Date: 05 Jan 97 04:53:04 EST
Subject: M-G: ebonics


dear friends,

 Bob Malecki and a couple others say that criticizing the (strikebreaking)
Oakland , Ca.  schoolboard and others for pandering  to the
patois of "ebonics" as some panacea   to cover up these bourgeois
politicians   caving in to the  gutting out of funding for english  language,
 ESL, Head start and other  moderately successful programs
is racism or the  politics of the 'white middle class'.

Bullshit Bob! Try  Preaching  your liberal platitudes and panderings
to black students in LA or Oakland Schools who are sick and tired
of being dissed( whoops !!) by the upper middle class forces  who
sit on these school boards  and who go along with 90% of 
of Pete Wilson's and the Calif. Legislatures cutting hundreds 
of millions of dollars out of school budgets over the last 6 years.

Along with the bourgeois programme of making the workers 
paying for more 'public' monies tranferred to the rich.
Many black , white, latin  and other working class  students 
are facing a dummying-down of public education into previously
latent but now more blatant 3 or 4 tiered public education based
directly not just on race, but class as well.

In LA as well as Oakland here in Calif, many  black public school students
and parents themselves  have denounced the use of "ebonics" as part
of this dummying- down  process for working class students . 
With all the budget cuts and class over crowding.
(Typical  HS English classes pushing 40  students in LA and Oakland
 public schools!)
Use of Ebonics will more likely just use up more precious class time 
and in this education for the capitalist  market system , leave  many
working class black youth  falling even further behind the higher tiers
of  the "separate and unequal" "schools" in the phony 
"bourgeois " equality of the present  public education system.
Educators  like Jonathon Kozol  (Savage Inequalities) have shown have
tiered the education funding and training structure to serve the needs
of the bourgeois corporations, who as they need LESS skilled ghetto  labor,
and LESS educated black workers who  are a key  potential volcano
of workers rebellion of   past and future, are truly ghettoizing the level
of  "education' for workers to correspond to THEIR profit needs and 
the needs of social control as well.

If "ebonics' use by teachers  can  combat elitism and bring the 
teachers , TAs, classified employees,  students and working class
 parents together to fight for quality education in the inner cities, then
 that would would be a big step forward for the black and other working
 class forces, who have taken defeat after defeat from the rich and their state
here in Cali f .and other states over th past 5 years.. 

But to promote the use of  "ebonics" (patois) as a  second  language  and make
pseudo scientific defenses of it, e.g  "Ebonics is genetically based 
language in African Americans with origins in Africa" ( Arguments so absurd that

even the board members  are retracting them now!!) is to fall into 
a real trap of reactionary "eugenics" thinking . This is however ,
where so many  nationalist supporters of separatism/segregation, usually  
mainly white  racist exploiters but now with a coterie of black  nationalists 
sucking up for a bigger piece of capitalist pie, are taking us.


Neil



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