In December 1996 the school board in
Oakland, California passed a resolution meant to change the current racist schooling of
African-American students. The media coverage of the resolution resulted in a national
spectacle dubbed, "Ebonics." The Ebonics controversy focused on whether African-American
speech patterns constitute a dialect of English or another language. The national
consensus seemed to be that Ebonics is not a distinct language. This conclusion was
arrived at through editorials, articles and commentaries which distorted the debate. For
example, the New York Times called Ebonics "black slang" on December 24,
but later, on December 30, used the phrase "patois of many low-income blacks."
Richard Riley, the Education Secretary, weighed in to say that African-American speech
patterns constitute a dialect, not a language.
It all started on Christmas eve of 1996
when a New York Times editorial piece, titled "Linguistic Confusion,"
denounced the Oakland School Board. After this, local and national news almost unanimously
dismissed the idea that African-American speech patterns are linguistically distinct from
English. Intellectuals were sought for their responses. Patricia Williams, a law
professor, writing on the Op-ed page of the New York Times, feared that
"teachers who speak standard classroom English” will be "flailing about in
some really bad version of a standardized black English." She wrote that if Ebonics
were taken seriously, it would look like "standard English speakers…who,
encountering any black person, start ‘dude’-ing and ‘I be’-ing up a storm, high and low-fiving
to beat the band." In a speech given at my university, Maya Angelou got the entire
University of North Florida arena laughing with a quip about the "ebonic
plague." This same phrase was used as a title for a New York Times Op-ed piece that
described the Oakland school board as "wrong, if not deranged."
When speaking of this project to
colleagues and friends, I’ve been offered examples of other kinds of linguistic
differences which would be, apparently, as equally ridiculous as Ebonics. I’ve been told
about "hebonics" which would chart Yiddish speech patterns. I read on the
Internet that "the language folks who brought us Ebonics have decided to pursue some
of the seemingly endless taxpayer pipeline…by designating Southern slang, or
‘hickphonics’." Garrison Keillor made fun of the idea of Ebonics in a radio sketch
about "wobegonics"– taken from his series "The News from Lake
Wobegone."
The one-sided debate over language and
social difference couldn’t hold the national attention long because a one-sided debate is
pretty boring. The national uneasiness around the idea that African-Americans speak
differently because of a long history of cultural and political segregation abated, and
all that is left are stupid jokes about accent.
But in looking back to what was said in
the news, one point appears frequently: the real issue, the newsmakers kept saying, is
that U.S. schools are failing. Frequently, a writer would opine that the education of
African-American students is lacking, but "institutionalizing black English would
severely handicap…students in their efforts to compete in the job market"
(Rodgers). The Times wrote that because of the so-called mistakes of the Oakland
School Board that "for the last ten days the country has focused on the problem of
educating inner city black youths, an issue…too often ignored." Patricia Williams,
again, wrote that "this controversy boils down to the old familiar ingredients of
struggle for respect, resources, opportunity and jobs." The real problem, according
to this consensus, is that African-American students are segregated into schools that are
run-down and therefore they do not have the same opportunities to learn as other students.
All these intellectuals and opinion-makers decided that the firestorm of attention on the
Oakland School Board must be directed to the schooling of African-Americans. But to say
that the debate about Ebonics is just "carrying water" for debates around school
vouchers is an irresponsible dismissal of an important linguistic development. Ebonics
must be looked as an important discussion in and of itself.
The Oakland School Board’s position on
African-American speech patterns is difficult to articulate in sound-bite form, but
progressives must start articulating it. Henry Louis Gates told the New York Times that
the School Board’s statement was "obviously stupid and ridiculous." Ebonics and
the Oakland resolution are neither stupid nor ridiculous, and we, as socially-committed
intellectuals have the responsibility of disagreeing loud and clear with Henry Louis
Gates. Books such as The Real Ebonics Debate and articles such as "Suite for
Ebony and Phonics" begin this kind of work.
There are two kinds of dismissals. One of
the dismissals emerges from the assumption that Ebonics is nothing more than an accent.
The pronunciation of words and slang is what Ebonics has come to mean. Secondly, the
Oakland School Board is imagined to have used a specious argument about language as a way
to get their hands on federal money. Again, Patricia Williams, declared in the Times that
"the Oakland school board’s action has been [a] rather transparent strategy of
categorizing Ebonics as a distinct language in order to gain access to extra financing for
the education of bilingual students." Ebonics is more than a category game; it is
"one of the most distinctive varieties of American English, differing from Standard
English…in several ways (Rickford 84).
Ebonics was a chance to roll out what I
call the myth of bootstraps literacy. The U.S. sells more books, newspapers, magazines,
and advertising based on this myth of raising one’s self up through hard work in school
than we know. The effects of this myth are devastating. When the myth is represented to
us, the African-Americans who have overcome obstacles (the Ward Connerlys, the Judge
Thomases) are needed. In the Newsweek article on Ebonics, Rachel Jones, says
condescendingly, "Frankly, I’m still longing for a day when more young blacks born in
poverty will subscribe to my personal philosophy….my mastery of standard English gave me
a power that no one can take away from me."
School, according to this myth, exposes
all students equally to the conventions of spoken and written English, and students soak
in these conventions through practice, practice, practice. Also, "poking through The
Canterbury Tales by age 8" helps–or so says Rachel Jones in Newsweek magazine.
The child who looked at the classics from an early age grows up to be an academic hero.
These tales of academic heroism are common: Richard Rodriguez’s "scholarship
boy" in Hunger of Memory is another story of asserting one’s ambition to excel
in school.
But this image of a bicultural Horatio
Alger needs to be looked at more closely. Identity and language may appear fluid, and we
may marvel at individual’s ability to move between cultures. The individual who is able to
move between Ebonics and standard English seems to choose to learn the conventions
of standard English or seems to choose to retain their earlier speech patterns.
The bootstraps literacy myth assumes that
African-Americans choose to be literate by identifying with the dominant culture or, they
opt out, and resist U.S. culture. This is a cruel joke. Literacy is an activity structured
in racist society, and an individual does not merely choose speech patterns.
Other assumptions of the myth of
bootstraps literacy can be seen in the many accounts (often offered by African-Americans
and Latino/as) of the power of learning good English. These features of the myth include:
(l) writers refer to their own experience in school; (2) the individual chooses between a
dialect and standard forms of expression; (3) mastery of Standard English is the most
powerful tool for entering mainstream U.S. society; (4) African-American youth "drop
out" of mainstream U.S. society; (5) resources available to marginalized students are
enough. This fifth assumption leads intellectuals to claim that Great Books in school and
Standard English in the home constitute an "environment for learning."
This myth of bootstraps literacy totally
erases what actually happens and has happened. Before the emancipation of slaves, the
uprisings in the South prompted local ordinances which forbade the teaching of reading and
writing. In other words, the U.S. withheld literacy from African-Americans through
legislation, and now withhold it through unequal funding of schools, and through tracking
and other mechanisms. In her a chapter titled, "Slaves, Religion and Reading,"
Janet Duitsman Cornelius writes that in the 19th century white Southerners
enacted "a wave of repressive legislation" that banned literacy activities of
slaves. "Laws banning the teaching of slaves were…in effect in four
states…[during] the period from the 1830s to 1865: Virginia, North and South Carolina,
and Georgia." She writes that "the impact of these laws is debatable"
because "they were seldom taken seriously by the courts." However, "the
distinctive aspect of the southern reaction from 1829-1834 was the stress on religion and
literacy as major cause for the revolts" such as the Turner rebellion and an uprising
in Jamaica known as the Baptist War. The revolts, feared by Northerners and Southerners,
were supposedly led by "preachers" who wrote pamphlets against slavery. "As
a South Carolinian put it, there could be no mass literacy in the South ‘until man can eat
of the tree of knowledge and not know evil.’ He insisted that bans on black literacy would
have to continue ‘until those of our Negroes who are taught to read the Bible shall be
unable to read [David] Walker’s pamphlet’."
This same fear of the literate African-American
who will use his or her knowledge in order to change their conditions of life is with us
today, and one can see it in the histrionic calls for Great Books and "the
basics." What would happen if African Americans read slave narratives instead of
Shakespeare? What would happen if students recognized their own speech patterns as valid
expressions which have a place in social discourse?
The media, and casual discussions of
Ebonics, repeatedly entertain the stereotype of the anti-social and dangerous African
American who will flout the dominant culture and not assimilate. James Shaw compares
Ebonics to black-on-black crime. He writes in the Los Angeles Times, "The
Oakland plan is nothing more than inverted racism. Like drive-by gang shootings and
riot-inspired community turndowns, it is one more example of how black people can commit
acts of racism against themselves." It is as the use of Ebonics is a resistance to
the dominant culture, and is a doomed language. This picture of the anti-social African
American who will opt out, (and only speak Ebonics) frightens white Americans,
and is just titillating enough to sell copy. Frank Rich, in the New York Times,
opines that "inner-city children…are already prone to rejecting mainstream speech
and academic achievement as too ‘white.’" "Young people who embrace [Ebonies]
too fully" are not part of the mainstream, and will become criminals apparently.
Ebonics will confuse "the minds of disadvantaged young blacks" further,
according to Rachel Jones in Newsweek. She writes that "young
blacks…perceive clear speech as a Caucasian trait" and if the differences between
Ebonics and standard English were highlighted in classrooms, then students would succumb
"to a dangerous form of self-abnegation that rejects success as a ‘white
thing’." What could be more frightening than an African American refusing to
participate in mainstream culture? A slave uprising? The burning of Los Angeles? At the
same time that U.S. society segregates and vilifies African Americans, it drums into
everybody’s head the myth of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps by studying the
Standard English of white people. This painful contradiction between what we believe to be
true, and what actually is, has to be addressed. The U.S. has a long history of isolating
African Americans, and this cultural segregation has shaped speech patterns which must be
validated and explained in classrooms.
John Rickford explains how Ebonics, the
language of African Americans, has developed over the centuries. He writes: "The
genesis of Ebonics lies in the distinctive cultural background and relative isolation of
African Americans, which originated in the slaveholding South. Many African slaves, in
acquiring English, developed a pidgin language–a simplified fusion of English and African
languages–from which Ebonics evolved….A pidgin language emerges to facilitate
communication between speakers who do not share a language; it becomes a creole language
when it takes root and becomes the primary tongue among its users."
Ebonics is a creole language. This is the
linguistic point that was most egregiously misinterpreted by the media. On December 30,
1997 Stephen Holden wrote that "the resolution contains emotionally charged words and
phrases that smack of a black separatist ideology. For example, the resolution says that
Ebonics is ‘genetically based and not a dialect of English.’" In response to Holden,
Ernie Smith explains how the phrase "genetically based" was meant to operate
metaphorically within the resolution. But School Board’s resolution was misconstrued by
powerful media megaphones. "The metaphorical use of terms from biology [such as
‘genetically based’] is common in historical linguistics; there is nothing unusual about
their useThus we speak,
for example, of the genetic relationship
that exists between English and German: that there is [an] ‘ancestor’ language from which
the ‘daughter’ languages are descended in a somewhat different way. Ebonics is
historically derived from certain West African languages as well as from English."
Linguists also use this creole account to
describe the development of languages on Caribbean and Pacific islands. Rickford explains
that these islands had "large plantations [which] brought together huge groups of
slaves or indentured laborers. The native
languages of these workers were radically different from the native tongues of the small
groups of European colonizers and setters, andwith minimal access to European speakers,
new, restructured varieties like Haitian Creole French and Jamaican Creole English arose.
"
Slavers in the South also brought
together huge numbers of laborers whose languages differed radically from their European
slave owners. Sixty-one percent of the population of South Carolina was African-American
before slavery was abolished (Rickford). But this "creole account" of languages
in the U.S. didn’t make it into Newsweek or The New York Times. And why not?
Whose interests are served by this distortion of the Ebonics debate? The answer is very
clear: white people. By dismissing new educational initiatives that emerge from viable
linguistic research, the nation has effectively shut the classroom door to African-American
students. In Duval County, the school district labeled 1,900 students as Educable Mentally
Handicapped last year. If they graduate, these students will earn a special diploma that
neither the military nor community colleges will recognize: 1,369 of those labeled
Educably Mentally Handicapped are African American. "From California to Texas to
Florida, blacks far outnumber whites in these programs." The post-civil rights era
mechanisms for determining African-American students’ so-called linguistic deviance rob
millions of an education. These mechanisms include standardized tests and teams of
psychologists and teachers who decide the needs of students. Some of the concepts that
frame the schools’ decisions about who is educably mentally handicapped and who is not,
are socialization and readiness to learn. When mostly white people are determining
who is socialized, and who is ready to learn, then schooling becomes a racist sleight-of-hand
trick.
"One reason for the high ratio of
African-American EMH children is that classroom teachers refer more black than white
students for special testing." In other words, before the child is even tested by
psychologists or their IQ is determined, a teacher’s impression of the child identifies
his or her needs. Thomas Serwatka, Associate Dean of Education at University of North
Florida, "reasons that white teachers are less likely to refer white students [to the
EMH program] because they don’t behave like EMH kids." In other words, the kid who is
not like the white teacher is different. Serwatka continues, "If you act as the
culture of the school asks you to act you don’t get referred."
Special education in the U.S. constitutes
a racist deskilling of African-American youth. If the Oakland School Board wants to
change this situation by preparing their teachers for the linguistic differences that
exist in their classrooms already, then leftist educators better listen.