But starting in fifth grade, as she grewolder and mastered code-switching, Alexis was tracked into more “acceler-ated,” “advanced,” and eventually “honors” classes. Alexis saw fewer andfewer Black students around her in the increasingly segregated “advanced”tracks in middle and high school. Linguistic segregation and physical seg-regation merged

No school teacher ever told Alexis herhome language (AAVE) was a sophisticated and rich form of English—onlythat there was a right and wrong way to speak and write. These assertionsof white linguistic superiority harmed her sense of herself in powerful ways,especially coming from the places where she was supposed to learn andfrom the people who were supposed to teach her. All of this soon seemedvery normal.

For Alexis, it wasn’t until reading Young’s article and learning more aboutcode-meshing, code-switching, double consciousness, and “Standard Eng-lish” that she realized how this structural linguistic racism had been harmingher since first grade.

First,the narrative erases the four decades of civil rights struggle before 1969 toend racial exclusion at white American colleges. Second, it erases the historyof the Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that educated hundreds ofthousands of Black students before 1970. Third, it ignores the pressure thatwas building for CUNY to end its systemic exclusion of Black and Brownstudents through 1965 and the desegregation programs that did end itbetween 1965 and 1970

She learned at once that “standard” English was thegoal and anyone who couldn’t quickly assimilate would be considered “lessthan” their peers.

To Kynard, this integrationist narrativeand stance in fact rationalized the “admissions and enrollment schemes”which have been “always used to keep students of color out of white colleges”by casting those students as “outside the bounds of school culture” either tobe excluded or “paternalistically saved”