File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-07.045, message 76


Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1997 00:37:59 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-I: Hooked on Ebonics



I intend to stay out of the "Ebonics" debate, but I myself would feel
seriously insulted, were I a Black student who spoke "ebonics" of Black
English, or whatever one calls it, and some honky teacher who had been
given some classes in this language or dialect came in an tried to talk
that way. Of course if the classes helped the white teachers understand
what I was saying, that wouldn't be a bad thing, as long as they didn't
come and and try to talk it. I would also feel seriously cheated, were I
Black student who had been brought up speaking "Ebonics" or whatever as my
mother tongue if I were not taught standard English in the class to the
point where I could speak it as well as anyone. If I didn't learn it, I
would be at a desperate disadvantage as regards opportunities for
employment and higher education. I think every Black person in America
knows this. This certaintly isn't to say that Black English is inferior,
it's just not standard and it's not the language of good jobs and
classrooms in good schools. No doubt it might be in a nonracist society,
but I wouldn't want to be sacrificed to that ideal if it meant I had no
chance to improve my lot in this society. But I'm not Black, so what do I
know?

--Justin (who trained himself out of a Southern accent and now speaks a
featurless transatlantic Ivy-League patois)

On Mon, 6 Jan 1997, rakesh bhandari wrote:

> Sterling, I am not African-American, so you may as well erase my comments
> on ebonics right now.
> 
> Hugh seems to be saying that African-American children should be taught the
> rudiments of a scientific world view in Black English, though few seem to
> be bothered by the segregration of black students this will entail. Which
> to me makes little sense because many students speak in the same damn way:
> why is it that only African-American students will be taught in ebonics in
> special classes?   Moreover,  this is not the most important way to connect
> with African-American students who understand English just fine. As I
> noted, the racism and exclusions of the outside, adult world; family and
> finanacial tensions; the overcrowdedness of classes; the shame of poverty;
> the topics and readings chosen for dicussion; the uncritical way textbooks
> are taught--all this contributes to the alienation of not only
> African-American youth but children in general.
> 
> Moreover, it can only be suspected that instruction in ebonics is a cover
> for deeply reactionary Afrocentricism; the Oakland school board is putting
> aside special money to hire Ebonics trained teachers. Frankly, this scares
> the shit out of me.  To be fair, I have learned that the word "genetic" has
> a specific meaning in historical linguistics and that the Oakland School
> Board may not be invoking a crude biological determinism by their claim
> that Ebonics is a genetic language--this has not been clarified in either
> the NYT or San Francisco Chronicle articles, which I have read.  However,
> the board has remained unclear about whether students will be encouraged to
> make a transition out of Ebonics or whether they will be encouraged to
> celebrate it.
> 
> I think this whole discussion avoids one of the most important
> concerns--that this  speech we are calling Ebonics bears the marks not of a
> West African language but of the linguistic subordination and mental
> obtuseness enslaved African-Americans were *forced* to demonstrate over
> centuries of oppression--indeed a commanding African-American English
> speaker has historically simply been a marked man, as a "uppity nigger."
> Can Ebonics thus be studied not for its roots in West Africa but for its
> servile characteristics? I have been asking this question since my first
> post, and so far I don't think I have got a straight answer.  Remember,
> African-Americans left West Africa a few centuries ago and we should not
> abstract the study of language (in this case Black English) from the
> relations of domination in which it has developed. It is only in this
> context that we can understand the beauty of the resistance which it
> demonstrates, as well as its servile characterstics--while purging
> ourselves of nostalgia for the conditions in which the language developed.
> But in all honesty, I do not anything about linguistic theory.
> 
>    Of course, by not encouraging the full command over the English
> language, the Board may leave the children with the prospect of having to
> accept those jobs at the toxic site dumps and the road sites (I think Tim's
> concerns here are quite valid). Indeed this is what a lot of parents are,
> to put it mildly, freaking out about.
> 
> Moreover, I don't think the Ebonic return to a mythical West African past
> or the undialectical attempt to demonstrate the continuity of this mythical
> West African essence in everything African-Americans have said, created or
> done over the last four hundred years (see the lunatic writings of
> Afrocentric granddaddy Molefi Asante who  supported UNITA in Angola as
> Farrakhan has kissed the boots of every African fascist) or the attempt to
> conceptualize American history as the ceaseless unfolding of the same
> unchanging and unchangeable logic of "race relations" and racial
> motivations is the way to reach students; it is a way to mystify them about
> society, historical developments and discontinuities and their own
> potentials for transformation, exploration and change. And it is a way to
> mystify them about the inevitability and desirability of segregration.
> There is nothing great about Ebonics or Afrocentricism.
> 
>   This Ebonics program is not about teaching children--all children, as it
> should be--about the cultural history of the blues and its impact on
> working class culture as a whole, African-American poetry or teaching
> students a critical history of the working class and American racism.
> 
> In Sweden, Hugh may have little knowledge about the pernicious,
> destructive, asinine, idiotic ravings of Afrocentrics, who subscribe to
> such insanity as a melanin theory of behavior (this is why I don't think it
> is outlandish to fear that biological determinism may be at work in some of
> these claims about Ebonics) and claim that there are essential African
> characteristics indeed hardwired into black kids alone (like a preference
> for oral over written expression; obedience to charismatic black
> chieftains; and the experience of mental oneness over revolutionary changes
> of the material world and social relations); and Justin is correct, they
> are also racists and often viciously anti-semitic.   This is no way to
> reach African-American students, it is a way however to set them back and
> deliver them into a lunatic world of self-imposed social isolation, limited
> access to the world's cultural inheritance (which belongs to no one and
> everyone),  fantastic conspiracy thinking,  biological determinism and
> ignorance.
> 
> Rakesh
> 
> 
> 
> 
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