If you’ve wondered what the literal face of an evil left-wing Woke Supremacist looks like, look no farther than the face of Marta Schaffer. She seems like an ordinary, nerdy woman, does she not? Do not be beguiled. She is a California English teacher who teaches her students that grammar is part of White Supremacy. Her goal as an educator is to “undermine that B.S.”
According to the news report, Schaffer fights white supremacy by alerting her students to, and teaching them about, the overemphasized importance of grammar usage and writing rules. She uses her social media posts on Tik Tok to sell an even wider audience on the idea that proper grammar and syntax are part of the White supremacy she claims is an entrenched part of our culture. She maintains that she teaches the rules that “we actually use to communicate instead of the made-up rules that White supremacy created for when we write papers and stuff, which is what scholars call the language of power.”
She is a profound advocate of academic essays written by African American students using African American Vernacular English, otherwise known as “AAVE” language.
She worries that standard usage of theses statements in writing assignments, proper citation of sources (which we must remember is a preventative measure against plagiarism), and transition words like “however” and “therefore” are coterminous with misogyny, white supremacy, and colonization.
The non-sequiturs involved in her line of reasoning do nothing to help her case. And yes, she is a tenured high-school teacher.
She wishes to focus more on how students talk in real life, rather than how they ought to write in a manner that is grammatically correct. How students speak at home or with peers, she believes, is more important than forms of communications that can be universally accessed through standard application of grammatical rules. The language of respectability, which is the language of utilizing proper grammar, she teaches her students, is far less important than one’s “natural language.”
Given the sloppy and ungrammatical way in which too many persons communicate; given the fact that several members of certain groups grunt like farm animals in their communicative endeavors, and make unintelligible noises that pass for language, this teacher’s pedagogical advice is more than ill-advised—it is nefarious.
Marta Schaffer thinks she’s a radical provocateur. She is, though, nothing more than a nihilistic, left-wing white supremacist with a profound lack of respect for her students. Her goal is to expropriate—especially—the agency of black students, to create a vast underclass of students who, when they speak, will sound as if English is their third language and who will never be able to achieve any semblance of socio-economic parity with their white counterparts and compatriots at large.
Marta Schaffer does not want black American students to master the English language and achieve facility and fluency with and in it. She has grasped the connection between grammar and cognition, and she aims to keep blacks in a position of cognitive diminution so she can rule over them. She can exercise her managerial class privilege and ensure that her perverse, racist privilege inheres and that said students never escape the cycle of linguistic and socio-economic challenges they face if she ensures that, at a minimum, they speak in sentences where subjects and verbs do not agree, sentence fragments are the norm, misplaced modifiers go unnoticed, and improper punctuation are noticed by future employees who will never hire them.
The irony is that she communicates this evil malarkey in perfect grammatical sentences. She promulgates the evil of grammar to her black students by using perfect grammar. No code-switching on her part. She never allows them to have the luxury of switching between standard English and AAVE, because she realizes that such an option would empower them; it would give them options and choices.
Grammar is not an arbitrary, made-up language game created by racist power brokers. It is a science that deals with the formulation of the proper methods of verbal and written communication. It teaches us how to combine concepts into sentences. It establishes precision and clarity into first thinking and then verbal and then written communication. Grammar rules the use of language. Language is not just a tool of communication. It is a tool of cognition. If one were to dismiss the rules of soccer, one would be left with merely the maneuverings of human bodies on a field. There would be no game. The movements would be unintelligible. One would not be witnessing a codified set of rules that establishes a system that we recognize as soccer. Only a senseless movement of bodies.
The utterance of sounds without rules that govern their orderings, that identify conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs, verbal conjugations, tenses and moods, gerunds and infinitives, metaphors, and establish a method of choosing among synonyms, and a method of defining concepts and words, would reduce us to the level of grunting farm animals. There would be no capacity to develop high-level concepts, abstractions, and to formulate abstractions from abstractions. We would be unable to project a future (as has been the case with certain inferior cultures), and we would live a base and cyclical life, one totally ensconced in biological time. Such is the power of language.
A document or an utterance without punctuation or with improper punctuation is like a rambling mind incapable of producing nothing but unfocused streams of consciousness—incomprehensible to anyone and everyone, even to the writer or speaker himself.
Schaffer is the cognitive equivalent of a Chinese foot binder. The absence of grammar does not result in freedom. It results in abject stultification of the mind. An assemblage of words, and a series of word salads not governed by grammatical rules are indiscernible to a civilized human mind.
And that is what she wants to afflict on blacks: a highly curated silo in which “black talk” remains among blacks, and where blacks are rendered incomprehensible to a broader public. She knows with full malice aforethought, I believe, that this will result in a reduction in the perceived intelligence quotient of blacks in the minds of others.
It is noteworthy that she singles out black vernacular as a treasure trove worth protecting from the evil incursions of white racist grammar, but she seems to have no problem correcting the grammar of white students. What is it about the nature of white students such that, if they commit grammatical infelicities, they stand open to linguistic correction? Why are blacks, on this topic, left outside the pantheon of the human community; one might even say, the domain of the ethical?
We know why. Schaffer is a sadistic leftist who has staked her life on the spectacle of black suffering and, paradoxically, on the pretense of relieving that suffering. We know that there is no such damn thing as “Black English.” It is broken, ungrammatical English. Subject/ verb confusion, the abbreviation of abbreviations –among other infelicities—do not constitute a language unto itself. I don’t care what John McWhorter says to the contrary. I’m not convinced by his scholarship on this matter. The whole world knows that when a black person incapable of speaking standard English opens his or her mouth that he or she is placed at an immediate disadvantage on many levels. Schaffer wants to manufacture this disadvantage because left-wing liberals trade in this type of oppression under the guise of liberating a people from some made-up form of oppression. She is the real white supremacist. If her life is meant to create a false scenario (liberating black people from racist grammar), then she retains the perverted and sick pleasure of needing to see them suffer indefinitely by placing the blame on a racist society that has oppressed them by imposing “white grammar” on them.
This woman is not only evil, she is guilty of dereliction of duty as well. The idea that any instructor leaves her charges to wallow simply in “who they are” is proverbial nonsense. If this were the true goal of educational institutions, we would exist in a state of moral ferality. There would be no one to offer moral instruction when we simply felt like indulging in our homicidal impulses on the playing field; no one to punish us for succumbing to our “natural feelings of laziness” which result in delayed homework assignments; no one to suspend those from school who are endowed with a natural proclivity for cheating on exams.
People like Schaffer must be exposed for the frauds they are. She is not a militant assemblage of mediocrity. She is routinely mediocre. She is attempting to de-sacralize and de-legitimize one of the ways in which we transform ourselves from natural creatures into moral creatures—by means of language that is grammatically structured. She wants to normalize and mainstream the idea that such usage of language is illicit. This is one step in the direction that C.S. Lewis prophetically called The Abolition of Man.
I hope you sent a copy of this to her school. It’s brilliant.
“Schaffer is the cognitive equivalent of a Chinese foot binder.”
What a brilliant analogy!
But why focus on nihilism. Let us focus on the future, if there is to be a future. The Ayn Rand Institute is now offering, online, FOR FREE, Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s course “The Principles of Grammar”. If I remember correctly, as a teenager, I had to forego many a Chicken McNuggets and french fries lunch to save $120 to buy that superb course.
“At the end of the course,” says Dr. Peikoff, “you should be able to see every grammatical rule, directly or indirectly, as a consequence or expression of some essential requirement of the human mind,” not “a simply a hodge-podge of memorized rules that make no sense. … I hope that [the course will give you] a sense of logic and security. Logic in regard to understanding the nature of grammatical issues—why they are as they are—and therefore security in regard to the whole subject. You will know the purpose, the rationale of the rules, and so I hope you will be able to think at the end that you can now make decisions on your own dubious or controversial cases. You don’t have to rely helplessly on authorities.”
This article isn’t about objectivism, derp.
This is an easy to read article full of credible information. It was comprehsivwe
and certainly a help to seeing the scheme and harm of grammar destruction.
I would hope every citizen could see this article.
Joe Mckean
It’s always Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand with this poser!
Oh Shut up– you asinine idiot. You’re the one all rolled up inside Ayn Rand’s ass. Get over yourself. I do have an area of competence in the philosophy of language. Little people like you don’t get to really comment on my work–you twerp. Your sophomoric little high school opinions don’t qualify as knowledge. And the petty angst and personal depression you suffer from are not worthy of metaphysical speculation. Let’s see you publish something in this magazine–, you pathetic lout. Read widely. Get some degrees. I have 5 of them including a Ph.D. Get a real perspective! I’ve sold thousands and thousands of books. What have you done besides being born?
I’m assuming that you are imitating Jason Hill and that he would have much higher standards than this reply portrayed.
Ok you’re a lot better than the people you say you are better than. This is probably his most on-topic Ann comment too. I still just saw the name and thought, guess we’ll see what she has to say. I don’t hate the guy but he’s a pretty big fan, getting a teeny bit stale. He should feel free to express it, but so should anyone that wants to laugh, “her again?”
Wow, fiesta little one aren’t you ! ANYONE that needs to brag about their number of ‘degrees’ is in fact just another loser !!
“No mind is better than the precision of its concepts.” – Ayn Rand
It can be argued that no mind is better than the precision of its grammar. Stupid grammar makes for a stupid mind.
What I have noticed about black-ghetto-culture (and you don’t have to be black to be immersed in that culture. I have seen many Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and even a few whites and Asians immersed in that subculture) is an implicit, intentional, dumbing-down of grammar, language, and thought.
The dumbing-down, is so to speak, sub-consciously-intentional. Language pheromones who’s subconscious odor mark you as a member of the hive. If you were to speak a grammatical, intelligent, eloquent, sentence you would thereby, immediately, mark yourself as an outsider. And an implicit enemy of the dumbing-down and dumbed-down mindset which in ghetto culture is implicitly seen as a virtue and a badge of cultural membership.
At the peril of your safety, you don’t want to be grammatical, eloquent, or demonstrably intelligent. Not if you have to live in the ghetto. Does a dumbed-down mind result in dumbed-down grammar? Yes. But it is also true that dumbed-down grammar keeps a mind in a dumbed-down state idefinitely. It’s a self-reinforcing loop of dumbness.
Large areas of London now have white kids speaking with Jamaican accents and smoking pot.
Young Londoners speaking an imitation-Jamaican and getting stoned on good home-grown grass?
Yes, and that has been the case for the last half-century, Mo da Prophet!
The big difference is the fact that the grass is a jolly site stronger and, in terms of purchasing power
parity, far cheaper than it was in 1972..
Should that have been *a jolly sight stronger* rather that site?
I really must lay off the pot!
We’ve been calling them “Rastafarians,” in the US for the past couple decades.
When was the last time you were grammatical, eloquent, or demonstrably intelligent. Looking for “attaboys?”
Today and everyday.
Lol it’s the reverse. I talk normal, i have lots of black friends, and some suburban fags that come around talking like they have difficulty speaking their own language, and we all laugh when his black-face accent cracks. They aren’t safe at all, we just know they’re so obsessed with being like us they’ll literally live as an actor. Just designating yourself as a tool.
It’s not intelligence that is hated. Armies line up for me when I decide I care about stopping all the death for a day or so. It’s people acting like worthless trash they were brainwashed with makes them smarter. In many cases, like in the DC ghetto, it’s heartbreaking, these kids have never had access to an education in school or an upbringing at home. It’s barely above a child raised by wolves. Many are incapable of second degree reasoning, and want to fight anyone that says anything they don’t misunderstand because of the constant shame they feel at their lack of knowledge. You are not safe with these people whether they accept you or not, the only security is the ability to exact revenge after you die. Ghettos are not safe places with or without all this.
This is Marxist brainwashing in full display
They are saying higher IQ people should stop thinking to appease low IQ people.
That’s how one destroys any advanced civilization.
To quote National Lampoon magazine (years ago). “No mo’ o’ yo’ mo’ fo’ bizness, whitey!”
Dat iz de bets ardikle I hax evr red too dayt aboud mi.
Dank yu bery muched
How much more of this lunacy will we put up with?
How much more of this lunacy will we be forced to endure?
Routine mediocrity is the goal now. Can it get much worse?
It already has. Randi Weingarten’s army of woke fools are on the march, and tolerate no dissent.
Their agenda resulted in a father arrested at a schoolboard meeting.
Why arrested?
He was a little upset that his 9th grade daughter was viciously raped in the bathroom by a trans-trash male, and wanted answers. (What he got was their contempt.)
Yeah, it can. Your pilot or your doctor will be affirmative action.
Communicating while landing a 737 at Laguardia in foul weather is sufficiently fraught with even the best, most precise English.
” November 1234 turn right heading 090 degrees.
Know what I mean?”
“How students speak at home or with peers, she believes, is more important than forms of communications that can be universally accessed through standard application of grammatical rules.”
If that’s true, what do they need her for? She’s really just a lazy fraud not up to the challenge of educating those students that really need it. Teachers that don’t teach and schools that don’t educate are expendable, and not worth the resources they consume. One day when the realization of that gains critical mass, she’ll be out of a job. In the mean time, another generation of illiterates get passed through the so called education system.
Liberalism is the gift that keeps on giving. When graduates students complain that a professor correcting their spelling and grammar is a microaggression, we realize the inmates are running the asylum. (My apology to any inmates reading this who were traumatized by that phrase.) Requiring students to show their work with math problems is racist.
When claiming to speak Ebonics could get you extra pay as a teacher in California, we get a clear picture of the decline of education. When even “Reverend” Jesse Jackson states black children should learn to speak and write standard English, we realize how absurd the idea is.
As someone related to so many of America’s greatest writers that begin with colonial poet Anne Bradstreet and continues up to now, this kind of teacher (so-called) is a especially vile form of activist. The use of noun and verb, and the rest of the tools of language has been altered to produce what can only called an especially vulgar act of hate. And the thing is – this is but one member of a class of instructors that currently infest our schools with their presence. The caring and educated parent ought to know of this, and firmly remove the child from the activist. That ought to be only the first act of what needs to be the directive of removing the activist from the school, and seeing that no other school hires her. Her skills belong on the streets, and there is the only place she ought to be found.
Punctuation and grammar originated amongst Catholic monks somewhere between the 12th and 14th centuries. Punctuation and grammar were not formalized prior to this time.
We all know that education is the easiest major on campus and elementary ed. is the easiest of those. During the 1990’s it was determined that the average SAT score of the average teacher in the US was below the national average.
Hardly validates what this ignorant person says.
“African American Vernacular English, otherwise known as “AAVE” language”, is this a rebranding of Ebonics? Are there arcane rules of grammer and does language evolve? Of course. Next this teacher will go to war in syntax and semantics, out the window. Crazy.
I taught high school English in the late 1970’s and early 80’s in a little east Texas town (Silsbee). My school was heavily black. I am white. At the beginning of each year, I would tell my students the purpose of language is communication, and that I would be teaching “standard” English. I told my students that many of them did not use standard English at home, and that every dialect has a place for powerful communication depending upon the audience, but standard English was the language of power and success whose mastery would maximize opportunities.
I then taught my students sentence diagramming. I found it necessary to provide a framework in which to discuss the parts of speech. It also helped the kids who learned best by visual presentation of information.
Dr. Hill has written a fantastic piece here. He has accurately described what can only be evil on the part of this teacher. What I did not know back then, but what I know now, is that language and cognition are inseparable. Thank you, Dr. Hill, for this lovely and powerful essay. I wish all teachers of good will would take these irrefutable premises to heart!
Your students were very fortunate. Many teachers, even in the ’70’s, were happy to be seen as accommodating and let their students “grunt like farm animals” rather than communicate intelligently. You liberated yours from that trap.
Yeah, it is quite odd how language and cognition are inseparable. I’ve seen some good examples, but I have a headache so I won’t try to remember them right now. Languages from India give a different way of thinking, for example.
She not only looks evil, she looks really, really stupid.
I enjoyed sentence diagramming, and it did help me. I don’t think they teach it anymore.
Any form of intelligence is now deemed racist, as is anything/anywhere/anytime.
THOSE WHO CAN’T DO TEACH.
THOSE WHO CAN’T TEACH TRY AND FIND EXCUSES FOR THEIR MISERABLE FAILURE.
Those who can, do!
This trite statement is found to be demonstrably inaccurate frequently. How could any statement of this nature be universally true of any profession or trade, for that matter? The teacher being discussed is unworthy of the profession. The teacher exposing the delusional nonsense seems to be bright and able. Back in the 60’s we were taught to be cautious about universalisms.
Don’t misunderstand I never was a fan of Obama. But he did bark out some pretty good grammar
Her mind was melting listing to Obama giving a speech
I can understand that many Leftists in the Black Community define themselves by “White Supremacy” that leads them to ma very DELUSIONAL confining perspective. BUT WHAT? I find so Cognitively Dissonant is that the BIGGEST cheerleaders are White folk and especially Woman defined as an adult female. These individuals of the Left actually HATE themselves MORE much MORE than they do their country of birth.
The vitriol is as thick as molasses. Behind every tree and under every rock is a “White Supremacist. Yet, they are able to exclude themselves and excoriate ALOL other Whites.
If these whining little pinheads got everything that offends them banned we would have nothing left a whole but of whining little twats
We’ve gone from the “Soft Racism of Low Expectations” to the “Hard Racism of No Expectations” !
Black Students all over Africa are learning Proper English in one-room Schools.
Apparently no one has told them that’s not possible.
It’s “aaoow” and “gaarn” that keep her in her place: NOT her wretched clothes and dirty face.
That’s what Prof. Henry Higgins said about Eliza Dolittle. Also:
An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him.
We do no one a favor when we assume they are incapable of learning. This is an insult to them.
“Language most shows a man; speak that I may see thee” ― Ben Jonson
Thanks, nice article. Attending mostly black schools as a teenager, we had to learn to speak like the blacks in order to survive. Then speaking like that was a definite handicap in other circumstances, like wearing bad clothes, which cause people to look down on you even if they are too polite to say anything about it.
I’d like to see how this teacher would discuss the phrase (below) to students of any “color” without eliciting a grammatical rule….dangling participles.
“Caution: Pedestrians slippery when wet”.
That’s a howler.
Everybody benefits from good grammar. If flight controllers do not communicate understandably, planes crash and everyone who flies can be killed. If the police and criminals do not understand each other. Someone can be hurt. If chemistry and physics students and professors do not understand each other, bad chemistry results, or no chemistry. Everyone benefits from good grammar and usage. It all hangs together and benefits everyone. If the builders had not used different languages, maybe the Tower of Babel would have been completed.
This teacher’s views are themselves symptomatic of the systemic racism of the LEFT and how it serves to undercut the progress of African Americans. That pathetic woman should be nowhere near a classroom.
My rule of thumb is that the harder they virtue signal the deeper their latent racism. In this case she may be making sure that when the blacks take over she can show a history of kowtowing.
Az dont know me no nuffin… ya feel me ?.
The United Kingdom and The United States of America, two countries divided by a common language.
I knew a black American guy when I lived in California who was very intelligence in many ways, much better educated than me, though I have little education, Im a white guy, and he told me in his precise clear English that he had been accused of speaking ”white” by other black Americans so rather than emulating this great guy they decided he was, in their words… ”A Race Traitor” and this is a perfect example of blacks in the USA not learning that success is the best revenge and just play victim victim like the evil racist white man that keeps coming into the Projects and shooting all those brothers for no good reason…
Meanwhile the Projects across America are THE most dangerous places in the entire country… Whiteys fault.. Right?.
re: “. I told my students that many of them did not use standard English at home, and that every dialect has a place for powerful communication depending upon the audience, but standard English was the language of power and success whose mastery would maximize opportunities.”…
Back in the day of Ebonics, we had a very good [black] engineer in our department and one day, he and I discussed Ebonics and/or ‘Black English.’ Him: pro; me: con..
He asserted his right to speak the way he wanted under any and all circumstances.
Continued…
Part two…
I said that, sure, under most circumstances, I don’t have any problem with that, but if I were your manager, I would never send you out to speak with a customer or make a product-line presentation anywhere.
Why? Because, on average, nearly none of our major customers would understand what you were saying, since they’re not at all familiar with your spelling, grammar or pronunciation!
You may be “transmitting” what you believe to be good information, but your “receivers” wouldn’t understand a word of it.
I used the electronic analogy which I knew he would understand: If _I_ am transmitting a high-quality FM signal at you but you’re an AM receiver of ANY quality, good or bad, what information can you extract from my ‘sending’?
Precise answer: Zero, and that’s what our customers would ‘understand’ from you, and I could not afford to send you to them with such a microscopic ROI for the trip.
Fortunately, Ebonics never took much hold in my electronics world.