[EDLING:441] Fwd: The Fire Next Time: Henry Louis Gates, his ties to PBS, Black English, etc..

[Tamara Warhol]

Via Language Policy-List <lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu>

black children struggle with standard English,
while hip-hop becomes white lingua franca
------

Changing Places
By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.
The New York Times, September 30, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/30/opinion/30gates.html

How do you spell rat, " my father would ask me during a lull
in one of his many bid whist card games with his buddies from
the paper mill. "R-a-t," I'd respond dutifully, with all of the
preschool pride that I could muster. "Not that mousy kind
of a rat," he'd say. "I mean like rat now. " His buddies would
howl as my perplexity grew.

Like many black people who came of age in the 60's, I've always
delighted in the mind-bending playfulness of the black vernacular.
And jokes turning on malaprops and double-entendres are among
the most vital aspects of black culture. The Kingfish's quip, on
"Amos n Andy," that he and Andy should "simonize our watches"
is nearly canonical in many black households.

But all of us have our favorites. It's said that Tim Moore, the actor
who played Kingfish, once had to appear in court as a defendant.
"Yo' honor," he told the judge, "not only does I resents the allegation, but
I resents the alligator!"

Still, I have to confess that the use of "ax" for "ask" has always
been, for me, the linguistic equivalent of fingernails' scraping
down a blackboard. The first time I heard the word "ask"
pronounced that way was on a Bill Cosby album in the 60's.

"I'm-o, I'm-o ax you a question," his character stammers,
and in my Appalachian hamlet we'd laugh at that, certain that
nobody would really be foolish enough to say "ax" for "ask."

Don't get me wrong: it's not as if the black citizens of Piedmont,
W.Va., spoke the king's English, but axing was something
 we did in the woods.

It was when I first visited Bermuda, where just about
everyone I met says "ax," that I began to suspect that
this usage had deeper origins than I'd known. Sure enough,
 as William Labov, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania,
explained to me, "aks" is traceable to the Old English "acsian,"
a nonstandard form of "ascian," the root of "ask."

Professor Labov argues that black Americans have become
more monolingual since the 60's - that fewer of them have a
mastery of standard English. That's the result of residential
segregation, the fact that poor blacks tend to live with poor blacks.

But it's also compounded by desegregation, which ended up
separating the black poor and the black middle class.
Because of these two factors, there's now a large group of
poor black people whose face-to-face conversations are almost
entirely with people like themselves. As the cultural critic Greg
Tate told me, black people are "segregated, landlocked and
institutionalized between prison, the project and public institutions."

He added that "there's a certain tribal caste to segregated
African-American communities for that reason," and that's
reflected in their increased monolingualism.

Writing in The Times 25 years ago, James Baldwin ventured
that the black vernacular was one of self-defense.
"There was a moment,
in time, in this place," he recalled, "when my brother, or
my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me,
for example, the danger in which I was standing from the
white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with
a speed and in a language, that the white man could not possibly
understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today."

Is that still true? The black vernacular seems to be everywhere
these days, from Dave Chappelle's show to Boost Mobile's
"Where you at?" ad campaign. "It becomes part of the mainstream
in a minute," the poet Amiri Baraka told me, referring to the black
vernacular. "We hear the rappers say, 'I'm outta here' - the next thing  you
know, Clinton's saying. 'I'm outta here.' "

And both Senator John Kerry and President Bush are calling out,
"Bring it on," like dueling mike-masters at a hip-hop slam.
Talk about changing places. Even as large numbers of black
children struggle with standard English, hip-hop has become
 the recreational lingua franca of white suburban youth.
Baldwin's notion of using black English to encode messages
seems almost romantic now.

Is it possible, after all these years, that white folk have come to speak
"black" far better than blacks speak "white"? Just axing.






--
Tamara Warhol
PhD Student
Graduate School of Education
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA
warholt at dolphin.upenn.edu