Grammar policing as colonialism: The unseen cost of the English Language

From a young age students in America are taught to internalize the rules of the English language, taking what we learn in school and applying it to our everyday life with tactical precision. By doing so, we confirm our knowledge of the language and, on occasion, use that knowledge to correct others. This behavior, known as grammar policing, has been a common part of spoken English for centuries, and while it may seem harmless, it is far from so. The fact is, grammar policing shapes the way we perceive the English language on a fundamental level, and traces its origins to one of the most controversial systems known to the modern world, colonialism.

While it may seem like a stretch to claim a lineage between grammar policing and colonialism, the facts support the idea that proper, spoken English was designed with explicitly racist overtones, and incorporated into a system of genocidal thought aimed at Africa, the Americas, and all colonies of the British and later American empires. While many think of genocide as the systematic destruction of a people, it is also a destruction of their culture, and in no place is this distinction more apparent than in the colonial schools set up throughout the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries.

As Western Europeans spread across the globe, they brought with them a sense of superiority indicative of colonialism (Pernsteiner, 2014). This superiority manifested itself in many ways, but was most noticeable in the “superior intellect” (Vera, 1995, p.296) that many Western Europeans claimed to possess. It was the mistake of the colonizers to believe that technological progress (coal and steam industrialization) was the only form of progress, and so as they arrived in technologically “underdeveloped” parts of the world, they felt it was their duty to bring the local population up to speed, though not without compensation, which often took the form of depleting native populations of labor and natural resources.

The help they claimed to offer came in many forms, but the most recognizable of these was the colonial school. Speaking of his time in a colonial school in Kenya, author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (1986) wrote that “the language of our evening teach-ins, and the language of our immediate community, and the language of our work in the field were one. And then I went to school, a colonial school, and this harmony was broken. The language of my education was no longer the language of my culture” (p. 111). After being beaten and made to wear humiliating signs for speaking his native language, Thiong’o was forced to learn a language that had no bearing on his people or their history, and was then told he was stupid for not learning it properly.

The heart of this issue is summed up nicely by social justice educators George Sefa Dei and Chizoba Imoka (2018), who noted that:

Even though English language and European knowledge system is indigenous to a minority of the world population, the global education architecture upholds a narrow and Eurocentric understanding of education. The success of students across the world is measured and determined by their: competence in English language, embodiment of Eurocentric norms/perspectives and alienation from their indigenous cultures (p. 1)

The deliberate suppression and elimination of cultures has often been accompanied by the promotion of new ‘educational’ opportunities, and in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, those opportunities came in English.

The fact that “proper grammar” is a modern, colonial concept that began to develop as a need to differentiate “good” native English from “bad” foreign English is an often overlooked part of the language’s history. In the drive to colonize and ‘educate’ native populations across the world, a system was put in place that gave a faux-intellectual edge to those with the grace to be born in a white-majority, English-speaking country, because it was presumed that whiteness and intelligence were interchangeable. Simply by being taught English in a Western education system, these students were able to claim an intellectual edge on people with no interest in learning an alien language that was irrelevant to their everyday life.

The same instance can be seen playing out time and again across the world, from British schools in India to Native American children being taken from their families in the 19^th and 20^th century to be raised and taught in boarding schools run by the United States. Language and how we teach language have always been part of the toolkit when colonial assimilation is being considered because “settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory, if not invariably genocidal” (Wolfe, 2006, p. 387). If the goal is to eliminate a culture, the first step is to eliminate the language of that culture.

So, we can see that policing the way in which we are told to speak has at least some connection to these stories of colonialism, but how does grammar policing effect social justice in the present? Scholar Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2011) may have said it best when he wrote: “racial domination, like all forms of domination, works best when it becomes hegemonic, that is, when it accomplishes its goals without much fanfare” (p. 173). Racism works best when it is digestible through everyday systems of power such as our teachers, our parents, and even our peers.

This brings us to the grammar police and the people who tell us that y’all or ain’t are not words. The fact is words communicate single, distinct, and meaningful elements of speech and writing. So long as you understand the meaning behind the specific element, it constitutes a word. So why are we obsessed with keeping some elements of speech out of the language? To find the answer, all you need to do is look at racial and economic gaps in our system. The set of linguistic idiosyncrasies common among African-American communities (often called Black English) and the dialect of the poor are synonymous with the dialect of stupidity in the eyes of the “well educated” Eurocentric world (Franklin & Hixon, 1999, p.89). In her paper “African Americans have this slang” scholar Karen Paley tells the story of a Black Boston College Student who was forced to retake her practicum in teaching due to her continued use of Black English. The constant criticism of her spoken English by students, fellow teachers, and parents was often coupled with criticism of her intellect and capability to teach, showing that the effects of colonial grammar are still very much alive today.

While it is easy to see how colonialism and grammar have had an effect on education, we often fail to analyze how they affect our academic and public institutions, including libraries. Both academic and public libraries have a long history with internalized discrimination, much of which is predicated upon the same intellectual discrimination students in colonial schools faced (Simons, 1974). In the United States, libraries remained segregated through the 1960s under the assumption that “Black people just weren’t interested in literacy or having an education… they didn’t have the same capacity as white people to learn” (Wiegand, 2018, p.1). This assumption, which was partially derived from the language-based perception of intellect, had a profound effect on libraries that we can still see today. Many African American studies programs in the United States kept their collections separate from their institution’s main library for decades after desegregation due to an assumption that main libraries did not have Black student interests at heart (Glover, 1984), and many public libraries have had continued trouble engaging with and maintaining non-white patrons (Jiao, Onwuegbuzie, & Bostick, 1996). The fact is, the history of discrimination in libraries based on the concept of racial intelligence created by colonial education systems continues to have a profound effect on libraries and patrons today, with many patrons from marginalized communities reporting a type of “library anxiety” when having to interact with public and academic libraries (Jiao et al., 1996).

As members of an English-speaking society, it is important for us to recognize how important these hidden stereotypes of the English language actually are. Through grammar policing, we are taught to look at people with different backgrounds and experiences with the English language as less intelligent, and that has a major effect on our society. Whether you are a librarian or a bank manager, the way you perceive someone’s intelligence affects the service you provide them. By policing the grammar of those around us, we are actively contributing to a system that limits opportunities for the most vulnerable members of our society. The racially charged history of grammar policing is not something that can be solved overnight, but we need to begin addressing the issue now, so future generations will have an opportunity to overthrow a system of oppression as common and prevalent as the English language.

 

Works Cited

Bonilla-Silva, E. (2012). The invisible weight of whiteness: The racial grammar of everyday life in

contemporary America. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(2), 173-194. Doi: 10.1080/01419870.2011.613997

Dei, G.S. & Imoka, C. (2018). Colonialism: Why write back? E-International Relations. Retrieved from: https://www.e-ir.info/2018/01/03/colonialism-why-write-back/

Franklin, G., & Hixon, M. W. (1999). Yourdialect could place you onthe wrong side of the intelligence bell curve. The Negro Educational Review, 50(3), 89. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1304523432?accountid=14608

Glover, D. (1984). Academic library support for Black studies programs: A plea to Black studies faculty and administrators. The Journal of Negro Education, 53(3), 312-321. doi:10.2307/2294866

Jiao, Q.J., Onwuegbuzie, A.J., & Bostick, S.L. (1996).Library anxiety: Characteristics of ‘at-risk’ college students.Library and Information Science Research, 18 (2) (1996), 151-163. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0740-8188(96)90017-1

Paley, K. S. (2001). “African Americans have this slang”: Grammar, dialect, and racism. Retrieved from: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED461117

Pernsteiner, A. (2014). The Colonial bath: Colonial culture in everyday life (1918–1931). In N. Bancel, P. Blanchard, S. Lemaire, &D. Thomas (Eds.), Colonial culture in France since the Revolution(pp. 200-208). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gh82z.19

Simons, H., & Johnson, K. (1974). Black English syntax and reading interference. Research in the Teaching of English, 8(3), 339-358. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40170604

waThiong’o, N.(1986). Decolonizing the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.

Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387-409. Retrieved from: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/14623520601056240?scroll=top&needAccess=true

 

Vera, H., Feagin, J., & Gordon, A. (1995). Superior Intellect?: Sincere fictions of the white self. The Journal

of Negro Education, 64(3), 295-306. doi:10.2307/2967210

 

Wiegand, S. (2018). The hidden history of segregation in libraries [blog]. Retrieved from:

https://www.proquest.com/blog/pqblog/2018/The-Hidden-History-of-Segregation-in-Libraries.html