This book begins with my essay, Content
in Context: Why is There a Furor Over
Ebonics
? My essay situates the controversy
about Ebonics within the context to understand the explicit and implicit
content of the debate. The presentation of a historical continuum
helps the reader to see where
human communicative behavior
began
in Africa, its development and spread to other parts of the continent
and the Diaspora
. This essay also brings into bright focus the prolonged conflict between
imperial, white supremacist hegemony
and its unrelenting intention to
subject African
people to domination by imposing European culture and language. I
argue that attempts to dismiss Ebonics as a legitimate language
of African descended people are efforts to negate the universal
memory of African people. If Ebonics can be dismissed and marginalized, then
all other members of the African family of languages
are ultimately doomed to the same fate.
The next
piece, From
Medew
Netjer
to
Ebonics,
essayed by Kimani Nehusi, recasts the entire debate about the newest
member of the African
family of languages
in its proper context by
beginning at the beginning. Nehusi focuses our attention on the
historicity, multidimensional relationship
and connection of African languages between the oldest known member
in the African language family, the Medew Netjer, from the ancient
Nile Valley
culture, to the newest member, Ebonics. Among the many areas of
investigation, Nehusi examines the social history of Afrikan languages,
while forging into bold relief how the double standards used in the
classification of a language shifts from grammar when classifying European languages to lexicon
as the sole criterion for defining African
languages, including Ebonics. Additionally, Nehusi addresses other neglected
areas of importance in this debate such as the Afrikan universal linguistic
behaviours,
spirituality, spirituality and words, names
and naming, gender, reduplication, space and time
dimensions, lexical items,
orthography, humor, and non-verbal
communication
.
Ernie A. Smith
provides a penetrating analysis of the
double standards at work in the misclassification
of Ebonics
and in the discrimination
against speakers of Ebonics and teachers proficient in the
language, Ebonics. In his essay,
Ebonics and Bilingual Education of the African
American Child, Smith
launches the strongest challenge to the use of the phrase “Black
English” and the tacit assumption that
Ebonics is English, and, as such, there
exists, ipso facto a genetic kinship between “Black English”
and the Germanic language family
to
which English belongs. By using the criteria of common origins and
continuity in the rules of grammar, Smith presents a clear argument that
Ebonics belongs to the African family of languages, exposing how Black
English and other such names of African
American Vernacular English
constitute misnaming and inappropriate synonyms for Ebonics. He
supports his argument with ample examples of Africanism
in the linguistic patterns by speakers of Ebonics in the United States of America. On the
basis of this research, he shows a multiplicity of ways institutions and policy makers
sustain language discrimination against students and teachers who
speak Ebonics and thereby, contravene federal, state, and local policies as
well as the US Constitution.
Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay’s essay, Linguistic
Dimensions
of Global Africa: Ebonics
as International Languages of African Peoples,
is most arresting because it takes the conversation around Ebonics into the
international arena while examining the
two major paradigmatic approaches used for research and articulation:
(a) an archaic discourse about Africans from the standpoint of the European
in the role of the dominator; and (b) a new approach where African people,
including their languages, histories, and cultures, are studied from the
standpoint as subjects and not objects.
She expresses her disappointment over African descent
linguists participating in this debate who hesitate to acknowledge
Ebonics as international languages of African peoples because they (the
linguists) are experiencing nothing other
than a personal inferiority complex. Blackshire-Belay exposes the
reader to many ramifications of Ebonics, among them are the variables of
language contact
of Ebonics, symbol of cultural identity, controlling our own language, Ebonics for survival, proverbs, stories, and music with their Global African dimensions.
Another one
of the distinguished contributors to this work is the father of Ebonics, Robert Williams
. His essay,
Ebonics: Myths and Realities, dispels some of the fallacies about
Ebonics by setting the record straight on the myths and realities
surrounding Ebonics. Robert Williams
offers a historical sketch of the social history that led to the
coinage of the term Ebonics along with his extensive knowledge on the
subject. He presents some of the arguments that were
part of his testimony before the Congressional subcommittee
in Washington, D.C., during January 1997. Among his many
illustrations, Williams stresses
the
importance
of
recognizing the effective use of the child’s home language as a viable
pedagogical tool
.
As expected,
Keith Gilyard
adds his brilliant and colorful
insights to the debate. In his essay,
It Ain’t Hard
to Tell: Distinguishing Fact
from Fallacy in the Ebonics
Controversy,
Gilyard
succinctly
highlights
the controversy’s flimsy foundation precariously seated on
misinformation that blatantly ignores the voluminous body of documented
work. Gilyard interrogates the stance of Koch, Steele, and Jackson by using
them as examples of people who did not complete their homework before
declaring themselves language experts. By emphasizing, as part of his
discourse, how linguists are careful not to differentiate between a language
and a dialect by rating one as superior or inferior, Gilyard lays to rest
any misconception that Ebonics is inferior to English. Gilyard tantalizes
the reader with parts of his personal language voyage, while he argues for a
curriculum
that places the consciousness of the
student and teacher in the same domain.
Adding to the vanguard array of scholarship is
Geneva Smitherman’s,
A Commentary on Ebonics
: From a Ghetto Lady Turned Critical
Linguist. In her riveting piece, Smitherman takes the reader
along the path of her struggle. Smitherman shares the nature of her
struggle and how she became triumphant. On her journey, Smitherman
has fought to include the linguistic patterns
of
“Black
speech ” in the discourse of the academy
. She points out the dialectical relationship
between language and power, between
language and oppression, and between language and liberation. Smitherman
also highlights the Ebonics research tradition and her personal
encounter with language and liberation, from the Martin Luther King, Jr.
School
vs.
Ann Arbor School
District Case to the Oakland Unified School District’s policy initiative.
While she resolutely believes that the academy must validate the
language of African Americans in the curriculum, Smitherman stresses
that African descent
students must also express themselves well in the language of the
wider community
.
Arthur Spears
refers to the language used by many
African
Americans as African American
Vernacular English (AAVE
). In Spears’ essay, Ebonics
and
African American English, he
reports that scholars such as William Labov
, Walt Wolfram
, and William Stewart
led the pioneering empirical research in this field in the early
days while, later, scholars such as Smitherman, Rickford, Baugh
, and Spears continued the approximately thirty year-old tradition.
Indisputably, argues Spears, “the AAVE variety of English, like all language
varieties, is systematic and governed by its own set of grammatical rules
.” Simply put, the rules of AAVE grammar
and Standard English
are quite different. Spears challenges us with respect to his views
of Ebonics, contending that Ebonics is not a language, but rather a group
of languages and associated
communicative behaviors culled from several West African languages
. He believes that more field study is still needed to find out precisely in
what ways these languages are related, though it is understood how they are
related on a broad level.
Besides
sharing her intimate relationship with the profession of teaching and
learning
in general, Iona
Anderson-Janniere
interviewed by Andrée McLaughlin, presents her personal
odyssey of teaching, teacher-training activities and the experiences that
led her to investigating, discovering and exploring curriculum
needs for African
American students. Essentially, her
interview, Teaching Students of
Diverse
Language
Backgrounds,
focuses on the growing group
of language learners migrating or immigrating to the urban areas of
America, as well as the large numbers of African descent
students being pushed into special education classes because of the misclassification
of
Ebonics
as an inferior variety of English. Anderson relates her experience
as a teacher of English as a second language and English as a standard
dialect.
John Rickford, another one of the distinguished contributors to this
work, lends his extensive reservoir of information with respect to the
reaction and realities of teaching students whose first language is not
English. Rickford’s essay, Ebonics
and
Education: Lessons from the
Caribbean
, Europe
and
the USA, cites a similar proposal to the Oakland Unified School
District
from Trinidad and Tobago
, July 1975. He uses Carrington and Borely’s
(1997) study to contextualize his arguments in support of the
Oakland Unified School District’s initiative, thereby showing the proper
international ramification of OUSD’s bold stance. By virtue of
Rickford’s involvement with the SEP
initiative, a precursor to the final Oakland resolution
, he shares many of his insights, evidence of the value of unconventional
approaches that take into consideration the African
ancestry
students’ home language, contrastive analysis, and successful pedagogical approaches. His essay, like
all of the others in this volume, is illuminating, while redirecting our
sights from the over-sensationalized
, media-hyped
controversy to finding ways of helping our students gain mastery
over reading and writing skills. He points out that the crisis of poor
reading and writing skill is national in scope and it is not exclusive
to the African American
community.
