Decolonize Now: Standard English and Doing the Right Thing
In this unstable and chaotic world, everyone needs a quiet place–a foothold–to regain some peace and stability. It may be painting, reading, talking, singing, or just deliberately taking the time to think hard about something. My foothold is writing. It was all I ever wanted to do. When I was little, though, I didn’t think I was going to share it with anybody. I didn’t think that I’d be going to college for it and I definitely didn’t think it’d be a job. I just knew it was my art. My safe and quiet place where everything else just melted away. Like eating or sleeping, writing was necessary to keep me upright and breathing.
As anyone (artist, academic, or otherwise) commits to the long road of developing their passion, their growth isn’t as steady as y=mx+b. There are episodic booms of evolution. My first one is tied to SUNY Plattsburgh. In the U.S., the collegiate ages (18-21) are critical ones. For most people, it’s where you learn to Be A Person. To function as an adult. You learn yourself without the imposition from others. You learn what you like, what you want, and how hard it is to find those things...and how frequently they change. Writing changed me; I got to study my medium. The English Department is full of wonderful people and wonderful teachers. I even had the privilege of being taught by The J.L. Torres-Padilla himself. He revolutionized my idea of what an essay was. Freedom. It was so nice (and weird) to write freely for a grade. Much of my first years in the writing program felt like unlearning all of the strict rules from high school (the despised 5-paragraph essay…) but at times there was still an underlying standard that prevented me from true, artistic, unrestricted expression.
I grew up in what me and my friends call “the yeehaw part of New York.” It really just means upstate. It was a predominantly white area: dominantly white, even. There was confederate flags on trucks, bags, and clothes. The n-word was an essential middle school vocabulary word; my bus rides and lunch times were basically Call of Duty lobbies. The culture also seeped into my schooling. “Good writing” was meant to signal whiteness–to have our reader assume a white author. This included grammar, references to our culture (oh boy did they not wanna hear about hip hop), vocabulary, and the texts we wrote on. All of these expectations were hidden in words like developing a “proper academic” or “professional” voice. I learned the writing best received followed those standards, discouraging my Black vocabulary, my Black grammar, the things that made me my father’s child. Yet I did it. My autism made this easy for me; constant watching and copying and suppressing; every second spent in the company of others was studying what was the “right thing to do” socially, academically, and identity-wise. What I learned every time, but especially in my writing, was that it wasn’t necessarily what was right (right being me, natural, my best way of communicating), it was being white. My teachers failed to acknowledge that AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) was a complex language with its own rules, and dismissed words and phrasing as grammatical errors. Even in dialogue, I got marked down. She ain’t do it no way was “corrected” to she didn’t do it anyway, I been knew to I have known, I ain’t say that to I did not say that, etc. etc. They wrote off my clarity as simplistic and too colloquial and opted to mold my language into a more proper, more elusive one. All this to perpetuate the myth of one singular academic “Standard English” that was forced onto them.
It wasn’t until junior year of high school that I considered blending my blackness and academics. I wrote a poem for the school newspaper for Black History Month which was never celebrated anyway. My first rejection was because of length. I cut it down. The next time, again, length. I tried to shorten it, but by the time the teacher got back to me, it was past the deadline. Titled “The Shortest Month of the Year” it came out to one page long, double-spaced. I was discouraged from exploring my blackness in any way–except to recount our pain and suffering. I have felt the unsaid pressure of a white classroom countless times: even in college. The “be sure to write academically”s, the “we celebrate our many rich cultures and our diversity”s. The “we will be reading white author white author white author”s. I first learned what a microaggression was at SUNY Plattsburgh. I was so used to overt racism that I didn’t know it even could be covert. The difference is that in high school they’ll ask if you have a dad, but in college, they’ll just think it.
The two classes I took with Dr. Torres-Padilla (Latinx Literature and Creative Nonfiction/Poetry) were the only ones that had dedicated space for me to celebrate my BIPOC existence. A classroom that was celebratory instead of colorblind. “Relish in your brownness,” he said. “In your hybridity. Because it’s beautiful.” That was cathartic. As a biracial person, that broke all the chains I and others had put on me. I was allowed to put my grammar, vocabulary, and culture in my writing and have it celebrated. I didn’t really feel that in my other classes. Lessons are built by and for white teachers to teach white students. It’s good intentioned, but always raises awareness of things we been knew, because we been in it our whole lives. Even without meaning to, it centered the white student. Leaving us to explain, provide background, to talk and write in such a way that caters to whiteness. Why must I write an essay on the New Jim Crow’s relevance today? Why must I read Aristotle and Plato, and not DuBois and hooks? Why I gotta use “Standard English” to say what I gotta say, when it don’t really matter? You understood that what I said. The development of a general Standard English Academic Voice was to gatekeep education. What other reason is there to gatekeep like my gatekeepers did? Why other than to do the white thing? By these restrictive rubrics, our writing is still confined, even if in a nicer, bigger cage. Decolonization of academics has been a long effort, I feel like we got a foot in the door. Still, though, I know most, if not all, the non-white students in my department. I definitely know all of them in the Creative Writing major. There are no non-white professors in the SUNY Plattsburgh English department. It feels hard to try to experiment and write on your terms and not the professor’s
Like the two classes mentioned before, my Writing Tutoring class addressed this specific issue! It was so refreshing to learn that the preservation of voice and expression was essential to the tutoring process! For example, ESL students were encouraged to make use of linguistic structures of their first language in their writing and even incorporate their languages into their academic writing. We were taught to give the students enough confidence to advocate for themselves–it takes a lot of courage to contest your teacher's “corrections.” In that class, I was equipped with many good academic decolonization tools. It changed my relationship with writing and reading completely in just one question. What does “Standard English” even mean; is it real? I think it’s a conversation worth having. Engaging with our languages and dialects and cultures is what makes writing ours. We should stand our ground on that. We should rejoice in the art that comes from that. We should defend that art with everything we have in us.
Of all the classes, the poetry and nonfiction class with Dr. Torres is irreplaceable in my heart. That time with Dr. Torres is irreplaceable in my heart. Reveling in my hybridity has made the academic writing space less restricting. My art is constantly freeing itself from the effects of colonization. Externalizing what you have internalized–that is, taking it out of your body and mind, then letting it go–is useful for any kind of art and intersection. Dr. Torres taught me to be real with my reader and myself. He helped me to kill the internal writer that was clinging to whiteness, clinging to approval. I am enough. My art is enough. And by recognizing that, it will be good and it will be whole.
I no longer cut down the length of poems whose lengths were never the problem in the first place. None of you should, either. Instead, let’s work to defend decolonized writing (ours and others’) in the academic space. Good teachers will learn and listen. You are enough. Your art is enough. You will both be good and whole. Revel in anything that makes your art yours, and defend it if you need to. And for y’all doing the grading: do the right thing, not the white thing!
