It can be tough finding an apartment in this town if you're black

This was on his blog. I don't know who he was talking to, but who you are talking to makes a difference. I don't think he should feel like he needs to use standard English when ranting to himself, mostly.

After I described a technical session I attended at a conference, one of our non-tech people pulled me aside and thanked me for "speaking English". What that meant was "thanks for effectively communicating the gist of a technical proceeding to a mixed audience". If the goal is communication, then tailoring "standard" English to the audience and context is critically important.

Of course, in international conference space, surrounded by people who spoke in subcontexts nested in subcontexts, I write and speak differently. Like "discussing geographies of uncertainty when subunit spatial autocorrelation is problematic to stable effect estimates for integration into HIA projections" differently. In other sessions, people very much altered their speech for the sake of the tranlators, who had general technical scientific background but might stumble over specific jargon snippits. I write informal pieces even more differently, and then there is the comment speech I use on blogs. Fuck yeah, that.

Put simply: the problem may not be that vitriolic blogger has lapsed into slang, it may just be that he isn't talking to you!

"(whatever or whomever you may believe that appellation to mean, or even if you don't feel that the term should be used because it perpetuates the dominant group's institutionalized religious beliefs at the expense of those with equally valid non-institutionalized beliefs or lack of same)"

Actually laughing aloud at this!

Come on though, do you really think racism can't be reduced? Look at how much it's gotten better in many ways during your lifetime and mine. Same can be said for homophobia, sexism, religionism, etc. I definitely don't think we should give up and stop acknowledging that these things exist.

I don't think communication even has to be standardized to be understood. Yes, there was a misunderstanding regarding palito, sure. But we're going to find ambiguities and structures that lack clarity in most communication. We're also going to run into terminology we're not familiar with. It doesn't necessarily mean that the speaker needs to change it. If I read technical language like the stuff Swirlygrrl uses, I'm not going to understand most of it. It isn't being written for me though. If there was some reason I needed to understand it, I'd hope the speaker would be able to translate for me. Likewise when I do the transgender issues training and disability rights trainings at work. I provide a glossary so people can understand what terms mean and know which terms tend to be preferred by people in these communities. I don't ask people in these communities to change their terminology.

Again, I point to Rosina Lippi-Green, who makes the point that intelligibility isn't usually the issue when people take issue with "nonstandard" forms of English. She gives examples of people who were fired for using Hawai'ian or African-American or southern or gay male dialects. These folks were perfectly effective communicators, and no one had an actual difficulty understanding what was being said. People were uncomfortable that it wasn't being said the way they would say it.

Again, I'm not talking about someone using a marked/stereotypeable form of English that's associated with white people. I'm talking about if I were to speak colloquially in my own dialect. As in, Mr. Clemens is speaking in a dialect that's appropriate for someone of his race who's frustrated and letting off steam. If I do the same and let off steam in the manner that comes naturally in my dialect, as far as I know, people don't make fun of me or assume that I speak the same way in meetings.

Yes, the horrible pink deodorant soap isn't appropriate for anyone's skin. But I think you know the point I'm making. I've seen many a hotel that does give out decent quality soap/shampoo/lotion, but it's still not of a variety that's geared toward skin and hair textures that a person of color is more likely to have. This is an example of systematic racism. They probably aren't doing this because they don't want people of color to feel welcome there, but more because they're white and they thought "oh, this is a really nice skin care kit" and didn't realize that the products are mainly only going to be appropriate for people with their same skin and hair. The person who ordered the stuff is not "a racist" per se, but the effect at work (that it's harder for a person of color to get their needs met there) is "racism." No, shampoo by itself isn't a big deal, but it's an example of going around and running into stuff every day where you aren't the default and YOU have to adapt, rather than the system adapting to include everyone.

Also, in linguistics, a sentences is grammatical if it conveys a meaning that you understand. It's ungrammatical if it doesn't (Through cat fluiding anti-blue and). You're referring to someone using different prescriptive grammar from perhaps the prescriptive grammar rules of the dialect you prefer. But aside from "palito" and a couple of the ambiguous constructions that weren't related to dialect, I really don't know how you can say you don't understand the points he's making.