For those of you who are NOT UC Santa Cruz Community Studies majors, Ebonics is the dopey name a bunch of academics gave to black vernacular English, a non-standard variety of English spoken in inner cities populated by African-Americans. Apparently, DEA needs these folks to help monitor wiretaps.
Give me a break!
When I was a DEA agent, we had plenty of black agents who could go into the inner city and buy dope undercover all day. They could use both varieties of English.
More importantly, it's too bad the suits at DEA decided to use that ridiculous term. That's nothing, however. I can remember when some academics were proposing that "Ebonics" be taught in high school and college as a valid foreign language. How demeaning is that?
Not that I have anything against non-standard varieties of any language. (I learned Papiamentu, which is a creole.) They are a valid means of communication. In a sense we all mix standard and non-standard language depending on the social situation. Yet, we must all know that using non-standard varieties can be devastating to any hopes of a career if you can't also use standard English. Indeed, any effort to raise a non-standard variety of English to the same plane as standard English only does a disservice to those speakers (in this case, African-Americans).
But that's not fair, you say. It is discriminatory. It is racist. Hogwash. It's no different than telling a dock worker in Marseilles that he needs to be able to use Parisian French (the standard) if he wants to rise into the higher socio-economic strata. Fair or not, it's reality. We are all judged on how we speak our native tongue.
But to Hell with reality. Here we have some academics encouraging the promotion of a non-standard variety of English. Why?
Political correctness.
4 comments:
There is no such thing as Ebonics. There are certain speech patterns dominant among the lower classes of Devon and London, who were the most likely to be shipped out to America as slaves (called "servants," but so were the first Africans, and a majority didn't survive their seven year plus indentures).
These are the people many, not all, of the earliest arrivals from African learned English from. This pattern of speech persists in some communities dominated by Americans of African descent today. It should be called "Devonian," not "Ebonics."
Tell the people in any black community in America that there is no such thing as Ebonics. In fact, there was a proposal that it be recognized and taught in schools!
My teacher friend, who knows Spanish, says that the kids in her class use a Spanish Ebonics version that she can barely understand.
True, dat.
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Well, I don't have a pulpit from which I can speak to "the people," as a unit, in "any black community," but I have volunteered at a Boys and Girls Club and attended churches in more than one community where the overwhelming majority of residents are of African descent, freely denying that there is any such thing as a "white" person or a "black" person, or that there is any such thing as "Ebonics." I'm still alive, and even unbruised, and I haven't lost any friends.
I recall a young lady who was saying to a friend "I do not talk white." I turned around and said "Of course you don't, white is a color, talking is done with sound, sound don't have no color." She smiled and said "You know what I mean." I smiled back and said "Yes, and you know what I mean."
I recall with some tenderness the day I overheard another young lady repeat to her younger cousins something I had once said to her, "See this patent leather purse? My hand is not the color of this purse. See this piece of paper. Siarlys is not the color of that piece of paper."
Lighten up Miggie, it does a world of good to simply relax and talk to people.
Oh, and the time a pastor read a Biblical passage with the syntax "I be not..." He paused and asked "I wonder where our kids learned to talk like that? Maybe they've been reading the Bible." Or, maybe the syntax still used in many "black" communities is modified 17th century late Middle English, roughly the same dialect common when the King James Version was written.
There is no language called Ebonics. It is bad English.
Go to an interview for a Fortune 500 company and speak Ebonics. You will end up cleaning the floors.
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