Ebonics as a Language:
Just because I’m on a roll pissing uptight White people off, here’s what I think about Ebonics. As I said before, many or most plantation owners would punish their Black slaves for speaking their native languages. That means that every group of people that immigrates to America (or had America brought to them) runs the risk of losing their cultural identity and their native languages, but the Blacks were forced to abandon their cultural identities in a way that no one else was. Every other ethnic group of people in America is descended from ancestors who didn’t speak English— or who spoke English differently, at the very least. Whether you talk about Italians, Poles, Jews, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexicans, Navaho, or anyone else, every group of people in America has a cultural identity that is defined at least in part by a foreign language, even if that language is Gaelic or Olde English.
That sense of cultural identity gives the people of a culture some sense of history. A sense of history gives the people of a culture some sense of where they came from and what led them to where they are now. Without that the people of a culture won’t have as much sense of direction, and consequently they won’t have as much sense of a future. It’s a simple principle of geometry that two points define a line. Over the course of an individual’s life or the life of a community, two things are usually known and one thing isn’t: the past and the present are known and the future isn’t. There you have two established points and a direction you’re trying to find. With those two points you can plot a line and be able to tell where it leads. If a culture of people—regardless of who it is—has had a lot of their past erased, is it any wonder that they should have trouble figuring out where to go from here?
Unlike every other ethnic group that came to America, the Blacks were forcibly severed from their cultural identity and native languages. So they did something that no other group did: They invented their own cultural identity, complete with their own version of English. If Black Americans have any native language to call their own, Ebonics is it.
Last I heard, some years ago, a bill to start teaching Ebonics as an official dialect of English in the California public school system was defeated. Around that same time a bill to allow government officials in Florida to conduct government business in Spanish passed. Okay, so let me get this straight: English is the official language of the United States, and the government’s official position is that Black children’s native dialect is improper English, but Spanish-speaking government officials should be allowed to conduct official government business in a language that isn’t any form of English at all.
What the f*ck?…
Of course, as long as democratically elected government officials are able to conduct government business in English, which I assume they are, and as long as the government business is being conducted, which I assume it is, does it really matter what language they conduct their business in?
On the other hand, does Ebonics need to be taught in school? It was invented by people who didn’t go to school, and the people who speak it don’t learn it by going to school. However, for the people who speak it, it is an important part of their culture, and they’re every bit as entitled to observe and be respected for their culture as every other American. So if you really want to teach native speakers of Ebonics something useful, why don’t you teach them Ebonics as a part of a class on how their culture came about? Every Black teenager in America knows their ancestors were enslaved by the Whites, but something that isn’t so obvious is how their people have endured and hung onto their human dignity in spite of having been enslaved. That’s every bit as much an accomplishment as the Whites conquering most of the world.
And of course, something like that doesn’t only apply to Ebonic culture. Anywhere you have a large minority population, you could teach a variation on that class. I know there are plenty of Native American teenagers in America who could sure use some good news about things their people have accomplished since being conquered. There are other schools with large populations of Asians, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, and French Canadians, just to name a few. For the people of those cultures, teaching them about the accomplishments of their own people would give them something to be proud of, and for the White neighbors of those people, it would help give them a reason to respect the minority culture as much as their own.
There’s been a debate for some time about how valid the traditional Euro-centric version of history taught in public schools really is. As the saying goes, history is always written by the winners. According to Euro-centric history, the Europeans and then the Americans are always the heroes, and everyone else are always the badguys, and whenever the European explorers or American settlers win it’s a victory, and whenever they lose it’s a defeat. Is that public school system version of history fair to the ever-increasing number of Americans whose ancestors didn’t come from Europe? Of course not. Some cultures get left out completely, and the rest get villanized. But here’s something I’ve never heard anyone mention about Euro-centric history: If you aren’t a European American, the story doesn’t have a happy ending. You ever wonder why so many minority Americans don’t seem to have any hope for the future? Maybe it’s because they— and the rest of the public— are taught to believe that their people have already lost.
But I’m getting way ahead of myself again…