Posted on 06/04/2004 8:24:41 AM PDT by mcg1969
There are still certain things some black people won’t talk about in front of some white people. American culture may be seemingly more integrated than, say, 50 years ago, but cultural walls remain. Racial issues, in multiracial company, are often circled until they are impossible to ignore and have to be discussed; blacks, when there are only other blacks around, often cut to the chase. But private black discourse, in my experience, is not focused on pinning things on skin color. The main difference between multiracial conversations and ones solely among blacks is that in private, African Americans are often more critical of themselves than outsiders would ever dare to be.
Last month, Bill Cosby broke the unwritten rule of keeping black dirty laundry in black washing machines. While at a multiracial gala dinner in Washington, D.C. commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Cosby targeted under-educated lower-income blacks as the source of various social problems. Among his comments: “People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we’ve got these knuckleheads walking around...the lower economic people are not holding up their end of the deal. These people are not parenting.” He went on: “Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us. We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.” And he mocked the way some blacks name their children: “With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all that crap, and all of them are in jail....They are standing on the corner and they can’t speak English.” Let’s hope Fantasia Barrino, Shaquille O’Neal and Muhammad Ali never see a transcript of Cosby’s comments.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Who needs age-old legitimate speech patterns when everyone should sound like the Midwesterners on TV?
I'm not opposed to everyone knowing standard English (which is a rather recent concept, btw). I just don't want to destroy the legitimate heritage of the various dialects and accents that people have had for hundreds of years. Does this bother you?
I'd avoid folklore anthologies if I were you.
Of course it doesn't bother me, or anyone else here. You're obviously reading more than necessary into what we're saying. As long as public schools teach standard English, and as long as we create a culture that recognizes the true importance of it, I don't mind if people have a second language (whether that is in fact a dialect or a true second language or something in between); nor do I mind that students read literature written in dialect. What I object to, as did Bill Cosby, is the apathy many parents have over insuring their kids can function in the professional mainstream.
Then there is no disagreement among us.
I described the two extremes. I did not refer to the broad middle of southern speech which includes many distinct accents. Southern Louisiana alone has perhaps 5 distinct accents in English, not to mention at least 3 versions of French. I did refer to some of the southern speech as one finds in, say, Southport, Florida. There is not an inordinate amount of cussing but the speech is entirely mumbled and goes along with a manner that resents giving any information to anyone. If you ask a resident what the name of the main street is he will say he doesn't know and you will probably ask for a repeat to try to understand. Southport is an entirely white burglet. There is a sizeable black community over by Caryville, also Florida, that has a nearly identical mumble and attitude. I have also heard the same speech(?) from a pair of Australian youths from Sydney, not what I always thought Australian sounded like.
It was not the educated classes that settled Appalachia.
I've always heard that Appalachian is Elizabethan English, but I'm not the one pushing it (it's the neo-Confederates, which is ironic considering the mountain folk's attitude towards slavery and the Confederacy). Basically, if you aren't advocating the elimination of all legitimate regionalisms then you and I have no quarrel whatsoever.
Hardly. I love accents and languages. My own accent is echoic. I sound pretty much like whoever I am talking with. Some folks used to think I was mocking them. In my youth I picked up languages the same way and at one time or another spoke Turkish (as a 7-9 y.o. kid) Dutch, Asian French, and Vietnamese. I do English pretty well, too. I am especially fond of those particular southern accents I spoke of, the Mississippi and Alabama loveliness- black and white-, of Irish Gaelic, and Vietnamese, all of which I firmly believe to be languages invented long ago by committees of men for women to speak before there were nightingales in the world.
I know the old New Englend sound you write of. My grandfather had it. I would not characterize it as beautiful, but it is very pleasant and goes with the brevity of speech that seems also to characterize those people. My Grandfather was out of Worcester which now seems to have the worst of the urban Massachessetts sound.
Not quite the case. It is a fair generalization but I know doctors and lawyers with accents. If your abilities are only average for the profession you are entering then it would very much be an advantage to speak grammatical Standard English. Those accents that do not dispense with proper grammar and construction do much better in the professions than those that have a debased structure. Ideally one's sound should not take a listener's attention from one's message and that works everywhere for Standard English and it works for the grammatically correct regional accent of the doctor setting up shop in the region whence he arose.
Wish I could learn another language. Some people just seem to have a gift and others (namely me) don't.
AT this day and age, much of the problems in the "black community" if you can even call what many black inner city neighborhoods have fallen into communities, are largely self inflicted.
Yes there is still racism in the world, but the biggest most fundamental issues anymore are not the ignorant cracker that's holding them down.
P.S. It sounds like Wisdom.
Having an accent is not the same as being unable to speak proper english! Yes lots of doctors have Indian accents, but they speak ENGLISH, and some of them better than most americans.
What the poor blacks often speak is not anything remotely resembling proper english. Bad Grammar is not an accent.
I envy my daughter. She learns languages easily in the classroom. I could never do that. If I have no immediate need for a language I can't learn it just because I want to. I spoke VN pretty fluently in 68-70 and since the early 1980s have been very close to the local VN emigre community. I go to mass in Vietnamese. That has not kept me from losing most of the language. I got books and later got computer programs. I paid a lady to give me lessons. No good. The emigres were/are all trying to learn English and I don't have to speak VN. In one month back in Viet Nam last summer I got pretty good again. No one around me spoke English at all. When I got back I was talking to my friends like they were in the old country. Now I'm losing it again.
Improving one's grammar invariably moves one's accent closer to Standard English and mitigates the unintelligibility of the ghetto or swamp accent. To improve your grammar you have to begin to think a bit about what you are saying and you will be conscious that what you are doing is trying to be understood by people beyond your old neighborhood. You can't help improving your accent when you set out to improve just your grammar.
You know, I thought that "Thanh" looked Vietnamese.
I can't learn any language, classroom or otherwise. My ears don't catch sounds very well and my mind doesn't process aural information that quickly. Add to that the fact that spoken languages are taught inductively and there you go.
The one and only language I have ever learned is Biblical Hebrew, which is a textual language taught deductively and learned visually (letters on a page). Plus I had almost supernatural motivation to learn that one. It remains to this day my one and only language success; I haven't even been able to learn Israeli Hebrew.
There is something mysterious and incantational about liturgical languages that makes them more appealing than mere everyday conversation in another language.
Than,
Just not buying it... accent and GRAMMAR are not the same. There are people with incredibly thick accents that speak proper english grammar.
What is going on in the inner city "thug" communities is not even an attempt at english grammar, absolutely abysmal enunciation and frankly vocabularies that are well under 600 words.
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