The Hate U Give Mixtape
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This player features songs referenced in the novel. Since Starr doesn't mention any 90s R&B break-up songs specifically when considering how to show her boyfriend Chris she's angry with him, I took a stab at a few songs for which she might have been referring. |
Note: Below you’ll find a bibliography of all of the titles referenced in the essay prompts that I provided on my “Low-Stakes Activities and Writing Prompts” page, as well as one or two more, with brief explanations as to what each text is about and its relationship to a given prompt. I hope that you find this to be a useful resource as you consider what texts you might want your class to read alongside Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give. Of course, it’s important to remember that while The Hate U Give is a young adult novel, it still runs approx. 444 pages, depending on the copy. While the writing is very accessibly, you should not assume that your students will be familiar and comfortable with reading let’s say 100 pages of the novel a week alongside one or two of the articles listed here. This is not to say that students cannot perform at this capacity, or that they shouldn’t be asked to; it is instead to provide a word of caution and hopefully an eye towards effective pedagogy. If we really want students to see some value in reading—as well as to develop their reading comprehension, active reading abilities, and analytical prowess—we have to work within what Vygotsky called a student’s “zone of proximal development,” which will vary between students in your classroom.
So, take some time to get to know your students and their reading habits. After the first reading assignment, ask them to do some writing about how they felt about the process of completing this task; and try to make sure that they feel comfortable sharing these feelings with you and their fellow students in the classroom. This is not to say that you should allow students to make excuses merely to shirk their responsibilities as students, but it is to say that freshmen, for whom the prompts/activities on this site are designed, are still learning how to be college students. I feel that it is part of our job description, as FYC instructors, to aid in smoothing this transition. Once you get a sense of where your students are at, you should be able to adjust your course schedule accordingly. I actually like to approach this democratically, involving students in the process. Once we come to an agreement, I will literally revise my established course schedule to the best of my ability based on a dialectic between comprise and curricular expectations. That said, I hope that you find the readings I’ve provided here effective for promoting critical engagement with the subject matter among your students.
Brooks, Wanda et al. “Narrative Significations of Contemporary Black Girlhood.” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 45, no. 1, 2010, pp. 7-35.
-Using a Black feminist epistemological framework and adolescent identity development theory, these five researchers set out to investigate how writers represent the heterogeneity of young Black girls in school-sanctioned African American Young Adult Literature. Through their study, they develop four identity categories common across the texts they examined: intellectual, physical, kinship, sexual. If you review the writing prompts that I have proposed on my other page, you will see that there is a prompt that asks students to use these identity categories as lenses for an analysis of The Hate U Give.
Combahee River Collective. Combabee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizations in the 70s and 80s. First Edition, Kitchen Table/Women of Color, 1986.
-While Kimberle Crenshaw is credited with coining the term intersectionality andestablishing it as an interpretive framework for understanding how various systems ofoppression are overlapping and interlocking, many argue that the concept originateswithin the work of the Combahee River Collective, who set out to try to understand theirdoubly oppressed position as Black women within the scope of both the feminist and theBlack Power movements. As they point out in this statement, their underprivileged statusas Black women was rarely acknowledged in the former movement; whereas, their workwas largely silenced within the patriarchal structure of the latter. If you review thewriting prompts that I have proposed on my other page, you will see that there is aprompt that asks students to use this statement to develop a definition of what constitutesas an intersectional analysis. Then, they are asked to apply lens towards an analysis ofThe Hate U Give.
Gladwell, Malcolm. “Small Change.” The New Yorker, 4 October 2010,https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell.
-In this essay, Gladwell argues that social media is not a fertile breeding ground for revolutionary activity. According to Gladwell, these digital platforms allow for what he calls “weak-tie” connectivity between activists and people in their base, but not for the “strong-tie” bonds established by civil rights activists of the past through face-to-face communication and base-building within the community. In other words, Gladwell does not feel that the revolution will be Tweeted. The Hate U Give showcases two forms of activism: grass roots organizing in the streets, led by Ms. Ofrah and the Cedar Grove King Lords, and Starr’s social media campaign. If you go to my essay prompts page, you will see that I have written a prompt that asks students to evaluate the effectiveness of each form of social movement organizing, engaging in the debate that will be established between this article and Patterson’s “Black Lives Matter is Killing It On Twitter.” In these papers, The Hate U Give will provide a sort of case study, where students can draw on examples from the novel to help to make their case for which organizing strategy they find to be most effective.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Dover Publication, INC., 1994.
-In this course, in relation to the novel, I would only assign a couple of passages in this book, where Du Bois fleshes out his theory of double consciousness. Starr creates a double life for herself between Garden Heights, where she lives, and Williams, the predominately white private high school that her parents forced her to attend after her friend was struck by a stray bullet during a gang-related drive-by shooting when Starr
was just ten years old. If you review the writing prompts that I have provided, you will see that there is one that asks students to evaluate whether or not they feel that Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness applies to how Starr navigates her two worlds. I am interested to see whether or not students will consider how social class mediates Starr’s experience in a way that Du Bois does not prioritize within the analysis of racial disparity the theory of double consciousness presents. Of course, the relationship between race and class is entangled in both The Hate U Give and Du Bois’ work, but I am curious if students will see one as mattering more than the in today’s political climate: the supposedly post-racial age of Obama vs. the rise of the alt-right and the Trump
presidency. It is always interesting to see what political and ideological baggage students bring into the classroom with them.
Fish, Stanley. “What Should Colleges Teach Part 3.” New York Times, 7 Sept. 2009,
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/what-should-colleges-teach-part-3/.
-In this Op. Ed. Stanley Fish argues that both high schools and colleges are failing their students with regard to these students’ developing the ability to write clearly in Standard American English. Fish claims that if high schools are not going to do their job of training students how to write properly, College Writing programs must take this
responsibility onto themselves. Therefore, Fish would see College Writing classrooms transformed from process-based writing workshops that privilege expression over sentence level error into programs focused on grammar instruction and sentence construction. In this piece, Fish specifically takes aim at the Conference on College
Composition and Communication’s 1974 resolution that students should have a right totheir own patterns of language and varieties of dialects within the college classroom: a resolution meant to offset racial discrimination in university admissions and college writing programs based in linguistic difference. Throughout the novel, Starr moves back and forth though two distinctly different dialects of English or codes successfully. If you look at my prompts page, you will see that there is one that juxtaposes Fish’s piece with arejoinder by Vershawn Ashanti Young. After students read these two articles, they areasked to evaluate Starr’s rhetorical prowess in the ways in which she utilizes language indifferent contexts to determine on which side of the Fish/Young debate they stand.
Gay, Ross. “Some Thoughts On Mercy.” The Sun, Jul. 2013, https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/451/some-thoughts-on-mercy.
-Drawing primarily on personal experience and the strength of metaphor, Ross Gay delineates a few of the encounters that he has had with racism, both systemic and attitudinal, throughout his life in the face of the recent uptick in publicized racist police violence against young Black men in the United States. This essay’s strength, and
perhaps its weakness, is that it does not present a direct call-to-action but a request that his audience reflect on the recent strain of racialized violence through the lens of a specific set of questions. Similarly, The Hate U Give does not advance a direct argument against racist police brutality but instead asks readers to view an instance of this violence through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old girl, as she questions how such inhuman and violent acts can be allowed to stand. The prompt that I have written asks students to question that relationship between the ways in which each text deals with the same issues. In the end, students are tasked with determining whether or not the novel itself answers Gay’s call. In other words, in what ways might the novel itself, if at all, perform the type of mercy Gay is describing in his essay.
Lorde, Audre. “The Transformation of Silence into Action.” Sinister Wisdom 6, 1978.
---“The Uses of Anger.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 25, no. ½, 1997, 278-285.
-After Khalil’s death at the hands of a police officer, Starr is angry and completely emotionally distraught, and she spends a lot of time searching for the most productive ways to channel her anger. In this regard, her mother, her father, her Uncle Carlos (a cop), and Ms. Ofrah (her attorney) provide competing perspectives for how Starr should
negotiate her feelings and seek justice for Khalil. I thought it might be good to throw one more voice in the pot, and that voice is that of Audre Lorde’s. While I think that it will be easy for students to draw parallels between Lorde and particularly Ms. Ofrah, Lorde does not pull any punches in her call for Black women to harness their anger in the form of political action that moves past the politics of respectability and civility that have been utilized to silence the rage that builds up over generations of racial, gender, and class oppression. The prompt that I wrote asks students to consider what type of advice they feel Lorde might provide Starr in her time of grief and in her desire for justice, as well as how this advice might differ from the lessons provided by Ms. Ofrah and/or Starr’s
mother.
Morgan, Joan. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip Hop Feminist Breaks It Down.
Touchstone, 1999.
-In the chapter that I would assign from this book, Morgan critiques the Strong Black Woman (SBW) persona, rooting it in a history of chattel slavery, where Black woman were hyper-sexualized, and their physical endurance was aggrandized, in order to justify slave masters’ repeated acts of sexual assault and the exploitation of Black women’s bodies in the social reproduction of the labor force through their offspring. Morgan calls on Black women to “erase this tired obligation to super-strength” and to lay claim to their imperfections, vulnerability, and humanity (110). The prompt that I wrote asks students to evaluate Starr’s character in relation to Morgan’s call. While Starr’s mother clearly fits the SBW archetype, might Starr herself embody the type of complexity of emotion and
personality that Morgan is calling for?
Patterson, Brandon E. “Black Lives Matter is Killing it on Twitter.” Mother Jones, 3 Mar. 2016,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/study-shows-how-black-lives-matter-controls-police-narrative/#.
-Patterson’s piece assesses the role social media has played in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This article provides a counterargument to Gladwell in its emphasis on how new media platforms allow activists to control the narrative around issues that matter to them. While it does not specifically address base building, this essay does demonstrate how widely BLM was able to spread their message among young people today. Hopefully, this essay will give students who choose to work with the prompt associate with both Patterson and Gladwell’s articles a lot to think about when they consider the most effective social movement organizing strategies in today’s digital age and in relation to the events that take place in The Hate U Give.
Pierce, Charles P. “The Body in the Street.” Esquire, 22 Aug. 2014, http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26327/the-body-in-the-street/.
-While I did not provide a writing prompt associated with this essay, I have included it here because I think that it is extremely powerful. The author utilizes a quote from Dos Passos’ “The Big Money,” USA Trilogy as a lens to reexamine the nation-within-a-nation thesis with regard to the Black experience in the United States. Pierce’s argument is centered around the question of why Mike Brown’s dead body was allowed to lie in the middle of the street for four hours after Darren Wilson, a white police officer, shot him dead in what is supposedly the richest and most exceptional country in the world. In this regard, Pierce positions Black people as members of a third world nation built within the body of the 1st world country that calls itself the United States. I really think that something could be done with this piece in relation to a comparison and contrast analysis of Garden Heights vs. Uncle Carlos’ gated community in The Hate U Give, and I may do something with it. I just haven’t written it out yet.
Thandeka. “The Whiting of Euro-Americans: A Divide and Conquer Strategy.” World: The Journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Vol. XII. No: 4 (July/August 1998), pp. 14-20.
-“The Whiting of Euro-Americans: A Divide and Conquer Strategy” by Thandeka provides a brief overview of the social construction of race in America. Grounding her analysis in the list of race/slave laws that were legislated in Virginia in the late 1600s and early 1700s, Thandeka argues that race originated as a divide and conquer strategy to prevent poor whites (indentured servants or free) from collaborating politically with poor blacks (permanent slaves, indentured servants, or free). Hence, for Thandeka, racial difference worked to obfuscate class difference through the induction of these laws in the colonies and the accompanying racial ideologies that developed alongside their implementation. In connection with data that can be found at LovingDay.org, my prompt is asking students to consider how the relationship between the miscegenation laws that were maintained in various parts of the United States until the landmark supreme court case of Loving vs. Virginia in 1967 and an ideology of racial division that still persists in certain cases even today. In The Hate U Give, Starr is in a romantic relationship with a white boy named Chris from her school. Throughout the novel, it is clear that this relationship is a course of tension for Starr, who is even fearful that her father will find out. I am asking students to consider whether or not the relationships between members of different racial backgrounds depicted in the novel work to maintain, or to reify, the same racial divisions intended through the drafting of miscegenation laws as well as Jim Crow de jure segregation. Or, does the novel’s depiction of these characters transcend the ideological barriers between people of different races that these laws and policies played a role in erecting?
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English.”
https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1095&context=ijcs.
-Young’s essay provides a rejoinder to Fish’s “What Colleges Should Teach Part 3” through its skillful argumentation and deft employment of African American Language and rhetoric. Young does an excellent job of demonstrating that what he calls “code meshing,” or the blending of different dialects of English into one linguistic repertoire, does not diminish the intellectual potency of a written argument. Without fetishizing language, Young takes up SRTOL’s call to allow multiple dialects of English into the college classroom; however, Young sees this project as not simply putting an end to discrimination, but in a very optimistic vein, enriching the learning experience of all of the students in the classroom, regardless of their various dialects of nurture. I have found in the past that this piece tends to receive mixed reactions from the class that are not always meted out the way one might think. Students of all backgrounds are presented with Standard English as the code of access and power from a very young age in the United States. Young’s essay challenges them to think critically about an ideal they have internalized since the time they entered into kindergarten classrooms. However, I have never introduced this piece alongside Starr’s example of an expert and deliberate code switcher in the past, and I am curious as to whether or not this will have an impact on my student’s reception of Young’s argument.
-Using a Black feminist epistemological framework and adolescent identity development theory, these five researchers set out to investigate how writers represent the heterogeneity of young Black girls in school-sanctioned African American Young Adult Literature. Through their study, they develop four identity categories common across the texts they examined: intellectual, physical, kinship, sexual. If you review the writing prompts that I have proposed on my other page, you will see that there is a prompt that asks students to use these identity categories as lenses for an analysis of The Hate U Give.
Combahee River Collective. Combabee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizations in the 70s and 80s. First Edition, Kitchen Table/Women of Color, 1986.
-While Kimberle Crenshaw is credited with coining the term intersectionality andestablishing it as an interpretive framework for understanding how various systems ofoppression are overlapping and interlocking, many argue that the concept originateswithin the work of the Combahee River Collective, who set out to try to understand theirdoubly oppressed position as Black women within the scope of both the feminist and theBlack Power movements. As they point out in this statement, their underprivileged statusas Black women was rarely acknowledged in the former movement; whereas, their workwas largely silenced within the patriarchal structure of the latter. If you review thewriting prompts that I have proposed on my other page, you will see that there is aprompt that asks students to use this statement to develop a definition of what constitutesas an intersectional analysis. Then, they are asked to apply lens towards an analysis ofThe Hate U Give.
Gladwell, Malcolm. “Small Change.” The New Yorker, 4 October 2010,https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell.
-In this essay, Gladwell argues that social media is not a fertile breeding ground for revolutionary activity. According to Gladwell, these digital platforms allow for what he calls “weak-tie” connectivity between activists and people in their base, but not for the “strong-tie” bonds established by civil rights activists of the past through face-to-face communication and base-building within the community. In other words, Gladwell does not feel that the revolution will be Tweeted. The Hate U Give showcases two forms of activism: grass roots organizing in the streets, led by Ms. Ofrah and the Cedar Grove King Lords, and Starr’s social media campaign. If you go to my essay prompts page, you will see that I have written a prompt that asks students to evaluate the effectiveness of each form of social movement organizing, engaging in the debate that will be established between this article and Patterson’s “Black Lives Matter is Killing It On Twitter.” In these papers, The Hate U Give will provide a sort of case study, where students can draw on examples from the novel to help to make their case for which organizing strategy they find to be most effective.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Dover Publication, INC., 1994.
-In this course, in relation to the novel, I would only assign a couple of passages in this book, where Du Bois fleshes out his theory of double consciousness. Starr creates a double life for herself between Garden Heights, where she lives, and Williams, the predominately white private high school that her parents forced her to attend after her friend was struck by a stray bullet during a gang-related drive-by shooting when Starr
was just ten years old. If you review the writing prompts that I have provided, you will see that there is one that asks students to evaluate whether or not they feel that Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness applies to how Starr navigates her two worlds. I am interested to see whether or not students will consider how social class mediates Starr’s experience in a way that Du Bois does not prioritize within the analysis of racial disparity the theory of double consciousness presents. Of course, the relationship between race and class is entangled in both The Hate U Give and Du Bois’ work, but I am curious if students will see one as mattering more than the in today’s political climate: the supposedly post-racial age of Obama vs. the rise of the alt-right and the Trump
presidency. It is always interesting to see what political and ideological baggage students bring into the classroom with them.
Fish, Stanley. “What Should Colleges Teach Part 3.” New York Times, 7 Sept. 2009,
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/what-should-colleges-teach-part-3/.
-In this Op. Ed. Stanley Fish argues that both high schools and colleges are failing their students with regard to these students’ developing the ability to write clearly in Standard American English. Fish claims that if high schools are not going to do their job of training students how to write properly, College Writing programs must take this
responsibility onto themselves. Therefore, Fish would see College Writing classrooms transformed from process-based writing workshops that privilege expression over sentence level error into programs focused on grammar instruction and sentence construction. In this piece, Fish specifically takes aim at the Conference on College
Composition and Communication’s 1974 resolution that students should have a right totheir own patterns of language and varieties of dialects within the college classroom: a resolution meant to offset racial discrimination in university admissions and college writing programs based in linguistic difference. Throughout the novel, Starr moves back and forth though two distinctly different dialects of English or codes successfully. If you look at my prompts page, you will see that there is one that juxtaposes Fish’s piece with arejoinder by Vershawn Ashanti Young. After students read these two articles, they areasked to evaluate Starr’s rhetorical prowess in the ways in which she utilizes language indifferent contexts to determine on which side of the Fish/Young debate they stand.
Gay, Ross. “Some Thoughts On Mercy.” The Sun, Jul. 2013, https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/451/some-thoughts-on-mercy.
-Drawing primarily on personal experience and the strength of metaphor, Ross Gay delineates a few of the encounters that he has had with racism, both systemic and attitudinal, throughout his life in the face of the recent uptick in publicized racist police violence against young Black men in the United States. This essay’s strength, and
perhaps its weakness, is that it does not present a direct call-to-action but a request that his audience reflect on the recent strain of racialized violence through the lens of a specific set of questions. Similarly, The Hate U Give does not advance a direct argument against racist police brutality but instead asks readers to view an instance of this violence through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old girl, as she questions how such inhuman and violent acts can be allowed to stand. The prompt that I have written asks students to question that relationship between the ways in which each text deals with the same issues. In the end, students are tasked with determining whether or not the novel itself answers Gay’s call. In other words, in what ways might the novel itself, if at all, perform the type of mercy Gay is describing in his essay.
Lorde, Audre. “The Transformation of Silence into Action.” Sinister Wisdom 6, 1978.
---“The Uses of Anger.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 25, no. ½, 1997, 278-285.
-After Khalil’s death at the hands of a police officer, Starr is angry and completely emotionally distraught, and she spends a lot of time searching for the most productive ways to channel her anger. In this regard, her mother, her father, her Uncle Carlos (a cop), and Ms. Ofrah (her attorney) provide competing perspectives for how Starr should
negotiate her feelings and seek justice for Khalil. I thought it might be good to throw one more voice in the pot, and that voice is that of Audre Lorde’s. While I think that it will be easy for students to draw parallels between Lorde and particularly Ms. Ofrah, Lorde does not pull any punches in her call for Black women to harness their anger in the form of political action that moves past the politics of respectability and civility that have been utilized to silence the rage that builds up over generations of racial, gender, and class oppression. The prompt that I wrote asks students to consider what type of advice they feel Lorde might provide Starr in her time of grief and in her desire for justice, as well as how this advice might differ from the lessons provided by Ms. Ofrah and/or Starr’s
mother.
Morgan, Joan. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip Hop Feminist Breaks It Down.
Touchstone, 1999.
-In the chapter that I would assign from this book, Morgan critiques the Strong Black Woman (SBW) persona, rooting it in a history of chattel slavery, where Black woman were hyper-sexualized, and their physical endurance was aggrandized, in order to justify slave masters’ repeated acts of sexual assault and the exploitation of Black women’s bodies in the social reproduction of the labor force through their offspring. Morgan calls on Black women to “erase this tired obligation to super-strength” and to lay claim to their imperfections, vulnerability, and humanity (110). The prompt that I wrote asks students to evaluate Starr’s character in relation to Morgan’s call. While Starr’s mother clearly fits the SBW archetype, might Starr herself embody the type of complexity of emotion and
personality that Morgan is calling for?
Patterson, Brandon E. “Black Lives Matter is Killing it on Twitter.” Mother Jones, 3 Mar. 2016,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/study-shows-how-black-lives-matter-controls-police-narrative/#.
-Patterson’s piece assesses the role social media has played in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This article provides a counterargument to Gladwell in its emphasis on how new media platforms allow activists to control the narrative around issues that matter to them. While it does not specifically address base building, this essay does demonstrate how widely BLM was able to spread their message among young people today. Hopefully, this essay will give students who choose to work with the prompt associate with both Patterson and Gladwell’s articles a lot to think about when they consider the most effective social movement organizing strategies in today’s digital age and in relation to the events that take place in The Hate U Give.
Pierce, Charles P. “The Body in the Street.” Esquire, 22 Aug. 2014, http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26327/the-body-in-the-street/.
-While I did not provide a writing prompt associated with this essay, I have included it here because I think that it is extremely powerful. The author utilizes a quote from Dos Passos’ “The Big Money,” USA Trilogy as a lens to reexamine the nation-within-a-nation thesis with regard to the Black experience in the United States. Pierce’s argument is centered around the question of why Mike Brown’s dead body was allowed to lie in the middle of the street for four hours after Darren Wilson, a white police officer, shot him dead in what is supposedly the richest and most exceptional country in the world. In this regard, Pierce positions Black people as members of a third world nation built within the body of the 1st world country that calls itself the United States. I really think that something could be done with this piece in relation to a comparison and contrast analysis of Garden Heights vs. Uncle Carlos’ gated community in The Hate U Give, and I may do something with it. I just haven’t written it out yet.
Thandeka. “The Whiting of Euro-Americans: A Divide and Conquer Strategy.” World: The Journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Vol. XII. No: 4 (July/August 1998), pp. 14-20.
-“The Whiting of Euro-Americans: A Divide and Conquer Strategy” by Thandeka provides a brief overview of the social construction of race in America. Grounding her analysis in the list of race/slave laws that were legislated in Virginia in the late 1600s and early 1700s, Thandeka argues that race originated as a divide and conquer strategy to prevent poor whites (indentured servants or free) from collaborating politically with poor blacks (permanent slaves, indentured servants, or free). Hence, for Thandeka, racial difference worked to obfuscate class difference through the induction of these laws in the colonies and the accompanying racial ideologies that developed alongside their implementation. In connection with data that can be found at LovingDay.org, my prompt is asking students to consider how the relationship between the miscegenation laws that were maintained in various parts of the United States until the landmark supreme court case of Loving vs. Virginia in 1967 and an ideology of racial division that still persists in certain cases even today. In The Hate U Give, Starr is in a romantic relationship with a white boy named Chris from her school. Throughout the novel, it is clear that this relationship is a course of tension for Starr, who is even fearful that her father will find out. I am asking students to consider whether or not the relationships between members of different racial backgrounds depicted in the novel work to maintain, or to reify, the same racial divisions intended through the drafting of miscegenation laws as well as Jim Crow de jure segregation. Or, does the novel’s depiction of these characters transcend the ideological barriers between people of different races that these laws and policies played a role in erecting?
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English.”
https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1095&context=ijcs.
-Young’s essay provides a rejoinder to Fish’s “What Colleges Should Teach Part 3” through its skillful argumentation and deft employment of African American Language and rhetoric. Young does an excellent job of demonstrating that what he calls “code meshing,” or the blending of different dialects of English into one linguistic repertoire, does not diminish the intellectual potency of a written argument. Without fetishizing language, Young takes up SRTOL’s call to allow multiple dialects of English into the college classroom; however, Young sees this project as not simply putting an end to discrimination, but in a very optimistic vein, enriching the learning experience of all of the students in the classroom, regardless of their various dialects of nurture. I have found in the past that this piece tends to receive mixed reactions from the class that are not always meted out the way one might think. Students of all backgrounds are presented with Standard English as the code of access and power from a very young age in the United States. Young’s essay challenges them to think critically about an ideal they have internalized since the time they entered into kindergarten classrooms. However, I have never introduced this piece alongside Starr’s example of an expert and deliberate code switcher in the past, and I am curious as to whether or not this will have an impact on my student’s reception of Young’s argument.
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