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Teaching Interlude III Undoing the Singularity of “Ethical English” and Language‑as‑Racial‑Inferiority Like many students I have met, Sherrie, a young black woman, did not see herself as someone who wrote well.1 That spring semester of 2001, Sher‑ rie and her writings are as clear to me today as if it were just yesterday. Sherrie would routinely do things in weekly, informal journal assignments such as write two verb forms for the subjects of EACH of her sentences and circle one of them. The “answer” that she circled was usually “wrong.” I had never seen anything like it: every noun had two verbs in parenthe‑ ses, making her writing look like a handout from an elementary school grammar workbook. When I asked Sherrie what all of this circling was about, she told me that when she writes, she can’t decide which verb form to choose so she puts both in brackets and goes back afterward to circle one. I suggested to her that she write what comes to mind first and then we could go back and look at her patterns. She must not have liked this idea too much because she continued to write two verb forms, as she had done before, only now she left them uncircled, writing me notes at the bottom asking ME to circle the right answer for her so that she could see what was right. None of this would have been such a problem for me if it weren’t for the fact that Sherrie produced very little writing and what she did produce contained very short, choppy sentences that lacked clar‑ ity, fluidity, or complexity. She stopped doing these things by the end of the semester, but she still insisted that she would never get subject‑verb agreement and that she was a horrible, messy writer. When I showed her one of my own messy drafts to counter her view of herself, she simply laughed and told me: “Girl, you so crazy.” At the beginning of the semester, Sherrie had been one of the more outspoken advocates for speaking “proper English,” which she referred to 107 108 Vernacular Insurrections as “ethical English,” a dogmatic and unyielding point of view that con‑ tributed to the caricature of academese that she often pursued in her writing. Sherrie embodied what Young warns us about if we continue to essentialize African American Language and standardized English as diametrically opposed categories.2 Cutting Sherrie off so completely from African American Language (AAL) and offering her such a stilted view of standardized English had not helped her at all and, in fact, had literally halted her writing. All I could do at that point was roll up my sleeves and go to work, which in this case meant bringing out a whole arsenal of black authors across the African Diaspora and having the class criti‑ cally interrogate style, language use, and the multiple political possibilities for textual production and audience. I also hoped to offer a classroom where my own written responses to students’ writing centered on their content and back‑and‑forth written exchanges about politics, as opposed to surface correctness.3 It doesn’t take much for first‑year college writers to see that there are many textual options and that each is politically loaded. This is not to say that many are actually willing to question or rupture the boundaries of standardized English or school writing; many will not take on the political choice to write for audiences outside of the still overwhelmingly white professoriate who will be reading their next papers in their ensuing years of college. Regardless of their own writing decisions, however, students certainly see that there are folk out there who have always transgressed imposed boundaries.4 As for Sherrie, by the end of the semester, she no longer argued for the recognition of “proper” or “ethical” English, stopped circling all them verbs, and gained more of what I would call college writing fluency. I won’t say, however, that she critically or dynamically engaged the polem‑ ics of something such as code‑meshing like Young advocates,5 because, frankly, getting her to simply write AND question her own internalized racism that had articulated itself in a linguistic imperialism and hierarchy (where she was silent and at the bottom) was where my entire energy for the semester was spent. Witnessing Sherrie’s seeming acceptance of a racialized linguistic inferiority was a critical turning point for me and...

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