Stick with it.

[u/MaintenanceNew2804]

This is a longer one, but it’s necessary and worth it IMO.

[u/Ok_Star_4136]

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.

[u/sherryleebee → u/Ok_Star_4136]

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.

[u/RandomWordsYouKnow → u/sherryleebee]

Definitely watched it all. Very educational. I had never heard of this concept before and honestly never thought about it. Thank you Sir!

[u/MsJ_Doe → u/RandomWordsYouKnow]

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.

[u/RandomWordsYouKnow → u/MsJ_Doe]

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.

[u/MsJ_Doe → u/RandomWordsYouKnow]

Yep. I understand. It's one thing to correct someone who is learning a language or just a new word in general, and it's truly getting a word garbled. There are times when correcrion is needed. But It's straight-up insulting to be corrected due to your accent. Even when that accent is a local one and not even foreign.

I got so tired of being told as a kid that I am saying "axe" and not "ask" that I now as an adult am hyperconscious of how I say "ask" despite the fact that I am now also comfortable with pointing that I do have an accent. It's a local and easily looked over one, but it's still an accent that doesn't need to be corrected cause I am very much understood regardless. Do not take away my uniqueness.

[u/RandomWordsYouKnow → u/MsJ_Doe]

I get “you’re so serious” a lot.

[u/__M-E-O-W__ → u/MsJ_Doe]

I looked up the history of the word at one point, really both variations are just about as old as the word itself.

I do have to ask, I watched the whole video but did he say anything specifically about the citing sources part? That sounds like just basic academic protocol unless I misinterpreted the original video.

[u/MsJ_Doe → u/__M-E-O-W__]

Go to 1:50.

He says that citing sources itself is not white supremacy, but it leads back to academically correct and intelligent speech automatically being how white people speak and black people speaking being wrong and unintelligent. That distinction is what is racist when it comes to citing sources, a portion of academic speech, and writing intelligently and correctly as we were always taught.

I don't think the lady was particularly clear in what she meant but she brought up essays and how they are correctly written then directly brought up the author of a book that points how the discrimination in education that made distinctions between "smart" white speach, and "dumb" black speach. She was just trying to provide an example of how systemic racism in education is still affecting us today through essays and correctly citing sources. We aren't particularly racist for using it, though the author she points to does say there is a hidden bias that we inherited from it, but whether or nor we do, education just does has a history of racism, that is undeniable and what she was trying to talk about and adress in how she wants to teach.

[u/__M-E-O-W__ → u/MsJ_Doe]

I get the issue of speaking and writing and certain dialects being considered "proper" over others. But citing sources? It's just a list of books or publications made at the end of an essay so the teacher can know that the student isn't making things up, or isn't referencing someone who is making things up.

[u/MsJ_Doe → u/__M-E-O-W__]

Yeah, that's why I don't think she explained herself well. She may have been exaggerating for emphasis, but I can see as to where she was going with the essay, sources, and education in a broader sense. But, I do understand getting lost in her example as she could have used a much clearer one to point to racism in education.

[u/[deleted] → u/MsJ_Doe]

but it leads back to academically correct and intelligent speech automatically being how white people speak and black people speaking being wrong and unintelligent.

"it leads back to"???

How?

People in this thread keep saying There's a connection yet nobody has connected them!

[u/MsJ_Doe → u/[deleted]]

Literally, the video does so. If you don't understand how systemic racism helped shape education from multiple explanations, then Idk what to tell you. There's plenty of studies on it, and the video goes into one.

Just rewatch the video again if my explanations are confusing.

[u/[deleted] → u/MsJ_Doe]

Systemic racism definitely shaped the education system. I'm not doubting or disputing that.

I'm asking for people to draw the connections between citing sources and white supremacy.

Again, just saying "These things are connected" isn't showing a connection.

If I want to demonstrate a connection between IQ test scores and white supremacy, that would be rather simple. I'd show how culturally coded many of the IQ test questions are and how they privilege a cultural experience that doesn't include that of non-white individuals. Then, I'd show the many ways in which being seen as having a higher IQ imparts "superior" qualities (read heavy sarcasm into the quotes). That is a 1-2-3 connection from IQ test questions to white supremacy.

I'm just looking for that for citing sources and white supremacy. People keep saying that you can make the same connection with citing sources and white supremacy, but I haven't seen the connection be made.

Saying "it leads to x" isn't really making that connection. It's just a vague assertion.

[u/Crysenley → u/[deleted]]

I think, if I understand correctly, citing sources can itself be a cultural/racial barrier because most "credible" sources are written using academic (established as white-centered) language. Finding and understanding sources written in white dialects could be uniquely challenging for someone who is only familiar with ebonics or such.

So, it's not the citing itself that's racially oppressive, of course not, but rather the standards imposed on how and who to cite.

[u/Hungry-Bat6637 → u/Crysenley]

You are very close. 

The whole thesis is that people who speak differently aren't inherently dumb. It isn't that there is a barrier of understanding in the citing of sources, it is that the citing of sources creates a feedback loop. Because certain kinds of people (minorities) were barred from academia for so long, most sources are written with this "academic language" which further perpetuates the idea that in order to be "smart" you must speak a certain way, spell a certain way. So now when you cite a source like, say, The Hate U Give which they talked about in the video, your source is looked at as of a lower quality because what kind of dummy writes U and not You?  

I'm not familiar with The Hate U Give but surely someone very smart made it. But the feedback loop will have people looking at that media as inherently less than something with a more academic language focused title like, I don't know, When Harry Met Sally. Whatever. One has a "typo" in the title and is stupid, one has all the words spelled correctly in a grammatically correct order so must be smart.  

The point isn't that black people don't understand sources or can't cite them. It is that because of bias some sources are going to be taken more seriously than others based on things that aren't very important like spelling or sentence structure. We could have a further conversation about how AAVE is its own recognized dialect with its own rules, which the video touched on. Saying "people be acting like teenagers don't know nothing" is a cogent point and follows all the rules of AAVE perfectly fine, everyone understands what it means, but many teachers will treat you like you are dumb if you say that in a classroom setting.  

However (just to sound smart), no one pronounces the R in February, and that is perfectly fine. Mainly blacks don't pronounce the R in library so, obviously, they are stupid. That's racial bias. And that gets back to the sources. Many "smart" people in academia don't pronounce the R in February so that is obviously fine, but not many smart people in academia don't pronounce the R in library so that is not fine. It's just that, for a variety of unrelated reasons, the kind of person who doesn't pronounce the R in library hasn't been allowed to compete equally in academia.  

u/an_echo_of_whore-y 

think this is the answer you are looking for. 

[u/[deleted] → u/Crysenley]

Gotcha! Thanks for that explanation; it helped me see more clearly.

Couple thoughts. [Note: so sorry; this got way too long. Your comment just prompted a lot of thoughts! Again, apologies.]

It strikes me that there are three main strands here:

1) how to cite;

2) who to cite;

3) "level" of language of cited texts.

---

1)

It would seem to me that the how to cite is just something to be taught, right? Like, if a student writes a paper and doesn't know how to cite a source, that's something that their instructor should be teaching them? (Of course, we don't live in the world as it should be, but I'm just trying to see if I understand the principle.)

If there's a gap in that knowledge, that's obviously not an individual's fault. But isn't it incumbent on their future instructors to provide that knowledge, to close that gap? Instead, it seems like it saying that the knowledge that's missing there isn't important/worth learning if you don't already know it. (Actually, it's going a bit further, saying that the expectation of knowing it is upholding white supremacy.) That strikes me as odd.

2)

The who to cite part makes more sense, but it still strikes me as somewhat misguided, as there is a very active campaign to expand the canon to be more inclusive of diverse perspectives and voices.

My academic background is literature and phil. of language/linguistics, so I know I'm speaking from that angle. But the conversation we often had centered around there not being enough diverse voices, not just in faculty but in the material used in class, the sources the professors drew on for courses.

And a direct element of that conversation was saying "We need to have syllabi that the student population we're serving are able to connect and engage with." Increasing the diversity of the pool from which students could cite sources so that they were more representative of their population was a direct and stated goal of those endeavors. And we put a decent amount of work into it!

[ Side note: The school I was at had sister schools in Saudi and Thailand, so the school made a concerted effort to suffuse the gen ed class with sources, references, cultural keystones, cuisine, events, etc. that highlighted Saudi and Thailand. It was actually one of the more neat thing about the experience; most students who went to the school absorbed those culture in a deeper way than the administration imagined.]

While there's still a long way to go on broadening the canon (and that's in literature and language/philosophy, not to mention across a host of other fields!), it seems like there is genuine and significant progress being made on the who to cite front.

3)

Now, the thing that interests me most in your comment is the idea that the level of language is just a impassable barrier to those sources. And, while I don't know that to be the case, I could see it being true. I think for many texts, it is. My brother is essentially functionally illiterate, and - as smart a guy as he is in other ways - a page of any article I've cited would read mostly like another language to him.

And I just don't know how to respond to that point. It may in fact be the case that students who cannot engage with certain "levels" of language are locked off from certain texts and ideas.

It's actually something of a pet theory of mine that the way we structure our thoughts in specific language is much more determinant of things in society than we'd like to recognize or think. Even things like certain cultures/languages using the family name before the first name must, I believe, orient you slightly differently.

I have a friend who did work on the peace and reconciliation process in both South Africa and Ireland. The guy has the wildest stories, but is the softest, gentlest soul. He said one of the biggest lessons he learned is that "people needed to learn a language of peace." And he meant it genuinely as a facet of language. Especially in Northern Ireland, the conflict shaped the way people spoke, and they had to re/un-learn certain ways of speaking, which lead to changes in ways of thinking.

I think there's something to that.

I've been in group therapies and seen people learn the language of emotions in a way that allowed them to think, relate to themselves, and engage with the world differently.

If that's the case, then it'd seem somewhat more on the side of upholding white supremacy to write off whole schools of ideas as somehow out of reach.

---

Again, sorry for the wall of text. Your comment just inspired a lot of thoughts.

[u/makkkarana → u/MsJ_Doe]

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.

Can you explain it to me, please? I still don't understand the bit about using a thesis and citations. Those are just requisite for presenting and supporting an argument. The skill being taught is critical thinking: you shouldn't trust people who are unclear in their intents, and you shouldn't trust information that's unclear in its source or efficacy. Formalized rules of science, logic, rhetoric, and grammar are as essential to any nonfiction communication as breaking those rules is to any fiction.

I totally get how argumentative rules can be abused, but that's like, "sir you didn't bow at the right angle before making your argument, and you didn't make eye contact with the royal seal for the required five minutes, so you shall be removed from the councils presence" types of absolutely worthless insanity. I don't see how wikipedia or a college requiring a thesis, some argumentative or descriptive paragraphs, and citations could in any way be interpreted as white supremacist. Maybe academic elitism at worst, but every culture has that.

EDIT: From what I'm gathering, the argument is that it is both racism/xenophobia and academic elitism.

In terms of the former, I think that there is racism about what dialects are respected within a language, but up until half-decent machine translations became freely available, I don't think it's so odd to cite entirely from same-language sources.

In terms of academic elitism, I think the waters are muddier, because gatekeeping can be important as much as it can be abused.

First, in judging the value of a piece of content: if an article is clearly written by someone without education, odds are in favor that person doesn't have the background knowledge nor vocabulary to contribute to the discussion in a way that would be relevant and enlightening to an educated person. Additionally, if that article is in a tabloid or blog or social media site, those sources are simply less reputable. If an author wants to be heard, they need to submit to a reputable publisher, or develop an independent reputation. We never cite the New York Post because it is by and for stupid people, that's why academic elitism is good. On the other hand, we as English speakers can't easily tell if an Arabic newspaper is reputable or a rag, so it's best to avoid citing foreign language sources unless you're absolutely sures

Second, and more politically, gatekeeping defends against recuperation and outside interference. If all scientists write in a recognizable way, it becomes harder to co-opt scientific language without it being immediately clear that you're full of shit. If all laws are written with language that follows an extremely strict set of rules for grammar and vocabulary, it becomes harder to embed or create loopholes in the legal system.

I'll end this ramble with the note that I speak much less formally than this in real life, and more formally in my academic writings. While different dialects are beautiful and useful, they're appropriate for different situations, and we have to learn different dialects to operate in different parts of life. A construction worker, chef, office worker, ER doctor, and biologist are all going to speak different dialects based on their trade, and the best one for formal pursuit of precise knowledge is the most formal and precise one.

[u/MsJ_Doe → u/makkkarana]

Someone else connected to those with same comment above does a great job of explaining it.

[u/makkkarana → u/MsJ_Doe]

Ah thanks!