Let me tell you a story, good people of Tumblr. I think this needs to be shared. Preserved, if you will.
At the school I went to for grad school (Naming and shaming: Texas State University), all Communication and Nursing majors were required to take a test called the GSP (Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation). You could try to take it three times. If you didn’t pass on the third time, you would have to change majors. So, this is a PRETTY BIG THING.
The problem was that the GSP was a very stupid exam. It was created at the University of Texas (still namin’, still shamin’) in the 1960s. Texas State, and several other state schools in the area still used it (I don’t know exactly which, so I’ll refrain) in 2013. It was a flawed test, not balanced very well, and it still tested for spelling, something that everyone agreed was not needed in this day and age. All the GSP taught was how to pass the GSP–there were a few questions that were hyper specific to its definition of style and usage, you had to know that the test didn’t believe in the Oxford comma, etc., etc.
So. There is a test that exists that a good chunk of people think is shit. But because this is academia, no one does anything about it, until one day…one day.
I direct your eyes to question 30, shown in the image above. The university’s Writing Center (which I was a grad assistant for at the time) gave weekly GSP review sessions. Question 30 was from one of the practice tests. Question 30 was also circulated randomly into the pool of questions actually asked on the GSP. (Yes, part of passing the GSP was literally studying actual GSP questions–I told you it was a stupid exam).
Anyway, one day at a practice session, a girl read this question, raised her hand and asked, “What’s a grand kleagle? It might be paranoia, but as a black person, when I hear someone talking about robes and torches, it creeps me out.”
So, to Google! A dozen or so students and a tutor pulled out their phones…and that’s when it was discovered that a Grand Kleagle is a KKK officer in charge of recruiting.
To sum up:
A TEST REQUIRED TO BE PASSED IN ORDER TO COMPLETE TWO MAJORS HAD A QUESTION THAT INCLUDED A THREATENING QUOTE FROM A MEMBER OF THE KKK. AND THIS FACT WAS DISCOVERED BY A BLACK STUDENT. IN 2013.
You might be wondering why no one has noticed it up until then. Well, I have a hypothesis that people did notice it, but did not give a fuck, as why would you want those kinds of people being nurses and journalists anyway. I figure by the 90s and 00s, nobody knew what the fuck a Grand Kleagle was, and most other students didn’t pay too much attention to the question, or didn’t want to talk about their suspicions.
After years of everyone complaining about the GSP, a community was suddenly enacted to create a new assessment! The offending practice test was hidden behind the counter in the writing center, and the offending question taken out of circulation. Within a year, there was a new test. An assessment that people had been begging to get changed since the mid-90s FINALLY got changed.
Before the new test was fully implemented, I begged the director to let me take a picture of the old test, to document this racist bullshit. At this point, the story was legend in the writing center.
The director gave me permission to photograph the evidence. Those are her hands in the above picture.
Until the implementation of the new test, a whole generation of students had to read that racist bullshit.
2013.
I’m too white to say, “stay woke,” but shit. Stay woke.