In an effort to portray his classroom policy as more than just white supremacy being enforced by a white man, Foster Wallace goes on to claim that even prominent Black writers like James Baldwin accepted the necessity of SWE. You can believe it’s racist and unjust and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I’ll tell you something: If you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you’re going to have to communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our country uses to talk to itself. In class - in my English class - you will have to master and write in Standard Written English, which we might just as well call “Standard White English,” because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people. Summarizing the lecture he delivered during private conferences with students, Foster Wallace writes: While English departments and their instructors now hopefully concede a more nuanced approach to language, Wallace was echoing the orthodoxy of his time.

In “Tense Present,” an essay published in Harper’s Magazine in 2001 and later reprinted as “Authority and American Usage” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, David Foster Wallace makes what today might be considered a startling admission: While working as an English professor at Illinois State University - and perhaps also earlier as an adjunct at Emerson College - Foster Wallace compelled his Black students to write in “Standard White English,” as he describes it, despite their complaints of racism.

Infinite jest sparknotes