Black English Has Its Place

Like thousands of middle class and middle class-aspiring African Americans, I was taught throughout childhood to loathe black English. I was taught it was a lazy tongue, used by people too “low class” to learn the proper way to speak: Speaking black English would lower me in the eyes of society, and would deprive me of ever getting a good education or a good job.

But in the hallways and on the basketball court of my Chicago high school or with my Mississippi-born grandparents, if I didn’t speak and understand black English, I never would have been heard.

I was not alone in my ambivalence. Amy Tan, author of “The Joy Luck Club,” says in her essay “Mother Tongue:” “When I was young, my mother’s English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English.” So many African Americans can relate to those words. Shame when a prominent black said words in the wrong way with the wrong syntax or agreement. Shame when the pretty girlfriend spoke the wrong English in front of your parents. The English I learned on the basketball court was wrong. And like Tan’s mother, those who used it were limited in the perceptions of others.

Part of me, then, can understand the reactions of many Americans, some of them black, over the recent Oakland school board decision to teach black English--”Ebonics”--to teachers and counselors. In the critics’ view, teaching black English gives respectability to “jive” and “street” talk. But after 14 years of teaching in urban colleges with disproportionate numbers of inner-city students, the other part of me has learned a thing or two.

The American Speech, Language and Hearing Assn. classifies black English as a “legitimate social dialect with unique lexicon, grammar, phonology, syntax and semantics.” Black English is already respectable. It’s in the music. And from there it has enriched the fabric of American English. Black English is in jazz. Among the hundreds of the jazz world’s words that have filtered into the American lexicon are “hip,” “cool,” “gig”’ “jiving around,” “get high” and “gimme five.” Black English is in blues and soul, giving America expressive, often sensual, words and phrases like “hot,” “baby,” “mojo,” “fine,” “mess with,” “thang” (as in doin’ my), “take it easy,” “slick,” “rip-off,” “cool out” and “bad.” Black English is in Negro spirituals (“Dat Ole Man River,” “Ah Got Shoes”). It is in gospel (“Ain’t No Devil in Hell Gonna Walk on the Jesus in Me”) and through these mediums of expression has found a home in the vernacular of the black church. Black English is in rap and hip hop. Surveys show that the heroes of many of today’s inner-city students are not Martin Luther King Jr. or Jesse Jackson but people with names that are more like prison monikers: Do or Die, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Ice-T, Notorious Big.

Students bewilder their older teachers with words like “def,” “dis,” “hit the skins,” “b-boys and fly girls,” “peel a cap.” Add to this the more familiar but disrespected grammatical, syntactic and pronunciation characteristics of black English, and the tendency is to dismiss such talk as irrelevant, subcultural or gang-related.

In my developmental composition and English 101 classes, I use black English and “Spanglish” to point out how multilingual the students are, how richly creative and inventive their culture is and how their words can be translated into standard English so the majority of Americans might understand their written or spoken material.

Isn’t that what the Oakland school board envisions? In a district where 53% of the students--but a disproportionate 71% of the special education classes--are African American, the board is admitting that present methods of instruction are failures. The issue of usage should be centered on appropriateness. Standard English is clearly the road to acceptance and power in the workplace, the boardroom, the university. The key, however, is that people should not be made to feel ashamed of their home English or mother tongue. As Tan puts it, “Language is the tool of my trade, and I use them all--all the Englishes I grew up with.”