Posted on 08/06/2013 12:04:45 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Last week, Don West, defense attorney in the George Zimmerman murder trial, asked friend of Trayvon Martin and case witness Rachel Jeantel a strange question. “Are you claiming in any way that you don’t understand English?” he inquired, though she had been answering his questions in fluent English throughout much of the previous day. Jeantel, who was born and raised in Miami, insisted that she did, but West wasn’t convinced. He asked her once more whether perhaps, because her first language was Creole (transmitted to her by her Haitian mother), she had any trouble understanding English.
West was not alone. In the days that followed Jeantel’s testimony, the internet was ablaze with comments about her “poor English,” some of them willfully mean-spirited and others prescribing well-intentioned solutions to the perceived problem of widespread ungrammatical English. Well-intentioned or not, ungrammaticality is not a problem that Jeantel had. We need to look elsewhere to understand the strange phenomenon of being accused of not speaking your own language.
Some have rightly denounced the racism implicit in Jeantel’s questioning, admittedly unknown to West, who may well have been confused about her linguistic background. But even well-meaning commentators aiming to vindicate Jeantel have not quite gotten it right. Salon’s Brittney Cooper wrote that Jeantel speaks her own “idiosyncratic” idiom that combines “the three languages – Hatian Kreyol (or Creole), Spanish, and English — that she speaks.” Well, not exactly. Virtually anyone who was born and raised in the United States can speak perfect English without interference from any other language, no matter where their parents came from. The suggestion that Jeantel’s language is peppered with influence from Haitian Creole and Spanish implies that there is something off about her English. There’s nothing wrong with speaking imperfect English, but that doesn’t describe Rachel Jeantel, and to suggest otherwise misses — you might argue even reinforces — the real injustice at the heart of her cross-examination.
That there is nothing incorrect about the way Jeantel speaks is not so much an opinion as an undisputed fact that any authority on language could readily point out. I breathed a sigh of relief last weekend when linguist John McWhorter explained that Jeantel’s “English is perfect. It’s just that it’s Black English.” What McWhorter calls “Black English” is a dialect spoken by millions of Americans, and decades of linguistics research, much of it compiled by McWhorter himself, attests that it is a robust dialect like any other, with an internally consistent grammar and vocabulary. Many of those millions of speakers speak exclusively African American English in their communities, only to be taught from their earliest interactions with American public institutions, as schoolchildren, that their dialect is ungrammatical.
Jeantel’s English is not any more or less grammatical than the Standard American variety spoken by Zimmerman’s attorney, but unlike the defense attorney, she did not have the advantage of speaking the dialect that is sanctioned by America’s dominant social stratum. Linguists like John McWhorter fervidly oppose linguistic prescription — the practice of prescribing rules governing language use that do not reflect the way that people speak in practice — which they hold to baselessly and arbitrarily privilege certain varieties of speech over others. Linguistic prescription may be baseless, but it is not arbitrary at all: Prescriptivism systematically and invariably privileges the language of the already powerful.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Trayvon Martin case, which thrust the persistence of racism in America uncomfortably into the spotlight, has continued to clumsily illustrate the structural disadvantages encountered by millions of black Americans. African Americans are victim not just to gross racial profiling, as was Trayvon Martin, but also to linguistic discrimination, a little-understood prejudice that springs directly from linguistic prescription. Some forms of prescription, like rules against split infinitives and ending sentences in prepositions, illogically impose grammatical rules that do not naturally occur in language, but are, on some level, harmless. Others, like our culture’s categorical repudiation of African American English, have social ramifications easily as severe as racial profiling. It can be awfully difficult to excel in school, to succeed in the professional world, or to deliver credible testimony in court when virtually every institution in your society operates with the assumption that your language is fundamentally incorrect and takes it as an indicator of your intelligence.
Many have already pointed out that Rachel Jeantel was wrongly cast as unreliable and combative last week because of her race, gender, and size. We need to add language to that list. It is not because of her flawed English, as some have suggested, but in spite of her perfectly articulated English that Jeantel was discriminated against. Linguistic discrimination is just one of many mechanisms that systemically disadvantage African Americans in the U.S., but it is a crucial one. There are few things so disempowering as being silenced for the language that you speak.
Bless Ya and Welcome to Free Republic.
So a 200 pound slab of ghetto attitude doesn’t want to speak standard American English? This is a surprise. “Privileging” one dialect allows intelligibility, coherence and accurate communications.
Show me one piece of good literature or poetry, a technical manual or assembly instructions written in this putative alternate dialect of English.
We’ve all heard this lame Ebonics alibi before. Give it a rest. Standard American English is the language of the productive, the useful, the law abiding, the ones who used to make this country work.
It’s a dumbed down language using English words.
She speaks English in the same manner as a second year student speaks a foreign language. A hodgepodge of nouns and verbs that makes the listener guess at true meaning.
To ever listen to two Jeantels talking is to realize that they can barely communicate, taking 5 minutes to convey what 20 seconds of well constructed language could convey.
To paraphrase Woopie, if you don’t want to be treated like a moron, you will have to speak English-English.
Jeantel’s speech??
Obama’s speech??
What can we infer from obozo’s speech inflection? I had never thought about that before. What do his speech characteristics tell about his past?
“Standard American English is the language of the productive, the useful, the law abiding, the ones who used to make this country work.”
That’s right; now apply the same lax grading standard to math, history, etc., and you have the current state of education in urban black (and increasingly in white) education. No way to compete in a global workforce, especially when the foreigners come here and quickly grasp the language better.
Speakin’ a poetry and literature, the Irish showed the English how their own language should be used. There is actually some great “Ebonic” literature, in American Negro folk tales and songs, much of it captured, unfortunately, by white intermediaries, so it is discounted as racists. I am thinking of Steven Foster and Joel Chandler Harris. Even Margret Mitchell accurately captured authentic era African American speech.
Young Master Soetoro is legatee of none of this.
If she spoke the a different dialect of English she could have been more fluent in her lies, just saying.
William Faulkner may have written in that southern language; it looks bizarre because of the number of apostrophes and such.
When you work with people in 2013 who ask things like, “How he do that?” and, “Why he do that?”, then you know there is little hope for so many of them. They are the first victims of automation in my company; in fact, they were the driving force behind much of it. Computer programs don’t forget mailing addresses, write one amount in numbers on a check then a different amount in words across the face of it, etc...
"Dats just retartet!" (Final "d" pronounced as "t" by some in Midwest, at least by some TV media blacks.)
“Some years ago the esteemed Walter Williams said that if you see that your future lies in prison then learn ebonics. If you see that your future lies in business then learn Standard English.”.......
Nothing more needs to be said.
If memory serves me correctly, not too long ago there had been a push to actually “teach” ebonics in public schools.
That said, perhaps there are classes in ebonics being taught somewhere we are not aware of. Just another odumbo “Executive Order”?
This article, idiotic though it is, is well written in very clear and proper standard English.
As an experiment, I would love to see the author translate it into “Black English,” and see what clarity remains.
If you cannot speak or write clearly, you cannot think clearly.
She speaks the negro dialect
Or that if they are going to breed, at least try to make the family tree fork a little.
Agreed, and putting tattoos on your face, neck, and visible chest area is a damn fine way of making yourself unemployeable in any legitimate, meaningful employment.
“My Chinese wife does complain that our grand kids don’t speak good Chinese”
That sentence is as grammatically incorrect as anything Jeantel has ever said.
Language isn’t just communication with others, your brain uses it internally, words are the building blocks of thoughts and concrete blocks are better than mud bricks.
The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
Yeah, now say that in "black" english.
How's this: "yo be f*ckin' wit me"
Not only the language but their appearance and presentation usually coincides. When your hair looks like a poodle and your dressed in clown clothes and covered in tattoos with body piercings, expect the grammar to coincide.
You could also compare this thread to the standard english spoken and written 100 years ago and make the observation that all of us are speaking a less intelligent version of the language.
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