DW1b

DW1b: Analyzing "Myth Education: Rationale and Strategies for Teaching against Linguistic Prejudice" by Leah Zuidema

“You may have dark skin, we tell them, but you must not sound Black. You can wear a yarmulke if it is important to you as a Jew, but lose the accent. Maybe you come from the Ukraine, but can’t you speak real English? If you didn’t sound so corn-pone, people would take you seriously. You’re the best salesperson we’ve got, but must you sound so gay on he phone?” Zuidema follows this up by stating that “Many of us feel free to make judgements about others because of the ways that they use language. We make assumptions based on the ways that people speak and write, presuming to know about their intelligence, their competence, their motives, and their morality.”

The excerpt above, derived from “Myth Education: Rationale and Strategies for Teaching Against Linguistic Prejudice”, by Leah Zuidema, brings to our attention the amount of ignorance and prejudice that language produces, especially in today’s society. It illustrates the feelings that we all experience on a day to day basis when we use language, both written and oral. We are taught Standard English from the moment we enter the school system, and condemned if we use any sort of variety of this. We were, and still are, constantly corrected on our grammar “mistakes”, which are really just the dialect we use outside of school. Individuality of speech is viewed as unacceptable while at school, and those who do not comply receive lower grades and less favoritism. Zuidema stresses the idea of conformity of language, and how it is pushed onto us from every aspect of life, whether it be at school, work, or just in conversation with a person you just met. Immigrants, for example, who may have difficulty pronouncing certain words in English, or have a thick accent, may be viewed as “not American”, or “stupid”. A person is judged, discriminated against, and stereotyped based on their language. If we heard a President give a formal speech using words such as “gonna”, “ain’t”, “wanna”, or any other type of common slang, we, as a society, would consider him ignorant or uneducated.
We all have, undoubtably, experienced linguistic prejudice at some point in our lives. This idea is conveyed throughout my literacy narrative, in less obvious and dramatic terms. School is a major contributer to linguistic prejudice, and in a way, is encouraging such behavior. You can see this in the grading system for written papers, which is based solely off of “Standard English”. There is no room for variations, dialect difference, or slang in this grading system, and if you happen to stray off the “Standard English path”, your grade will suffer. I started to realized this, as mentioned in my literacy narrative, around the time I entered middle school. It is at this time when your written language really starts to matter, and words such as “ain’t”, were to be sifted out of our vocabulary. As human beings, we tend to judge anything that is different than us, and we do this especially in language. School, however, is the first place we need to start recognizing, and accepting, individuality of language. There is no "right" or "wrong" language, therefore the school system needs to start realizing this issue, start accommodating for it, and work out solutions for the linguistic prejudice that is incorporated throughout the system.