← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · kminta
Thread ID: 4418 | Posts: 12 | Started: 2003-01-11
2003-01-11 01:57 | User Profile
Anybody remember the whole "Ebonics" fiasco some several years back? Not one of the finest moments in our country's education system. Elizabeth Wright eloquently shares her opinion (and mine) on this controversial topic.
[url=http://]http://www.issues-views.com/index.php/sect/2004[/url]
[Reprinted from Issues & Views Winter 1997]
Wasn't the whole point of the Oakland school board's acknowledgment of Ebonics as a genetically-based black language system to give us all a hearty, thigh-slapping laugh? No sooner did we take them up on their contribution to the nation's humor than they went and got all serious on us, declaring that we just didn't get it. Well, a lot of college students got it well enough to create some of the most clever and pertinent satire. And, of course, the internet was flooded with parodies and witticism. In fact, an Ebonics page has sprung up that offers Ebonic translations of the great literary classics, from Plato to Shakespeare to Milton.
But on college campuses, students soon learned that they do not possess such of parody. At Cornell, a student newspaper published an imaginary course description rendered in Ebonics, part of which reads, "Da white man be evil an he tryin to keep da brotherman down." You can guess what happened next. Two hundred copies of the paper were burned, the administration denounced the newspaper's writers for "race-baiting and stereotyping," while some indignant students even called for a "speech code." At Dartmouth, a student newspaper ran a full column written in Ebonics, which set off a firestorm and brought administrative punishments.
Apparently, it's okay for the members of the Oakland school board to put forth an utterly preposterous notion, in order to extort federal bilingual funds, but it is incorrect to respond, in kind, to their nuttiness. Moral for the Oakland school board, and others that may have similar plans--Don't start what you don't wish others to finish.
Copyright é 2001 Issues & Views
2003-01-11 02:35 | User Profile
I remember the "niggardly" flap in DC about this time, and the black man who sued Microsoft for $40 million in "emotional damage" because he misspelled "Niger" river with two g's and found several listings in the Encarta encyclopedia.
2003-01-11 03:44 | User Profile
Something about "ebonics" you'll find of interest. I give you the Song of Solomon, suitably translated:
De Song of songs, dat is Solomon's, Let him kiss me wud de kisses of his mouth; for yer love is better dan wine Cause of de smell of yer good intments, yer naum is lik intment tipped out; derefore de maidens love ye... Look not upan me, cause I be black, cause de sun has shouun upan me; my mother's childun was mad wud me; dey maud me kipper of de vineyards; but myt own vineyard I han't kept... My beloved spoke, an said to me; Git up, my love, my fiar un, an come away... Jews a liddle while ahter I passed by em, I foun him day my soul loves...
Here's the punchline. That's not ebonics. That's the dialect of rural Sussex, England, as compiled by an antiquarian in the middle of the Nineteenth Century - a time when said dialect had almost become extinct.
Southwestern England, which encompasses Sussex, was the region that most of the planters of tidewater Virginia came from. They didn't speak in this peasant dialect, but the indentured servants and other lower-class people they brought with them in the 17th Century did. The African slaves picked up the language of those whites whom in they replaced in menial labor. So chalk up another for Whitey: we invented ebonics as well!
Source: page 260 of David Hackett Fischer's invaluable [url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195069056/qid=1042256300/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-6613852-7649764?v=glance&s=books]Albion's Seed.[/url]
2003-01-11 04:00 | User Profile
Southwestern England, which encompasses Sussex, was the region that most of the planters of tidewater Virginia came from. They didn't speak in this peasant dialect, but the indentured servants and other lower-class people they brought with them in the 17th Century did. The African slaves picked up the language of those whites whom in they replaced in menial labor. So chalk up another for Whitey: we invented ebonics as well!
;) Not one of Whitey's greatest contributions to history now, is it?.
2003-01-11 04:13 | User Profile
Not one of Whitey's greatest contributions to history now, is it?
Nope - it's just a very localized rustic patois that snuffed it about the time Thomas Hardy was learning to shave. I just find it extremely amusing that Congoids have elevated it to a central part of their identity. :D
2003-01-11 04:31 | User Profile
Nope - it's just a very localized rustic patois that snuffed it about the time Thomas Hardy was learning to shave. I just find it extremely amusing that Congoids have elevated it to a central part of their identity.
:angry: Not this Congoid, mister!!!
2003-01-11 05:05 | User Profile
I showed a black co-worker the quote from Albion's Seed. He had...mixed feelings about it. And I read a black professor go on about how the transference of "be" for "is," "are" and "am" revealed something essentially, vibrantly African about the speakers of ebonics. You didn't have to be a philologist - just a fan of pirate movies - to know this was not a particularly African usage. "Arr, he be a right fat merchantman, matey!"
2003-01-11 05:08 | User Profile
Sorry. Guess I overreacted there a bit.
2003-01-11 05:20 | User Profile
Originally posted by kminta@Jan 10 2003, 22:08 Sorry. Guess I overreacted there a bit.
kminta, brutha, you are my kind of nigga.
The first test to pass is to take good-natured taunting well.
2003-01-11 05:35 | User Profile
No apologies necessary - and no slur intended on my part. Just as when I rant about liberals - I must remember that my mother's one.
2003-01-11 08:47 | User Profile
Originally posted by Hereward@Jan 10 2003, 21:44 ** So chalk up another for Whitey: we invented ebonics as well! **
See, what they say is true: well-off blacks do try to emulate whites. :) Blacks I've known who came from Africa do not speak Ebonics.
2003-01-11 17:51 | User Profile
Found my kind a goober -- eat their own goober peas right there in front of you whittlin' and whistlin' Dixie (that me doing the shittlin' and whistlin', practing partial birth abortions on right wing neocon chicken hawks and their Cath-O-Jew supporters)
Did you know there are 6 ways of sayng "No" in ebonics? last in the list comes "udothataginmuthaf*kai'llkillya". 'jus da way de hors' 'round 'nda 'hood.
I had no mixed feelings at all, threading through Suxxex, England (Welsh people ck), Virginia Tidewater planters ck. Those gentlemen, the grandson of Thomas Jefferson himself among them, let ol' Cuffee -- the Serviles -- go, in the 1830's. Nat Turner turned the tide. People will run all over you if you let them. Look what Bush and his neocon supporters have done to America. Hard to take, I know, but there ain't that many liberal Cuffees around no 'mo, bro, and that bulge under de jacket ain't moissquat, wanna see?
Another connection on the tread was to the fascinating phenomena of dialect-creation and transfer via work-culture/dominant-subordinate relations. I observed this taking place during mid-40-60's between Texas great high plains farmers and (off-the-books) Mexican laborers. My father and "Martin" (Mar-teen, we said), could rattle off strings of sounds you would have to know both tongues, plus condensed state-of the-art machine and operations talk -- and them -- to follow, but it was easy to pick up. Such things would reproduce rapidly, and, if I may say so, without benefit of external judgment, but it would, surely, be wrong to adjust public schools standards to accomodate it. Unless, it became so predominant that the speakers wanted to seceed -- that is what is happening in upper Spain today-- very, very violent scene. The Basques claim they have their own language, and want their own culture. Would you let them split? I think I would.
Finally, the same reason for excluding ebonics from public school education -- lets call it purity in communication (that is how I would defend it on principle:
" The language of the U.S. Cconstitution's signers is the language of that documents' jurisdiction -- and the sole basis of authority in use of force by its federal government, and state-affiliated institutions"
-- argues that no graduate of a Catholic or Jewish school should ever hold the highest public offices; AND that no funds raised by taxes under the republican system the constitution set up be used to support and help reproduce their schools and way of life. This does not imply judgment or bias toward them. On the contrary; it is a petition of deepest concern. You must turn against Bush to be an American. He has targeted these two religious groups by name as the 04 swing vote, after committing the unAmerican act of redefining what he ran on after being elected.
NO EBONICS - NO VOUCHERS - NO "FAITH BASED" ANYTHING in politics