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.
Young's article also opened my eyes to linguistic racism I had been privileged enough to not see prior
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
SAE was created in order to silence Black American voices and push segregation in education further.
She learned at once that “standard” English was thegoal and anyone who couldn’t quickly assimilate would be considered “lessthan” their peers.
Children who come from households that speak a different language feel outcasted and punished. Many aren't explained the vast dialects of the English language and how any set one isn't necessarily "correct"
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”
White Americans created a system in which people of color were never intended to prosper.