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(c) 1999 2-BZ Media Ebonics is spoken by kids in the inner cities all over America. I don’t know why us human beings have to get so complicated all the time. People wanna talk about whether Ebonics is a language or a dialect. What’s the difference and who cares? I saw two birds chirping at each other the other day. I couldn’t comprehend what they were saying…but did I automatically assume they were stupid? No, the birds seemed to be perfectly happy talking to each other in their language - they were getting their groove on. It is completely irrelevant what I think about how those two birds speak to each other. The point I am making is that the only time this issue even arises, it is always because of some outsider who wants to stick his nose where it doesn’t belong. The issue escalates now when thinking about how the children must somehow grow up and assimilate into the "culture" of mainstream America. Questions are asked such as "Can these kids hold a job?" "Can they be interviewed?" etc. These are extremely good questions but the answers are made unnecessarily complicated. The ability to do what is necessary is sometimes complicated by human resistance. First of all, if we must get technical, Ebonics has been proven by a handful of linguists (Labov - see link) to be at the very least - a pidgin. This is a dialect of the English language. Labov’s studies go deep into the linguistic structure of a typical Ebonics sentence, explaining the consistent replacement of articles such as "the" and words like "an" with Ebonics translations. He based his conclusions on the fact that Ebonics (also known as African American Vernacular English) had enough structure. I say all this to remove the negative impression of it. Why does America love to beat down on our inner city kids? Ebonics is regarded as stupid, the people who speak it are considered stupid, it is made fun of, and other than a few dedicated linguists, is NOT taken seriously. Why isn’t it clear that Ebonics is a dialect of English just as there are dialects of Chinese or French? Also, I hardly stand it when people diss Ebonics, claiming that it is
for the benefit of the kids. Again, we are dealing with the opinions
of outsiders. Yes, they will be African Americans who say "I grew
up in the hood, bla bla bla." However, the truth is that their hearts
are so cold that they would rather piously force feed the kids with a military
regimen of learning "proper" English than to put the vehicles in
place that make a natural transition possible (not to mention fun).
The Oakland school district simply tried to put such vehicles in place,
but their intentions were misunderstood. This is what I mean by "human
resistance."
Here are just a few ideas from the desk of tOObiz: 1. For inner city situations, you need to hire young men and women with
teaching degrees and backgrounds from the inner cities. The problem
is difficult enough to complicate it by putting teachers in front of the
kids who don’t share their culture, their perspective, their reality, and
their pain.
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