Posted on 06/04/2002 9:16:59 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Remember "ebonics?" In December 1996 a national debate erupted about the Oakland, Calif., school-board decision authorizing teachers to use street slang while teaching children standard English. For the last six years, with the connivance of the mainstream media, most Americans have been able to forget ebonics. Unfortunately, however, this foolishness has continued.
Linguistics professors Walt Wolfram and Erik Thomas defend ebonics as the legitimate dialect of a dynamic minority in their new book, The Development of African-American English. New York state regent Adelaide Sanford recently insisted that her support of ebonics had been "misrepresented" and that ebonics is the language of great black poets of the past, such as James Weldon Johnson. In 2001, the Linguistics Society of America (LSA) reiterated its 1997 statement supporting ebonics. And, in 1998, academics Lisa Delpit and Theresa Perry edited an anthology, The Real Ebonics Debate, in which none of the approximately 30 contributions dared to criticize the newly accepted dialect.
"Experts" tell us that ebonics is three things: 1) an African language that is genetically passed on among blacks; 2) a vocabulary that has grown out of the encounter of African slaves with Irish immigrants; and 3) a wholly new dialect created since the 1960s by young blacks to separate themselves from whites.
You might expect someone to have pointed out that the above definitions are mutually incompatible. But no such luck. Despite having a professional interest in rigorous, scholarly debate, most linguistics professors long ago abandoned any pretenses to objectivity. The most common — and correct — understanding by blacks and whites alike is that ebonics is broken English and/or street slang. However, any educator so defining ebonics is sure to be shouted down, or worse. As a result, those who know better have remained silent — as one well-meaning academic once advised me to do.
Although ebonics supporters such as Keith Gilyard publicly have claimed otherwise, children taught using ebonics readers did worse than their peers who were taught with standard English readers. Consider this from an ebonics reader used by professors John and Angela Rickford:
"This here little Sister name Mae was most definitely untogether. I mean, like she didn't act together. She didn't look together. She was just an untogether Sister.
"Her teacher was always sounding on her 'bout daydreaming in class. I mean, like, just 'bout every day the teacher would be getting on her case. But it didn't seem to bother her none. She just kept on keeping on. Like, I guess daydreaming was her groove. And you know what they say: 'Don't knock your Sister's groove.' But a whole lotta people did knock it. But like I say, she just kept on keeping on.
"One day Mae was taking [sic] to herself in the lunch room. She was having this righteous old conversation with herself. She say, 'I wanna be a princess with long golden hair.' Now can you get ready for that? Long golden hair!
"Well, anyway, Mae say, 'If I can't be a princess I'll settle for some long golden hair. If I could just have me some long golden hair everything would be all right with me. Lord, if I could just have me some long golden hair.'"
Ebonics is a pillar of Afrocentrism. It is a movement which, using intimidation, violence and pseudoscholarship, has dumbed down the education of black children beyond recognition, illegally barred whites from teaching black children and deliberately cut poor, black children off from the mainstream of American life.
Afrocentrists maintain that the pigment melanin makes blacks intellectually, morally and culturally superior to whites. They teach black children that ancient black Egyptians flew gliders, that whites who dispute such fairy tales are racists who seek to deny black greatness and that all black educational failure is due to a racist, white conspiracy.
Afrocentrists such as George Washington University professor Robert Williams, who coined the term "ebonics" in 1973, maintain that it is an act of disrespect for a white teacher to correct a black child. Professor Charles Coleman of the City University of New York's (CUNY's) York College has argued that remedial education is harmful to black students.
Progressive white educators who support Afrocentrists insist that it is wrong to correct students' usage and grammar. Unfortunately, this approach leads teachers to give passing grades on writing-proficiency exams. The CUNY remedial students then are permitted to take college-level classes despite possessing only semiliterate reading abilities.
Many middle-class blacks like to sometimes "go ghetto" and use street slang. But these professionals can speak standard English — in many cases, better than I can — and can always go home. The poor and working-class blacks to whom Afrocentric educators have refused to teach standard English, however, have nowhere to go.
Nicholas Stix writes frequently on education issues and has been an instructor in the City University of New York.
Whenever I want to make my kids laugh, I say" Hey I be jiggy wit dat." Whereupon they roll their eyes and say "Dad, that is so last year!"
In other words, Ebonics is something used by the self-described downtrodden to shut the "unworthy" or "strangers" out.
All countries have unofficial dialects which have their own argot and literature, including Theater, Newspapers, Songs, Poetry, and traditions: e.g. Neapolitan in Italy, Yiddish in Germany, Russia, and Poland, Catalan, Basque, Gallego in Spain. It's considered very cool to know them ... but you're supposed to know the official language, too. Maybe the Negro educators have this in mind?
I paid attention and I will be incorporating that into raising my children (when I have them). I will also incorporate a lesson I learned from Ken Hamblin in his book Pick A Better Country. He told of when he was young, his father would sit him down with the paper in the morning and show him the 'police beat' section and drill into his head that if his name ever appeared in there it would be an embarassment to himself and especially the family. It instilled in him a fear of having "his name in there" when he was growing up.
It is the only time i have ever heard of a parent doing that. Seems to me it would be a worthwile thing to do with young children.
Ignorant racist fool. He'll get his...
Trust me, it's not the "only time" it's ever happened. I've been in my share of trouble for not speaking properly, and if I had a dollar for every time my dad threatened me over getting in trouble with the law...
That would be the FeeBee and SeaAh.
Somehow I doubt that. The founders came from England and French was the language of diplomacy at the time. I can't see them sounding like the Dukes of Hazard.
WHAT??? Some of the most educated esteem-worthy people in this country had/have Southern accents. What kinda damn Yankee are YOU? Now I AM a-fixin to get medieval on yer heinie...
Fifteen ways to avoid a good Southern a$$-whuppin. Issued by the Southern Tourism Bureau to ALL visiting Northerners And Northeastern Urbanites:
1) Don't order filet mignon or pasta primavera at Waffle House. It's just a diner. They serve breakfast 24 hours a day. Let them cook something they know. If you confuse them, they'll kick your a$$.
2) Don't laugh at our Southern names (Merlene, Bodie, Ovine, Luther Ray, Tammy Lynn, Darla Beth, Laura Jo Inez, Billy Joe, Sissy, Clovis, Perky, Becky Sue, etc.). Or we will just HAVE to kick your a$$.
3) Don't order a bottle of pop or a can of soda down here. Down here it's called Coke. Nobody gives a flying flip whether it's Pepsi, RC, Dr. Pepper, 7-Up or whatever- it's still a Coke. Accept it. Doing otherwise can lead to an a$$ kicking.
4) We know our heritage. Most of us are more literate than you (e.g.,Welty, Williams, Faulkner). We are also better educated and generally a lot nicer. Don't refer to us as a bunch of hillbillies, or we'll kick your a$$.
5) We have plenty of business sense (e.g., Fred Smith of Fed Ex, Turner Broadcasting, MCI WorldCom, MTV, Netscape). Naturally, we do, sometimes, have small lapses in judgment (e.g., Carter, Edwards, Duke, Barnes, Clinton). We don't care if you think we are dumb. We are not dumb enough to let someone move to our state in order to run for the Senate. If someone tried to do that, we would kick her a$$.
6) Don't laugh at our Civil War monuments. If Lee had listened to Longstreet and flanked Meade at Gettysburg instead of sending Pickett up the middle, you'd be paying taxes to Richmond instead of Washington. If you visit Stone Mountain and complain about the carving, we'll kick your a$$.
7) We are fully aware of how high the humidity is, so shut up. Just spend your money and get out of here, or we'll kick your a$$.
8) Don't order wheat toast at Cracker Barrel. Everyone will instantly know that you're a Yankee. Eat your biscuits like God intended - with gravy. And don't EVER put sugar on your grits, or we'll kick your a$$.
9) Don't fake a Southern accent. This will incite a riot, and you will get your a$$ kicked.
10) Don't talk about how much better things are at home because we know better. Many of us have visited Northern s***holes like Detroit, Chicago, and DC, and we have the scars to prove it. If you don't like it here, Delta is ready when you are. Move your a$$ on home before it gets kicked.
11) Yes, we know how to speak proper English. We talk this way because we don't want to sound like you. We don't care if you don't understand what we are saying. All other Southerners understand what we are saying, and that's all that matters. Now, go away and leave us alone, or we'll kick your a$$.
12) Don't complain that the South is dirty and polluted. None of OUR lakes or rivers have caught fire recently. If you whine about OUR scenic beauty, we'll kick your a$$ all the way back to Boston Harbor.
13) Don't ridicule our Southern manners. We say sir and ma'am. We hold doors open for others. We offer our seats to old folks because such things are expected of civilized people. Behave yourselves around our sweet little gray-haired grandmothers or they'll kick some manners into your a$$ just like they did ours.
14) So you think we're quaint or losers because most of us live in the countryside? That's because we have enough sense to not live in filthy, smelly, crime-infested cesspools like New York or Baltimore. Make fun of our fresh air, and we'll kick your a$$.
15) Last, but not least, DO NOT DARE to come down here and tell us how to cook barbecue. This will get your a$$ shot (right after it is kicked). You're lucky we let you come down here at all. Criticize our barbecue, and you will go home in a pine box.. . . Minus your a$$.
************************
God Bless America
In a time honored tradition of Southern women, may I just say to you, "Well, bless your heart"........
It is fashionable to speak today as if European history were devalued: as if historians, in the past, have paid too much attention to it; and as if, nowadays, we should pay less. Undergraduates, seduced, as always, by the changing breath of journalistic fashion, demand that they should be taught the history of black Africa. Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at the present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history.
Please do not misunderstand me. I do not deny that men existed even in dark countries and dark centuries, not that they had political life and culture, interesting to sociologists and anthropologists; but history, I believe, is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests, dynasties and usurpations, social forms and social disintigration. If all history is equal, as some now believe, there is no reason we should study one section of it rather than another; for certainly we cannot study it all. Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past which, by history, it has escaped.
The book was written by an English historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and arose out of a series of lectures he gave on BBC television in 1963. Imagine that happening today.
We should run all of our correspondence with the left through this
http://rinkworks.com/dialect
choose Jive.
Comes out like this.
"Expuh'ts" tell us dat ebonics be dree doodads, dig dis: 1) an African language dat be genetically passed on among brothers; 2) some vocabulary dat gots grown out uh de encounta' of African slaves wid Irish immigrants; and 3) some wholly new dialect created since da damn 1960s by yung brothers t'separate demselves fum honkys.
sorry for link failure-first post
You think maybe European immigrants from the old country talk funny?
So, maybe their grammar was from thinking in Yiddish and speaking in English?
So, maybe we should have taught our children to speak in broken english?
Did anyone ever read the book The Education Of Hyman Kaplan?
-PJ
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.