Mention the word “ebonics” around most (white) people, and
you’ll generally get either sneers or passionate denunciations of it. They’ll
call it ghetto-talk, and tell you that they only want black people to succeed, but
that that degraded, vulgar, debased mutation of English that they speak is
keeping them from doing that.
Well, maybe, but I doubt it. I bet that Rosa Parks could
have talked like Winston Churchill, and they still wouldn’t have let her sit in
the front of the bus.
Regardless, anti-ebonics is bigotry, even if those who
express it claim good intentions. In essence, when white people say that when
black people should speak “proper English,” what they’re saying is “Be less
black. You may not be able to do anything about being black, but for God’s
sake, try not to SOUND like it. Try to sound more like us, instead.”
It’s not only bigoted, it’s hypocritical as hell, too. White
people mangle English just as badly as any ebonics speaker ever did. The next
time I hear someone say “Me and him went to see Toby Keith last week,” I’m
going to throw the speaker through a plate glass window. Why is how black
people speak any worse than how white people abuse English?
Knee-jerk anti-ebonics also originates in the mistaken, yet
pervasive, notion that it was once proposed as an alternative to teaching standard
American English in public schools. This isn’t true. Replacing standard English
was not what Afrocentric thinkers of the 60’s and 70’s proposed. They proposed codification
of Black English (which they named ebonics,
the language of ebony-colored people) and its development as a literary
language. This was not a new or radical idea, as we’ll see later. But somehow,
it got around that militant blacks wanted to use our hard-earned tax dollars to
pay for teaching kids bad English—an untruth that, nonetheless, met with fierce
resistance and withering derision. Now ebonics is a joke—a punchline for dialect
jokes of the lowest kind. Because the word “ebonics” has been so thoroughly
derided, and because the associations are so completely negative, I’m going to
ditch the term and refer to it as “Black English.”
Attacking and deriding Black English is, regardless of the
stated intentions of those who do it, a personal attack. To deride someone’s
language is to devalue the speaker, because language is an integral part of who
we are. It is intimately tied to our very identity, as Andre Aciman describes
in his memoir Out of Egypt, as he discusses
Ladino, the Spanish-Jewish dialect spoken by his grandmothers:
“It
was the language of loosened neckties, unbuttoned shirts, and overused
slippers, a language as intimate, as natural, and as necessary as the odor of
one’s sheets, of one’s closets, of one’s cooking. They returned to it after
speaking French, with the gratified relief of left-handed people who, once in
private, are no longer forced to do things with their right.”
Attacking Black English is not only hateful and harmful. It also
indicates ignorance of both the nature of language itself, and of the history
of peoples and languages.
It should be by now a truism that no language is superior to
any other. All languages have the same capabilities and limitations. Because
there is so little genetic variation among humans as to be absolutely
negligible, all humans, which we now know thanks to Noam Chomsky, are born with
the same cognitive/linguistic capability—universal grammar is part of the human
genetic endowment, regardless as to what kind or color of person you are.
Essentially, we’re all genetically hardwired to speak the same pan-human
language, with minor variations. Thus, there’s no reason to believe that any
language is of lesser or greater value.
I would also argue that Black English isn’t a degraded or
incorrect form of English, but that it is the distinctive language of a
discrete nationality. African Americans are in America ,
but not entirely of America .
They have been, historically, excluded from the mainstream, sequestered to
enclaves and, within those enclaves, speaking a language embedded in which is a
distinctive culture and history.
Black English, like all languages, is a product of the
history of its speakers. English, for example, is the
Celtic/German/Latin/Norman French mishmash that it is because of all the things
that happened to the English people—and, like Black English, it was once the
derided language of a downtrodden people.
After the Norman invasion of 1066, English was the language
of conquered peasants. Norman French was the language of the overlords. Even
though English persisted (albeit with some modifications—we use English, “cow”
and “pig,” to describe the animal, but French, “pork” and “beef”, to describe
the meat. The peasants raised them, but the aristocrats ate them), French was
still the language of the court. It took a Shakespeare—a genius of low birth, writing
in the common, vulgar vernacular for the amusement of the common, vulgar
masses—to show that English could be used to express the most sublime ideas and
the most eloquent description of the human condition, and in doing so, to prove
that English had as much value as French.
Black English is no different. It reflects the unique
history of African Americans. Its vocabulary is, pretty much in its entirety,
English. Slave traders broke up groups who spoke the same languages and sold
them in different locations, on the not inaccurate assumption that it would be
more difficult for people who weren’t able to talk to each other to organize
and rebel.
Accordingly, English words were transposed on top of African
ones. But because most American slaves originated in western Africa ,
they spoke languages that belonged to the West African language family, which
all share a similar grammar. The verb “to be,” for example, is not conjugated
in the West African language family. Whereas we conjugate the verb (“I am,”
“she is,” “they are,”) the West Africans don’t bother. There’s no good reason
why they should, either. Conjugation adds little to language in either clarity
or expressiveness.
Displaced Africans, upon arriving here, replaced African
words with English ones—but the underlying West African grammatical structure
of their native languages persisted. Thus, when African Americans use sentences
like, “I be tired,” or “They be at the store,” it’s not lazy English—it’s an example
of the persistence of West African grammar. This persistence argues for its
robustness and resilience. Black English has a remarkable level of cohesion
with surprisingly little regional variation. In every major American city,
Black English is more or less the same—it retains the same cadence, syntax,
vocabulary, and even accent whether it’s spoken in New York, Chicago, Memphis,
Detroit, St. Louis, New Orleans, or Atlanta.
It wasn’t just grammar that persisted, either. Africans
brought with them a rich folklore which, like their language, morphed in
reaction to their new surroundings, but survived. Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle
Remus” stories, for example, originate in Africa .
Anansi, the Trickster Spider of West African folklore, became Brer Rabbit in
this country: African folklore, adapted to an American context.
These and other examples argue for Black English’s status as
a language in its own right. And those thinkers who coined the term “ebonics”
and attempted to codify it and to develop it as a literary language weren’t the
first to try this. It’s an idea with lots of historical precedent.
Take Czech, for example. Originally, it didn’t even have a
name. It was the language of the peasants of Bohemia , which itself was an unfashionable
backwater of the Hapsburg Empire—just another regional variant of the garbled
jumble of Slavic soup of East Central Europe.
But in 1846, the Czech intellectual Frantisek Palacky
decided that Czech wasn’t just a ragbag collection of grunts and gutturals
spoken by uneducated pig farmers or the illegitimate cousin of Russian and
Polish. It was the language of a people, with their own unique history and
culture. He began writing in Czech, founded journals in it, and used it to tell
the story of his people. A century later, it is the language of Milan Kundera,
of Vaclav Havel, of Nobel Prizewinner Jaroslav Seifert, and of Jaroslav Hacek,
the author of Good Soldier Svejk, one
of the truly towering works of comic literature in the human canon.
Yiddish is another example. In the 19th century,
damn near no one liked it, including those who spoke it. It was the ebonics of
German, a degraded form of German written in a degraded form of Hebrew, the
language of a despised and persecuted people.
German Jews, who’d abandoned it a long time ago, were deeply
embarrassed by their Eastern coreligionists’ Yiddish, calling it a “piggish
jargon.” The “better class” of Russian Jews also detested their own mother
tongue, and called for their brethren to abandon it and start speaking Russian.
Hebraists and Zionists, embarrassed by its ghetto/shtetl associations, called
for Hebrew—the language of Moses, the Prophets, King David, and a bunch of
other people who may well have never existed—as the “official” Jewish language.
But writers like Mendele Mocher Sforim, S. An-Sky, Y.L.
Peretz, Sholem Asch, and ultimately, Nobel Prizewinner Isaac Bashevis Singer thought
differently. They recognized its value as the language of the Diaspora, reveled
in its pungent expressiveness, and began writing in it.
Black English hasn’t yet found its Shakespeare—that writer
who uses it to create works of such power that it cannot be ignored. There are
plenty of artists working in it and using rap as a medium, but I’m fearful that
rap’s too-rapid commercialization and subsequent bowdlerizing will bastardize
it and sap its vigor before its potential is realized. And in any case, Black
English is going to need a novel or thirty before most people admit that, like
English, Czech, and Yiddish, it’s an appropriate vehicle for expression and a
language of its own, and worthy of respect.
In the meantime, however, neither Black English nor its
practitioners should be mocked. It’s not a zero-sum game—African American
children can, and should, learn standard English—but the development of Black
English does not have to come at the expense of teaching proper English. Its
development as a literary language should be encouraged. And those of us who
don’t speak it should consider ourselves fortunate to live in a time when we
might actually witness the flowering of a new literary language coming into its
own.
