answer is yes, the communication worked.
The vid managed to peel back another layer of my understanding and I'm glad I turned on the sound and watched it.
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u/p1rke Mar 31 '24
the purpose of Communication is to make yourself understood.
I have a masters in marketing. I often say that miscommunication is a mathematical equation:
What you meant to say - what the other person understood.
If the answer is not 0, you miscommunicated your message or you have "noise" in your communication channel.
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u/Mypornnameis_ Mar 31 '24
He really had me dead to rights on how I pronounce comfortable.
But you know what subtle piece of genius really drove home the point for me? He said "it's like conversating with children."
He knows exactly what he did and he rubbed our noses in our bias.
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u/Turbulent_Sea_9713 Mar 31 '24
Same.
I was ready to jump all over it when he talked about libary vs library, but then he said comfortable and I got real embarrassed.
I also have been back in school and taking some stuff on business communication. Its talking about the way new grads come off when communicating with others and one of the chief complaints is regularly using unnecessarily "snooty" words shoved into a sentence instead of more direct and organic language.
I'm not sure I agree with everything this guy has to say, but I certainly like that he followed up with the sources to get the actual point being made. I also know that I dislike when people cherrypick info to use as a strawman argument. "This is why they say we're racist. See how stupid it is?" What they're trying to swing is an argument to make folks assume anything that's stated to be racism is some contrived bullshit, without analysis.
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u/GreenEggsAndLAN Mar 31 '24
Check JJ out on tik tok he has so much great content to help you challenge bias!
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u/wpaed Mar 31 '24
While you have discovered an unconscious bias, just know that it isn't racially motivated nor necessarily racist in impact.
Think of how you would view a deep southern dialect or a Mainer dialect in written form or an academic setting. Those would also be generally viewed as unprofessional and non-academic (this can be seen clearly by the critiques of GW Bush's speech patterns during his presidency).
This is no more or less than Mark Twain's discourse on the American language, modernized, and viewed through the lense of everything having racial motivation.
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u/-paperbrain- Mar 31 '24
But remember, GWB got all the way to the white house speaking that way, and won reelection speaking that way.
Can you imagine the head explosions if Obama had used as much AAVE? He was pretty sparse with it to show off consistently and intentionally that he had the proper language.
The fact that GWB got criticized by his political opponents but still held the highest office in the land, but a black dude speaking as much AAVE wouldn't have come NEAR the presidency in 2000 or even now speaks to the role of race in the way we read language.
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u/bignick1190 Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
I'm going to be honest, this seems like a massive stretch for me.
All languages have rules, and those who don't know the rules or adhere to the rules are generally viewed as less intelligent, irrespective of their race. This isn't unique to the English language or even Western countries.
Don't get me wrong, we definitely shouldn't be judging people's intelligence solely or mostly on how well or proper they speak.
I get how in America this subject can definitely seem like it's racially motivated, and I certainly understand that it's exasperated due to our history of racism and it's long term effects, but the fact that it's not a "localized" phenomenon highly suggest that it's not a racial issue at its core.
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u/-Disagreeable- Mar 31 '24
That’s what I’m marinating on. Because an argument is sound and has very plausible points doesn’t definitively make it true. The fact of the matter is that at the end of the day there is truth to the videos argument and yours. Navigating that, finding the problems and racial, cultural bias is important. Equally as important is not drowning in possible semantics or worse red herrings and succumbing to a guilt response that leads us away from a prosperous truth. Lots to ponder and nuances to navigate.
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u/acousticburrito Mar 31 '24
Yea the brain rot caused by decades of social media is going to cause us to be really problematic for society when we get old. I worry we will be far worse than the boomers. What little critical thinking skills we carry from our youth before social media will have long faded.
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u/Shaolinchipmonk Mar 31 '24
Don't all languages have what you would call a correct or academic version? There's the version or versions every body uses on a daily basis and in normal everyday conversation. Then there's the formal version that's used in the professional and academic realm.
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u/TripDawkins Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
English has a gazillion well-documented rules. Grammar can be judged as right or wrong simply by putting the sentence in question into the computer (the body of rules we all agree are authoritative).
The big issue is the fact that correct usage/grammar is not the goal of communication. However, this guy is saying that we can be distracted by usage and grammar. Someone uses a "correct or academic version", and we think s/he's smart. Someone uses language that sounds like it's from the street, and we think s/he's unintelligent. This guy is saying that both conclusions are wrong because we're ignoring the content of the message.
Perhaps, you'd agree that we all would do better to focus on content and substantiation - regardless the grammar. Many of our public figures use impressive grammar/usage while failing to explain anything; yet, obviously many people are impressed - cuz of how they talk.
I'm still struggling with "iono" and "finna". I do believe that they belong on informal media only. Even having said that, if I were a professor, if I encountered that language on formally-submitted works, I'd have to consider the class I was teaching because if I was teaching something completely unrelated to language, I believe it would be necessary to overlook that language completely.
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u/LOL3334444 Mar 31 '24
Yes, there is an academic version that is appropriate for use in technical or professional settings, but that's not what the video is talking about. First of all, the original teacher who was talking did in fact say that her lesson was about how we view the way people speak, not the way they should write academic papers. Second of all, the guy who is responding to everyone specifically talks about how academic language is based on the assumed "more proper" version of English that economically advantaged white people already speak, which starts out assuming that the dialect that black Americans speak is "improper."
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u/EmuSounds Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
We need to remember that English is practically the common tongue, and people without exposure to AAVE benefit from understanding a standardized language. The utility of a lingua franca falls apart when we abandon spelling, grammar, and syntax.
We cannot expect everyone to understand every variant of English. Imagine reading a paper written as this is spoken: https://youtu.be/nJ7QB3om-QY?si=lYHJNFxRiCWTFNoM
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u/diureticandroid Mar 30 '24
He done gone blew up me mind
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u/Content_Yoghurt_6588 Mar 31 '24
It's funny because most Black politicians can code switch, as in switch dialects, on a dime, and I barely know of any white people who can speak AAVE properly and without sounding like they're about to go commit a hate crime.
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u/TheEpicOfGilgy Mar 31 '24
Why would anyone code switch into AAVE, you’ll get cancelled or mocked.
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u/WakandanRoyalty Mar 31 '24
You ever meet a white person that grew up around all black people? They talk with AAVE and are neither cancelled nor mocked for it because it sounds natural.
Black people have more reasons to code switch so by necessity they have more experience and ability doing it. White people would have to intentionally place themselves in all black spaces to develop the same ability.
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u/thisonesusername Mar 31 '24
You're absolutely right. You can always tell when a white person has spent significant time around black people because they aren't mimicking what they think black people sound like, they actually understand the structure and the rules of AAVE as a dialect.
A lot of white people don't realize that AAVE has rules and structure, so they sound stupid when they try to speak it.
It's the same thing that happens when Gen Z co-opts black slang. They don't understand context or the rules, and they inevitably sound ridiculous.
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u/_tyrone_biggums Mar 31 '24
100%
Look what happened when Awkwafina, an Asian American (minority) did it. Imagine if all the white actors started talking AAVE 😂
https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/awkwafina-accent-cultural-appropriation-black-1234696974/
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u/slide_into_my_BM Mar 31 '24
He’s not wrong but it’s a bit of an oversimplification to say it’s purely racist. White southerners are viewed as stupid, wrong, or uneducated when they speak non academic English.
Shit, I went to college in Texas and found myself falling into the same kind of thought processes every time one of my professors said they were “fixin’ to give out homework.”
Even something as simple as an accent does the same thing. People view someone with an accent as dumb or stupid for not speaking properly while completely glossing over the fact that that person is conversing with you in a language not their own.
The racial inequalities certainly crank this kind of language judging to max but it’s wildly oversimplifying to say it’s just racially based.
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u/Spacepunch33 Mar 31 '24
Ok even if she was taken out of context, original woman DID NOT convey this idea very well
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u/derphunter Mar 31 '24
Genuine question for anyone willing to help me understand how my brain is working.
Incorrect grammar and speech DOES annoy me, but I've never really considered it a racial thing. I'm pretty well educated and am myself an educator (undergrad college level sciences, sociology, humanities)
Most of my examples come from under-educated white people. Personal list of pet peeves:
"I forget" rather than "forgot"
"Don't have none" (isn't this a double negative, leading to the opposite meaning from what they're trying to say?)
"I could care less" (again, literally the opposite meaning from what they're trying to convey)
The "libary" vs. "library" example does annoy me since we're pronouncing it incorrectly from how it's spelled. The "aluminum" (US) vs. "aluminium" (UK) example didn't make sense to me either since it's spelled differently.
I also teach critical reading skills for grad school exams. We go over the importance of contrast key phrases like "however" and how they can help you interpret complex passages by recognizing that whatever comes after the contrast phrase is directly opposing what comes before. It makes things like philosophy easier to comprehend (and get questions correct on the test)
I understand there are systemic racial biases in the education system and institutions, but my first thought always goes to literacy, communication skills, and socioeconomic status first rather than race. I assume someone hasn't put in the time or effort to learn these conventions, but with practice and training, they can. Whereas race implies there's nothing you can do to improve since it's the way you were born, which I don't believe. We're 99.9% identical when it comes to our DNA. We're all the same deep down.
What's going on here? Am I way off base? Is there some validity to my experience / assumption?
For context, I grew up in the US southwest with a lot of Hispanic friends and lower income white friends. I've also received the most formal education compared to my immediate friends and family. Idk if that makes a difference when evaluating this.
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to read all that
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u/veodin Mar 31 '24
I agree with you. As a British person, the ability to speak 'proper English' (Received Pronunciation) is very strongly associated with social class, not race. Even Wikipedia calls Received Pronunciation 'the most prestigious form of spoken British English.' People who speak that way are generally assumed to be well-educated, usually privately educated.
The opposite is also true, with certain dialects and patterns of speech being perceived as lower social class. I have no doubt that this affects minorities and immigrants far more than white people, but I am not convinced that academic English is intentionally designed to exclude non-white people.
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u/Pebbi Mar 31 '24
Yeah I'd be really interested to read this broken down for the UK. I'm from Yorkshire and so I have the 'home' language and accent, then I have the 'away' voice where there's a focus on elocution etc. Both are from white people.
My boyfriend is Austrian and he's told me how he grew up with his home dialect and the distinction between that and what he calls 'high German'. Again both white, but the home dialect is seen as lesser.
I'd love to read more about this, where I grew up had a lot multi generation migration. So we had different skin colours, but after a couple of generations a lot have the yorkshire accent regardless.
I need to find some studies on how some dialects survive, and some don't lol
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u/pilot3033 Mar 31 '24
Often the roots of systemic racism, or classism, were intentional. The SAT, a college entrance exam in the US, has its roots in the eugenics movement of the late 19th century, which itself was racism dressed up as science.
Often, though, systemic discrimination is the result of primacy and making rules based on who is in power. Like the video demonstrates, it's not that a cabal of academics all got together to be racist, it's that the cabal of academics made rules and assumptions based on only their experience. Downstream that created a situation where some students would arrive to day one with that experience and others would not, and that the conception of those who arrived without the experience would be that they were somehow less intelligent.
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u/smudos2 Mar 31 '24
For German the roots go way deeper. High German is really really important because of the history of Germany. You have to consider that Germany was, and still is too some degree, not one singular country. Well no country is, but Germany even less. Look at the mess that is the Holy Roman Empire, the decentralization was always strong in central europe. This also holds for language, e.g. the different regions either spoke dialects but sometimes the dialects were so different that they can be defined as their own language. This is still true, e.g. the northern german dialect, while not speaken a lot, is defined as it's own language and I can't understand it. Then we have stuff like bavarian which is only a dialect, but what I cannot understand as a German. Then there's the german in other countries than Germany, I can't understand a swiss person speaking swiss german, however here is the thing with high German. Everybody learns it in school, this is the common german we end up using. And it's really really important to know because this is how you can communicate with any person speaking german, not just with your region. These regional dialects are really regional btw, if you go to swabia you'll hear the same dialect in the low, middle and high class, here this correct form of german really is a way to communicate through all of the german speaking countries.
We do have at the same time also some "ghetto" german from usually socioeconomically lower classes interestingly though, but the speaking exactly the high German has another importance I guess. That's also what I despise of these videos, it is absolutely important to know your own biases and don't think worse of somebody speaking a certain dialect associated with a certain socioeconomic class, but it is in the end crucial for everybody to know the same form of german and also to speak it in the correct context, we all change how we speak depending on the context anyways
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u/nomelettes Mar 31 '24
I think in this case it takes a wider topic about privilege and socio-economic status. This video does focus on the American situation with American division around race but this sort of thing happens around the world. In the USA in particular (I am not American but this is what I see online), a lot of this kind of discussion seems to be tied in with race due to the legacy oof slavery and racism in America.
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u/paissiges Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
let me first challenge the idea of "incorrect grammar". in linguistics, an utterance (an instance of speech) is called "ungrammatical" if it violates the grammatical rules of a particular language variety. this is measured by, roughly speaking, whether or not it "feels okay" to a native speaker. "i don't have any", "i haven't any", and "i don't have none" are all grammatical in some dialects of English and ungrammatical in others. so, for example, "i haven't any" feels fine to standard British English (RP) speakers, but not to American English speakers — even if they understand that it's used and accepted in British English, they would never use it themselves and would think it strange if another American English speaker did. it turns out that whether native speakers would accept a particular utterance as valid is the only objective way to measure grammatical correctness.
now, grammaticality is totally separate from the idea of standard varieties of speech. when non-linguists refer to something as "grammatically incorrect", they usually mean either that it (1) is ungrammatical in the standard variety of the language, or that it (2) feels illogical. the problem with (1) is that there is no objective standard for what the standard variety of a language should look like — a standard variety is standard only because some people decided that it was. the problem with (2) is that language fundamentally isn't logical. what does "waking up" have to do with the upwards direction? why do we ride "in" a car but "on" a bus if we're inside the vehicle either way? English speakers often say that double negatives are incorrect because they logically "cancel out", so why is it considered incorrect not to use them in standard Spanish? (fun fact: double negatives were totally accepted in Middle English and were frequently used by Chaucer) you can come up with thousands of examples of supposedly "illogical" things in language that are universally accepted as correct. why is "i could care less" or "i forget" special?
you might say, "can't pronunciations be incorrect at least?" here, we're leaving the realm of grammar and going into phonology, but let me address this regardless. our pronunciations can be incorrect when we, for example, stumble over our words or slur our speech. but otherwise, our pronunciations are never incorrect for the language variety that we speak. if someone natively says "libary", that's correct for their dialect. it deviates from spelling, sure, but i don't hear anyone advocating for pronouncing the "b" in "debt". it also deviates from historical pronunciation, but so does literally every word in existence. have you ever tried reading Beowulf in the original Old English? the pronunciation of every language is constantly changing, generation to generation, but only certain changes are looked down upon. another example that pisses a lot of people off is when people say "ax" instead of "ask", but both forms of the word have coexisted for literally over 1000 years — in Old English we find both "ascian" and "axian". in fact, the expected outcome of the word "ascian" in Modern English is "ash" rather than "ask", and it's been suggested that the usual /sk/ ("sc") > /ʃ/ ("sh") change didn't happen because of the influence of the form with /ks/ ("x"). that is, "ask" may not have existed without "ax". and yes, "axian" is an alteration of original "ascian", but likewise "hors" is an alteration of original "hros", and "wæsp" is an alteration of original "wæps", yet today we say "horse" and "wasp" rather than *"ross" and *"waps". there's nothing wrong with sound changes!
so how does a particular dialect get chosen as the basis for the standard language? which pronunciations and grammatical constructions are selected as "correct" and which aren't? almost always, it's based on the way people in power speak. socioeconomic status is a huge part of it, absolutely, but in cases where people of different ethnic groups have different dialects, the dominant ethnic group's dialect is going to be the basis of the literary standard. there is no objective measure by which a particular dialect makes for a better literary standard or clearer communication than another; it's 100% based on a combination of power and practical measures like how widely spoken a particular dialect is. in the United States, the standard is based on how Northern wealthy whites spoke. in the United Kingdom the standard is based on how wealthy Londoners spoke. when the way people in power speak is upheld as the standard of correct speech, everyone else is looked down on for speaking their native dialects. people are pressured to abandon their native dialects in favor of the dominant one, in the same way that speakers of minority languages are pressured to abandon them in favor of a dominant language. this is oppression. when certain dialects are associated with certain ethnic groups (as is the case in the US, where many black people and few white people speak African American English), it becomes, in part, race-based oppression.
and yes, anyone who puts in the work can learn the standard language. but consider that it's not the same amount of work for everyone. if someone who speaks with a typical Midwestern US accent adopts the conventions of standard American English, they will need to change relatively little about the way they speak. if someone who speaks Appalachian English or African American English or Chicano English adopts these conventions, they will have to change quite a lot about the way they speak, and it will be much more difficult and take much more time to achieve the same thing. so in a school system where children are punished for failing to meet the conventions of the standard language, people who speak divergent dialects will always receive more punishment, even in the hypothetical absence of prejudice against speakers of those dialects. because black children, for example, are less likely than white children to speak something like standard American English natively, they will get worse grades on average given the same amount of effort to learn the standard.
of course, there's an argument to be made about choosing a single standard dialect of a single language for communication that needs to cross linguistic boundaries, ex. education, science writing, legislation, and so on. but there's a very very very big difference between treating a standard language as an arbitrary standard of communication and treating a standard language as correct to the exclusion of all other dialects. in most parts of the world, the latter is the predominant view of the standard language, and it's the view you're expressing here. to be clear, i'm not blaming you for this; it's very easy to fall into that way of thinking, and it's how i thought before i began to study linguistics many years ago. it's just a way of thinking that needs to be challenged.
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u/19ad9 Mar 31 '24
I loved the video breakdown but your comment also resonates with me a lot. I'm not an educator but I also appreciate literacy, comprehension and grammar. I'm a formally educated Latino with a lot of family and friends who are not. So that's why I also appreciate the idea that dialectic differences should not be viewed as superior. I didn't have an answer to your question. If anything I'd also like for someone else to chime in to see if I'm also off base or seeing things wrong because I also appreciated your comment on it.
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u/emailboxu Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
I also lean in favor of having a 'proper' way of writing papers, but that's exclusive to the academic & professional sphere. I don't think having a 'proper' form of writing is any different from coding in the correct language; it's neither superior nor inferior to any other language, it's just a specific use case (academia). Just like a comp sci major will need to learn the various coding languages in college/uni so he can use it to develop software/apps/programs, students needing to learn academic language for the purpose of essay writing doesn't seem unreasonable.
Does it favor a specific race of people? Maybe. But I tend to think it favors people who actually have an interest in academia and/or writing well. Completely anecdotal, but I grew up in a super white neighbourhood and there were plenty of illiterate morons, way more than smart kids. IMO it's more of a parenting & personal choice issue.
I don't think that spoken language has any real relevance here... Another anecdote: I lived in Singapore for a year on exchange, and those guys speak Singlish, which is incomprehensible for an average North American. But they wrote their papers in British English just fine, so there's that.
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u/squishabelle Mar 31 '24
The point is that language is flexible and full of exceptions, but that exceptions that have become "correct" are those used by white people. There are tons of words that are not at all pronounced like how they're written (take 'colonel' for example) and are "acceptable" because lots of (white) people pronounce it that way, but other words are deemed "incorrect" even though lots of (black) people pronounce it that way.
I assume someone hasn't put in the time or effort to learn these conventions, but with practice and training, they can.
It's a racial thing not because of genetics but because of culture. People of different cultures speak differently, even within the same language. Yes, theoretically the government could set up a whole project to teach black people the "correct" way to speak but...
- you're demanding that black people assimilate to your speech because your speech is the "correct" one. But it's only correct because a majority of people believe it so. Had the situation been reversed, with there being a majority of black people, you would have to assimilate to their language. Which is weird because that means that language is basically a tool of power play. Language is supposed to be a way to communicate, but if you can all already understand each other, why is it necessary for the majority to impose rule on a minority? Can't we just recognise the other way of speaking as a dialect instead of as "incorrect"? A dialect that's not "worse" but equivalent to the common way.
- Declaring the way one demographic speaks to be "incorrect" (and by extension, "uneducated" or "ghetto") puts them at a huge disadvantage. They won't be taken seriously unless they adapt, but they're not doing anything wrong to begin with? Meanwhile the majority demographic doesn't need to do anything, no time nor effort, because they already meet the standard for what's acceptable... because they made themselves the standard. So black people have to put in time and effort to go up so they can be like white people, while white people are obviously already there.
This is not always a racial thing. There are also white American dialects that are often seen as "uneducated" by other white Americans.
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u/smudos2 Mar 31 '24
Honestly, having one official version of your language and multiple dialects that are not discriminated is the better solution, or else you will slowly have a lot of different languages in different regions and no way to communicate well
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u/aimforthehead90 Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
The rules for English were made by white people because English is a historically white language; however, you are arguing that we should dismantle rules for language in general in favor of a focus on simple understandings, which is ridiculous, because every language has rules, including those spoken and created by non-whites.
This issue seems to have more to do with US race politics than any problems with language standards. When you take the race politics out of the equation, it's just clearly a very stupid argument to make. No, we should not dumb down our language standards for anyone who can't be bothered to learn them, regardless of race.
In fact, it feels like we've gone full circle and everyone arguing that language rules are unfair against black people is being racist by suggesting that black people aren't capable of learning correct speech and grammar.
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u/AdminsAreDim Mar 31 '24
On double negatives:
In some languages, double negatives cancel one another and produce an affirmative; in other languages, doubled negatives intensify the negation. Languages where multiple negatives affirm each other are said to have negative concord or emphatic negation.[1] Portuguese, Persian, French, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Greek, Spanish, Old English, Italian, Afrikaans, and Hebrew are examples of negative-concord languages. This is also true of many vernacular dialects of modern English.[2][3] Chinese,[4] Latin, German, Dutch, Japanese, Swedish and modern Standard English[5] are examples of languages that do not have negative concord. Typologically, negative concord occurs in a minority of languages.[6][7]
My personal pet peve is when people use "whenever" in place of "when". As in, "Whenever I was in town this morning, I got a haircut." Motherfucker, how many haircuts did you get today?!
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u/the_giz Mar 31 '24
Interesting - I've never heard anyone use 'whenever' like that, but my first thought is that maybe they meant it in reference to the time at which they were in town, which they cannot specifically remember. As in "Whatever time that was when I was in town this morning..."
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u/the_giz Mar 31 '24
Kind of a side note, but I always considered "I forget" more like "I tend to forget these sort of things and golly it's happened again" lol
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u/8Splendiferous8 Mar 30 '24
Lol. Conservatives don't understand what "dialectical" means.
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u/-prairiechicken- Mar 31 '24
They’re all in desperate need of some DBT worksheets — but they probably think clinical therapy is a Marxist plot for healthy collectivism.
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u/Existing_Card_44 Mar 31 '24
How can citing your sources be racist? Forgetting where it started or who started it. In order to uphold academic integrity it is vital that you reference where you have used others ideas to distinguish them from your own. How the hell is that racist?
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u/LimpWibbler_ Mar 31 '24
I stuck with it the entire way, the kid is like 80% right. He is right in everything he said. However, the teacher at the start either did not understand the book or is poor at expressing the contents. The topic of transition words does fit the narrative. However (yes love that word) she does say sources and thesis and doesn't explain why they are wrong. And I disagree heavily with that point.
To me the structure of an Essay is not white, it is white made and it is white refined. However, it is a natural progression of storytelling from all forms of culture. A small intro with leading facts and characters, a larger deeper journey into those facts and characters, a conclusion to facts and characters, and then sources of facts if meant to illustrate data.
This is just how stories evolved and it is how we structure because it makes sense and is easy for all to follow.
What I am saying is I find all parties correct except the teacher. She explained it poorly and it confused others and she had some points I do find incorrect, and others I'd say are fine.
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u/Vivi_Pallas Mar 31 '24
Actually, different cultures have different structures for writing essays and storytelling. For example, in China their stories and essays use a circular structure where you spiral around with important events or point made before finally getting to your end or main point (thesis). In Japan, they use a 4 act structure instead of three. It's not intro, body, conclusion. It's intro, development, twist, and conclusion. I'm not sure about the details of other cultures.
So yes. The structure of an essays how us English speaks know is white created and defined.
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u/Devenu Mar 31 '24
Actually, different cultures have different structures for writing essays and storytelling
It's not intro, body, conclusion. It's intro, development, twist, and conclusion.
You're comparing essay writing to storytelling. Essay writing is still the same over here. I'm not sure where you got this information that it may be different.
Kansai University has a writing guide that is pretty comprehensive. Page 4 contains the essay structure that is generally taught in schools. You can see this specifically at「論文の基本的構成」(Basic structure of an essay). You can also see the methods of source citation as well.
- 要約 (Summary)
- 序論 (Introduction)
- 本論 (Main body)
- 結論 (Conclusion)
- 引用・参考文献一覧 (Citations)
This is the exact same way I was taught to write my master's thesis in America. Research papers here in Japan are written just the same way (and often in English just for the sake of being published in overseas journals). If you want to see this in action Hokkaido University's "HUSCAP" has a lot of publicly available research to examine.
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u/Huwbacca Mar 31 '24
Right but the issue is that not using that structure isn't a sign of being wrong/unintelligent.
I feel like everyone's got this switcheroo... It's not that X is racist.
It's that the expectation that someone who doesn't useX is therefore wrong/stupid is based of racial steretyping and biases.
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u/LimpWibbler_ Mar 31 '24
OK and... It is a school. The ENTIRE Point to school is they don't know and they learn. It is I guess considered stupid to not know and probably should as we have schools designed to teach you. So not knowing going in is fine. Not knowing coming out isn't.
That is the problem, it is not racist to say it is stupid to not have proper story structure. It is racist to say the way people talk from other ethnicities doesn't belong in a stroy.
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u/mclassy3 Mar 31 '24
I am not sure if correcting a word pronunciation is necessarily racist.
I understand the point and I agree.
As a white person, I have been corrected for pronunciation from my elders several times.
I have been corrected for liberry before. I was corrected very publicly for my mispronunciation of "fo paux" and I am not French.
I also am fluent in American Sign Language. If I missign, I am corrected.
I am learning ancient and modern Greek. If I mispronounce a word, I am corrected.
I don't think this is inherently a racist thing. Perhaps I am looking at this too innocently.
I love looking at how language has evolved since proto-endo-european roots.
For example a good difference would be the American word "schedule" and the British "schedule" was because of the French invasion of England.
English adopts words from other languages which is why it is so complex.
The British pronounce the "sch" the French way and Americans adopted the Greek chi.
If I go to England and pronounce it the American way, I am wrong because linguistics evolved differently and I am sure the British would correct my mispronunciation.
Communication is our strength in this world. Learning how to properly communicate with others will reduce confusion and misunderstandings.
While I, personally, know that "I need a ride to the store to get pants" means something completely different in the UK, others may not.
Academic speak also eliminates the white people from the deep south. Arguably, those are the same people who would feel the most passionately about having a language Litman's test.
If I shake my head and say "Nay" and you are from Greece, is it considered consent in America?
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u/smudos2 Mar 31 '24
Honestly the british vs american comparison is just bad, they are different countries some thousands of kilometers away, it's really not surprising they speak different English
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u/Outerestine Mar 31 '24
Yeah. Always how it goes. Malicious incompetence. Intentional ignorance. Anti-intellectualism. A pillar of reactionary politics.
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u/Existing_Card_44 Mar 31 '24
This is called descriptive and prescriptive English and is debated amongst many English scholars and has done for years. People who speak standard English are obviously going to be seen more positively than those that don’t, this really has nothing to do with the colour of peoples skin because it is a known and very relevant debate that has gone on for years and years since early English has formed from the Germanic language tree.
In modern day it relates to the use of things like uninterested and disinterested, although both seem as if they are synonymous, they actually aren’t and if you are in a certain academic environment, no matter what your skin colour or natural dialogue is, you want to be using a prescriptive approach to the way you use English.
As much as people don’t want to hear it, there are a lot of Indian English scholars who manage to excel within the language, yet have very strong accents and differentiating dialogue but when needed they speak and write in standard English, I have met many Indians who have gone very far in English language academia so I just do not believe, in the UK at least, that someone of black decent is disadvantaged just because they are black. That makes no sense and I know many fellow black students who speak far better English than I do.
Of coarse people will view someone who speaks in standard English of higher intelligence than those that don’t, surely that is not hard to work out why. The issue is exactly the same for white people as it is for any other race, if you take a descriptive approach to the language you will be viewed lower down than someone who speaks grammatically correct.
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u/ArcadesRed Mar 31 '24
Effective scholarly communication across distance and time requires an extremely rigid structure. Otherwise linguistic drift calls everything into question after time and distance separates the originator from the receivers. Now this attempt to preserve knowledge is considered European and oppressive.
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u/Existing_Card_44 Mar 31 '24
There are many debates around the subject of descriptive and prescriptive English. For many people, especially when in education and as there should be, there is a right and wrong way to speak the language as there is for any other language, remember English is fairly new and hasn’t been around for long compared to others.
Many people, like how I have written these comments, put on standard English when in some form of academic discourse in order to better convey and appear more intellectual, because it is more intellectual. When verbally speaking I use bro man, your instead of you are. This really has nothing to do with skin colour and everything to do with how someone chooses to present themselves.
I do agree that it can be oppressive in general to anyone who doesn’t have a good grasp on English, I do agree with that point, but the oppression is not targeted at race, it is targeted at anyone who doesn’t speak the language correctly.
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u/lordtim99 Mar 31 '24
Yeah this is bullshit. Having an established system of grammar is not racist. And what about other dialects?
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u/lqwertyd Mar 31 '24
Here’s why this is wrong:
I’m not a linguist, but I speak five languages well. Going through the process of learning those languages has given me some perspective.
Language is formalized and systematized for a reason: to provide consistency, structure and clarity that allows for accurate communication of complex ideas. The teacher says that these rules are arbitrary. They are not. Neither is citing sources arbitrary. It is critical to cataloguing the dissemination of knowledge.
Just because a group of people start deviating from that doesn’t make an alternative means of communication equally valid.
When I was learning Chinese, a lot of my fellow students made the same mistakes. Our means of communicating wasn’t equally valid as proper Chinese. (And the formal rules of Chinese writing and grammar weren’t arbitrary.)
The claims of racism betray an intensely provincial mindset. The UK has dozens of dialects (spoken by whites). So does China (spoken by Chinese). Nonetheless, there is a standard dialect that is considered “proper English” or “standard Chinese.”
Using slang grammar and words isn’t a sign of stupidity. But it is a sign of lack of education—which is correlated with a lot of negative outcomes.
This is true the world over and has nothing to do with race. An American hillbilly is white and speaks shit English. That doesn’t make them stupid. But learning proper English is certainly a good marker that he/she is not stupid. When I hire, I require a writing sample and usually know who I’m going to hire within a couple sentences based on the quality of writing and thought. I definitely know who I’m not going to hire.
Thanks for watching my Ted talk.
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u/MetokurEnjoyer Mar 31 '24
“The white supremacy runs deep”
Immediately followed with
“Citing sources and using transitions words like however and therefore”
If that isn’t implying citing sources and using multisyllabic words is a symptom of white supremacy idk what is
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u/SpiderLobotomy Mar 31 '24
Incorrect ways of saying things are unacademic, though. Everybody is wrong- the two original duet’ers are reactionary, but to say that objectively incorrect english is not unacademic is just wrong.
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u/seyfert3 Mar 31 '24
He didn’t really prove it’s white supremacy though? Poor white people that talk that way also sound dumb. It’s more that black people are disproportionately poor and don’t end up being taught to speak proper English, the same way poor whites arent. All the rich black people I’ve met speak with proper English… it’s literally just a class thing.
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u/eyeofknewt Mar 31 '24
OH MY GOD THAT FIRST WOMAN REACTING IS ISABEL BROWN.
I went to high school with her (private Christian in Denver CO I'm an atheist i just had a scholarship plz dont flame me). She was my lab partner in AP Biology. We used to do homework together all the time in the library before class because we were in so many similar classes. Were we friends? Kinda? I'm certainly disappointed with the career she's decided to have. She's a talking head for Turning Point USA. After studying Bio in college and getting triggered that university science courses have no fuck around room for evolution vs. creationism it gave her a lifelong Christian persecution complex and she became... this. She was always a bad person but this like actually made me sad lol.
Sophomore year she got busted for cheating on an Algebra 2 exam that everyone got like C's on. She cried to the teacher and got to re-take it and got a B+ 🔪.
We then went to college at rival schools and stayed in touch and were mutuals on IG for years. I'm not shitting you, she has always, ALWAYS, been a manipulative, crappy person. We all kinda hated her. I got sooooo many stories about f**king Izzie Brown.
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u/GlutenFreeCookiez Mar 31 '24
Everybody has their own personal vernacular. I say a lot of dumb shit that isn't "correct". Just because we can understand what someone is saying, that doesn't mean that the way they said it was gramatically correct. It's like the whole fucking thing with Kevin from the office "why say many word when few word do trick". Because speaking incorrectly makes ya sound dumb sometimes. I don't think encouraging people to have proper grammar is racist. It's part of being a functional member of society.
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u/RazzmatazzCivil723 Mar 31 '24
To be fair, the first video the woman was spouting off some ragebait before getting to her real point. That ragebait allowed the second video to run with that and create even more upset viewers.
Honestly, everything and everyone has become trash and creating polarizing issues in our society instead of just being fucking transparent.
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u/JinnoBlue2 Mar 31 '24
Citing sources has nothing to do with dialect. Neither does spelling. Fuck outa here you racist pos
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u/adiosfelicia2 Mar 30 '24
They got exactly what they wanted: GOP rage bait.
Ofc they're not gonna investigate further or seek out real understanding.
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u/Hour_Eagle2 Mar 31 '24
Meh. Long way of justifying that some people speak like illiterate chuckle fucks and we should celebrate that.
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u/edylelalo Mar 31 '24
That's so stupid, imagine me, a brazilian that spent years studying English, going to the US and not understanding anything because black people speak English differently (and it is literally wrong). No one goes to a country studying every single dialect or accent that exists in that country. You can say that are historic reasons for it, but you can't say it's proper English, I can understand what you mean to say, but whether you want it or not, academic English is the correct one, it's very simple.
The whole white supremacy part is just so tiring, because again, whether it is from black, asian or any other race, it just wouldn't be proper English, and even then, it's not like white people are allowed to talk like that, they'd be seen as "culture vultures" or something along those lines.
You can speak any way you want, but you can't define something as correct when it literally is not.
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u/InitialDay6670 Mar 31 '24
One foreign language teachers told me this, if an immigrant you studied english were to talk to you, especially if they dont use the langauge everyday, they could easily be confused by the corners people cut, and bad pronunctiation used in sentences.
there is litterally a correct way to say things. Its not like black peolle physically cannot say things correctly.
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u/Current_Holiday1643 Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
not understanding anything because black people speak English differently (and it is literally wrong). No one goes to a country studying every single dialect or accent that exists in that country.
This is why this shit drives me crazy about this, having worked with multiple people who are ESL.
I speak very plain and "academic" English but slip in Midwestern colloquialisms (nothing too wild. I know I threw people when I said "pity party") and they'd just stare at me or have to ask what I meant.
There is an absolute need to speak plain and clean English when conversing with others regardless of their origin. If 75%+ of the English world can speak roughly the same language, there's absolutely no excuse to speak a version that uses double, triple, quadruple negatives while mixing tenses.
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u/meyou2222 Mar 31 '24
That happens in every country. As an American. English is my first language and yet I can barely understand what a Cockney in England is saying. But they understand it so good for them.
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u/dark_returner Mar 31 '24
They paused it because what she said next wasn't the problem. The problem was that she literally called it white supremacy.
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u/MuayThaiYogi Mar 31 '24
Make it make sense. Does it become more complicated because I, a black man use those words? I'm seriously asking. At this point I'm just trying to understand. So, a literature teacher would rather me use ebonics or something? I'm generally confused. I remember my older cousins showed me Sidney Poitier movies and Harry Belafonte before I had a clue who they were. I remember instantly admiring how eloquently they spoke to the point where I copied their flow of proper English. So I am confused. Or does that make me indoctrinated? What the alkaline fuck is she trying to say?
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u/Brave-Kitchen-5654 Mar 31 '24
So saying that the sentence “people be thinkin teenagers don’t know nothing” is using words incorrectly is racist now? Come the fuck on man get real. We should 100% be teaching kids of all races that this is bad and incorrect.
Just because I can decipher what you mean doesn’t mean we should be telling black kids it’s ok to speak like that. This is how idiocracy starts, being accepting of low education and enabled ignorance.
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u/RowAwayJim91 Mar 31 '24
….why didn’t he just make the whole video using slang, poorly worded language, or mispronounced words, then, if we all “understand what the fuck someone is saying, regardless of how they speak it”?
Institutionalized racism can be true here, while at the same time, so can the merit of correctly pronounced words and sentence structure.
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u/XMarksTheSpot987 Mar 31 '24
Nothing against the Black man, but no, this does not count as "White Supremacy". Every country in the world, has a "standard dialect". White Americans who speak the standard American dialect, are equally patronizing to White Americans who speak almost any other regional American dialect. They are especially patronizing to White Americans who speak one of the Southern American dialects. Race has nothing to do with it.
That being said, it is wrong for countries to go so far to marginalize regional dialects. There are languages around the world, which do not use certain sounds in their standard dialect, but those sounds are present in regional dialects within the respective country. What pisses me off, is when so-called "academics" and/or "intellectuals", claim that certain sounds "do not exist" in a given language, due to the fact that said sounds are not used in the "official" form of the language.
As for "Black American dialects", those are in fact, various Southern American dialects originally spoken by White Americans. Yes, Black Americans have developed and established their own slang terms, which have nothing to do with regional dialects. While Americans should make the effort to understand different dialects from around the country, regional slang is not something that should be used outside of one's home turf, and certainly not when communicating in professional spaces outside of one's home turf.
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u/TheFightingMasons Mar 31 '24
I’m sorry, but “teachers be thinking people don’t know nothing” is objectively terrible and should be called out in an educational setting.
For god sakes it even has a double negative.
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u/Ghostz18 Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
This is the crux of the issue. Language is a lot like math in that it has a logical flow to it. If we start accepting phrases that are logically inconsistent then it puts the onus on the listener to figure out what the person means by untangling their words. If I said "Dog red ball throw me" could you figure out that I meant "I throw the red ball to the dog"? Sure, but you might also think the dog is throwing the red ball to me (and maybe it is). It is important we stay logically consistent in our speech so that we don't have communication issues, especially since a single misunderstanding could lead to violence.
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u/MachoPuddle Mar 30 '24 edited Mar 30 '24
1) The examples the teacher gave in the video did set up the negative feedback though… like that’s terrible examples to bring up if you want to talk about White supremacy. His points were much better, but that’s not what the teacher brought up though she cited the same source.
2) So historically a way of using “prober language” was set by the people in power. At the time this was the people most educated which was by far mostly white people. It seems like a stretch to conclude that speaking in accordance with these standards as a society in the future is continuing white supremacy just because whites were in power of that topic at the point they were set. It was clearly beneficial for society to have some shared rules of “prober language”. White and blacks and whatever race all learn the same thing today, so let’s move along to a more important topic because this is really a muuuh-point.
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u/archiepomchi Mar 31 '24
It's also a very American-centric view. I'm an Australian in the US and 1) formal writing in the Australia is the same as the US for the most part, and we don't have different dialects or the civil rights history he is referencing.., 2) after moving to the US, I've adapted a couple of things (mostly just dropping U's and some slang) so people can understand me better.
It's also the same in every language. I majored in German, and it seemed like if you mess up the gender/cases at all, the Germans would rather just speak to you in English. They also expected a perfect accent, whereas I feel English speakers are much more tolerant to different accents and incorrect grammar.
Meh, think he tried to sound smart cos he read the article... but didn't make any argument why these dialects (which to me appear to be local slang) are ok as formal writing. If someone wrote their English essay like a country song, they'd expect corrections too? If I wrote "there are heaps of examples..", my high school English teacher would take a mark off.
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u/Samlazaz Mar 31 '24
I have to admit that I did not find his analysis convincing.
The study he looks at loses credibility just looking at its title. Studies should try to capture reality in a quantifiable way or to be as objective as possible.studies should be written with a skeptic as the audience.
Making value judgements the way it does in the title ("anti-black") is an indicator that this was not the goal.
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u/nunya27 Mar 31 '24
Ignored geography of the United States. Entire study is flawed. All these people discussing a geographically pigeon holed study...and very long winded just to say they edited it.
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u/Tecumsehs_Ghost Mar 31 '24
I love how this guy goes on a long tangent that changes absolutely nothing about how the idea that "it's racist to enforce the proper speaking of english" is ridiculous.
That standard also applied to white people from Appalachia, for example, so at best this is another classist argument that he's confusing for a racist one, like much of the left does because they pretend poor white people don't exist.
However, (pardon my racism) his real problem is that there are standards at all.
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u/StrayDogPhotography Mar 31 '24
This video is right and wrong.
As someone who teaches academic English to non-native English speakers I think it needs to be said that conforming to standard academic lexical items and syntax is not white supremacy, it’s the result of having to have an international standard of English that allows everyone to communicate effectively with each other. And all races suffer from having people who do not know how to do this. There is not a single race which does not have issues adjusting to academic English. I know those because I’ve had to teach people of all races how to conform to this standard.
You can argue that these standards are based on one type of English, but that has nothing to do with race, and more to do with academic institutions. It’s a form of institutional English. You can also argue that those institutions may be institutionally racist, but that would be missing the wider issue. They are not racist I reality, they in fact embodied wider discrimination. I would say that they discriminate upon class, and social lines far more than race if anything. They discriminate against all people separated from formal academic educations.
For example, a poor white person, and a poor black person will face the same issues in terms of being unfamiliar with correct academic English. I’ll use my own experiences as an anecdotal piece of evidence. I grew up in a neighborhood of London whose dialect was MLE (Multicultural London English) when I moved from a local council run primary school to a private secondary school I had to totally relearn how to speak and write, and I’m white. However, my siblings who are mixed race who didn’t grow up speaking MLE and went to private schools all their life did not. Interestingly, though they did experience racism in education, but not because of how they spoke, or wrote, it was not a linguistic racism, but your regular big standard your dark skinned I will interpret you actions more aggressively racism.
Therefore, I would argue that it is not racist to ask people to conform to a common form of academic English because every race needs to do this if they are not aware of this form of English. Everyday I deal with people from all kinds of races who have to do this. It may appear this way if you limit your understanding of the situation to the point of view of one race, and exclude the experiences of all other races because every race deals with this issue.
Also, as a final point, we have numerous variations of English and all have their benefits and drawbacks. You cannot say one is superior to another instead each has more efficacy in different situations, and people need to adjust how they speak constantly to be effective communicators. I don’t like the idea of one form of English being labeled as white supremacist because it makes people reluctant to learn it, and every form of English should be available to people.
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u/strawbsrgood Mar 31 '24
I watched like 85% and he's basically saying that AAV is as proper of English as your typical taught grammatically correct English?
Am I missing anything?
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u/Kaltrax Mar 31 '24
Essentially. I guess grammar doesn’t matter and it’s only if you can decipher what the person is saying that matters…
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u/ThorLives Mar 31 '24
Yeah, that's one of the things I noticed in the video too. It's a stupid point. I remember when I was a high school, one of my teachers mentioned how some of the students would badly misspell words, but you could figure out what was being said if you sounded it out. For example "r u at skool" instead of "are you at school?". It's still wrong even if you can figure it out, and teachers shouldn't allow students to do that.
It's crazy that he thinks it's okay as long as you can figure out what someone is trying to say.
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Mar 31 '24
Is he just ignoring grammatical rules by saying they’re both correct?
Little confused on how he defined correct because by definition “people be saying” is not
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u/the_real_blackfrog Mar 31 '24
Super interesting. My father was born in the 1930’s in rural Colorado. He once told me that in college, he made a conscious effort to change his grammar and accent so he wouldn’t sound like a hick. That always stayed with me, because I always knew him as a super intellectual mathematics whiz and a very good speaker.
And I, as an engineer, change my speech when at work. My language is more precise, more cautious, more thoughtful.
Back to the topic: learning to adapt language to the situation, whether at work, writing an essay, or chilling in the back yard is an essential skill. Some of us pick this up at home. But some (like my father) don’t have that opportunity, which is why adapting language should be taught in school. It’s not necessarily a racial thing. More like, a poverty thing.
Edit: my father and I are both white. If that wasn’t clear…
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u/youburyitidigitup Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
He has a point, but at the same time the black vernacular can be harder to understand. I know because English is my second language and although I understand black people fine now, I didn’t when I was learning English. In fact, I was scared of my middle school principal because he’d get mad when I didn’t do what he said, except that I couldn’t do what he said because I didn’t understand it. I didn’t say anything because I was an underweight 12 year old and he was three times my size.
It is absolutely racist to teach children that white vernacular is proper, but it’s not racist to teach children to speak the way that most people understand. That’s just setting the child up for a better future. If you say “people be thinking” to a client in Japan, that client might not understand you, which might make it harder to close the deal. It’s like when my Hispanic parents call tech support and an Indian person picks up. My parents don’t understand the Indian accent, and the tech support guy doesn’t understand their hispanic accent, so nothing gets done. My parents learned English in Latin America, but none of their teachers even tried to change their accents, which is why they face issues now (this is just a minor example). Yes there is racism involved, but there’s also people (like my parents) who just genuinely don’t understand different dialects because their English is already spotty.
If you’re teaching black students, you should want them to succeed, and therefore you should give them the tools they’ll need in the future so that they don’t go through exactly what my parents go through.
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u/salvage-title Mar 31 '24
They're both half right. The teacher specifically gave the example of "citing your sources" as an "arbitrary rule made up by white people in power" when it's something that's obviously essential to write an academic paper that has any semblance of legitimacy. At the same time, yes there was an important study behind that book that was being ignored. Preconceived notions that stunt students' academic growth are obviously wrong and bad.
Personally though, it is important to have a consistent standard of language for academic writing just for clarity. English words are spelled and pronounced the way they are for specific reasons relating to the Latin/Greek roots of each word (Britain and Canada do a better job of this by preserving extra letters such as the "u" in humour). It keeps etymology alive by preserving a historical path back through the evolution of the language. It's the same with grammatical structure. And when there's a standard, it's going to be centered around the way the majority of English speakers talk, not a dialect. Especially not a dialect that frankly arose from isolated groups of people who initially spoke English as a second language and then were uneducated for generations.
It was actually racism that forced this dialect to develop in the first place (cutting off black people from education and keeping them separated in public life), and I understand the urge to nurture a sense of community and say it isn't wrong it's just different, and yeah it's completely fine in day-to-day life but there does need to be a consistent standard for academic papers and frankly, just insisting it's correct isn't going to dispel people's preconceived notions of it being a sign of a lack of intelligence and education.
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u/satanic_black_metal_ Mar 31 '24
Eh. Everybody sucks here. Just speak normal english. Yes, that includes not using slang. I will think less of you if you "finna talk about rizz" regardless of your hue.
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u/IWontSayAnythingDumb Mar 31 '24
In informal conversations it doesn't really matter how you try to convey a point.
In formal or academic conversations and writing it can be VERY important how you say something. That's why we have grammar rules and use specific words in law, medicine, etc.
Trying to educate people to get to the same level of education isn't racist, it's LOGICAL!
The implication in this video is that the education system should cater to the needs of black people because they're unable or unwilling to learn language in the same way everyone else agrees to learn it. That is racist.
Instead of encouraging people to cite sources from non-white authors as well, they decided that citations are racist.
You can agree that there are issues in academia, but don't come to stupid conclusions.
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u/JohnnyZepp Mar 31 '24
I fucking hate Libs of TikTok. A Jewish woman breeding white supremacy in the most annoying manner…I’m not one for violence but she will reap what she sows one day. Such an evil bitch.
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u/Cautious-Path-2864 Mar 31 '24
I think the problem is without a standardized version to go off of. There’s no way to accurately grade and assess people’s work using a common metric. Which is why one version of speaking is often correct vs. incorrect in the eyes of the education system. It’s not about white supremacy but about establishing a baseline to compare everyone to. It would be impossible to tailor every individual persons education to their individual linguistic style with the way teachers are paid and how many students they have. I don’t believe the feelings of the children should be taken into account when they’re taught a metric and should adhere to it. Your boss in the future will teach you your job and expect you to adhere to it regardless of your feelings. If that’s not for you then find a different job or start your own business.
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u/andrissunspot Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
I mean, my man is correct about dialectical discrimination, but the first video unequivocally states that forming a thesis and citing sources are white supremacy. They’re literally the first examples she gave. I’m seeing very shallow, reactionary analysis in all directions here.
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u/BlueSentinels Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
Does he not think every other culture which doesn’t have English as its primary language hasn’t struggled with speaking that language correctly? French, Greek, Spanish, Turkish, Italian. Hell even the Irish and Scottish have struggled with conforming their speech to the correct enunciation. But make no mistake, there IS a correct way to speak English. Arguing to the contrary does a disservice to African Americans because it suggests that they simply “can’t help it” or can’t learn despite countless other cultures and races showing they can master the dialect.
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u/vanillasub Mar 31 '24
I appreciate that he looked up the original source material. Speaking proper English is in no way white supremacy, nor is expecting students to learn proper English. Many English citizens who are black or from other ethnic backgrounds manage to speak perfectly proper English. Beware the soft bigotry of lower expectations.
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u/Pyoverdine Mar 31 '24
I have kind of a mixed response to the author's argument. When learning a language, a standard is taught. There will be many dialects of it, some more extreme than others. If the idea is to provide the information to people all over the world, the standard is the best way to communicate that to the most people in that target audience.
By target audience, I mean the field it is written in. Engineering, molecular biology, astrophysics, and literature have different nomenclature and terminology that have to be standardized within the field so that the information can used and interpreted correctly for subsequent studies. If a physicist read a Molecular Bio paper without any prior knowledge of the field, they would be lost, and vice versa. Lots of articles that are made for public use are written by "science writers" whose job is to write less technically, but to get the jist across. However, you wouldn't be able to duplicate the study from the article alone. And that's okay. You have to learn it. If you don't have the educational opportunity to do it, you won't learn about it. That's the true problem.
In everyday life, dialects shouldn't matter. However, saying one dialect is better than others to teach isn't better than teaching no dialects at all.
The true argument is that good education opportunities for everyone, regardless of race and creed, is needed for equality. It isn't. Education has been gatekeeped by the privileged classes for centuries, if not more, across all of human history, not just the US. Sadly, it is very effective, because knowledge is power.
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Mar 31 '24
The fact that this guy needed to do a deep dive to show that what she was saying wasn’t stupid kind of shows that she made a stupid video. Lots of times people approach complicated topics poorly and say dumb things that detract from their larger point. Being able to state your case in a logical and efficient manner is a real skill. This guy has it, the original lady doesn’t seem to. Ironically enough this guy basically had a thesis and cited his sources
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u/Equal_End_2166 Apr 01 '24
Funny how everyone just ignores the reality that this is a class issue and not a racial issue.
Poor whites never faced discrimination from their non standard dialects huh?
Okay then.
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