“The English Language is Racist” would have been a better title for academic, Asao B. Inoue’s obscure 2019 book, ‘Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate.’
Inoue is a self-styled “antiracist” whose literary history, and Twitter feed, reflects an obsession with race as a subject.
Not unusual, considering the wave of profits flowing in for the likes of ‘White Fragility’ author Robin DiAngelo, and Critical Race Theory advocate, Ibram X. Kendi.
Milking white guilt from the gullible is a cash cow.
Most agree that racism is sinful. Few deny historical wrongs happened by way of the rejection of the Imago Dei Biblical Christian Doctrine, and the subsequent embrace of the social Darwinian mythos of race, but there’s still hard cash to be won from it.
Labelling people racist simply because of the colour of their melanin translates into big dollars. Making racism, big business.
Granted, there’s room for the honest critique of any ethnic majority. There isn’t when the context of that critique is built on poisoned presuppositions that measure a white person as sinful or evil, just for having white skin.
It’s clear that Critical Race Theory replaces a culture of silence with a culture of suspicion. Thus, throwing society from one form of racism into another.
Through his conclusions Asao Inoue appears to be guilty of both.
According to The Daily Wire’s Chrissy Clark, Inoue (an associate Dean at Arizona State University) believes ‘English is derived from white people, which means it’s inherently white and racist.’
Inoue (who believes ‘he lives in an explicitly racist world’) claims that grading English isn’t done so by an objective rubric, but through the lens of white supremacism.
For example, ‘ranking is rooted in racism; grading is a form of ranking, grading must also be a racist idea.’
(Note the circular reasoning.)
Clark writes that Inoue’s ‘main argument is that grading calls for student uniformity and high-quality completed assignments, both of which are allegedly racist ideas.’
Inoue’s solution is to ‘get rid of grading systems’, which would remove what he calls a ‘slave making mechanism.’
By removing the system that ‘requires children to speak and write proper English during English and literacy classes’, society can fight ‘white language supremacy.’
In other words, cancelling grading a student’s understanding of correct syntax, grammar, vocabulary, and conventional linguistic standards within the English language is quintessential “antiracism” that will end the ‘white racial habitus’, and it’s ‘racist status quo.’
His reasoning rests on the assumption that white people have an “unearned privilege”, because they’re taught to speak English at home, which for Inoue translates as systemic racism, and the reason why he never received an “A” in English class, only a “B.”
Clark explains that Inoue, born in Hawaii, to a father who is ethnically Japanese, and mother who is Eastern European, holds a Doctorate from Washington State University.
Following the necessary facepalm, two reactions to Inoue are justifiable. First, serious prayer. His conclusions appear to be drenched in victimhood, and rooted in resentment. Second is exasperation for those who buy into the victim mentality.
In particular, Bureaucrats, who, keen for some virtue signalling P.R, would sacrifice academic standards on the twofold racist idea that all “white people are racist”, and the presumption that non-white people need English language standards dumbed down for them, because “antiracists” consider those with a darker shade of melanin, incapable of understanding, or mastering the English language.
The consequences of Inoue’s conclusions are a downgrade of professionalism.
Would you trust your family or your own healthcare to institutions that give potential professionals degrees based on their skin tone, gender or sexual preference, not the quality of their performance/acumen/merit?
The kind of degree-by-where you land on the intersectionality scale, will create higher risk, further division, and racism, because those who’ve been elevated by virtue of their skin colour, or sexual identity, aren’t actually capable of doing the job entrusted to them, and therefore can’t be trusted in the role their degree/doctorate is supposed to prepare them for.
Sadly, it won’t be “WOKE” unis who get the blame. It’ll be you. Just like all bureaucrats, the buck will be passed. So will the blame. As the WOKE mob pins racism on anyone who decides to steer clear of those sold out to this Cancel Culture trend, and those whose academic credentials are questionable, because “WOKE” unis were more interested in virtue signalling quotas, than the quality of academic achievements.
English isn’t racist. Today’s “antiracism” is, and today’s “antiracists” are.
Inoue isn’t a product of racism. He’s a product of a racist victimhood industry.
For those fed-up with this endless rule-by-idiocracy, it’s a reminder of the dumbing down of Western Societies.
It’s also indicative of the fact that while a civil war is still avoidable, a schism in the West, is, now, all but inevitable.
On one side stands those who side with Truth over falsehood. On the other, stands those like Inoue, who embrace the Radical Leftist totalitarian phantasmagoria.
The best outcome the leftist ideological hegemony could hope for is that the majority turns towards self-preservation; switches off, and tunes out, while holding their breath, and hoping, that the gathering storm doesn’t hit them in the same way it is hitting others.
To quote Churchill,
“World War 2 was preventable, but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool. We surely must not let that happen again…We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.” – (1946. ‘The Sinews of Peace’)
Related reading: Taking the White Supremacist Narrative Too Far
First published on Caldron Pool, 9th March, 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
