Category Archives: classism

Grammar!

I really, really love grammar. Seriously. I grew up in a family that had more copies of Strunk and White than people. When I went off to college I was accompanied by a treasured copy of the AP Stylebook. I have gotten into shouting arguments about the Oxford comma. I take grammar seriously.

Which is why some people may consider it odd that I think grammar Puritans should shut up and fuck off.

Not everyone had the benefit of a house full of books and parents that encouraged the love of language and their very own copy of Strunk and White. Some people had to try to learn grammar from (gasp) English class. A lot of those people went to schools that were underfunded, overcrowded, and full of not-very-good teachers. Furthermore, there are lots of people with disabilities that make speaking with “proper grammar”– or speaking at all– extremely difficult, as well as people who don’t speak English as a first language. Nitpicking other people’s grammar is silencing.

And can we talk about this idea of “proper grammar” for a moment? “Proper grammar” is the grammar that privileged people use. Textspeak is bad because it’s associated with teen girls! Appalachian English is bad because poor Southern people use it! African American Vernacular English is bad because poor black people use it! I cannot imagine how people who call themselves grammar nerds think that AAVE is bad, given its absolutely amazing tense/aspect system. Seriously, if you can read about tenses and aspects in AAVE and not die of joy, I question your commitment to grammar geekery.

Nevertheless, I think there are times that grammar really matters. For one thing, it is impolite to make your readers do a lot of work trying to work out what you’re saying*. (It also makes them less likely to bother to read your message.) Therefore, you should probably refrain from, randomly, putting commas in, where commas do not, belong because it slows down and confuses the reader. However, two people who both understand AAVE speaking to each other does not violate this rule, while Judith Butler does constantly, so I expect that people should be equally annoyed at Ms. Butler and at people, who put commas, everywhere.

Furthermore, I’m actually still more of a prescriptivist than a descriptivist by bent. I would prefer that people speak forms of English that have the most possible nuance, shades of meaning, expressiveness, logic, and beauty. For that reason, I’m overjoyed about the use of “he went” to mean “this is a paraphrase of what he said,” but displeased about the use of “disinterested” to mean “bored.” (It means unbiased! Bleh.) I also reserve the right to be upset about the abomination that is “irregardless” (irregardless and regardless mean the same thing! Christ, people, we just got the flammable/inflammable thing sorted out, don’t go adding more words that look like opposites and mean the same thing).

That rule is part of the reason I, as a grammar nerd, am endlessly in support of non-”proper”-grammar English: sometimes it has a beauty and emotional expressiveness than “properly” grammatical English does not. (I point skeptics to the Twitter of the incomparable quailitree.) To ignore that because of some bullshit rules that people made up in the nineteenth century is shitty as fuck.

*Unless for some reason trying to work out what you’re saying is part of the point. This is the James Joyce Exemption.

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On Gendered Oppression

Memo To The Social Justice Community At Large: the privilege/intersectionality model of how oppression works? Is a model. It’s an oversimplification that people use because the actual reality of how oppression works is way too complicated to talk about. It is not the Ultimate Truth Of How Oppression Works Forever and Ever. 

Therefore, there are dynamics of how oppression works that the privilege/oppression model doesn’t talk about at all.

Let’s talk about prison. Men of color are overwhelmingly more likely to go to prison than any other group, far disproportionate to their numbers. The white men who go to prison are usually poor. While women of color are also more likely to go to prison than white women, and poor women than rich women, the problem so vastly disproportionately affects men that it’s not even funny.

Or anti-queer hate crimes. Of the sexual-orientation-related hate crimes recorded by the FBI in 2011, nearly 60% were a result of the perpetrator’s hatred of specifically gay men. (I checked a couple previous years to make sure this wasn’t a fluke and, yeah, it hovers pretty consistently around ‘slightly more than half.’) You can argue that the FBI’s data-collection strategy is fucked (I’d be happy to edit this to include a correction if it is), but assuming that it isn’t, gay men are disproportionately likely to be victims of a hate crime.

This just doesn’t work in the privilege/intersectionality model, which predicts that women of color will face more racism, poor women more sexism, and LGB women more homophobia, than their male counterparts. But– at least in certain aspects of these oppressions– men clearly and objectively have it worse. 

Some people have decided to patch this by creating an alternative “female privilege,” where women have not-going-to-prison privilege and not-being-beaten-up-for-being-gay privilege. The problem here is that if you are a white middle-class-or-above man… you generally don’t have to worry about going to prison! You may smoke your weed in peace! If you are not gay (and not the kind of feminine that assholes think means ‘gay’), your chance of being beaten up for being gay is nigh infinitesimal. The prison-industrial complex and anti-gay hate crimes do not affect straight white middle-class-and-above men any more than average.

The solution here is just to throw out the privilege/intersectionality model in this particular case. It just doesn’t work here. And when you throw out the model that’s making everything more confusing, the only statement left is “gay men, men of color, and poor men face forms of homophobia, racism, and classism that are affected by the fact that they’re men.” Which is perfectly logical, sensible, empirically validated, and supported by both statistics and lived experience. 

(And that’s the NSWATM post I never got around to writing while I was there.)