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Racist, Sexist, Homophobic or just misunderstood!
“You all are always complaining about everything!” Shouted a student from the crowd of hundreds of attendants of Dr. Jennifer Collins Bloomquist’s Linguistic Blackface: Language and Race in Children’s Animated Film convocation held in Phelps Stoke Auditorium on September 5th, 2019.
Dr. Bloomquist, a professor of linguistics and Africana studies at Gettysburg College, was examining how animated films have historically exploited African American English voices to represent social and political ethnicities, and continue to do so today. After the shouting, however, she did not lose the spirit to get her message home to her enthusiastic audience.
After the convocation, Elston Harris ’20 went on the Berea page to try to give clarity that the student may have been misjudged for his shouting rather than his intention to disagree with the speaker. This caused a stir as students threw jibes left, right, and center how the student sounded racist and should have been respectful enough to raise his concern during the question time.
Y’all are always complaining about everything!
To understand what may have caused such a stir in the middle of a convocation described by many as eye-opening, the Pinnacle spoke to students and a faculty to vent into the issue. Isaac…
