Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

180 Language Diversity in the Classroomearlier by Heilbrunn (1997) in the New Republic a dismissive paper thatBaugh (2000: 91) described as full of ‘sweeping overgeneralizations’ thatdid great disservice to research across a range of scholarly disciplines,demeaning it as ‘Ebonology’.The black critic with the highest profile was (and is) the popularentertainer, Bill Cosby, who has been particularly outspoken about thelanguage and behavior of the black community. As reported by Freeman(2006), Cosby said:Let me tell you something... your dirty laundry gets out of school at2:30 every day: it’s cursing and calling each other ‘nigger’ as they’rewalking up and down the street. They think they’re hip. They can’tread. They can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling, and they’regoing nowhere.Smitherman (2006) points out that Cosby was a vociferous opponent ofEbonics at the time of the Oakland trial, and he obviously remains so. Ina speech delivered in 2004, Cosby refers again to black youngstersstanding on the corner... Everybody knows it’s important to speakEnglish except these knuckleheads. You can’t land a plane with ‘‘whyyou ain’t’’. You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out ofyour mouth. (Cosby, 2004: 3)Cosby’s remarks were printed in The Black Scholar, in an issue almostentirely dedicated to Black English; it is well worth consulting for acontemporary overview of black scholarly opinion. Particularly interestingare the papers by Cole, who feels that Cosby has come out with harshbut necessary truths, and by Kirkland et al., who argue that Cosby islinguistically ill-informed; see also the contributions by Black andWoodford.It is something of an irony, Smitherman (2006) reports, to find thatCosby himself beyond putting BEV into the mouths of some of hiscartoon characters had in fact acknowledged the acceptability of codeswitchingin his 2004 speech. ‘You used to talk a certain way on thecorner’, he said, ‘and you got into the house and switched into English’(Smitherman, 2006: 3). Odder still, she notes, is that in a much earlierspeech (to the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971), Cosby told hisaudience that ‘I think all you niggas need to... check yourselves out...So I say good evening, niggas’ (Dyson, 2005: 240). For a vehement butinformed denunciation, from a markedly left-wing position, of Cosby’sstance and the broader sociopolitical context of which it is a part, seeCane (2004). McWhorter (2000, 2003) also provides further pointed