Anre S. Morain

Freshman Composition English

Prof. Brenna Crowe

11/18/2020

Across history, Africans and their diaspora have had a large influence over entire cultures the most notable being the manipulation of language. The most famed examples being Haitian creole and Jamaican Patois, but these kinds of African inspired dialects even affect entire countries. Several different dialects of Arabic exist because of these diasporic differences and yet to the American people for almost a century the notion of Ebonics being considered a language is appalling. This sentiment shared by many in professional spaces is both disrespectful and harmful to the African American community. I believe that Ebonics has a rich and deep history in doing exactly what languagess were made to do and for those reasons I believe it deserves to stand along Standard English not as a perversion from the truth but another Language separate yet similar. In the Chapter “‘Are You Bilingual Like Me Miss Johnson?’: Ebonics Revisited” by Kitty Kelly Epstein and the piece “Liberating American Ebonics from Euro-English.” by Arthur L. Palacas we explore the syntax differences between ebonics and standard English and the differences between how they are treated in professional spaces.

And in “Are Billingual Like Me Miss Johnson?: Ebonics Revisited”  we see how the dialect of Ebonics was initially treated in professional kids, specifically in the teaching of children. We see national outrage as white teachers speak on their fear of being overwritten and a smaller less noticeable wave of shock and pride from African-American teachers that a black person had enough influence to shake the system so significantly. What followed the initial reaction really sets the tone for Ebonics as a dialect. Nothing but purposeful ignorance and insults are thrown towards the dialect and the people who use it. The discussions on the use and influence of Ebonics started a media race riot where everyone was speaking on the notion of teaching ebonics in schools for certain types of literature. According to this piece most of the arguments used came from a place of misunderstanding and ignorance. The people opposed to the teaching of ebonics, or rather the use of ebonics as a teaching tool in school, were often not studied in linguistical studies like the former United States Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley and the former NY Governor Mario Cuomo. Anyone who has studied Literature can see the use of ebonics to show the culture of the people in the setting but also the cultural significance that it has in many spaces.

“Nobody Mean More To Me Than You And The Future Life of Willie Jordan” by June Jordan illustrates what I mean perfectly. Having realized that none of her students were fluent in reading books written in the ebonics featured in “The Color Purple”(Jordan 2), June Jordan steers the class away from formal standard English opting instead to study the characteristics of ebonics. She spends a hefty portion of the story explaining the rules for ebonics and how they came up with them. In the very creation of these rules, we can see that ebonics has not only hints of structure but a certain fluidity to its flow, we can see just how easy it was for them to come up with these rules (Jordan 4-5) because they more or less already existed, thus strengthening my notion the ebonics is and always has been a language in and of itself. Examining the rules themselves as someone who does speak ebonics you can see that even ebonics has its own regional differences from the different cities they were spawned in. Rules such as “If it’s wrong in Standard English it’s probably right in Black English, or you’re hot” make this regional difference strikingly apparent because while this may be true further in the south or further in the past, current-day Northern ebonics will more or less follow basic grammar and syntax while redefining words and mixing up certain phrases. These differences cement even further the status that ebonics should have as a dialect of English rather than cast aside as garbage or waste to beat out of kids from an early age. The notion that the people who speak this language are meant to be reeducated or retaught the English language is plain disrespectful to the very roots of the language. A language created with artistry and creativity, born from the mixing of slaves and seeped in perseverance.

This perseverance can be seen in works like “Whitey on the Moon” by Gil Scott-Heron. This piece was written using euphemisms commonplace in places where ebonics was used. The piece speaks on the class struggle faced by many in the black community wherein they see these wonders funded by the gov’t but can’t afford to pay rent because of taxes imposed upon them by the state that doesn’t let them see the fruits of their labor. The story told by Gil Scott-Heron’s poem “Whitey on the Moon” is faced by many people in the black community today, it’s message is conveyed powerfully using ebonics structure. Just like messages that only work told in eastern languages this story about the strife of the black person in America could only be told in ebonics.

There are so many other stories like this, stories that can only be told in ebonics and the several other pidgin languages of the African diasporas, and many people hold the firm belief that they should be taught in school. Like young Ms. Morgan Gill who contest that Ebonics having is own distinct grammar and syntax giving it validity as a language that deserves to be called as such. In her TED talk she examines commonalities among the many variations of ebonics and how they are still used to communicate deep and serious messages like police brutality and oppression by citing artist like Kendrick Lamar who have won Pulitzers. Despite the success of Ebonics as a tool in communication, which is what language as a whole is Intrinsically for, there are many who dont take the integration of it in school well even if it would mean students who speak ebonics would better understand topics.

In “Liberating American Ebonics from Euro-English” by Arthur L. Palacas we see how just how well an even lightly ebonics influenced curriculum was received by the people in and outside of Oakland, and how Influential ebonics as a whole has been on the people of America. In this piece, we begin with the nature of ebonics and fundamental misunderstandings that clouded the social impacts of the study of ebonics. These misunderstandings were that 1) Ebonics and Standard English have similar deep structures and 2) Ebonics is highly variable, displaying alternations along with a continuum of standard, standard-like, and non-standard forms. We see the differences in the English rules for grammar and the ebonics rules for grammar highlighted for the next three pages, such as the non-existence of plural and the non-existence of subject-verb agreement. The rest of the piece dives into a Chomskyan approach to the typology between the two ( Ebonics and Standard English). That’s twice in this essay that researchers have observed a structural influence of African languages on Standard English with the end result being Ebonics both citations from two separate research journals. The nature of these two research journals is based in study of not just ebonics and its impact but the impact of the world on ebonics. One could argue that the as the use of Ebonics grew and became more of a cultural phenomenon ebonics itself turned into a more tame and understandable language to be repackage as “internet slang” wen the internet eventually rolled around, but thats a little too far from my thesis to explore so instead I will see how introducing ebonics to the professional eye effected the professionals that criticized it and ebonics itself mainly in the context of the oakland school system but also in context of famous speaker such as James Baldwin and Toni Morrison Who are cited often by even these scholarly sources. 

To give some context about the nature of the of the statistics I suppose I should speak on the actual incident that called for them to be made. In 1996, the Oakland School Board in Oakland, California passed a resolution regarding a linguistic variety known as “ebonics”, This resolution being that Ebonics in the school board would be classified as a language. This resolution would have many practical implications i.e. teachers with knowledge of Ebonics could potentially be paid more, funds would be used to teach all non Ebonics speaking teachers Ebonics, and this knowledge of Ebonics would be applied in teaching students Standard English. Instead of treating Ebonics as a lazy form of English, it would be recognized and respected as a legitimate form of language in its own right, with patterns and systematicity equal to those of Standard English. Students who speak Ebonics at home would not be required to learn Standard English seemingly by osmosis, but rather would be taught the specifics of the standard dialect explicitly as to learn both fluidly. Now this resolution sparked outrage nation-wide because many felt that we were lowering our standards of English by allowing Ebonics to be considered a Language in its own right and it wasn’t just racists and bigots who held this belief. Famous Black Voices akin to Maya Angelou and Jesse Jackson also felt this way about the topic, which inevitably emboldened others namely Mario Cuomo and the entire Clinton Administration to also speak on this “issue”. When all was done you had sll these people who use language to their benefit but do not study it and it’s origins passing judgement on what is and isn’t a language, One could argue that their pervasive and persuasive use of language makes their input valid if not highly respected but one would not expect a carpenter to teach a blacksmith how to make his tools for the carpenter works wood and not the metal he works wood with. It is said in best in a 1979 writing by James Baldwin, “People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. (And, if they cannot articulate it, they are submerged.) A Frenchman living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man living in Marseilles; neither sounds very much like a man living in Quebec; and they would all have great difficulty in apprehending what the man from Guadeloupe, or Martinique, is saying, to say nothing of the man from Senegal–although the “common” language of all these areas is French. But each has paid, and is paying, a different price for this “common” language, in which, as it turns out, they are not saying, and cannot be saying, the same things: They each have very different realities to articulate, or control.” This paragraph sums up the entirety of language creation and later on in this writing Baldwin states that since Ebonics came from the slave necessity to communicate discretely and succintly and their only resources being the bible (which many couldnt read) and their old tribal languages (that varied from slave to slave) it deserves possibly more than other languages the title of language. This is also given merrit when writers like Toni Morrison, who write in ebonics for portions of their books and dialouges, are given high praise for exemplary writing. If the language they were writing in is sub par to Standrad English then how did it do the job that language is meant to do. The syntax and structure make sense on a analytical level so what issue would directors of education have with Ebonics in school aside from blatant bigotry. Even a look at stats for other languages will tell you that there’s more good than harm being done by allowing this type of learning, as seen in “ Validating the Power of Bilingual Schooling: Thirty-Two Years of Large-Scale, Longitudinal Research” (Collier, V., & Thomas, W. 1-4). 

We can see with certainty the benefits of teaching through Ebonics, not only on the merits of assisting students who already speak it but also the plethora of stories that can be told with it. We can see the very culture imbued into the words spoken even today, how the growth and use changed to suite the need of the people like any language should. The lessons than can be learned through the use of Ebonics are just as interesting if not more than English on the basis of relevancy and influence. This language bred from resilience and hardship is more than deserving of the moniker of language.

Works Cited

1. Gill, Morgan. “African American Vernacular English.” TED, TEDxYouth@RMSST , Mar. 2019, www.ted.com/talks/morgan_gill_african_american_vernacular_english. 
2. Collier, V., & Thomas, W. (2017). Validating the Power of Bilingual Schooling: Thirty-Two Years of Large-Scale, Longitudinal Research. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 37, 203-217. doi:10.1017/S0267190517000034
3. Jordan, June. “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You And the Future Life of Willie Jordan.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 58, no. 3, 1988, pp. 363–375., doi:10.17763/haer.58.3.d171833kp7v732j1. 
4. Scott-Heron, Gil. Whitey on the Moon. Youtube, Ace Records Ltd, 19 Aug. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4. 
5. Palacas, Arthur L. “Liberating American Ebonics from Euro-English.” College English, vol. 63, no. 3, 2001, pp. 326–352. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/378997. Accessed 27 Oct. 2020.
6. Robin R. Means Coleman, and Jack L. Daniel. “Mediating Ebonics.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 2000, pp. 74–95. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2645933. Accessed 27 Oct. 2020.

James Baldwin (1997) If Black English isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?, The Black Scholar, 27:1, 5-6, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.1997.11430831