Quoted without comment

[James A. Landau <JJJRLandau@netscape.com>]

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/01/12/2010-01-12_harry_reid_read_my_lips_theres_no_such_thing_as_negro_dialect.html


Harry Reid, read my lips: There's no such thing as 'Negro dialect'
By Michael Meyers
Special to NYDailyNews.com

Tuesday, January 12th 2010, 3:48 PM

<snip>
there is no such thing as "Negro dialect." Like "the Negro" itself, so-called "Negro dialect" is a fiction created to assign qualities and habits and deficits to a "race" of people. But blacks are not a "race"; we're people who happen to have darker skin than whites. We are individuals who belong to the same race as do whites and "Hispanics" and Asians.

If, as individuals, we speak less than standard or perfect English, then that is a personal failing and a challenge - not a racial character trait. Indeed, as many American blacks were coming up and out of enslavement, they learned broken English from their overseers because many whites then and now (and not just in the South) don't know the rules, much less the syntax and grammar, of the English language.

Dialects, accents and regional differences in language are fluid and not always fluent, but are never "racial." Some immigrants have been singled out for their slovenly English; others learn and speak sparkling English. Those of all hues who inhabit a New York borough are sometimes said to speak "Brooklyn-ese" or "Bronx" - but plenty of times we speak Standard American English.

The world is a complicated place, where individuals consistently overwhelm types.

Swirling prejudices about which groups learn and speak Standard English have been passed on from generation to generation - and have even been adopted by America's race industry, which proudly and falsely proclaims that blacks are "different" from whites in values and mannerisms and the language we speak.

This is the notion of which Reid needed to be disabused. Yet not one of our race leaders broke ranks to tell Harry Reid the plain truth when he called upon them for absolution. Not one of them said to him, "Harry, read my lips: There is no such thing as 'Negro dialect.' "
<snip>


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