Why Ebonics Shouldn't Be Dissed.

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 19^th 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.