Correcting students’ grammar is racist and should be avoided, two tutors hired by Claremont McKenna’s Center for Writing and Public Discourse were told.
During their onboarding process, the two student consultants “were assigned a research paper that detailed the ways that providing writing feedback can be racist – and the ways that writing consultants fail to effectively act as anti-racist advocates.”
“As consultants, we were urged by our superiors to not correct student’s grammar or issues that may arise from dialectal differences and departures from [Standard American English] without request,” they wrote in an op-ed in the Claremont Independent, an independent student news outlet.
“We were expected to adhere to the belief that all dialects should be considered part of academic writing, and that to consider otherwise is to partake in racist ideology,” they wrote in a piece published Sunday.