Defining Who We Are in Society

BROOKLYN — When passing a controversial resolution to help black schoolchildren learn standard English through Ebonics, the speech patterns many use at home, the Oakland School District reminded the nation of what language means to us. It is our very beginning. Once we as toddlers are given the gift of the communicating self, we can forever discover, learn and expand in a world of common symbols.

Perhaps nothing defines us more than our linguistic skills; nothing determines as much about where we can and cannot go. How we talk may be the first--and last--clue about our intelligence and whether we’re trusted or feared, heard or ignored, admitted or excluded.

But we treat our fluency like property. Depending where we are, our ability to speak in certain ways entitles us to access, membership and social riches, such as employment or popularity. As a culture, the greatest benefits go to those who write and speak in standard English, ways identified by most of us as “white,” specifically middle-class white.

But participating in the benefits of communication doesn’t require being white. It only requires that people around us--wherever we are--understand what we’re saying. Ebonics merely validates the distinctive talk among people on a margin far from the majority’s view of competence and invites them in. It recognizes that a voice developed amid inequality does not bespeak inferiority.

The problem with Ebonics is not that it will teach children what they already know, which, as critics point out, would be silly. The problem is that its public acceptance might throw into question claims of ownership to intelligence and belonging. After all, Ebonics is not as much the language of blackness as it is the only dialect of persistently poor, racially segregated people--the so-called black underclass. It is the dumbness against which all smartness is measured. But if we reached consensus that Ebonics is a real linguistic system born of difference whose use in schools may facilitate inclusion for children of the excluded, we must deal frankly with the exclusion itself.

Ebonics therefore becomes a troubling measure of separation. For many whites, it measures the contradictions of color-blind convictions. For many blacks, Ebonics measures the complications of assimilation and the resiliency of shame.

The ridicule and disparagement on talk radio confirms why an Ebonics program makes sense. Many whites have used the issue as an opportunity to vent racist jokes ordinarily kept underground or in sports bars. Others invoke it in order to restrict black cultural influences, such as banning rap music or canceling TV shows in which black characters use slang.

Meanwhile, more serious mainstream criticism sees the colorblind vision of the republic at stake. Suddenly interested in the achievement of poor black schoolchildren, pundits, federal officials and policy-makers unanimously condemn Ebonics for lowering standards. Inadvertently echoing English-only advocacy, they argue that Oakland’s resolution would replace children’s individuality with militant group identification and promote black “separatism.” The standard English language, they say, belongs to all of us.

Such hypocrisy is hard to beat. Of course, language, like intelligence, is no group’s personal property. But despite the well-meaning ring of colorblind ideals, you cannot demand sameness of language while perpetuating segregated education. Privately, any master of the language will admit, the best thing you can do for your kids is get them into schools with the tiniest percentage of (poor) blacks. Thus, it is no coincidence that the public school districts experimenting with Ebonics have long been abandoned by white parents. In fact, many public schools are funded by property taxes, making direct the connection between residential and education segregation. This separatism is quite normal. It is how social advantages are reproduced. But you can’t enjoy them at a distance and demand conformity, too.

Since the Supreme Court declared separate-but-equal school facilities unconstitutional in Brown vs. Board of Education, most urban school districts have become more, not less, segregated. Moreover, as wealth and resources develop the suburbs, the residential segregation that accompanies separate schooling has produced a degree of racial isolation among inner-city blacks that approaches complete homogeneity.

To be sure, the Oakland resolution’s description of Ebonics as a “primary” language was unfortunate. Such a language would not be English, and non-English cannot be criticized for being “bad English.” It is enough that Ebonics has a distinct lexicon and grammatical rules that are spoken exclusively by some blacks. It then qualifies as a reliable measurement of the gulf between many poor blacks and the middle-class world where standard English is spoken.

Recognition of this fact by socio-linguists and its application in school settings are at least three decades old. In addition to Los Angeles and Oakland, schools in Michigan, Texas and New York use what scholars call Black English Vernacular (BEV) as a teaching tool. The principle is hardly new: Begin teaching from where students are and bridge the familiar with the untried.

Another principle at work, however, is assimilation. If Ebonics measures distance, it also measures a closeness more successful blacks have to mainstream culture. Formally educated blacks who use both standard English and Ebonics depending on social context, or “code switching,” remain close to two worlds that seem at odds with each other. For white co-workers, they may introduce black English idioms into common parlance. Among less-assimilated family and friends, they may be ostracized for “talking white.” As a result, they often both bemoan and boast of their bidialectalism. It is a mark of cross-cultural identification, involving a complicated mix of pride, achievement and lingering shame.

Jesse Jackson illustrated this when he immediately denounced the Oakland resolution as an “unacceptable surrender,” then, soon after, changed his mind. His first reaction honored a long, revolutionary tradition of black educators teaching standard English to children at a time when white institutions and hate groups forcibly and deliberately denied us the written and spoken language. Much of the NAACP’s legacy--including the Brown decision--was built on such demands for access. It is not surprising, then, that its current director, Kweisi Mfume, denounced Ebonics by resurrecting the memory of Frederick Douglass, the freed slave who taught himself to read five languages.

Jackson inherits that tradition of civil-rights leadership. He understands how the social benefits of assimilation come primarily through language acquisition. Surely, he also recognizes a deep-seated shame many blacks feel at the persistent inability of less-advantaged blacks to cross over and speak both tongues. The public and institutional denigration of black speech patterns for so long contributes to an undeniable sense of stigma against which blacks from a variety of class backgrounds still struggle.

But in his second reaction, Jackson must have resolved that Ebonics does not dignify some shameful difference. If done right, it should validate, then transcend difference. This reaction also enjoys a long tradition in black culture, as illustrated by the diverse work of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Amiri Baraka. Many wrote powerfully in standard English, only to return at times to black dialect and write just as beautifully there.

Although Ebonics may prove valuable in teaching underperforming black children standard English, implementing Ebonics programs probably shouldn’t be confused with bilingualism. This would create potential competition for scarce funds between blacks and students for whom English is not a primary language. Hopefully, we will find a better way than pitting outsiders against outsiders. There are important differences in the experience of a Guatemalan or Vietnamese third-grader, who returns from school to immigrant parents. The stigma may not result from associating her language with ignorance, but the unkindness is just as real.

Instead, the Ebonics debate should heighten our appreciation of differences among us, as well as the special difficulties faced by students on the margins, who, along with their families, are trying, against long odds, to belong.*