According to Arizona State University Associate Dean Asao Inoue, grading students based on the quality of their work is racist. He should know; he suffered his own harrowing experience in high school after receiving a B instead of an A in English – not honors English, just plain old, dumb, ‘Merica English – simply because of his teacher’s deep hatred for all things and people Japanese.
After overcoming years of oppressive education, Professor Inoue has cracked the code to ending this “white language supremacy.” Labor-based grading. Never again must a student demonstrate excellence in writing to receive top marks in a class largely about writing. But why stop there? We know that both science and mathematics are racist subjects as well. What others may have slipped through the cracks? It is time to finally end the era of academic racism – it is time to implement labor-based grading across the board. Only when no one excels at anything can the idea of supremacy of any kind finally die.
Turning Japanese, I Think I’m Turning Japanese, I Really Think So
According to his blog, Inoue wasn’t always a professor of rhetoric and composition or an associate dean. Yes, once this hero of the hallowed halls of academia was just a man – and before that, just a boy. But before even that, he was just a baby. Before that … well, you know.
This tale begins as many do, back when “only birds tweeted” and “’drones’ were a kind of bee.” See what he did there? He worked the birds and the bees into his own origin story – clever, Dr. Inoue, clever. His mom met his dad in Inglewood, CA, where he was born. Dad didn’t stay in the picture long, however, and Mom took little Asao and his twin brother up to Oregon and then on to Las Vegas, where the boys grew up. His mother – “English, Irish or Scottish, and Greek or Italian (the family just isn’t sure)” – worked two and sometimes three jobs “just so we could be poor.”
He never met his father, but he knew the man was from Hawai’i and of Japanese descent. So, naturally – despite having never met his father, growing up with his white mother, and looking pretty much like a white guy – Inoue identifies as a “cis-gender, Japanese man” – his words, not mine. When it came to high school, however, that might have been a mistake.
The Racist Reader
Asao loved to read the works of such science fiction and fantasy giants as Tolkien, Asimov, Bradley, Brooks, McCaffrey, and Le Guin. By the sixth grade, he and his twin brother, Tad, had discovered Dungeons & Dragons and were adventuring in fantasy lands, as many a nerd did in those days.
Somehow, though, he wasn’t a great English student. He was a remedial student in that subject throughout elementary and junior high. But why? Clearly, as the American descendent of an American who happened to have Japanese heritage – that father he never met – Inoue had trouble grasping the White Man’s language.
And then came high school and one racist reader, who stood out even in the inherently anti-Asian system known as American Education.
“I lived in an explicitly racist world. The racism was very present to me,” Dr. Inoue wrote. “During my Freshman year of high school, I got an A in honors French and every other class I took, yet received a B (not a B+) in English, not honors English, regular English.” What was the young hero of this tale doing wrong? Nothing. “It was me, my habitus. I knew this but didn’t want to admit, admit that my language and body were being judged together.” Clearly, this one teacher had honed his or her hatred of Asians to the point that there was no hiding Inoue’s Japaneseness, despite his looking pretty much like an average, dark-haired white guy.
On second thought, perhaps it was the name: Asao Inoue. In any case, what restraint it must have taken for this so-called educator to bite back the bile and deliver that hateful B rather than failing the boy outright.
Writing the Wrongs … Wait, Writing, Righting, Which One Is It Again?
Now, years later, Inoue has overcome the horror of the white language supremacy. As associate dean at ASU and a professor of rhetoric and composition, Dr. Inoue knows that “all grading and assessment exist within systems that uphold singular, dominant standards that are racist, and White supremacist when used uniformly.” It doesn’t even matter who’s grading or what the standards are; simply having a universal standard is racist. In his book, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, Professor Inoue argues that students should earn grades based on their efforts, not the quality of the finished project.
The racial strife he perceived – that is, er, definitely experienced firsthand, for real, and not in any way just imagined – drove him to succeed, to become an educator, an administrator, and a better writer – well, okay, maybe just an educator and administrator, but as Meatloaf sang: “two out of three ain’t bad.” And thanks to his efforts, future generations need never suffer such motivation. Indeed, they need not so much as be asked to excel – just appearing to try will be enough.
Who needs actual talent and skill at writing? As you can tell from the assortment of quotes and the title of Professor Inoue’s book, there’s no real need to clearly convey thoughts in either an easily understandable or entertaining way.
This applies across the board. Who cares if the math doesn’t add up? Who needs to learn how to properly balance equations or understand how one chemical reacts to another? So what if no one in the next generation will know how to keep airplanes in the sky or make sure that a can of soda doesn’t kill you? Surely we can just let the computers handle that boring stuff.
What matters is that students can get an A simply by exerting effort – or, at least, by convincing the teacher they did. And the generation of mediocrity sure to follow? Simply the guarantee that no one is ever able to hold themselves superior to another ever again. Equality for all, finally. Thank you, Dr. Inoue.
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