Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Black English as Ebonics 179social dynamics and having nothing to say of any intrinsic ‘correctness’,it generally conjures up exactly that sense of ‘correctness’ in the publiceye. This is an entirely understandable reaction, of course, given that‘standards’ typically signify minimum requirements, and ‘specificationsthat must be met for acceptability’ (Fasold, 2006: 194). 3Reactions to the Ebonics Debateand to BlackUnderachievementWhat about some specific examples of reactions to Ebonics? Wright(2005a) has assembled a bibliography of about 100 ‘scholarly references’and 55 newspaper articles (listed chronologically, from December 1996 toSeptember 2003; Todd, 1997, also provides a sample of press reaction).A number of prominent black scholars rejected the Oakland approach,while at the same time endorsing the underlying motivation. HenryLouis Gates (cited by Rich, 1997), for instance, said that the originaldeclaration was ‘obviously stupid and ridiculous’, but also that it was the‘sheer desperation of public schools in the inner city’, the ‘grave nationalcrisis’, that pushed the ‘panicked Oakland board’ to move as it did. Gateswas also taken aback by the intensity of the reaction and the ‘nationalfixation’ on Ebonics. ‘As an African American’, he said, ‘I’m desperatefor solutions to illiteracy... I’d be open to any smart solution, but theOakland school board didn’t come up with one’. Yet it was the board’s‘non-solution’ that attracted all the attention, rather than the underlyingproblems (Rich, 1997).Within a broader and ongoing spectrum of criticism of BEV andnonstandard varieties generally (see Lippi-Green, 1997) both withinand without the black community it was clear that many blackAmericans were critical of the Oakland approach. Jesse Jackson initiallydecried the school board’s declaration to say that black students didnot speak English was ‘foolish and insulting... this is an unacceptablesurrender, bordering on disgrace... it’s teaching down to our children’;he later modified his views after meeting with board members and someprominent linguists (Todd, 1997: 15; see also McMillen, 1997). Thereaction of one black journalist Brent Staples of The New York Times was such that it prompted a prominent linguist (Baugh, 2000) to accept acommission to write about the Ebonics controversy. Staples (1997) hadjoined the anti-Oakland brigade, claiming that the school board deservedthe scorn that greeted its assertion that ‘broken, inner-city English [is] adistinct ‘‘genetically based’’ language system’. He also made brief, butapparently approving, reference to a longer piece written four days