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 too.
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 SchoolDistrict 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.
