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EBONICS........What do you think?
There is a lot of talk about Ebonics these days....most of us have our own opinion on this subject....some of us don't care....some of us.....are concerned about the direction this country is headed in........I like to place myself in the first and last category.......
Here is an article I ran across in our local newspaper...I have to agree with this side of it....please keep in mind while reading this article....it was written by an "African-American", "Black Man"...or whatever is "politically correct" these days....
EBONICS IS WRONG FOR BLACKS
"Who is you?"
A young black girl asked me that as I entered a classroom in Miami several years ago. Appalled, I instinctively looked to her teacher in anticipation of the correction to come.
But, the teacher's only response was to answer the ill-spoken inquiry.
I've always wondered why. did the woman think the girl incapable of asking properly? Or did she simply not care? I never found an answer, but the questions seem appropraite all over again with the recent news that Oakland, CA schools have chosen to recognize black English as a second language, a decision ridiculed by everyone from Jesse Jackson to NAACP chief Kwesi Mfume to Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, who this week said federal funds cannot be used for bilinqual education aid for students who use this "slanguage".
Your humble correspondent has exhausted his thesaurus looking fo r the word that best describes what he thinks of this. Absurd, asinine, imbecilic and moronic all come to mind.
Most of all, though, this is insulting. Deeply, profoundly insulting. In what is ostensibly an attempt to help black children, Oakland educators have chosen to codify and legimitize their alienation and isolation from the American mainstream.
Don't get me wrong. I love and speak black English, that idiom that resulted when whites, newly arrived from places like France and Germany, attempted to teach English to blacks newly stolen from Africa. It tickles me to know that the verb "to be" does not conjugate in some African languages and that this tendency survives in black American speech.
But, for the most part, commerce in this country is conducted in English, not black English. To say that black kids must be taught English as a second language suggests that the neighborhoods they come from - South-Central Los Angeles, Harlem, Liberty City - are foreign nations.
It's not that I don't understand the isolation of poor black neighborhoods. I was raised in one of them. But, if some people who live there believe those things and if they speak a version of English that emphasizes their sense of remove, it's not because they are incapable of anything elsed, but because they have not "learned" anything else.
It's because no parents have bothered to correct them and no preacher has challenged the notion that standard English is a language spoken only by prentenders and whites. It's because it is possible for a black child to say, "Who you is?" in front of her teacher - her "teacher!" - and not be corrected.
An Oakland school board member told reporters that correcting black kids is "not culturally respectful." Yeah, maybe so. Maybe there is a risk that some kids will be alienated if you correct them. But....there is an ironclad "guarantee" of alienation...if you don't.
So....why don't we demand better?
Easy, we have become too comfortable treating underclass black people as strangers impervious to assimilation, socialization and education. If you don't believe that, ask yourself this: Why hasn't anyone offered bilingual education to underperforming children of the white rural south who may be handicapped by their dialect?
The key to improving black academic performance lies not in further marginalizing black children. Rather, it is in believing - "knowing" with ferocious certainty - that they are as capable as anyone.
Frankly, I'm not so sure Oakland does.
Written by Leonard Pitts, Miami Herald
