Ball State University hosted a lecture this month to “engage with the question of how English language practices in college classrooms contribute to white supremacy.” In other words, good grammar is a white supremacist idea.

“Freeing Our Minds and Innovating Our Pedagogy from White Language Supremacy” was the title of the guest lecture by Asao Inoue, an associate dean at Arizona State University. “We are all implicated in white supremacy,” Inoue said during his presentation.

Inoue argues that “normative, white, monolingual English” users have an advantage when they’re graded on their grammar in class because they were raised with that language and those grammar rules while others have to learn them later.

“Your school can be racist and produce racist outcomes,” Inoue said. “Even with expressed values and commitments to anti-racism and social justice.”

In one of his slides, Inoue states that “grading is a great way to protect the white property of literacy in schools and maintain the white supremacist status quo without ever being a white supremacist or mentioning race.”

Some students attended Inoue’s presentation as part of a class assignment. “We have to take field notes for ENG 220: Language and Society, where we relate what we are talking about in class to real-life examples, and that talk was one of them,” Hannah Sullivan, one of those students, told The College Fix.